Going up the dilapidated escape stairs to the second floor, the walls on both sides of the dark corridor were knocked down and replaced by pig iron fences covered with unknown dirt and copper red rust. There was a layer of greasy black stains on the ground, and it was soft to step on, and Ethan thought of a nightmare he had a long time ago about his home --- the fifth space station. All the plants in that dream were covered with similar oil stains.
Most of the compartments behind the iron fence are empty, but there are many burn marks on the ground or on the walls. There was a stench of excrement and blood in the air, and Samuel couldn't help covering his nose with his arms.
"Damn...what the hell..." he cursed.
Ethan was still carefully searching for the smell. Apparently Samuel's father had been here, but he didn't stay too long.
Just as Samuel followed him through the "wards", something suddenly swooped in from the darkness, collided with the iron fence and made a terrifying howl of a beast. Samuel was so frightened that he fell to the ground unprepared. In front of him, a swollen behemoth was grinning at him through the iron bars. His facial features were squeezed and twisted. There were many tiny earthworm-like tentacles growing out of his knuckles, his fingernails were gone, and he was trying to grab Samuel.
Samuel was shocked, and cursed out a long list of swear words. Ethan turned his head to look at the sick "man", and took a sniff in his direction before he was relieved.
Fortunately, this is not Samuel's father.
However, when Ethan approached the iron fence, the violent and thirst emanating from the patient's body suddenly subsided a lot. The swollen body shrank, lowered its head, and looked at him cautiously from under the swollen eyelids, like a dog who has done something wrong and awaits punishment from its owner. Ethan stood very close to him, so close that it was a little too dangerous. Samuel quickly got up from the ground and grabbed his shoulders to pull him away, but Ethan waved at him and looked at the infected person with a bit of curiosity.
"Do you have something to say to me?" Ethan asked unexpectedly.
Samuel was surprised to see that the infected person actually muttered, but it was difficult to tell whether the words were human words or not. His tone was shrill, weird in some places, coughing in places, not human grunts in others. However, Ethan listened to those strange sounds seriously, as if he could really understand.
"Hey! We can't waste any more time, there's probably a camera here!" Samuel urged uneasily.
Ethan asked the infected person seriously, "You said they burned everyone? And those people are actually conscious?"
The Infected continued to grunt unbearably, Ethan's brows furrowed, and there was a flash of anger in his eyes. But then, he stretched out his hand, actually reached into the iron cage, and touched the distorted face of the infected person dripping with mucus, and there was even a bit of pity in that action. Leaning back, he turned to Samuel and said, "He said yesterday that he saw a few guards go upstairs with a normal person, and we have to keep going up."
Samuel stared at Ethan with an odd look. "You understand him?"
Ethan shrugged and said again in that indifferent tone, "Almost."
Why? Is it because you made them? This sentence, Samuel did not ask. He just felt more and more that the Ethan in front of him was no longer the Ethan he used to be. He still believed that Ethan wouldn't hurt him, but also instinctively raised the kind of fear and a tinge of… disgust that comes with facing dangers so different from his own.
But on the other hand, he yearns very much for that sense of alienation that is completely different from humans. Although it looks dirty and evil, it may be more direct and simple than human evil.
He remembered that, on Holy Spirit Day, when Ethan was attracted by the Lyra and entered the illusion in the sound of the lyre, Samuel also entered his own illusion. There, the black man showed him a book, a book describing the end of the universe, the end of humanity. In that ancient world, those huge and terrifying creatures dominated everything, and humans were just some bugs swimming in the deep sea.
Yes, haven't humans also changed from bugs to what they are now? Why do you think these bugs are scary now? Maybe these bugs should be what they are, maybe everything will return to the original point, and this dirty and chaotic world can finally become peaceful.
As a worm, can't we live happily ever after
The black man told him that his hatred would be repaid, and those who owed him would also pay the price in blood. At the end of the order, everything will return to the original chaos, and those who have passed away and those who have not been born, who may and may not exist, will be reunited with those who are still alive. Perhaps, that is a real paradise, right? Samuel thought dazedly.
