Chapter 214: Captain America

"There's something you haven't told us the truth about."

On the sturdy, reliable AT-802 agricultural aircraft, Li Cheng casually said to Caroline in the back seat, "Why would Pioneer Company issue a bounty? From the standpoint of keeping things sealed off, there's no need to bring in civilian ability users at all.

Unless they're really desperate."

"."

After a moment of silence, Caroline looked at Angelica in her arms and said helplessly, "The name Angelica is one I gave her. At the company, she's only called Subject 7094.

After witnessing Pioneer Company's atrocities, I secretly ran a genetic sequencing on this child. She has the potential to become a Level-5 ability user.

A Level-3 physical-enhancement ability user can ignore small-caliber bullets; a Level-4 can soar into the sky and dive into the earth like a superhero in the comics; as for Level-5—

In most projections, a Level-5 ability user is the equivalent of a human-shaped nuclear bomb."

Caroline raised her head and said bitterly, "No matter what, we can't let the company get their hands on this power. They'd brainwash Angelica, control her, turn her into an enforcer and butcher, even a breeding tool—regularly providing eggs to cultivate more Level-5 ability users.

I'm sorry I didn't tell you all this."

"Sounds pretty miserable."

Hui Yu sighed upon hearing this. "There's a Xiaoli right downstairs from our place. She told me her parents forced her to go on a matchmaking date with someone she doesn't even like, a guy called Da Huang. Of the two kids they had, one died young, and the surviving one is sickly. I heard she's got to keep matchmaking again next year."

"There's such a thing?" Caroline was stunned. "Don't her parents treat Xiaoli as a person?!"

"Who told you Xiaoli is a person?"

Hui Yu said, baffled, "She's a purebred cat."

??

Caroline's face was blank with confusion, unsure whether she should be more astonished by Hui Yu's bizarre way of narrating things, or by how she managed to understand a cat's speech.

Li Cheng, sitting in the front seat, glanced at his phone. The Ella gang had truly been scared by Li Cheng's threat to strip them bare before he left; over the past few hours they'd been relentlessly posting astroturfing threads on the ability-user darknet, ignoring the moderators—post, delete, delete, repost.

It should scare off some mid- and low-level ability users.

As for Pioneer Company's bounty, it was actually updating in real time, marking that Li Cheng and the others were near Denver, Keluoladuozhou.

That kind of precision definitely couldn't be explained by some kind of sniffer.

Li Cheng had been controlling the aircraft's altitude, evading radar detection, and often flying beneath the cloud layer to avoid being photographed by low-Earth-orbit spy satellites.

There was only one explanation: Cervantes had deployed some kind of telepathic remote-sensing method to track Angelica over ultra-long range.

"You used to be a researcher at Pioneer Company. Do you know of any method that can completely block telepathy and remote sensing?"

Li Cheng asked, twisting his head. Angelica was the mission objective and couldn't be stuffed into the dimensional warehouse.

"Block telepathy—"

Caroline froze for a beat, then caught on. "Yes! In the ability-user sequence, there really are psychic-type ability users. To control them, the company had a batch of helmets custom-made from special metal, distributed to company executives and prison-facility guards."

Caroline leaned forward, pointed at the map spread across Li Cheng's lap, and said, "There's a superhuman prison right here in Keluoladuozhou. I've been there before—right here."

Well, isn't that convenient.

Li Cheng immediately changed course, heading toward the prison several dozen kilometers away.

————

Tap-tap-tap.

A pot-bellied guard, baton in hand, hummed a tune as he walked down the long, narrow prison corridor.

On the surface, this prison was a psychiatric hospital; inside, nearly a hundred superhumans of varying levels were held.

When the fat guard had originally applied for this job, his stated reason was that he'd been bullied by mutants as a child, but only he himself knew there was only one reason he wanted the job—

To freely beat up people far more powerful than himself.

Boom!

The guard raised his baton and slammed it heavily against the thick steel blast door of a single-occupancy cell.

The heavy sound startled the thin, frail prisoner inside the cell—who wore a power-suppression shackle around his neck—into cowering in the corner of the cell, curling his body up and trembling uncontrollably.

"Hahaha."

The guard grinned broadly. This prisoner had been a Level-3 ability user who'd killed over a dozen people before—but so what? Wasn't he still acting like a quail now?

"Behave, you mutant freaks."

