Chapter 4 Contaminated Areas

Area 103 Cleaning Center, Technical Support Department. The technician was eating potato chips, and the screen showed the inside of sewer number a7 in sector 103. There had been an outbreak of water life contamination here. The hunters had gone down an hour ago, a level E mission in the district, and the hunters had gone down and taken care of it in twenty minutes. Now, it was the cleaners at work. All the technicians knew that when the hunters worked, they had to be on their game; when the cleaners worked, it was break time. The technician was eating chips, still typing and chatting with his girlfriend with one hand, glancing up at the screen now and then. Suddenly, he stopped eating his chips and stared incredulously at the screen. The pollution value on the screen increased steeply, forming a small peak. The data was still climbing. Level D pollution area. Wasn't the grade E? This contaminated area had been wrong in terms of rating from the beginning. The technician threw away the chips, his fingers flew on the keyboard, and the result of his calculations was still a level d contaminated area. SHIT! The technician rose to his feet. He quickly switched to the sewer screen. Each cleaner's helmet had a camera to help HQ monitor the situation. The screen shook as a flashlight illuminated the depths of the sewer, revealing a fish-man contaminant. It was a contaminant. The technician quickly contacted the cleaner squad and had just opened the public channel when he heard a loud bang. Someone had fired a shot. Sector 103, sewer a7. Carter didn't even have time to talk; the Fishman was too fast. Fishmen were twice as fast as humans could run. "Permission open, permission to fire," came Sherry's anxious voice from her helmet. A weapons clearance opened. Boom..... At the same time the permission opened, Janet pulled the trigger without hesitation, and Carter froze. The bullet ejected at extreme speed, hitting the fisherman's face with such precision that his face was thrown backward one hundred and eighty degrees by the force of the massive impact. Stillness. The extremely fast darting Fishman stopped in place for two seconds. Janet didn't dare to let go. "Hahahahahahahahahaha," A low laugh came from the fishman. He slowly raised his head; the center of the fish's eye was pierced, and his face was bleeding out. It was still alive. Janet's first judgment was in her mind. Fishmen were different from zombies. A zombie's weak point was its head, and once it was pierced, it would lose its ability to move. A fishman could still move after being shot in the head, somehow fitting the characteristics of a fish. Carter finally reacted. He pulled the gun from his back, his heart beating fast. Carter similarly raised his gun and fired. Bang, bang, bang. Carter delivered a flurry of blows that slowed the Fishman down. Janet smashed the Fishman's head, and it had one of its left legs broken, but it was crawling on the ground. So tenacious of life. "Do you guys know where the last train is at #1," the Fishman was still crawling this way. Fishman crooked his neck, "I won't make it to the last train, #1." Carter was on the verge of collapse. Bang. Janet fired another shot and the fishman bounced in place for a moment and then twitched. Janet asked, "Is it dead?" Carter's entire body was in a state of shock, "I don't know." The contaminant was usually dead through and through when the cleaner came in. It was also the first time he had seen a live contaminant. He was just working, touching fish out to catch his breath; no wonder he was not in the right frame of mind today. The more he relaxed, the more nervous he became. It turned out that there was a live contaminant here. Janet watched for a while and asked, "How long after the contaminant dies does it start precipitating spores?" Carter finally responded, "If the spores precipitate immediately after it has no vitals, that proves the Fishman isn't dead." Carter's gun, which he had just lowered, reared back, pointing it straight at the fisherman's corpse. The fishman was dead, but not quite. Janet was a pure newbie—such a dangerous thing to encounter on her first day on the job. Janet asked, "What do we normally do in a situation like this?" Carter said, "We just have to wait for help." Janet "........." Carter was equally depressed, "First of all, the odds of us running into a fisherman are so low. I've never heard of such a thing happening in my year and a half in the business. Second, we're not as physically fit as hunters, and we might die if we act rashly. So we can only wait where we are." "And did the distress signal go out?" Carter said, "I sent a signal when the fishers first appeared." But no one responded. "The distress signal went out; we just need to be patient." Carter sighed again, "It's my fault. If I hadn't had to come out for air, I wouldn't have gotten you involved." Janet glanced at him, "Don't be stupid." Saying meaningful things is a good use of time. Janet asked, "Did you notice anything wrong?" Carter had long ago realized that Janet seemed more perceptive than he was. She reacted to the contaminant a full minute before Carter, an artificial radar. When Janet said that, Carter thought there was a new contaminant; he gripped his gun tighter and asked, "What's wrong?" Janet: "Sherry hasn't contacted us until now." When the Fishman first appeared, Janet only heard the captain's words, then Sherry's voice disappeared. Their channel was public, and Sherry, as the captain, could hear movement on Janet's side. While Janet and Carter suspected each other of being contaminated, Sherry was probably thinking and judging. But she had just made a sound. Janet asks, "Sherry was killed?" Carter's face was hidden under his helmet, and he grimaced, "It could have been worse." Janet frowned. Carter said, "This proves we're in the core contamination zone. There's no way for anyone else to get in for a while, and Sherry can't reach us." "We can't receive any outside information right now." Carter