After he finished speaking, a holographic projection of a little girl in white appeared beside him. Then a cold, synthesized electronic voice rang out.
"Cleaner unlocking sequence initiated."
"Raising cryogenic chamber temperature."
"Injecting thawing solution."
"Injecting Citicoline, Potassium Aspartate, Type II High-Energy Mixture, and ACTH Mixture."
"Implanting target characteristics."
"Unlocking complete!"
The whole process sounded complicated, but it took only a few seconds. Immediately afterward, the edges of the three large black cases began to hiss as they released billows of white vapor. Then their lids opened automatically.
A huge hand wearing a black glove suddenly reached over the edge of one case and gripped it. With a powerful heave, its owner stood up.
He was a giant of a man, over two meters tall, with broad shoulders and a massive frame. He wore a loose black leather trench coat. His face was expressionless and covered in scars, grotesque as if he had suffered severe burns that had since healed.
His entire head was hairless, protected by a thick layer of ghastly pale exoskeletal armor. From a distance, it looked like a skull. The armor was over ten centimeters thick, capable of withstanding sustained fire from 7.62 mm rifles.
Of course, armor that dense meant there was very little room inside his skull for a brain—about the size of an apple.
But this monster, known as a Cleaner, had two additional large nerve clusters besides the brain in his head, one beneath each armpit and another in his groin. These two masses of tissue could also perform the brain's functions.
That wasn't all. His heart was similar. If someone dissected him, they would find that where his heart should be, there was only a pulsating, blood-red node. There were more than a dozen similar nodes throughout his body.
Together, these vascular cores performed the heart's original function. Even if more than half of the Cleaner's vascular cores were destroyed, he could still fight with tremendous strength.
Once the Cleaner stood up, blood mist billowed from his ears, nostrils, and mouth like boiling steam. Then two red lights shone in his pupils, and an image of Fang's face and identifying features appeared on his retinas.
The Cleaner strode over to another black case and began taking out its contents one by one. The case was like an entire armory. It even contained a tremendously heavy suit of armor.
The armor had clearly been designed to counter Fang's razor-sharp claws. It weighed over two hundred kilograms, and only a monster like the Cleaner could wear such heavy armor and still move with ease!
A few dozen seconds later, the Cleaner headed toward the drainage tunnel with heavy steps. Each one left a deep footprint in the damp earth, but although his pace seemed slow, he was moving fast. By the time he was fifty meters from the tunnel, he had broken into a accelerating jog and launched a charge!!!
Ten minutes later,
Fang stood, covered in blood, beside the Cleaner's massive corpse. The Cleaner's left hand had mutated into a giant blood-red claw, while a blood-red eye as large as a washbasin had sprouted from his right shoulder. He barely looked human anymore.
His body was covered in wounds, each deep enough to expose bone, and thick, murky blood poured from them. The blood-red eye had also been smashed to pieces, leaving behind a terrifying black hole.
To kill this monster, Fang had a large chunk of scalp torn from the left side of his head, leaving him in agony. His right arm had been severed at the elbow, exposing a pale, jagged bone stump. Only his left hand was relatively uninjured.
That wasn't all. Fang's face was a bloody mess. Earlier, at the hotel, he had been sprayed in the face with a cloud of mist. It had contained a large number of parasite eggs, which had burrowed beneath Fang's skin and secreted an anesthetic that kept their host unaware.
Then, at the most crucial moment of the battle, the parasites suddenly erupted. They nearly made Fang pass out from the pain, and his vision was badly affected; everything looked blurry. Yet despite both his hands being nearly useless, Fang had still killed the Cleaner! That was because his sharpest weapons weren't the claws on his hands, but his legs.
During his fight with the Cleaner, Fang had brought out his trump card: a second transformation!!
After his first transformation, he had become a beastman. By activating the "Blood of Jacob" within him while in that form, he could transform a second time, becoming a completely feral, blood-pure giant wolf of extraordinary savagery. Though his foreclaws had been ruined, the claws on his hind legs and his terrifying fangs had easily torn through the Cleaner's defenses.
But Fang realized in despair that this battle wasn't over—it had only just begun! The third black case dropped from the helicopter was already releasing pale white vapor and slowly opening.
What emerged was a monster resembling an octopus, with five strange tentacles! Their skin resembled that of a python, and thick, blackish-red liquid dripped incessantly from them.
Perhaps sensing Fang's gaze, the end of one tentacle suddenly split open, unfolding like a flower to reveal a three-lobed mouth. Inside, it was packed with densely clustered, pale, hooked fangs, each five or six centimeters long. It was a truly gory sight!
Cleaner II, deployed!!
At the sight of this, Fang's pupils contracted. He swallowed a pill, then turned and fled without hesitation! What a joke. His fight with the humanoid Cleaner had already nearly exhausted all his strength. Now another one had appeared—why would he keep fighting? The best of the thirty-six stratagems was to run.
In fact, if Anmoreya Corporation hadn't taken a tremendous interest in Fang and considered him an ideal experimental subject, wanting to capture him alive, killing the Cleaner would have been unlikely for him.
At that moment, in the command vehicle, they watched Fang on the screen dash toward a truck that had been parked by the roadside. He started its engine abruptly. A consultant beside Wilson said quietly:
"Based on the detailed data we've collected, he's already at the end of his strength. Our Blood Leech has been breeding inside him for thirty-seven minutes. He's lost more than 3,000 milliliters of blood, nearly two-thirds of a normal person's 4,800 milliliters. His injuries would have killed an ordinary person three times over."
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