Chapter 399: Pirates

"Holy crap, Sun Wukong?!"

Huiyu let out a gasp. The scene of that human head pinned beneath the cannon really did look like Sun Wukong trapped under Five Finger Mountain.

"Sun who-kong? Please, please, just get me out of here, okay?!"

The Latin man, with his buzz cut and stubble, kept shaking his head, tears and snot streaming down his face—clearly on the verge of a mental breakdown.

"Shh, shh, shh."

Li Cheng stepped forward, clamped a hand over his mouth, and compared his photo against the goc database. "He Sai? An auxiliary member of Prometheus?"

From the man's garbled, extremely nervous account, Li Cheng pieced together what had happened.

He Sai Gonzalez, Salvadoran, lv11, originally from the local gang-style guild 【Red-Haired Pirate Crew】. When the guild leader was assassinated by a rival gang, the whole outfit fell into chaos. After the tree fell and the monkeys scattered, He Sai was recruited by Prometheus and became a temp worker.

(I don't know when this tradition started, but a huge number of guilds in Central and Nanmeizhou pick their names from anime—Brazil's Seven Warlords of the Sea, Argentina's Gotei 13, Guatemala's Uma Musume, Colombia's Xianzhou Luofu, Venezuela's Knights of Favonius. Pretty abstract.)

Two weeks ago, He Sai was out exploring the Killzone with his squad as usual,

when he got greedy chasing a rare exotic beast with a 7,000-game-coin bounty on the Slums board. He broke off from the group, and somehow stumbled into a spatial teleportation trap.

One blink and he was here—captured by a bipedal beetle and stuffed into this cannon made of biological material.

Li Cheng and Huiyu exchanged a glance. A four-armed beetle walking on two legs was undoubtedly the God-Spawn infected specimen from the footage Changsun Yao had given them.

A lot of earlier guesses had to be thrown out. That infected specimen was no dumb beast running on pure instinct—it was a highly intelligent being, capable of building a biological lab by some unknown method.

Huiyu held her hammer at the ready while Li Cheng squinted and asked He Sai, "This place is part of the Killzone's physical form, right? That beetle imprisoned your body, but it didn't imprison your brain.

Why not log out of the Killzone, or contact your friends through the player panel?"

"I tried. It doesn't work."

He Sai's face was uglier than crying. "Every time the thought 【Log Out of Killzone】 pops into my head, my consciousness just dissolves.

Friend messaging is the same.

I have no way to call for help or use any skill to escape."

Clearly, that God-Spawn infected specimen understood the player personal panel's mechanics very well.

Maybe afraid Li Cheng would leave him behind, He Sai hurriedly added, "I've been keeping track of time. That beetle goes out for four or five hours every day, and each time it brings back native Killzone creatures.

It's only been gone two hours. If you pull me out now, we can get away before it gets back.

Please, just save me and I'll give you everything I own—I can sign a magic contract! If that's not enough, you can help me contact my companions after you get out."

"Shh. Quiet."

Li Cheng raised a hand to cut off He Sai's rambling and walked two circles around the cannon.

Huiyu stayed where she was and curiously asked He Sai how he'd been relieving himself these past two weeks—whether he'd been making do with iced tea bottles.

This cannon possessed technology utterly at odds with its grotesque, ugly exterior—a masterwork of the biological-modification arts.

It used paralleled supernatural creature tendons as rails, metallized bones as projectile armatures, and eel-like bioelectric organs as a high-efficiency power source.

At its core, it was a biological electromagnetic cannon.

Even more horrifying, this electromagnetic cannon was alive.

Organs harvested from different supernatural creatures were stitched together through fungal matting, absorbing oxygen at full efficiency every second. There was zero rejection between them—seamless, as if made by nature itself.

"What's wrong?"

Seeing Li Cheng hadn't moved for a while, He Sai asked anxiously, trying to turn his head to look—but the angle of his neck was locked and he couldn't turn.

"Close your eyes first."

Li Cheng's expression was subtle. He pulled out some tape from his inventory, taped He Sai's eyelids and mouth shut, then picked up the steel flag-spear and drove it into the bio-magnetic rail cannon right against He Sai's neck.

Sure enough, there was nothing below He Sai's neck—no shoulders, no torso. His entire body had been absorbed into the bio-magnetic rail cannon.

Dense, cable-like pale-yellow nerve bundles pierced straight through He Sai's dermis and reached his head.

Li Cheng pressed gently on the back of He Sai's skull. With a soft "crack," He Sai's cranium caved in like tofu—his entire brain was gone, broken down and merged into the bio-magnetic rail cannon.

"Holy mother—"

Huiyu sucked in a sharp breath. "Doc, can he still be saved?"

Can't treat him. Wait for death. I'm out.

Li Cheng silently let go. The special effect of 【Assembled Puppet · Modified】 was indeed powerful—raising the dead and regrowing bone was no problem—but the prerequisite was that the subject still had at least some original parts on them.

He Sai's entire brain had been broken down and merged into the bio-magnetic rail cannon, hidden somewhere in who-knows-which corner.

Even if Li Cheng shoved a CPU and RAM sticks into his skull, the instant his brain disconnected from the bio-magnetic rail cannon, he'd crash on the spot.

After reboot, the "living" He Sai would be a blank slate—and absolutely not the same person as the original.

Li Cheng peeled off the tape and murmured, "Your situation is a bit complicated. The specifics depend on the specifics."

He Sai stared blankly. "H-how bad is it?"

"Not bad. About bad enough that we'd have to name a disease specifically after you."

Li Cheng consoled him: "Best to call in the specialist team from the League of Evil Scientists. They might be able to preserve your soul."

"Huh?"

He Sai was on the verge of tears. The League of Evil Scientists' specialty was messing with souls; any situation requiring their involvement basically meant the patient was beyond saving on a physical level—better to switch to a new form of existence and start over.

Huiyu also offered comfort: "Being a ghost isn't that bad. I know a professional hostess ghost who eloped with a client. Before she left, she teamed up with a few people and killed the mama-san who'd been exploiting her for years. The client she ended up marrying even passed the national ministry civil service exam. They had two kids and lived a happy, blissful life."

??

Li Cheng's head was full of question marks. "What kind of toxic chicken-soup short video did you get that from?"

Huiyu said matter-of-factly: "A Chinese Ghost Story, duh. Isn't Nie Xiaoqian a nightclub hostess who lures men into drinking?"

Sure, whatever.

Li Cheng was about to duck his head and examine the bio-electromagnetic cannon again when he suddenly sensed something. He whipped out the steel flag-spear and drove it straight through Huiyu's chest.

Huiyu's chest was pierced, but she didn't for a second suspect Li Cheng would harm her. On instinct, she swung her Skull-Crusher Hammer with everything she had, smashing at empty air three meters behind her.

CLANG!!!

A tremendous boom echoed through the entire floor, and Grey Rain clearly felt the rebounding force transmitted through her hands,

In what had been an empty space, the optical camouflage slowly dissipated, revealing a red, ferocious beetle standing upright on two legs.

(End of Chapter)