District 103 Cleaning Center, Technical Support Department.
The technician was tucking the potato chips, and the screen in front of him was displaying the inside of sewer A7 in District 103.
There had been an outbreak of water creatures contamination here, and the monster hunters had gone down an hour ago, and the mission was an Level E, which was taken care of in twenty minutes after they had entered.
Now it's the cleaners who are working. Cleaners are just a bunch of garbage sweepers, what danger can there be?
All the technicians know that when the monster hunters on the working, they have to concentrate on the screen without any distraction, while the cleaners are working, it would be a leisure time to the technicians.
The technician just finished a bag of potato chips, his hand still typing and chatting with his girlfriend, glancing up at the screen every now and then.
Suddenly, he stopped and stared incredulously at the screen.The pollution value on the screen rose steeply, forming a peak.
Is the system crashed?
Something is wrong, the data is still climbing, the pollution concentration 30%, 40%, 50% ......70%!
Level D contamination area. There are four large, eye-catching, blood-red letters appeared on the screen and were flashing continuously.
Level D? wasn't it level E??
Could it be that this contaminated area has been rated wrongly from the very beginning?The technician threw away the bag, and his fingers quickly struck the keyboard, but the result of the calculation was still the same.
It's still a Level D contaminated area.
It's over, the technician stood up, it's over. He quickly switched to the sewer screen, each cleaner's helmet had a camera for headquarters to keep track of the situation.
The screen flashlight illuminated the depths of the sewer, revealing a fish head man contaminant, it was a real contaminant.
The technician quickly contacted the cleaner squad, and just as he opened the public channel he heard a thud.
Someone had fired a shot.
District 103, Sewer A7.
"Reporting a live contaminant, requesting unlock the… fk!!!"
Adrian didn't even have time to speak, it was all happening so fast, the fish-head man was amazingly fast and close in the blink of an eye.
"Permission granted, permission to fire!" Clara's anxious voice came from his helmet.
Ding
The weapons access opened.
Bang!
At the same time the permission opened, Zelda pulled the trigger without hesitation, and Adrian froze. The bullet popped out at breakneck speed, hitting the fish-head man's face with such precision that his face tilted backward 180 degrees under the force of the massive impact.
Stillness.
The extremely fast darting fish-head man stopped in place for seconds, Zelda didn't let her guard down, is he dead?
He slowly raised his head, the center of the fish's eye get shot, his face torn apart by the rush of blood.
Still alive.
Despite being shot in the head he was still alive, Zelda judged in her mind at first. It was different from a zombie, whose head was in the vulnerable, and once it getting shot, it would be incapacitated.
The fish-head man could still move after his head was blown off, somehow fitting the characteristics of a fish.
Adrian finally reacts, he pulls his gun from his back, after a year as a cleaner, this is the first time he's seen a live contaminant, his heart is racing and his hand is unsteady with the gun.
Adrian also raised his gun and fires.
Bang, bang, bang!
Adrian fired a burst of shots, with little accuracy, but managed to cause the fish-head man to slow down under the strong suppression of fire. The contamination's head was smashed by Zelda, and his left leg was broken, dragging on the ground.
He was so tenacious that he had to crawl to them.
"Do, you, know, where the ...... end train ...... is?" The contamination's head was full of blood, and his limbs were on the ground, crawling this way like an amphibian.
The fish-head man crooked his neck, and the scales on it curled around the edges, "I couldn't catch up, line 1 ...... end, end, end, end, end, end, end, end, end, end, end, end, end, end, end train ......"
Adrian lost madly san.
Bang!
Zelda added another shot, and the fish-head man bounced in place for a moment, then twitched like lagging, "End end end end end train ......"
Zelda asks, "Is he dead?"
Adrian mumbles, "I don't know."
The contaminants were usually dead through when the cleaners came in, and it was the first time he'd seen a live one.
He'd just come out for a breather during work, never expecting this. No wonder his mental state was off today, the more he relaxed the more nervous he became, it was because there were live contaminants here.
Zelda watched for a moment, with the fish-head man still twitching, and she asked the crucial question, "How long does it take for the contaminants to die before they start precipitating spores?"
