EM CH6

Chapter 6: Please Choose Your Faction

The corpses of the goat Aberrants were cleared out by the police and neatly laid out along the cordoned-off street. Medical staff and patients were evacuated one after another, shivering beside the ambulances outside the hospital.

Two armed police officers with holstered guns guarded the entrance to a clinic room, where relevant personnel inside underwent brief questioning.

The masked policewoman sat behind the examination desk. Before she even uttered a word, the authoritative aura she exuded caused the temperature in the room to plummet.

Beside her stood a blonde, curly-haired policewoman nearly 1.8 meters tall, cradling a submachine gun, responsible for protecting her superior’s safety.

Yu An kept his head down, staring at the handcuffs fastened around his wrists, unable to comprehend why he had been cuffed.

Yet the metallic texture against his wrists was all too familiar, like a shovel roughly digging up the memories buried deep within his heart.

He remembered that when he was fourteen, he personally sent his father to the hospital ICU. It was just that his methods back then were too simplistic: merely taking advantage of the man sleeping to seal the doors and windows, and turn open the gas valve.

A child didn’t yet know how to hide incriminating evidence. The traces of tape along the window cracks were noticed by the police officer, and in the end, he was caught, while his father was discharged from the hospital safe and sound.

Toward his father, Yu An had taken action twice in total: once for “excessive self-defense,” and once for “intentional assault causing severe injury.” Each time, he paid a heavy price, whether in terms of freedom or bodily harm. But he never gave up.

His father truly died from drunk driving and plunging off a cliff. This incident had nothing whatsoever to do with Yu An, at least according to all the evidence.

The day after the incident, Yu An calmly bought a birthday cake and sat across the dining table from his mother. His mother stared at him with terrified eyes, fidgety and trembling ceaselessly.

“Eat it, Mom. Today is our holiday.” That was what Yu An had said back then.

The policewoman’s stern voice interrupted Yu An’s train of thought. She was questioning Zhao Ran about the situation here.

Yu An looked toward Zhao Ran and realized he had been tilting his head to watch him the entire time, as if checking whether his emotional state was alright.

Zhao Ran didn’t answer the policewoman’s question. Instead, he made a blunt demand: “Officer Ye, unlock my intern’s handcuffs.”

Officer Ye said coldly, “They will be unlocked once suspicion is cleared. Zhao Ran, please cooperate and answer my questions. Surveillance shows you arrived at the hospital before the Aberrant invasion, rather than coming to rescue upon receiving a distress call. Give me a reason.”

The Peeping Eagle Bureau was a specialized agency established specifically for Aberrants. They emphasized resolving Aberrant cases and eliminating potential threats at maximum speed, so they didn’t strictly follow protocol during interrogation procedures.

Zhao Ran lazily sat up on the examination bed, found a comfortable posture, and spread his hands in reply: “I was injured, so I stopped by the nearest hospital to get patched up. After noticing the Aberrant invasion, I went into the surveillance room and used the hospital PA system to tell everyone to hide in the nearest room, lock the doors and windows tight, take cover behind shelters, and not make a sound.”

Officer Ye asked again, “All the staff in the surveillance room were knocked unconscious by heavy blows. Was that your doing?”

“Yeah. Anyone who didn’t listen and ran around blindly got knocked out by me.” Zhao Ran chuckled softly. “The surveillance room staff were the first to see the goat-headed man barge into the first-floor lobby, and they ran out shouting randomly, ‘We have to escape to a safe place!’ In this entire hospital, is there anywhere safer than right by my side?”

“When you arrived at the hospital, did you notice anything unusual?”

“Nothing unusual. When I got here, besides me, there was a fat guy in the clinic.” Zhao Ran rubbed the dried blood flakes on the hem of his clothes.

Officer Ye lowered her gaze, listening intently, and accurately caught the clue in Zhao Ran’s words: “A fat guy?”

“Yeah, must have been four or five hundred pounds. Very memorable.”

“An obesity patient.” Officer Ye’s eyes shifted slightly as she turned her gaze toward the slightly trembling nurse standing to the side: “Is there such a patient?”

