Trickster Hunter.

Chapter 478 The Devious Soldier

"No rush, take your time." The psychologist was still trying to calm the other person down, completely unaware that fine cracks had appeared in the ground beneath the chair the soldier was sitting on, and black, hair-like things were emerging from the cracks.

"Something's wrong," Ganna said in a deep voice. "Stop the consultation immediately! He's undergoing a transformation! Watch his feet!"

“Don’t make a fuss, we all know he’s undergoing a transformation.” Sun Hang stared coldly at the soldier on the other side of the one-way glass, whose limbs were beginning to twist. “Keep going, don’t stop.”

“But…but…” The psychiatrist hesitated for a moment, glancing at the soldier in the armchair who had become almost like a monster, then turned to Sun Hang and whispered, “He…it seems…to be unable to communicate with us normally…”

Suddenly, an explosion came from the other side of the glass, startling the two psychologists and Ganna. Their gazes immediately shifted from Sun Hang back to the bizarre soldier.

The soldier's chest had completely exploded, and hundreds of tentacles covered in black hair emerged from his chest cavity and spread outwards.

"This situation... you should be able to handle it, right?" Ganna resisted the urge to press the alarm button and asked Sun Hang for confirmation. "Do I need to call for backup?"

"No need. You guys stay here and don't leave." After saying that, Sun Hang pushed open the door and walked out.

The two psychologists and Ganna were left staring at each other blankly.

“He…he wouldn’t…want us to be…experiments…” A psychologist stared bitterly at the soldier—or rather, the monster—on the other side of the glass, and said in a trembling voice.

Although Xue Yue had just absorbed most of his negative emotions, the psychologist's negative emotions suddenly surged again when he witnessed a living person turning into a monster right before his eyes, and then faced the possibility of being "sacrificed".

But soon, he felt his fear rapidly subsiding. He looked thoughtfully to the side and saw Xue Yue sitting obediently in the corner, looking blankly at the people in the consultation room.

“It shouldn’t be. Mr. Sun Hang probably went to find someone…” Ganna shook his head. “This little girl is very important to him. If he wanted to use us as ‘test subjects,’ he wouldn’t have left her with us.”

“Yes…that’s true.” The psychologist who had witnessed Xue Yue’s incredible abilities nodded. “I just don’t know how long he’ll be gone…I feel like this glass barrier might not hold for much longer…”

"Don't panic, I'm here." Ganna revealed his mechanical prosthetic arm, and those hideous weapons emerged from under the concealed cover.

Although he wasn't entirely confident, the metallic clanging sound of the bullets being chambered still gave him a sense of reassurance.

Just as the three of them were wondering where Sun Hang had gone, the answer came to light a few seconds later.

The indicator light on the other side of the consultation room door turned from red to green again, and the previously locked door was forcibly opened from the outside.

The psychologist sitting at the table was startled. He instinctively reached for the door to close it, only to find that Sun Hang, who had just left the consultation room, had walked in from outside.

Sun Hang walked halfway down the corridor and found the entrance on the other side of the clinic. The door was easy to find, and there were many soldiers waiting for psychological counseling at the door. These soldiers were all shrouded in a dark shadow that symbolized negative emotions.

Amidst the soldiers' puzzled gazes, Sun Hang walked to the door, used his abilities to hack into the electronic lock, and forcibly opened the locked door.

He then stepped into the psychological counseling room once again.

However, this time he went into the other side of the consultation room.

After entering the consultation room, Sun Hang casually sealed the door with liquid metal. Before he could even get close, the tentacles covered in black hair reached out at him from multiple angles.

These tentacles weren't moving very fast, but as they reached towards Sun Hang, the black hairs on their surfaces kept growing longer... In the blink of an eye, these tentacles turned into dozens of things that looked like giant caterpillars.

Several flashes of silver light appeared, and the tentacles broke off and fell to the ground.

But these black hairs seemed to be contagious; wherever they touched, patches of black hair began to grow on the floors, walls, and ceilings, and started to spread outwards.

"It's not that it's strong, but it's really disgusting."

Just as the black fuzz on the floor was about to spread to Sun Hang's feet, Sun Hang took a step forward, and the fuzz seemed to be afraid of something, and began to retreat.

Under the blank stares of the two psychologists and Ganna, Sun Hang walked step by step to the bizarre soldier. Where he walked, he left behind a "vacuum zone" that no black fur dared to invade, as if it had been burned.

Just when they thought Sun Hang was going to "dispose of" the soldier "harmlessly," Sun Hang actually reached out and patted the soldier on the shoulder, asking with a smile, "Where did you see whom?"

The monstrous soldier shuddered. It struggled to turn its completely twisted and deformed neck around and stared at Sun Hang with its pair of dark, hollow eye sockets—its two eyeballs had been pushed out by the tentacles that had crawled out of their sockets and rolled to the wall.

When Sun Hang patted it, the tentacles that had sprouted from its body instantly retracted like startled coral polyps.

"I...I saw...my mother...in that city..." His voice was slurred, likely due to the mutated tissue also affecting his vocal cords. "I...my mother..."

"That city? Does it refer to the remains of Baikal?" Sun Hang pondered. The only place nearby that could be called a "city" was probably the "mysterious city" a few dozen kilometers away.

As for this guy's mother... "Find out where his mother is now?" Sun Hang looked up and said to the opaque one-way glass.

The two psychologists were taken aback at first, then realized that Sun Hang was asking them a question, and quickly started searching on the computer.

