Trickster Hunter.

Chapter 492 Zombie Giant Bear
"Related to strange creatures?!" Yang Lian was stunned.

She instinctively covered her abdomen and took two steps back.

Her suspicious action immediately alerted the surrounding guards, and two guards a short distance away raised their weapons and aimed them at her.

"Madam! Please do not resist! Keep your hands where we can see you!" a guard shouted, turning to his colleague and saying, "Quickly, contact the field department and have them send someone over!"

Staring at the dark muzzle of the gun, Yang Lian felt as if she had lost the ability to organize her thoughts—she had absolutely no idea what to say until two guards in full protective gear roughly tackled her to the ground behind her. Only then did she frantically cry out, "No, no! Don't press on my stomach!"

……

……

Tianfu City Mystery Research Institute, Eternal Night Cleanup Office.

Yang Qi had just torn open a packet of instant coffee when her phone, which was on the table, rang.

"what?"

Yang Qi glanced at the caller ID; it was a leader from the field operations department. She then looked at the other phones on the table and couldn't help but feel a little puzzled.

This leader and Yang Qi had no private dealings. If it was work-related, it was during his working hours, and the other party could have easily contacted him via internal phone; there was absolutely no need for them to call his personal number…

But if it's not work-related... what could the other person possibly need to contact me for?
With these questions in mind, Yang Qi picked up her phone, hesitated for a second, and then pressed the answer button.

"Hello?...Hello?"

After the call was connected, the other party was silent for a while, seemingly preparing their tone and words. It wasn't until Yang Qi asked "hello" a second time that the other party said softly, "...Director Yang, there is something I need to inform you. Your sister is currently in Laboratory Number Four."

"Laboratory No. 4?" Yang Qi was slightly taken aback. As a staff member of the research institute, she naturally knew what Laboratory No. 4 was for.

This is the place in the institute used to temporarily "store" newly contained strange objects.

"What happened?" Yang Qi's tone suddenly turned serious. "What happened to Yang Lian?"

"We found something highly suspected to be a monster inside her body."

"in vivo?"

“...Inside her uterus,” the other person said, “was an embryo with a strange meme response.”

"you sure?"

"Confirmed, and after comparing the meme frequencies, we found..." The other party suddenly lowered their voice even further, "...that the meme of this embryo is 99.827% similar to that of Chimera 17."

"..."

"In addition, we also found a metal nameplate in Yang Lian's residence. It has been confirmed that the nameplate belongs to one of the institute's contained items. However, we have reviewed all the surveillance footage and found no evidence of how Yang Lian stole the nameplate."

"Nameplate? What nameplate?"

"When Night Fury, Candle Dragon, and others went to the occupied area to search for the missing Sun Hang, they brought this back with them. It is said that this nameplate has the ability to control metal to create giant monsters. Since then, this nameplate has been stored in the underground ice storage of the research institute, under 24-hour surveillance..."

"You mean the plaque with the Russian name 'Elena Dimoshina' engraved on it?" Yang Qi forced herself to calm down and asked in as calm a tone as possible.

"Yes."

"Didn't the surveillance cameras capture anything?"

“In addition to the surveillance footage of the underground ice storage, we also retrieved all the surveillance footage of Yang Lian from the past month and a half. According to the experts’ analysis, Yang Lian did not seem to have any opportunity to approach the underground ice storage, let alone steal the nameplate.”

"So there are only two possibilities: either someone else... or something non-human stole the nameplate and put it in Yang Lian's room... or the nameplate came to her on its own. By the way, is the nameplate in the underground ice storage still there? If the nameplate disappeared out of thin air, why didn't it trigger an alarm?"

"The nameplate in the underground ice storage is still there, but it has become a blank nameplate. The text on it has disappeared and has instead appeared on the nameplate found in Yang Lian's residence."

"...That nameplate has a strange meme on it, right? Have you compared the frequencies of the two?"

"Exactly the same."

"Tell the people in Lab 4 to wait," Yang Qi said in a deep voice. "I'm heading there now."

