Chapter 170: Six Seconds to Massacre the City

Chapter 170: Six Seconds to Massacre the City

Isaac's voice crackled through the communicator again, his pace even slower than before.

"Boss, I'm not talking about Eden Council."

The file folder contained a note: This item was not manufactured by Eden Council. Eden Council can only observe it.

Wayne remained silent. Downstairs, Jenny's laughter rang out, and Emily was calling for her to hurry up and run.

The observer's name was blank, but the underlying encryption protocol used a language different from any known programming system on Earth.

Wayne switched off the communicator—not because he didn't care about what had just been said, but because Jenny was calling him from downstairs.

"Daddy, come down."

After placing the communicator on the windowsill, he headed for the elevator.

Over the next seven days, the defensive perimeter underwent three rounds of adjustments.

Rivera mobilized the military district's best electromagnetic shielding units, establishing anti-access installations within a two-kilometer radius of Bright Horizon Pediatric Therapy.

Reed posted a bounty on the dark web: any unregistered biological signal source approaching the hospital was to be eliminated.

Morrison personally led his team to install four physical containment walls inside the hospital, each filled with liquid metal.

At 3:17 a.m. on August thirteenth, the air defense warning system had failed.

No attack. No interference.

When Morrison woke up, he found the same phrase written across every screen: Signal source does not exist.

He grabbed his communicator. "Isaac."

"I'm here, but I can't see anything." For the first time, Isaac's voice carried a note of bewilderment.

"It's not a network failure. The signal itself no longer exists. The radar waves went out but didn't come back."

"What do you mean, didn't come back?"

"Exactly what I said. The electromagnetic waves were consumed."

Rivera's communicator buzzed. After listening for only a second or two, he rushed outside.

His military boots thundered down the hallway. By the time he reached Morrison, his face had gone pale.

Three people stood at the hospital entrance.

Morrison grabbed his gun and ran downstairs.

When he reached the second-floor window and looked down, he stopped.

In the plaza outside Bright Horizon Pediatric Therapy, thirty armored soldiers lay on the ground, weapons still in hand.

Various positions, but one thing in common: no visible injuries.

Alive, but unable to move.

Morrison could see the nearest soldier's fingers still twitching.

Reaching for his weapon, but his body no longer obeying his will.

Three figures in the plaza.

White robes. No insignia. No weapons. Not even shoes.

Barefoot on the concrete, as if they'd stepped out of some place that didn't belong to this era.

Morrison raised his weapon and took aim, but then he noticed something.

The barrel was softening.

Not metaphorically—the metal was transitioning from solid to liquid, or to a solid-liquid hybrid state.

Starting from the muzzle, it spread backward at visible speed. He dropped the weapon.

The gun hit the ground and became a puddle of silver-gray molten iron.

"Fuck." Morrison took three steps back.

Rivera caught up from behind, carrying an electromagnetic pulse emitter he'd retrieved from storage.

When he pulled the trigger, the device exploded.

The internal coils had melted before power even reached them.

Rivera's hand was burned, but he made no sound. He simply threw down the wreckage and stared at the figures below.

"Report distance," Morrison said into his communicator.

Isaac replied, "They've been at twelve meters from the entrance the whole time. Haven't moved since they arrived."

But within a ten-meter radius, all metal liquefied.

"Including what the soldiers were wearing."

Morrison understood why those thirty men had fallen. Not because their nerves had been severed.

But because their exoskeleton frames, communication chips, and ammunition had all turned to liquid iron.

The molten metal had poured into their uniforms, injuring them and leaving them immobilized.

The white-haired doctor rushed over from the stairwell, clutching a tablet that he kept waving around.

"This has nothing to do with electromagnetic pulses or high temperatures. The molecular bonds in the metal have been destroyed."

Morrison turned. "Speak in plain language."

They could control the structure of matter itself.

The figure in white robes standing in the center looked up toward the fourth-floor window.

Wayne stood there.

After Jenny and Emily had taken Veronica to safety in the basement, they left.

Wayne sat alone by the window. No blue glow in his left eye. No patches on his body. Just sitting quietly.

The white-robed figure in the center began to speak. Though the voice wasn't loud, it carried across the entire plaza as if amplified.

"Eclipse Sanctum Seventh Sequence Executor, acting on the Leader's orders, addresses Wayne."

Wayne didn't respond.

The white-robed figure continued. "Eden Council is Eclipse Sanctum's guard dog. You slaughtered the dog. Should we care?"

And what the dog was guarding belongs to Eclipse Sanctum.

Morrison cursed in the stairwell.

The white-robed figure said, "Third-generation dual-mutation gene carrier. Catalog number from the Fourth Era seed vault."

Mandrake's genetic blueprint was a sample from an Eclipse Sanctum experiment three hundred years ago.

"Your daughter is a third-generation descendant of that sample."

Morrison was about to shout out the window when Wayne stopped him.

After speaking, the white-robed figure pulled a stone from within the robes and carved something on it in a script no one had ever seen.

"Our Leader offers Wayne two choices."

"One: Strip all root-level permissions from your brain-machine protocol and surrender them to Eclipse Sanctum for research. Transfer Jenny to the Arctic facility as a genetic breeding matrix."

"Two—" The white-robed figure paused for a second. "The water content in three million bodies in this city will be extracted within six seconds."

Not guns, missiles, or conventional weapons. Molecular-level liquid reconstitution.

"Your military, your citizens, your wife—all will become three million corpses before your eyes."

After hearing this, Rivera pounded the wall in the corridor, knocking chunks of concrete loose.

But going down there wouldn't help. He had nothing left to use.

Isaac's voice came through Morrison's communicator, speaking so rapidly he nearly bit his tongue.

"Boss, analysis of their energy waveforms shows over 90% similarity to the data from that organism photographed beneath the Arctic ice sheet."

"What they're wielding isn't technology. It's material transformation produced by the biological field source itself."

Wayne finally spoke, looking out the window.

"Six seconds to drain three million people dry."

The white-robed figure said, "This is when our Leader requires your decision."

Wayne nodded, then did something no one expected. He climbed out the fourth-floor window.

He fell from roughly fifteen meters up, hitting the ground with a tremendous impact.

Spider-web cracks spread across the concrete.

Wayne stood at the center of the fissure. He crouched, then straightened, and walked toward the three white-robed figures.