The strange visions vanished in the blink of an eye, so quickly that Hao Ren barely had time to confirm whether they had really happened. He shook his head hard, but the corridor before him had already returned to normal. Another burst of gunfire came from farther ahead. He immediately cast aside the illusion and dashed toward the end of the corridor, driving his legs with all his strength. Behind him came the slightly disorderly footsteps of the other mercenaries.
The Data Terminal was busy fiddling with its own body inside the portable space, sensing the outside world only through shared audio. The moment it heard the gunfire and footsteps, it shouted, "What's happening out there?"
"Ulanov may have engaged this place's security robots," Hao Ren said quickly in his mind. "Speaking of which, why is this corridor so long..."
He remembered that when he had watched Ulanov leave earlier, he could see the end of the corridor at a glance. Yet now, as he ran toward it, the dark passage seemed to stretch endlessly before him. He ran for quite a while without seeing an intersection. At some point, the mercenaries' footsteps behind him had begun dropping away one by one. He glanced back and saw only another stretch of pitch-black corridor. At the far end, he could vaguely make out Nolan's figure, but everyone else had disappeared.
"That's strange. Where are the soldiers who followed us?" Hao Ren muttered. Just as he began to wonder whether he had been affected by some kind of illusion, another gunshot rang out from not far ahead, followed by the dull sound of a body hitting the ground.
The sound was already so close that he immediately cast aside his distracting thoughts and burst through the darkness like a gust of wind.