Every next floor is almost a similar scene, except that there are more and more monsters behind the iron fence. Samuel could no longer use "them" to describe these monsters in his heart, and he could no longer regard them as his companions. Those swollen and squishy monsters squirmed in the dark, making weird sounds like coughing or grunting. These things are usually very aggressive when they see Samuel, but once they notice Ethan, they will calm down immediately, and even crawl down, as if they were visiting their own king. And Ethan was in the dark, dirty and twisted corridor, but he didn't feel any sense of disobedience. His black clothes seemed to be very harmonious with him at this moment, as if he should belong to such black.
They encountered patrolling on the fourth and fifth floors. Those people didn't seem to believe their eyes when they first saw them, but immediately took out their laser guns and ordered them not to move. But obviously, these people are not Ethan's opponents. When the terrifying tentacles appeared on his back, when his body burned by the laser recovered in an instant, those patrolling guards were already scared to move. Apparently, there were some who still remembered to press the alarm for help, but before they could move, they were already strangled by Ethan's tentacles and thrown to the side of the iron fence.
Then Samuel saw the bloated monsters smash the guard's head to the ground alive and devour the flesh of his face. The screams of the guards caused the monsters in the surrounding cages to cheer excitedly, and slammed against the iron fence, causing the mucus to splash. It was as if a great revenge had to be avenged.
Ethan watched the scene of the guard being eaten indifferently, then turned to look at Samuel, "You never think that the number of guards is a little too small?"
Samuel was speechless in disgust at this time, and didn't want to answer Ethan's question at all. But Ethan really felt something was wrong. He was almost certain that this building was the bait at the center of the trap. I'm afraid that by the time they find Samuel's father, they'll be in prison too.
He didn't believe that there wasn't a single surveillance camera in these corridors. Probably some people were looking at him at the moment, trying to figure out what his abilities were and how lethal he was. This is a testing ground, a prison where he will be imprisoned. If he were a little more skeptical, he might have thought that Samuel was also part of the plan, the messenger who brought him here. After all, Samuel was the only one he would definitely not hurt right now.
But Ethan didn't care about that.
He took steady steps, rising layer by layer. Darkness condensed around him, turning into his outstretched arms. A strange sense of power filled his body, and the howls of the surrounding monsters stopped in his ears but all cheered.
Finally, they came to a floor without any iron fences and no prisons. It's an empty space with no windows, just clean concrete walls and some concrete columns. The white fluorescent lamps shone brightly in all directions. There was only one chair in the middle of the open space. An elderly Omega sat on the chair, with gray hair and a thin body, with a vague resemblance to Samuel in his brows. He closed his eyes and tilted his head, unable to distinguish between life and death.
"Dad!" Samuel shouted, and was about to rush over, but Ethan grabbed his arm.
"Wait." Ethan looked around cautiously.
It was still an empty and silent space, without a trace of sound.
Samuel couldn't wait, and rushed over. Ethan had to follow behind and slowly move forward. Those tentacles with powerful olfactory organs protruded from the back of the neck again, fluttering up and down, sniffing the smell in the air.
"Dad! Wake up!" Samuel shook his father in the chair, not noticing the change in Ethan's face, and looked up.
At this moment, an extremely wide net fell from the sky, and there was some kind of faint blue light between the fine meshes. Ethan instinctively stretched out his tentacles with sharp teeth or spikes to chop the net, but the moment he touched it, it shrank suddenly as if he was scalded, and at the same time he let out a pained cry. When the net fell on his body, the burning pain intensified several times, and bursts of smoke rose from his body immediately, and the skin that came into contact with the net was quickly blackened and carbonized.
He recognized the radiation that was tainted on the Internet, it was radiation from the egg of the Sequence God!
He never imagined that the Earth Alliance would have such a thing. Could it be that Eve gave them some news
The Egg of the Sequence God, the thing that once helped him suppress the mutation, has now become his poison...
