Chapter 136 - Reverse Trap (Patreon)

Ceres strolled through the market, keeping an eye out for anything weird and generally conversing with the residents. It was naturally grimier and sleazier compared to Zone 17, but he felt a similar sense of intimacy and unity between the people who stayed here.

Word of the worm plague had spread thanks to the group, but no one panicked or was fazed. As far as they knew, this was probably one of the least dangerous plagues or dangers they had faced in the last five years. Having gone through literal hell and continuous gang fights, the people here had nerves of steel.

Five days passed in a flash, with seemingly no leads. No new patients infected with the worm had been found ever since they began their investigation, which meant no new clues were left behind. Julia and Ceres had already gone through the entire list of locations, not being to find a single hint.

“How long are we going to do this for?” Saater sat next to Ceres at the front of the medicinal hall. Over the past few days, Saater has been keeping as close of a watch on Ceres as he could, especially after the stunt that he pulled off in the medicinal hall.

The only thing that he could surmise from his observations is: mysterious.

It was obvious Ceres was not from Rockhold, but Ceres did not even know some of the newer components or occurrences on Athen. “Is this guy from the past or something?”

Ceres was naturally aware of Saater’s observation, but he remained calm. As long as he did not use his black armour in front of anyone, there was no chance of him getting exposed.

“Don’t worry, we should be getting some results soon. Should be about today.” Ceres said mysteriously. Saater wondered what trump card Ceres had obtained that made him so confident.

Suddenly, a scream in the market was heard. Ceres immediately launched forward, following the sound of the noise. Saater tried to keep up but found himself falling behind. As he turned a corner of the street into a deserted alleyway, he found that Ceres was gone.

“What the… how is an exosuit designer faster than me?” Saater mumbled as he decided to follow down the alleyway.

Soon, as he reached the end, he found a collapsed person leaning against the wall, his arm shivering.

An obviously infected wound was growing on his wrist, pulsating with a weird purple glow. “Hey, are you okay!?” Saater immediately rushed up, kneeling next to the person to check his breathing.

Pulling out his multi-terminal, he began to do a deep x-ray scan, hoping to find evidence of the worms.

Suddenly, the collapsed person lunged forward and tried to grab Saater by the neck. With a close dodge, Saater’s combat instincts kicked in, and he immediately leapt backwards into a fighting stance.

“Shit, has the worms already taken over?” Saater muttered, slowly reaching behind him for his rifle.

“Maybe, but who cares, I have unlimited power now!” The collapsed person grinned, before running away. Saater was shocked – most of the infected would fight like wild animals, but this person was coherent and able to control his strength.

Saater resolved that he had to catch this new patient and inspect the changes. If the worm plague had evolved to such a stage, it meant a new mutation. However, he also felt that the person looked fairly familiar. “Where have I seen that person before…”

Not worrying about where Ceres was, he quickly gave chase, being led into a deserted abandoned area of the town. Saater recognized the area as one of the common locations that previous patients had in common, but they had previously failed to find anything. Perhaps it was like a gathering point.

Saater quickly confirmed that he could not spot anyone in the vicinity before engaging with the patient. He decided not to use the rifle, lest he irreversibly damaged the patient. “I have to keep him alive!”

Despite the patient’s strength, he was hardly trained in combat, fighting like a wild beast against Saater who was professionally trained for decades.

It was hardly even a fight, with Saater easily suppressing the patient without using any gimmicks on his Mirage Gunner.

Saater let out a sigh of relief, before suddenly a sharp energy beam hit him right in the back of his knee, piercing his weak point and causing him to collapse in pain. Two stealth exosuits suddenly dropped from a building window, landing opposite Saater.

“Confirmed, Queen’s Guards personnel Saater with Mirage Gunner. Begin elimination and retrieval of the subject.”

Without another word, the two stealth exosuits started to shoot towards Saater, who was still struggling to get up. “Who are you? You dare attack a member of the Queen's Guards in Rockhold?!" Saater roared under the flare of his personal shield, which activated.

There was no reply, only a sudden cry as one of the stealth exosuit suffered a knee to the face from a flying Ceres. “Good job Saater!” Halyon praised as he came in with Julia after Ceres, both wearing their exosuit.

A skirmish quickly started, between Halyon, Julia and the two stealth exosuits, while Ceres quickly headed over to the patient. “Well done, Saater. We couldn’t have baited them out without you.”

“What... you used me as bait?” Saater couldn’t believe he was not told about this, while Halyon and Julia seemed more prepared.

“Sorry, you were just too prominent of a target.” Ceres smiled.

With the effort of mostly Julia who was much more experienced compared to the weak Halyon, she finally subdued the two stealth exosuits, ripping off their helmets to see who they were. “Does anybody recognize them?”