“Yes.” The nurse answered while rubbing the sweat from her palms. “He came to the emergency room the night before last due to acute gastroenteritis. Because of his mobility issues, he was admitted to the hospital. I’m not very clear on the rest; Nurse Xiao Bao was in charge of caring for him.”

After arriving at the hospital, Peeping Eagle officers had already tallied the staff casualties: three doctors injured, one security guard dead, one nurse dead, one security guard missing, and one nurse missing.

They had located the dead nurse’s body in the stairwell, intact and undamaged. At the same time, a severed finger was found in the nurses’ station; DNA testing confirmed that this index finger belonged to the missing nurse, Bao Si.

Officer Ye turned to Yu An: “When you reported the case, you mentioned a nurse had been murdered. Tell me what happened.”

Yu An frowned slightly.

In his mind, the web page he had found on the computer in the nurses’ station suddenly surfaced: Hongli News: Devil’s claws reaching out to heavyweights? Obese patients frequently going missing; Aberrants suspected.

“The nurse named Bao ran away.” Yu An leaned against the wall with his head down, casually rubbing off the dried blood on the edge of his shoe as if none of this concerned him, abruptly drawing this conclusion.

“Go down to the morgue on basement level one and see if the massive corpse on the central stretcher bed is still there. No, it’s definitely gone,” he said.

Somewhat surprised, Zhao Ran turned his head to glance at Yu An.

Officer Ye’s gaze suddenly sharpened. Sweeping her eyes over everyone present, she issued orders through her earpiece and quickly received the result.

Sure enough, just as Yu An anticipated, the dead center of the morgue was completely empty. Both the stretcher bed and the corpse had vanished, and wheel tracks left by the stretcher bed were discovered at the entrance of the underground driveway.

Thinking about it now, how could a corpse in a state of bloat lack any putrid odor? That had to be a living person. It was none other than the obese patient Zhao Ran had mentioned, heavily anesthetized and disguised as a corpse, hidden in the morgue ready for transport. The one responsible for all this was the missing nurse, Bao Si.

It would be difficult for a lone nurse to push an obese patient down the sloped corridor, so she must have taken the elevator down to basement level one and remained in the morgue without heading back up. When the appointed time arrived, someone unlocked the door to the underground driveway from the outside to coordinate with her and move the stretcher bed out together.

When Yu An used the elevator, he noticed it was resting precisely on basement level one. This meant that when Yu An woke up from the corpse drawer, there was another person in the morgue.

That nurse had hidden silently inside one of the corpse drawers. Only after Yu An left did she crawl out and wheel the stretcher bed away.

Recalling the scene back then, when Yu An was feeling his way forward in the dark corridor, he indeed heard the sound of a rusted hinge swinging. It wasn’t the wind after all, but that person moving inside the morgue cabinet.

Upon hearing the conclusion that “another person had been hiding in the morgue all along,” Zhao Ran’s gaze suddenly turned gloomy, though it returned to normal shortly after.

Yet this slight, subtle shift in expression was keenly caught by Yu An.

Zhao Ran slowly leaned in close to Yu An, lowering his head to whisper, “What massive corpse? You couldn’t be making things up, could you?”

“I’m not lying. When I woke up, he was lying right in the center of the morgue.” Yu An stared into his eyes, those plum-colored pupils giving him an illusion of danger.

Officer Ye abruptly stood up, her leather uniform bringing a gust of chilly air as she interrogated Zhao Ran: “The nurse pushed a stretcher bed into the elevator to go downstairs, and you didn’t see anything unusual from the surveillance room?”

Zhao Ran shook his head: “I’m telling the truth. The cameras on basement level one were broken. Who would dare talk nonsense in front of Officer Ye?”

Indeed, Yu An could confirm this point as well. In the public inbox on the computer at the nurses’ station, an email had mentioned the camera malfunction requesting repairs, but the security logistics office had delayed a full day before responding.

It seemed there was an accomplice in the security logistics office too. It was virtually certain that the accomplice was the security guard who had disappeared alongside the nurse.