“We found out… This soldier’s mother, uh, has passed away.” The psychiatrist’s voice came from behind the one-way glass. “His biological mother died of a malignant tumor when he was only six years old. But he did not witness his mother’s death, nor did he attend her funeral—his father and relatives had been hiding the truth about his mother’s death from him, only telling him that his mother had gone on a trip to a very far place.”

“With the intelligence of a six-year-old… this kind of lie can’t be kept secret, right?” Sun Hang asked.

“He didn’t believe what the adults said, but he also didn’t believe that he had really lost his mother…” the psychologist said. “For a child, his mental state does not allow him to accept the facts that he cannot accept. Sometimes, even if he knows it is a lie, he will choose to believe it… Even as an adult, he still stubbornly believes that his mother is still alive, but has gone to a very, very far place.”

"How did you know that?"

"The military's routine physical examinations also include psychological testing."

"Isn't this considered delusional disorder? Can someone with this condition join the army?"

“Strictly speaking, it doesn’t,” the psychologist explained to Sun Hang. “Modern psychology generally considers this to be a spontaneous ‘self-protective’ behavior in humans. He simply doesn’t want to accept a certain fact, which is quite different from delusional disorder. Moreover, the soldier hasn’t shown any other abnormalities, and his emotions are very stable. Even when directly asked about his mother, he has never lost control…”

“His emotional instability is what ruined him,” Sun Hang lamented. “If only he had punched the person who asked him during the test if he knew his mother was dead…”

Although doing so would most likely result in being sent back to my hometown by the military, at least... I wouldn't end up like this.

"Besides your mother, what else did you see in that city?" Sun Hang asked the strange soldier again.

"I saw... a raging fire..."

"A huge fire?" Sun Hang frowned. "Could it be the city of Baikal that was ignited when the Death Aurora fell?"

“Ganna,” Sun Hang began, “among the soldiers who carried out reconnaissance missions and returned alive, has anyone mentioned seeing anything that resembled hallucinations inside the remains of Baikal?”

“There have been similar descriptions, but not many,” Ganna replied immediately. “Because the samples are very scattered and their descriptions have nothing in common, we previously thought that they were hallucinations caused by excessive mental stress and emotional tension.”

"Now it seems the problem is not so simple."

The mutated soldier's body had gone limp, its muscles began to rot and decompose, and the foul-smelling pus soaked through the armchair's foam cushions, dripping continuously onto the ground. Its lower body, having lost muscle support, could no longer sit steadily on the chair—if Sun Hang hadn't been holding its shoulders, it probably would have already slipped to the ground.

“Mom…Mom…she told me…she’s in a lot of pain…” The monstrous soldier was still speaking, as if it were talking to itself, or perhaps confiding in Sun Hang, “I saw her…in her stomach…there was a huge, huge lump…the lump was bleeding…blood was everywhere…”

"What kind of malignant tumor did his mother die from?"

“It’s pancreatic cancer… the ‘king of cancers’ with the highest mortality rate and shortest average survival time among all cancers in humans,” the psychiatrist who was reviewing the file replied.

“Pancreatic cancer…” Sun Hang subconsciously touched the location of his pancreas, which was right in the center of his abdomen.

"Does he know that his mother died of pancreatic cancer?"

“He probably doesn’t know…” the psychologist replied. “That ‘self-protection mechanism’ makes him unwilling to believe that his mother has died. But even if his rational mind knows that his mother has died, at most he would know that she died from some kind of disease, or to be more specific, from some kind of malignant tumor… His father destroyed all the medical records and test reports, so he probably didn’t have the opportunity to come into contact with those things.”

"So do you think that when he saw a lump in his mother's stomach, it was just a coincidence between fact and imagination..." Sun Hang said, "or did his mother really crawl out of hell and tell her son about the pain she suffered from illness before she died?"

"...It's probably just a coincidence," a psychologist said uncertainly. "The second possibility is too creepy...Besides, we all know that when someone dies, they're dead...Hell is just a superstitious concept..."

“That’s not necessarily true… Maybe hell really does exist.” Sun Hang shook his head. “In this era teeming with strange creatures, do you still believe in atheism? At least there’s enough evidence to prove that vengeful spirits can be transformed into strange creatures. What if what they see is something similar?”

“The time and distance involved are a bit too far…” Ganna’s voice came from behind the one-way glass. “Even if he saw his mother’s… uh… the spirit-like creature that his mother created after her death… it shouldn’t be in the remains of Baikal…”

Ganna thought for a moment, then continued, "If the spirit-like entity that arose after his mother's death had been attached to him and followed him for over twenty years, then this spirit-like entity would have been detected long ago. It's impossible that it didn't appear until this soldier entered the remains of Baikal... That doesn't make sense!"

“Then I’d like to ask you something.” Sun Hang reached out and held up the drooping chin of the mutated soldier, which had fallen off due to the dissolution of ligaments and skin. He then used two “screws” formed from condensed liquid metal to put the chin back on. “Are you sure what you saw was really your biological mother?”

“That’s… my mother…” the monstrous soldier said with difficulty, “She’s in pain… she’s bleeding… I want to reach out and touch her… but… but I can’t reach her no matter what I do!”

Just as it said this, a tentacle covered in black hair shot out and slammed into the one-way glass partition that separated the examination room, making a loud noise!
The four people on the other side of the consultation room, including Xue Yue, were all startled.

Fortunately, the glass, which could withstand a direct hit from a 10mm full-power bullet at close range, was sturdy enough that even after being lashed so hard by the monster soldier's tentacles, it showed no signs of breaking.

Ganna breathed a slight sigh of relief and couldn't help but ask, "Mr. Sun Hang... what exactly do you want to get out of it?"

(End of this chapter)