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Adrian's brain buzzes and he finally respond, "Immediately! The spores will precipitate immediately after the contaminant loses vital signs, so that means he's not dead yet!"
Adrian's gun, which he had just lowered, reared back, pointing it straight at the fish-head man, the contaminant on whom nothing had appeared to change until now.
Not a single spore.The fish-head was dead, but not quite.
Zelda is a pure newbie, today is her first day on the job, and less than half an hour into her happy cotton picking she encounters this crap.
Zelda humbly asks her predecessor for advice, "What do you normally do when you run into this?"
Adrian: "Wait for help."
Zelda: "......"
Adrian was also upset, "Firstly, the probability of something like what we encountered today is too low, I've been practicing for a year and I've never heard of the battlefield still having a leak after the monster hunters swept. Secondly, the capacity of cleaners are not as good as the monster hunters, acting rashly may be risky, according to the code of work, we must wait in place."
"Did the signal sent out?"Zelda asked, waiting for help also requires someone to know where they are.
Adrian: "I sent the signal when the fish-head man appeared."But there was no response.
He figured he was the senior and should calm Zelda down, "The distress signal was sent, we just need to be patient."
Adrian sighed again, "It was my fault, if I hadn't had to come out for air, I wouldn't have gotten you involved."
Zelda glanced at him, "You don't have to blame yourself."
Talking meaningless was just a waste of time.
Zelda asked, "Did you found something wrong?"
Adrian had long ago realized that Zelda seemed to be more sensitive than he was, she founded a contaminant a full minute before Adrian did, just like an artificial radar.
When Zelda said that, Adrian instantly got goosebumps and thought there was a new contaminant, he gripped his gun tighter and asked, "What's wrong?"
Zelda: "The leader hasn't contacted us for long time."
When the fish-head man first appeared, all Zelda heard was Clara unlocked the permission, then her voice disappeared.
Their channel was sharing, Clara as the team leader could clearly hear the sound from Zelda's side. When Zelda and Adrian suspected each other of being contaminated, Clara kept silent could be a consideration, but it's strange that she didn't make any sounds since long ago.
Zelda asks, "Was she killed?"
Adrian's face was hidden under his helmet and he grimaced, "Worse."
Zelda frowns.
Adrian: "It means that the contaminated area has opened up, we're in the core contaminated area, outsiders can't get in for a while, the channel is disconnected under the mental contamination, Clara is impossible to reach us."
"We, as two rookies sweeping the garbage, have no equipment on us, the channel is disconnected and we can't receive any message from the outside."
Adrian spoke fast, took a deep breath, looked at Zelda and said his final words, "Zelda, we're done."
******
"Scott? Austin? Come in if you copy!" Clara is calling them, but doesn't hear any response.
Clara was still collecting the contaminants when the gunshots suddenly rang out. She had assumed at the time that one of them was mentally contaminated, and Clara hadn't put much stock in it when Zelda had first drawn her gun.
Clara still had many contamination spores to collect on her side, because once they spread to the city the whole District 103 would be doomed.
Clara has her priorities straight, and no matter what happens, the first order of business is always to make sure the contamination spores would be collected completely. As she did so, she kept an ear out for any sounds on their side.
Assuming a fact that this is still a normal Level E mission, then everything is under her control.
But it apparently the situation on there was getting more and more chaotic, and there were sounds of sizzling currents coming from the channel.
Clara immediately felt that something happened, and her instincts told her that this didn't seem to be a simple level E mission.
She knew it was going to be bad when Adrian said there was a contaminant. Unfortunately, it was too late, and she soon got a message from the tech department.
A once-in-a-decade misfortune had occurred, the contaminated area had been rated incorrectly, and this was not even a Level E contaminated area, but a Level D.
Definitely the monster hunters can easily handle a Level D, but the people in here are two logisticians who can only clean up garbage. Those monster hunters thought that they had finished their work and left long ago.
But they don't know, if we compare this contaminated area to a devil's lair, then the monster hunters can only be regarded as cleaning up the garbage at the gate of lair, and the monster lord is in the deep lair.