They had teamed up to smuggle the patient out of the hospital, never expecting to run into the second goat-headed man breaking into the building. The nurse inadvertently had a finger bitten off by that monster, or rather… only a single finger remained.

The exact situation would require dissecting the goat-headed man’s stomach to determine.

“A premeditated gang crime. The nurse was responsible for smuggling the patient, while the guard coordinated outside the underground driveway, creating a time discrepancy against us.” Officer Ye pondered briefly, ordering an inspection of vehicles approaching Guxian Hospital after midnight, setting up roadblocks to screen suburban exits of Hongli City, and notifying the second squad to go all out to rescue the hostage.

“As for you two, hand over the Aberrant Cores taken from the goat-headed men and cooperate with the investigation.” Officer Ye glanced at Yu An.

Yu An froze and looked at Zhao Ran. Zhao Ran shrugged, gloating: “They’re just doing their official duty. If they tell you to hand them over, just hand them over.”

Yu An realized. So that was why Zhao Ran had acted so irritated upon hearing the sirens earlier.

Underground Railway had an unwritten rule: when seeking help from Underground Railway, one was strictly forbidden from simultaneously seeking help from other Aberrant hunting companies or the Peeping Eagle Bureau. If violated, Underground Railway would permanently remove the client from their protection roster without any refund.

Regarding this, Yu An could now completely understand. They didn’t want their hard-won Aberrant Cores to be fought over by other companies or confiscated by the police after shedding blood and expending effort.

The cores in the analyzer were worth at least thirty to forty thousand. If he had never laid eyes on them, that would be one thing, but having gone through so much trouble to obtain them only to surrender them left him feeling somewhat indignant.

The Core Storage Analyzer at his waist was opened by the two police officers conducting the search. Yu An was surprised to find that only two blue cores remained inside; the highest-grade Tier 2 Purple core had disappeared.

Yu An didn’t say a word. Instead, he quietly glanced at Zhao Ran standing to the side, who was casually smoothing his gloves without looking up.

The officers confiscated the two blue Aberrant Cores. Having acquired the cores, Officer Ye stood up and walked toward the exit of the clinic: “Timon, bring that young man back to the Eagle Bureau for questioning.”

“Yes, Madam!” Hearing her name called without warning, the blonde, curly-haired policewoman snapped to attention instantly.

Yu An was the only one who had clashed head-on with the goat-headed man and witnessed the missing patient in the morgue. They had every reason to believe that Yu An was a prime suspect and deeply entangled with the kidnappers.

“I’ve told you everything I can. Even if I go back with you…” Yu An felt a sense of powerlessness, unable to vindicate himself. He didn’t want to go to the Eagle Bureau and felt an instinctive dread toward Officer Ye. Yu An was certain that if she had investigated his father’s drunk driving crash back then, he wouldn’t have slipped away so easily.

He absolutely could not go back with them.

However, a female officer armed with a submachine gun and two armed police officers with sidearms guarded his sides, along with two brass mechanical eagles perched on the desk, occasionally preening their brass feathers with sharp beaks.

Under such tight surveillance, it was simply impossible to escape on his own.

His palms were icy and clammy, but were suddenly covered by a patch of warmth.

Zhao Ran clenched his hand into a fist, tucking his fingertips into his palm, and gently pressed down on Yu An’s knuckles. This way of comforting was rather peculiar, like a leopard sheathing its claws. It seemed he was unwilling to touch others directly with his hands.

The moment Officer Ye stepped out of the clinic and the door clicked shut, Zhao Ran grabbed Yu An and leaped backward: “What questioning? Weren’t all the questions finished just now?”

Shattering the window glass with his body and kicking open the brittle, rusted security bars with one foot, Zhao Ran dragged Yu An and vaulted outside.

“Halt, or I’ll shoot!” Considering the nurse was still nearby, Officer Timon didn’t fire. Instead, she blew her police whistle at once. Hearing the command, the mechanical eagles perched on the desk flashed electronic red lights in their eyes, flapped their wings with a prolonged screech, and gave chase along their trajectory.