took a deep breath and looked at Janet as she uttered her last words, "Janet, we're screwed." "Janet, Carter, come in if you hear me," Sherry called them but didn't hear any response. Sherry was still sheltering the contaminant when the shots suddenly rang out. Sherry knew how to prioritize. No matter what happened, the first business order was always to ensure the contaminant spores were taken in. She kept an eye out for any movement on their side while taking in the contaminant. If this was an average level E contaminated area sweep, everything should be under her control. But their side was getting increasingly chaotic, with nuisance current sounds coming from the channel. It was then that Sherry immediately felt that something wasn't right, and her intuition told her that this didn't seem to be a mere level of mission. When Carter said there was a contaminant, she knew the situation was already horrible. Unfortunately, it was too late. She soon received a message from the technical department. The contaminated area was rated incorrectly, surprisingly not a level e. Instead, it was a level d contaminated area. A Level D mission wasn't challenging for a hunter, but it was the cleaning crew inside. The hunters had left this place a long time ago. But they didn't know that if the contaminated area was compared to a devil's lair, the hunters were, at best, helping the devil clean the trash at the entrance. The actual lair was inside. The hunters would take at least half an hour to return. However, a second longer in the contaminated area is more dangerous, not to mention Janet is still a newcomer. Sherry tried to contact Janet and Carter, but neither could hear a response. She immediately guessed that the continued expansion of the Level D contaminated area had caused HQ to cut off channel contact. Sherry couldn't find her way into the contaminated area. Sherry had lost contact with them. Janet took a deep breath. Too much bad luck. When Lynn signed the contract with her, she said there was no danger of running into a contaminant in general. That was a small probability. When the staff training was conducted, the teaching video didn't teach how to kill a contaminant. That's because it's a small probability event. When Carter gave her the gun, it was said that there was generally no need to shoot. Because it's still a small probability event. Now, three small probability events collide, and Janet not only encounters a living contaminant, but she doesn't even know how to be able to kill a Fishman. The good news was that Janet had a gun and could fire thousands of shots with a single fueling of the air rounds without worrying about running out of bullets. The bad news was that the air rounds couldn't kill the contaminant outright. Janet tried to save herself by asking, "How can we kill the contaminant?" In the zombie world, the general rule was one shot to the head. In the wasteland world, a universal rule must be to kill a contaminant. Otherwise, humans couldn't have survived this long. Carter stood with a desperate look on his face. "I don't know." Now that the Fishman corpse was still lying around, there was no telling what the hell it was going to mutate into next. Janet said to the clueless Carter, "Hurry up and do something." Her mind didn't have a way to deal with the contaminant, but Carter did. Carter couldn't tell who the newcomer was for a while, but Janet's aura was too strong. Janet pressed on, "Didn't you want to be a hunter? Surely you've studied about it." Carter's nose was bleeding. Continuously mentally contaminated, his mind was a little unclear. After half a minute, Carter said, "We want to eliminate the contaminant. We have to find the source of the contamination." Janet asked, "The source of the contaminant?" "Yes," Carter said. "A contaminated area is created when there is a core source of contamination. The source of contamination is usually hidden so deep that he will find ways to hide it and use it to confuse you." Janet asked, "Ghostbusters?" "Well," Carter, "you're right to interpret it that way." The fishman in front of her was clearly a corpse, but the lack of spores precipitating out proved that this was not the source of contamination. Janet had to find the source of the contamination to survive. Janet asked, "How did the contaminant form?" She could only better understand the situation if she knew the cause. The fishman just now looked like a human. Carter was just about to speak when she was interrupted by a loud noise. There was a sudden roar in the distance. It was so loud this time that Carter didn't need Janet's reminder to hear it. Two headlights turned on without warning, and Janet's pupils suddenly contracted. An old subway slowly pulled out of the darkness. This was a sewer; why was there a subway? Janet felt a gray substance floating in front of her eyes, and for a moment, her vision blurred a little. She blinked, and when she opened her eyes again, she was no longer in the dirty sewer, and a blinking light appeared above her head. Janet lowered her head; underneath her feet, she was stepping on a tiled floor covered in a thick layer of gray. The station platform. This was a subway platform. The sewer was gone. Janet assured herself that she hadn't moved a moment ago and that the fisherman's body hadn't changed. But the environment had changed, from a sewer to an old subway station. This was the area Carter had said was contaminated. The rusty, yellowed front end said line one. The last train on line 1, the time on the front, was 23:35. This was the last train the Fishers were waiting for. The subway slowed to a stop in front of them, the doors opening to either side like an invitation between silent voices. Ding. The moment the subway stopped, there was a crunch in Janet's head. System Alert: You have opened the side quest, the disappearing last train of line one. Your purification progress is currently at 10 percent, and please keep working on it. Janet, "??" She had unintentionally triggered the side quest.