Just as the guard was about to pull his baton back, he heard a sharp, piercing whistle of something tearing through the air above the prison.

Whoosh—BOOM!

The reinforced concrete roof, sturdy enough to withstand missile bombardment, was smashed straight through by brute force.

Gravel flew, dust filled the air, and the one plummeting down from the sky was none other than Hui Yu, who had jumped straight from the aircraft.

She dropped to one knee, fist bracing the ground, face slightly lowered, striking a classic hero-landing pose.

"Avalon! People from Avalon are here to rescue us!"

The prisoners on both sides of the corridor wept with joy, frantically pounding on their cell doors and creating a cacophony of noise.

"What the hell—"

The guard stumbled back two steps in fright. At that moment the alarm bells rang out through the entire prison, and the other guards who came running also saw Hui Yu amid the swirling dust.

"Alarm! Level-1 ability-user escape incident!"

One guard shouted into his walkie-talkie calling for backup, while the rest pushed forward a large device shaped like a sound system and punched its button.

Bzzzzt—

The speaker released ultrasonic waves, and the superhumans in the cells on both sides of the corridor all groaned in agony.

Hui Yu clutched her head and cried, "Ugh! Ah! I'm dying! Just kidding."

The next second, Hui Yu dusted herself off and stood up. Looking at the utterly stunned guards, she smiled slightly. Her arms transformed into sharp lances, first piercing two men's hearts, then suddenly sprouting a mass of spikes that stabbed through them from the inside out.

"Open fire!"

The guards unhesitatingly drew their guns and shot—pistols, rifles, tasers, tranquilizer darts, toxic gas grenades, everything dumped at once toward the end of the corridor.

"That's all you've got?"

With a dozen or so anesthetic needles stuck in his body, Hui Yu casually pulled out the needle tubes, picked up a toxic gas smoke bomb from the ground, and took a hard drag. "Doesn't hit like a Razer Viper V3 Pro."

The prison guards had never seen such a scene and were all stunned stupid, but Hui Yu didn't care about that. He kicked off the ground and charged into the crowd, killing every target he saw.

Once there was not a single living person left at the scene, Hui Yu took out his walkie-talkie and said lightly, "All taken care of."

"Good."

Li Cheng had now landed the helicopter on a dry riverbed. He first released a paper crane to leave on the pilot's seat, then activated the Familiar Swap skill to exchange positions with Hui Yu.

Uh.

He looked at the severed limbs scattered across the ground, the blood smeared all over the walls, and the assorted internal organs hanging from the electric fan, his expression somewhat subtle.

Although Li Cheng himself wasn't exactly a saint who never killed, was Hui Yu's violent tendency a bit too extreme? It was like some Nordic-style decorative artist had been at work.

Maybe he should give the kid less homework?

Li Cheng muttered softly, found the cell key on a guard's corpse, opened several cell doors, freed the superhumans, and along the way used a rusty machete to smash the suppression shackles locked around their necks.

"Don't thank me just yet. Does anyone here know where these guards put the anti-psychic-control helmets?"

"They're in the equipment room! The northeast corner of the cellblock."

One superhuman said excitedly. These prisoners either spat acid to corrode the cell doors, or violently dismantled and smashed the walls, or froze the keyholes to destroy the lock cylinders. Helping each other, they successfully rescued all their companions.

"I'm not from Avalon. Whether you want to break out and flee, or want revenge on Pioneer Corporation, that's entirely up to you."

Li Cheng didn't care about the fate of these superhumans. After rummaging through the equipment room and finding the helmets, along with a speaker that suppressed anomalous abilities, he prepared to use Familiar Swap again.

Buzz buzz—

The sound of helicopter rotor blades traveled down the corridor through the big hole Hui Yu had smashed earlier.

Three figures were seen jumping down from the helicopter, passing through the big hole in the ceiling, and landing in the corridor.

All three were dressed in outlandish costumes, with the Pioneer Corporation logo embroidered on their chests.

A figure wrapped entirely in a leopard-shaped white bodysuit spoke first, his voice low: "Wakanda forever! I am White Leopard."

A middle-aged man wearing sunglasses, with a compound longbow on his back and a quiver at his waist, said coldly: "I am Corn."

Amid Li Cheng's stunned expression,

The last one, a Native American wearing an Indian feathered headdress and holding a round red-white-and-blue shield, said in a deep voice: "I am Captain Indian! Avengers, assemble!"

(End of chapter)