She demanded of the two armed officers: “What are you doing? Why didn’t you stop him?”

The two officers protested their innocence, stating that the instant Zhao Ran moved, they had reacted to intercept him. Yet at that moment, it felt as though someone had grabbed their collars and arms, freezing their bodies on the spot.

“Nonsense,” Officer Timon said in accented Chinese. “He only has two hands. How could he grab both of you at the same time?”

Glass burst and shards clattered coldly against the ground. Their silhouettes traced an arc beneath the lone moon, Zhao Ran’s long hair whipping wildly in the wind, tinting the freezing draft with an alluring hue.

Carrying Yu An half over his shoulder, Zhao Ran sprinted ahead. His toes kicked off low walls to vault upward, leaping across the staggered old buildings, no obstacle able to slow his nimble strides.

The stiff breeze blew the hair back from his forehead. Yu An shouted into the wind: “A core was missing. Did you take it?”

Zhao Ran turned his wrist over, revealing the Tier 2 Purple core held steadily in his left palm, and slipped it into the Core Storage Analyzer at Yu An’s waist: “Once you surrender it, you’ll never get it back. You’re way too honest, kid.”

“Fleeing like this, aren’t you afraid of being wanted?” Yu An’s hands were still locked in cuffs, so he could only clutch Zhao Ran’s clothing tightly to prevent himself from slipping off.

“Of course I won’t be wanted.” Zhao Ran wore a matter-of-fact look. “You’d better worry about yourself. Your picture might be in the papers tomorrow, hahaha.”

Yu An remained silent.

The interviewer had done this intentionally to push him away from the Peeping Eagle Bureau. If he became wanted by the Eagle Bureau, let alone finding a job, even daily life would be fraught with difficulty.

Yet through these few minutes of interaction, Yu An had roughly sorted out the relationship between Underground Railway and Peeping Eagle. The two were neither subordinate nor hostile. When the policewoman rushed upstairs, she cuffed only him and not Zhao Ran, proving that Underground Railway staff were outside their jurisdiction.

Seen this way, joining Underground Railway was a wise choice.

A piercing eagle screech sliced through the air above them. Yu An looked up to see two golden mechanical eagles tearing through the night sky, swooping down toward them.

Zhao Ran relied on the shadows cast by the mechanical eagles on the ground to gauge their positions, darting left and weaving right.

Getting pecked or struck by those brass talons and sharp beaks was no joke; at best, flesh would be torn open, and at worst, tendons severed and bones shattered.

No matter how good a person’s stamina was, they couldn’t outrun a flying bird. Moreover, the mechanical eagles possessed immense speed and endurance, darting between cramped old buildings and tree branches while their eyes flashed electronic crimson light, scanning and locking onto their quarry.

“Mechanical eagles are standard issue for the Peeping Eagle Bureau. Every officer gets one, just like a sidearm, capable of tracking and locking onto targets. Powered by the Aberrant Cores of birds of prey, they are highly practical Aberrant-powered weapons.”

Usually, human Vessels were unwilling to use low-grade Aberrant Cores, so those were mostly fed into Aberrant machinery and weaponry as replacement batteries. Aberrant Cores were far more durable and eco-friendly than electricity or fuel.

Zhao Ran picked up his pace without sounding out of breath, though the newly dressed wound began seeping blood once more.

“What happens if they catch us?” Yu An asked.

“The programming is probably set to incapacitate us. Hard to say. Snapping our hand and foot tendons? Or ramming a hole straight through the stomach? Both count as incapacitation.”

Zhao Ran deliberately teased him, wanting to see him frightened; with someone so detached, the soft, vulnerable side was always intriguing.

Yu An stared calmly at the eagle, his fingertips hesitating on the lid of the Core Storage Analyzer for two seconds: “In other words, you aren’t confident you can get away, right?”

Before signing the employment contract with the interviewer, he could not get caught by the Eagle Bureau. But escaping the clutches of two mechanical eagles required the speed of an eagle.

He wanted to take a gamble.