It would take at least half an hour for the monster hunters to return, and one more second in the contaminated area could lead to an early death, not to mention that Zelda was still a newcomer.
Clara tried to contact Zelda and Adrian, but it's in vain, she couldn't hear any response. She immediately guessed that the Level D contaminated area had opened up, and the contamination had cut off the contact channel.
Clara had lost contact with them.
......
Zelda took a deep breath, could anyone be as misfortune as she was?
When Valerie signed the contract with her, she said that there was low risk getting infection while working, because it's a low probability event. During employee training, the instructional video didn't teach them how to kill contaminants, only how to "pick cotton" because it's a low probability event to get infected.
When Adrian gave her the gun, he said that you don't need to shoot because it's still a low probability event.
Now three small probability events collide and Zelda encounters a living contaminant that she doesn't even know how to kill.
She did fought with zombies in her last life, but she never expected that she has to kill a fish in this one.
The good news is that Zelda has a gun on hand, and the air rounds can be fired thousands of times with a single fueling, so she doesn't have to worry about running out of bullets.The bad news is that the gun can't kill the contaminants outright.
Zelda tries to save herself by asking, "You know how to kill the contaminants right?"
The universal guideline for killing zombies in the last world is shoot them in the head, so there must be a universal guideline for killing contaminants in the wasteland world, otherwise humans couldn't have survived this long.
Adrian stood with a desperate look on his face, "I don't know."
Now that the fish-head man's body was still there, there was no telling what it was going to mutate into next.
Zelda said to Adrian, "Adrian do something!"
Her mind doesn't have a way to deal with the contaminants, but Adrian does. Adrian can't tell who's the newcomer for a moment because Zelda's aura is so strong.
Zelda: "Didn't you wanted to be a monster hunter? I'm pretty sure you've learned."
Adrian was embarrassed for a moment, he usually reluctant to admit his past. He did sign up to be a monster hunter once. He lost out, so he turned a cleaner. But how could Zelda know that?
Adrian got a nosebleed, and he's a bit muddled because of the constant mental contamination. He tried to calmly remember what he had memorized when he was preparing to the monster hunters exam. After a moment, Adrian said, "The way to kill them, you have to find the core of contamination."
"The core?" Zelda asked.
"Yes, "Adrian said." When a contaminated area gets formed there is always a core source of contamination, and the core is usually very deep, and it will try to disguise itself to confuse you."
Zelda: "An exorcism game?"
"Uh..." Adrian: "Yeah, something like that."
The fish-head man in front of them is clearly a corpse, but there is no spore precipitation, which proves that this is not a core of contamination. Zelda doesn't want to die, so she must find the core.
Zelda asked, "How do the contamination form?"
It's better to know what causes it. The fish-head man is actually very human, he seems to have some kind of "grudge". Adrian was about to speak when he was interrupted by a loud noise.
Vroom!
There was a sudden roar in the distance. It was so loud that this time Adrian could hear it without Zelda reminding him.
Two headlights turn on without warning, Zelda's pupils plumb, and out of the darkness slowly emerges an old subway train.
It's a spacious sewer, but still there shouldn't be a subway coming.
Zelda saw a gray material floating in front of her eyes, and for a moment her vision was blurry.
She blinked her eyes, and when she opened them, she was no longer in the dirty sewer, and there was a flashing light overhead. Zelda looked down, her feet on the tiled floor covered in a thick layer of ash.
Platform. This is a subway platform, no longer a sewer.
Zelda promises that she absolutely did not move even 1 inch just now, and the body of the fish-head man has not changed, but the environment has changed from the sewer to subway stations, so this is what Adrian said of contaminated areas.
The rusty front of the train says... line 1? Last train on Line 1, the time on the front is 23:35.
Is this the last train the fish-head man was waiting for?
Vroom…
The train came to a slow stop in front of them, the doors opening to both sides, like a silent invitation.
Ding
At the moment the subway stopped, Zelda's mind clicked: "Purification System warning: you have triggered the side task - the last train of the disappeared Line 1, the current purification progress of 10%."
Zelda: "..."
What did she accidentally trigger?