"Ethan!" Samuel rushed up to help him, but in an instant, a laser swiped across his cheek, creating a burning wound with a sense of deterrence. A flood of heavily armed soldiers came from all directions, guns aimed at Samuel and Ethan, who was curled up in the net, smoking from his body.
Ethan doesn't seem to be able to see those, he just feels a lot of pain and wants to struggle, but the more he struggles, the more it hurts, like a lot of red-hot soldering irons wrapped around him. The muscles in his body were tensed, to the point of twitching, but he finally held back and did not continue to scream.
In pain, he raised his green eyes burning with anger, and saw the man in a neat suit standing in the distance who seemed to be the leader of these soldiers.
The man was a tall, middle-aged Alpha, slightly bald, with gloomy eyes staring at him from a distance. Seeing that he finally gave up the struggle, he walked in some. He glanced at Samuel and said to him, "You've done well, now you can take your father away."
Samuel glared at him through gritted teeth, "You promised not to hurt him!"
"This bit of harm is nothing to him." The man said in a toneless voice, "You didn't take the initiative to notify the government after you brought him back. For this alone, I can throw you back to the forbidden city. Take advantage of me Haven't changed your mind yet, hurry up and get out."
"You bastard!" Samuel said he was about to rush to beat him, but he heard Ethan shouting reluctantly, "Samue! Don't be stupid! Take your dad first!"
It was then that Samuel remembered that there were dozens of guns pointed at him and his father. He glared at the man through gritted teeth, while looking in Ethan's direction with a look that wasn't just guilt or worry. Ethan also stared at him, shaking his head slowly.
Samuel clenched his fists tightly, gritted his teeth, and finally turned around and carried his unconscious father on his back. Upon seeing this, the officer ordered a small group of soldiers to "send" Samuel out.
Seeing Samuel walk away, Ethan finally relaxed. The terrifying pain is now a little numb. It seems that this net is only contaminated with the radiation of the egg of the presupposition, and it is not as powerful as the real egg of the presupposition. Otherwise he would have been badly burned by now.
"Ethan Eldridge." The Alpha walked slowly in front of him, looking down at him condescendingly, "A monster with tentacles all over his body, the source of infection of this great plague, I didn't expect it to be a man who seemed to have no hands. A scholar of Chicken Power."
Ethan was silent, staring at him coldly.
"I am Colonel Sasha of the Special Intelligence Unit of the Earth Alliance. From now on you are no longer inhuman, but you are also not a citizen of the Earth Alliance. You will be treated as an alien species and sent to the scientific research institution of the Special Intelligence Unit, Serum for our experts to study the plague." Alpha stared at him with a look of disgust and hatred, and sentenced coldly, "Although I would rather immediately burn your disgusting monster in human skin to ashes, for the sake of exterminate the people.”
However, Ethan suddenly laughed in a low voice, and the scalded scar on his face also twisted, looking very scary.
"Calling me a disgusting monster, I think you are the real monsters who burn the infected people alive regardless of whether they are conscious or not?" Ethan's green eyes swept over every soldier around him, " In fact, they still remember who they are and their past memories, although they do perceive a lot of things that they could not perceive before. The desire to eat raw meat in the early stage of infection will force them to lose control and have a certain degree of aggression, but once It's a lot calmer after that stage. They're still human at heart. Just because they look ugly, because they can no longer make human voices, you don't try to communicate with them, just think they've turned into monsters ."
Along the way, he heard the accusations of those monsters full of fear and hatred in the dark. They watched the friends or relatives who were sent with them being burned to charcoal, and watched the guards use thick and long iron forks to fork the charred corpses. The guards sometimes set them on fire with terrible flamethrowers before they even waited until they were fully worms.
In such torture, even if there are people's memories, they are left with only hatred, endless hatred. They gave up their human identity and completely regarded human beings as natural enemies.
Ethan looked at some soldiers who seemed to be a little bit stinged by his words, and others who didn't listen to what he said or refused to believe, and finally fixed his eyes on Colonel Sasha. He suddenly shouted, "Why do you say we are monsters and you are not?!"
In the echoes, a terrifying, deafening roar suddenly rumbled from below the floor, like a rush of thunder.