Yu An flicked the lid open, took out the Tier 2 Purple core inside, and pressed it into his left eye socket.

Once Functional Core: Satan’s Guidance embedded into the socket, it instantly forged a link with Yu An’s optic nerves. A surge of searing, stinging pain rushed in alongside dizziness, which Yu An endured through gritted teeth.

“Uh, wait, no, I am confident! Don’t be rash,” Zhao Ran comforted him earnestly, not wanting to scare him out of his wits. People under extreme stress could do anything; if he went berserk in desperation, it would be difficult to clean up.

Yu An didn’t answer.

The Tier 2 Purple core successfully linked with Yu An. Once he grew accustomed to the heat, the pain became bearable. This time, however, Yu An didn’t sprout goat horns. It seemed this was the difference between a Functional Core and a Monstrosity Core.

A Monstrosity Core caused human Vessels to display corresponding monster mimicry, granting base abilities matching the creature’s traits, while a Functional Core granted the Vessel a special ability.

The Core Storage Analyzer sounded a chime confirming the successful link. The right side of the screen showed that the remaining uses of this core had decreased from 6 to 5.

A trailing ribbon of purple light shifted with Yu An’s eye socket. Yu An looked up at the mechanical eagle, pinched his thumb and index finger together, put them to his lips, and whistled sharply.

The mechanical eagle was drawn to the whistle and met Yu An’s gaze. The circuit of light faintly traced across the purple core in Yu An’s left eye, and the goat skull pattern on its surface grinned maliciously, revealing a row of demonic fangs.

The base ability of Functional Core: Satan’s Guidance was to cause targets to lose their sense of direction.

As if jammed by interference, the mechanical eagle’s smooth flight trajectory turned erratic and clumsy. It crashed into several tree branches in succession, its brass feathers battered out of alignment until its internal mechanical core was nearly exposed. Yet despite such severe damage, it couldn’t stop. As if enchanted by the devil, it followed Yu An into the winding, twisting alleyway.

Seeing Yu An’s actions, Zhao Ran raised an eyebrow slightly, thinking to himself that the kid was audacious enough to attack a mechanical eagle. Truly, a newborn calf fears no tiger.

Yet he couldn’t help marveling. This was the first time he had seen a human capable of freely swapping Aberrant Cores. It was simply incredible; wasn’t this ability more formidable than many Aberrants?

“Very good, looks like the eagle has lost control. Lure it to a cramped spot so it crashes on its own. That way, the Eagle Bureau can’t blame us,” Zhao Ran whispered, directing his next move.

However, Yu An didn’t seem to have any intention of following Zhao Ran’s orders.

“Crashing it is a waste. Might as well pull off something big,” Yu An stared calmly at the eagle like a feral cat fixated on a sparrow. “I already see the core controller.”

Before Zhao Ran could figure out what he was planning, his arms suddenly emptied, as if a held cat had darted away.

“Betting that core will let me fly.” Yu An drew the forged-steel dagger he had only recently returned to Zhao Ran. When the wobbling mechanical eagle dipped to its lowest point, his entire body launched forward. His long legs clamped securely around the mechanical eagle. Gripping the blade with both hands, his first slash shattered its camera eyes, his second strike cleanly punctured and wrecked the signal transmitter, and his third drove straight into the drive mechanism, prying out the Aberrant Core inside!

As the wreckage of the mechanical eagle crashed to the ground, the chime of the Core Storage Analyzer rang out.

Name: Monstrosity Core: Eagle Wings

Origin: Eagle Aberrant

Category: Common Species

Rank Assessment: Tier 3 Blue (Prussian Blue)

Base Abilities: High-Speed Flight

Usage Restriction: Cumulative 24 hours of use

Description: A great business leader once said, feathers are meant for flying, not down jackets!

Resonance Condition: Unknown

It was actually a Tier 3 Blue. Yu An looked at the interviewer with an expression that said, “Isn’t this awesome?”

Zhao Ran buried his face in his hand helplessly. Spending barely over two hours with him had completely cured his low blood pressure.