The two attackers did not look like anyone in Rockhold, instead, they looked a lot more militaristic, with matching buzzcuts and generic face features. Saater tried to recall if anyone in the town looked like that. Eventually, Saater shook his head. “I don’t know anyone who looks like that. Perhaps we might get a better shot on our database.”

Halyon weakly walked over, before kicking the attackers in the stomach. He had suffered a few bad hits, but he took the additional time to vent his anger. "Yea, mess with me, huh?" Halyon gloated, despite the fact that Ceres and Julia did almost all of the heavy lifting.

“We’ll bring all three of them back to the medicinal hall,” Ceres ordered as the group headed back.

Inside the back room, Ceres was busy disassembling the stealth exosuit with the help of a mobile toolbox provided by the Queen’s Guards. He had requested it, recalling how shocked Julia was at his ability to dismantle the exosuits forcefully by hand. “Better to act as such rather than be exposed.”

"Indeed, money makes the world goes round." The mobile toolbox was even better than his original backpack which had foldable panels and an inbuilt 3D printer.

The toolbox featured a full holographic interface, along with a metal decomposer as well, allowing him to break it down. All of it was folded nicely into a briefcase-like device, extremely compact.

“How did you know that they were going to attack us?” Saater couldn’t help asking Ceres. Saater naturally did not let Ceres stay alone, continuously suspicious. His wariness was heightened even more when he had just been used as bait.

“I suspected someone was spreading the worms, hoping to catch patients who should have improvements or any unique outcome. Luckily a patient just so happened to exhibit that very symptoms, so I had no doubt that those observing the town from deep within would come out to extract him back for study."

Saater grew even more suspicious. He did not buy Ceres's claim that it was luck, seeing as how he mysteriously told him that it would soon happen. He wondered if Ceres was actually a double agent, working against them.

Saater left the room, seeing Julia and Halyon outside waiting. "Sorry Saater, Ceres told us to keep it a secret. And honestly, it worked out pretty well, hm?” Julia placed her hand on Saater’s shoulder.

“How’s the patient?”

“Oh, he’s been treated specially by Uncle Sai. He said it was a very serious upgraded case.”

At least the patient was being treated, Saater thought. Little did he know that the patient was actually also part of the trap, instigated by Ceres with the help of t Uncle Sai, who was also a Brood Host!

The reason why Saater found the patient familiar was that he was an employee of the medicinal hall! “Luckily he’s not that good with faces.”

Ceres smiled to himself, yet another plan successfully pulled off as he continuously stripped away parts of the exosuits. He noted that the attackers also had the same worms in their bodies similar to those who had ambushed them during their hovercar ride, trapped in a mechanical beetle on their arm.

He took the disassembled exosuits back to the basement workshop at the Queen’s Tower, leaving Saater and Julia to handle the two attackers. Without resting, Ceres immediately began an inspection of the exosuit with the help of Assistant A and Halyon.

Ceres was faced with a large problem - none of the exosuits’ parts was registered, nor did he know where they came from. That same sense of perfection in terms of body fit was present as well, making Ceres sure that it was the same exosuit designer.

“A Brood Host and an exosuit designer working together...” Ceres mused. He had already collaborated with the hall owner, so did that make them the opposing pair? However, the nature of the worms was that they died once they were exposed outside of the body, making it hard. Even the hall owner who was a Brood Host was unable to control the worms, claiming it was beyond his level of expertise.

Ceres did not learn much about bioengineering, so he ignored the worms and focused completely on the stealth exosuit. The design of the exosuit was laid bare to him, enabling him to perfectly reassemble it if he wanted to.

Throughout all his investigations so far, he did not attempt to jack into the exosuit using his own nerval jack. He had already tried to connect to it using a pseudo-simulated interface on a computer, but it did not work.

Lucky for him, he quickly found a recording device that seemed buried within the exosuit, recording at a weird angle. Spy cameras in this era were extremely small, and at a D-class state level, they were already able to fit in on one fingertip. Ceres only noticed that there was one such camera, and it was not connected to the exosuit system at all.

“Huh, who would put or plant a spy camera into their own exosuits?” He suspected that maybe the organization behind the attackers wanted to monitor their own troops, but it did not explain why the other attacker did not have a similar spy camera.

Also, the location of the spy camera was very well concealed between the gaps in the armour and the view was extremely limited as well. Ceres could not think of a reason why this spy camera was here unless a third party planted it.

Regardless, the existence of the spy camera was a boon to him. He quickly took it out and retrieved the video. It was hardly encrypted, causing Ceres to be even more confused.

Saater and Julia quickly rushed over after Ceres told them about his recent discovery, and they watched the recorded video together.