……

……

Deep within the remains of Baikal, on an unknown street.

"Keep going forward, keep going forward... twenty-five meters, twenty-six meters..." Yan Yu'an muttered to herself as she walked forward blankly. Suddenly, she turned ninety degrees and walked straight toward the wall next to the street.

Just as she was about to crash into the wall, it seemed to retract into the ground like an automatic sensor-operated lift door, revealing a new passage that was originally behind the wall.

"Hurry up and keep up! According to the dynamic model's calculations, this path will only exist for fifteen seconds!" Yan Yu'an immediately quickened her pace. Sun Hang and Wang Xiyi also started running, while Zhong Ling was once again carried on the back of the ghost. The group quickly passed through the narrow passage and entered an open plaza. "It's all winding routes; I feel like I'm going to get dizzy," Wang Xiyi couldn't help but complain. "Is Liu Li's dynamic model even reliable?"

“It should be reliable,” Sun Hang said. “Haven’t you noticed that we’re getting closer and closer to the center of Baikal’s remains?”

“But the path we’ve walked is enough to cross the Baikal Relics ten or more times,” Wang Xiyi said. “And I can’t fly… this really makes me a walking dragon.”

"It'll be soon," Yan Yu'an said. "We're only two blocks away from Victory Avenue."

“The last time we were there, we were three blocks away from Victory Avenue, but we ended up going in a big circle and getting further and further away,” Wang Xiyi said. “If you ask me, since we’re already this close, why don’t we just use brute force to push through? Although the Baikal Remains’ structures are quite strong, I can still manage to break through them.”

“We’ve already wasted so much time, what’s a little more?” Sun Hang shook his head and asked Yan Yu’an, “How much effective time does Liu Li’s dynamic model have left?”

“An hour and a half,” Yan Yu’an replied.

“If we haven’t reached our destination after one hour and twenty-five minutes, I will allow you to use the barbarian—” Sun Hang stopped halfway through his sentence.

“Looks like we’ll have to resort to brute force now,” Wang Xiyi continued.

"Abnormal memetic fluctuations detected," Yan Yu'an said in a deep voice. "A strange object is approaching us, very fast... at the four o'clock position!"

No sooner had he finished speaking than a huge black shadow crashed through the wall of the second floor of a building on the right and pounced on Yan Yu'an from above!
Before Yan Yu'an could react, the danger detection and self-avoidance programs of the "Lancet" armor were activated. The nozzles of the six hidden thrusters on the front of the armor ignited simultaneously, and the enormous thrust caused Yan Yu'an's body to be moved several meters horizontally.

"Bang!!!" A deafening crash echoed through the street. The huge black figure missed its target, then stood up and slammed its palms down hard at Yan Yu'an!
It was only then that Yan Yu'an realized that what had crashed through the wall on the second floor was a giant bear over eight meters long!

However, the giant bear was covered in gruesome rotting flesh, with the flesh in many places so rotten that the bone was visible. Many white maggots, thicker than a human finger, were crawling in and out of the bear's flesh.

"A zombie bear?" Wang Xiyi frowned. "It's a bit disgusting."

The fuel for the thrusters that had just been activated had been exhausted during the evasive maneuver. These concealed thrusters were designed as disposable life-saving devices. To make them small enough, each thruster could only store about four grams of fuel, which was enough to keep the thruster running for less than a second.

Of course, there are definitely more than six such hidden thrusters on the Willow Leaf Armor, but since Yan Yu'an has already reacted, the remaining thrusters were not activated after receiving the corresponding neural signals.

Yan Yu'an's body instantly fell backward. Just as she narrowly avoided the bear's paw, several pairs of rollers sprang out from the back, calves, and heels of her willow-leaf blade, propelling her to the zombie bear in a sliding tackle motion.

The next second, the metal spine of the power armor suddenly exerted force, supporting Yan Yu'an's upper body to stand upright. At the same time, a high-temperature fist sword with a crimson glow was emitted from the arm armor of both arms, which stabbed fiercely into the abdomen of the zombie giant bear!

The stench of rotting flesh spreading through the street immediately made Sun Hang pinch his nose and protest loudly, "Fight if you want to fight, but don't blow up the septic tank!"

Yan Yu'an ignored Sun Hang's complaints and continued her actions. The willow-leaf armor propelled her body as she ran around the giant bear, while the high-temperature fist sword embedded in the bear's body tore the wound from a dozen centimeters to nearly two meters in one go!

Intestines and entrails mixed with putrid pus rolled out of the wound in the zombie bear's abdominal cavity. However, this giant bear probably had no sense of pain. Despite suffering such a severe injury, it still turned around and launched a pursuit towards Yan Yu'an.

However, the action of turning around only made the wound on its abdomen even bigger.

But Yan Yu'an had already run up to its back in three quick steps. The willow-leaf blade's foot and leg armor had hooks, and combined with the support of the metal spine, it could even allow the wearer to walk on a 90-degree vertical wall as if it were flat ground, let alone the giant bear's back.

Yan Yu'an let out a low shout and swung his fist-sword down heavily, severing the giant zombie bear's spine!
Although the zombie bear is a bizarre creature, it seems to follow biological theories to some extent. After its spine is severed, its lower body is immediately paralyzed, and its huge body collapses to the ground once again. Its upper body paws pound wildly, smashing the paving stones on the street to pieces.

"Shoot it in the head! This thing is a zombie, you have to attack its head to kill it!" Sun Hang shouted from afar.

Yan Yu'an remained silent, but she seemed to have accepted Sun Hang's suggestion, stepping on the giant bear's body and walking forward until she reached the bear's head.

The giant bear has a huge head. Even if scaled down proportionally, its head is still much larger than that of a typical black or brown bear—it's eight meters long. Its head is like the cab of a semi-trailer truck, big enough to fit a mahjong table.

With a "whoosh," the length of the fist-sword in Yan Yu'an's hand doubled. She exhaled forcefully, aimed the fist-swords at the back of the zombie bear's head, and stabbed it down hard!

The zombie bear's skull was hard, but it was no match for the technological marvel of human industrial civilization—the Lancet's arms erupted with a tooth-grinding metallic clang, forcefully driving the two fist-swords into the zombie bear's head like pile drivers.

After struggling violently for more than three minutes, the zombie bear finally calmed down.

“It’s a pity the bear paws are rotten, otherwise such big bear paws would definitely sell for a lot of money.” Sun Hang sighed. “The fur on the body is also almost rotten. The only valuable thing is probably the skull… If this thing is cut off and processed, some rich and foolish tycoon will probably buy it and hang it on the wall of his villa as decoration.”

“Even if you dare to sell this thing, the rich won’t dare to buy it,” Wang Xiyi said with a smile. “This is a strange object; who knows, it might suddenly come back to life one night.”

“Then sell it to Tian Shu Tower. The decoration style of the Origin Palace is too monotonous. It’s perfect for making decorations.” But the next second, Sun Hang discovered that after the zombie giant bear died, its bones also melted away. The body, which had lost its skeletal support, lay limp on the ground, like a pile of minced meat.

“This is really worthless now.” Sun Hang tried to absorb a bit of the zombie bear meme, only to find that the thing’s ability was to “cause itself to rot”. Sun Hang was so scared that he quickly discarded the meme.

"I almost got a stomachache from eating that damn thing." Sun Hang kicked the zombie bear, still a little annoyed, but the street suddenly changed after he kicked it.

Suddenly, many small holes, each one centimeter in diameter, appeared on the ground. The paving stones that had been smashed to powder by the zombie bear leaked out of these holes like sand in an hourglass. The surrounding buildings were cut into countless small pieces, which were being rapidly twisted by countless hands like a Rubik's Cube.

"What's going on?" Wang Xiyi looked around warily. "What did Liu Li's dynamic model say? Which way should we go now?"

“The dynamic model… is not responding.” Yan Yu’an jumped down from the remains of the zombie bear. “This change seems to be beyond the model’s calculation range.”

(End of this chapter)