The spy camera’s field of view was limited, so they could only see a cutout portion, as though they were peeking through a gap in the exosuit from within. “This is not very helpful isn’t it…” Halyon frowned as they watched the shaky footage.

The video seemed to show them walking out of a base, but with such a limited field of view, Saater himself could not really verify where they were. The group discussed a map of Rockhold, while Saater labelled more than sixteen possible points all over Rockhold.

“Sorry, it’s the best I could do given the video. Rockhold buildings are not unique, being all pre-fab buildings so it’s hard to distinguish them without a better view.” Saater shook his head.

They even tried using an AI to try and automatically fill in the dark spots of the video, but they still ended up with the same sixteen positions.

“Well, at least it’s within Rockhold and not somewhere outside. We’ll have to plan around this.” Ceres said. He took a glance at the reassembled exosuit. “Now that we know where they possibly could be, maybe there’s a chance…”

***

Kitana groaned as she slumped down on a makeshift bed inside an abandoned pre-fab apartment. She had been in hiding for the last three weeks, having shaken off the tail that the rebellion had put on here after the miraculous fight she saw of the rebellion’s duel with the rulebreaker.

She had already leaked the information to her enforcer contact, but her main mission was not yet fulfilled. Kitana still had to find the lost ‘Drone-C’, the research subject that broke free from the vat.

“Halyon…” The death of her teammate still pained her greatly. She hoped that he was still alive, but in her mind no one could survive that collapsed research lab, so she had already struck him off, as did the enforcers.

One of her side missions was to recover the Keeper’s exosuit of Halyon, but she did not even find a clue even when she returned to the original research lab. She became wary that the rebellion may have already stolen the exosuit back for reverse engineering!

“Fucking rebels…” Kitana grumbled. Her multi-terminal began to ring, a call from the Keepers directly. A holographic project opened up, showing Maddy. “Kitana, a new mission for you. You’re our only Keeper in the area.”

“Am I? I have no drones to control, only an exosuit. How am I a Keeper?” Kitana complained. Though she was wearing a Keeper exosuit, it was heavily camouflaged and dirtied to look as though it was a second-hand exosuit.

“Two drones will be provided for this side mission. Your objective is to guard this individual and only him. Ensure his safety and in the event of an emergency, escort him back to us.” Maddy continued speaking. A list of personal particulars appeared before Kitana.

“Dr Theira, a biology expert… what is he doing in Rockhold?”

“He’s trying to play his part in restraining a plague, but he needs protection from attacks. Most notably, the Queen’s Guards seem very intent on capturing him for their own benefit. He’s a valuable talent to us, so you can not lose him. Failure is unacceptable.”

“Roger that. Who’s my contact?”

“The individual himself, he’s been notified already. Coordinates are here. Make sure you’re not being followed; this mission is important.”

Kitana nodded, getting up and packing her things. She did not have a lot, only the weapons and exosuit as well as a few pieces of rations and food she bought from the streets. Chewing on a chem-fried chicken skewer, she made her way to the coordinates.

Going through Rockhold was easier than expected for Kitana, apart from being chased by the rebellion’s counter-intelligence agents. No one really care who anyone was out on the street, as it was like a melting hotpot of criminals and outlaws.

She had already seen many questionable things, forcing her to suppress her desire to bring all of them to justice. Similar to Halyon, she could not comprehend how someone could live in such a city.

As she walked, the coordinates slowly led her to a deserted abandoned town on the outskirts of Rockhold. “For a doctor helping out with a plague, I would have expected him to be at the hospital or the care facilities…”

When she approached an unmarked pre-fab building that had a garage, a stealth exosuit suddenly appeared from the alleyway, causing her to almost raise her weapons in defence.

“This way.” The exosuit beckoned towards her. Kitana slowly followed, still keeping her weapons at the ready.

They walked down an alleyway, reaching a side door which opened to reveal an elevator. Kitana already expected some sort of secret hideout, especially if the Keepers were planning on transferring the two drones to her.

The elevator did not travel very far underground… only descending about four levels. It opened to reveal a fully functional research lab, coupled with patients who seemed to be strapped down to rough metal tables. This was the first of many room, and the research lab was designed like a maze to slow down invaders.

As she walked through the corridors, she saw many traps and automated turrets, as well as similar exosuits patrolling. “A bit overkill for a plague, is it not?” Kitana asked, but the stranger did not reply.

Reaching something like a final room, there was a single scientist, but he was dressed extremely casually, only wearing a t-shirt and jeans.

“Ah, Keeper, you’re here, that’s great!” The scientist beamed before bowing. “Dr Theria, at your service.”

Kitana’s eyes narrowed at the diagrams of human bodies and worms infesting them behind as well as multiple camera screens of the strapped-down patients. “What are you actually doing down here?”