Night had fallen deep.
Outside an abandoned water treatment plant in the city's distant outskirts, everything was dim.
The grass stood taller than a person, and not even an insect could be heard.
Chen Mo crouched atop a rusty iron tower, chewing mint gum as he looked down at the complex swallowed by darkness.
The coordinates Allen had given him were accurate.
On the surface, this was a dilapidated facility the city had decommissioned, so rundown that not a single light was on.
Through Blacklight Vision, however, violent energy fluctuations churned underground.
Those blackhearted capitalists at Vought certainly knew how to hide their filth.
Chen Mo spat out his gum, its sweetness gone, bent his knees slightly, and leaped from the water tower dozens of meters high.
Wind howled past his ears.
His feet slammed into the thick concrete, instantly leaving two cracks in the ground.
Inside the security booth by the entrance, two guards had been nodding off. The sudden crash made them shudder.
The beefy-faced guard on the left reacted quickly, raising his gun to fire.
Unfortunately, he hadn't even taken the safety off.
Chen Mo raised his right hand, and several dark red tendrils shot from his fingertips, tearing through the night like venomous snakes and piercing both men clean through the chest.
Blood splattered across the wall.
Neither guard even had time to scream before Blacklight drained them dry in an instant, leaving two shriveled husks crumpled on the ground.
Chen Mo withdrew his tentacles and checked what he saw against his memories.
After a roundabout walk, he came to an old wall.
He raised a leg and kicked.
The disguised alloy door, weighing several tons, gave a pained groan. Its hinges snapped, and the entire door hurtled inward like a cannonball.
A deafening crash echoed through the corridor.
A piercing alarm immediately blared.
Scarlet emergency lights flashed in alternation, illuminating the narrow underground passage like purgatory.
With his hands in his pockets, Chen Mo strolled deeper inside, walking over the broken glass and metal debris covering the floor.
Rows of enormous glass tanks lined both sides of the passage.
All sorts of deformed things floated in sickly green liquid.
Some were covered in tumors; others had withered limbs and unspeakable agony frozen on their faces.
They were all victims whose genes had collapsed after human experimentation.
As Chen Mo walked, he spoke to himself.
"Today, I'm going to take every last one of you bastards out."
A flurry of footsteps came from the end of the corridor.
Dozens of heavily armed special security guards held rifles at the ready, blocking the way forward.
The one-eyed security captain at their head roared.
"Open fire!"
A storm of bullets poured out, leaving no room to dodge.
A cruel smile curled the one-eyed man's lips as he imagined the intruder being riddled with holes.
This was special ammunition capable of piercing armored vehicles. Even the Seven would take a beating from it.
Chen Mo didn't so much as blink. He kept walking forward at the same steady pace.
The dense hail of bullets struck his carapace with dull impacts and fell away, failing to leave so much as a white mark.
Amid the flashes of gunfire, the slender figure looked like the Grim Reaper out for a leisurely stroll.
The smile froze on the one-eyed man's face. Cold sweat poured down his forehead, and his eyes nearly bulged out of their sockets.
How was this possible!
Even the Seven wouldn't dare stand there and take concentrated heavy fire like that!
Fear coiled around every guard's heart like a venomous snake, and their gun hands began to shake violently.
Chen Mo yawned.
"If that's all you've got, I'll just be passing through."
As soon as he finished speaking, Chen Mo's right arm swelled into a long, narrow dark red blade, and he charged into the crowd, leaving an afterimage.
A flash of the blade.
Limbs flew.
Blood flowed like a river.
In less than three seconds, the defensive line collapsed completely. Dozens of elite guards were sliced to pieces, leaving the floor strewn with their remains.
Chen Mo absorbed the scraps of flesh on his blade, returned his arm to normal, and kicked open the heavy laboratory door at the end of the passage.
The air reeked of harsh chemicals.
Inside the enormous laboratory, precision instruments ran at full tilt, and a corpse with its abdomen cut open was still strapped to the operating table in the center.
In a temperature-controlled cabinet on the left, dozens of vials glowed an eerie blue.
Compound V.
Chen Mo's eyes lit up.
He walked over, grabbed two vials, pulled out the stoppers, and poured them into his mouth.
He smacked his lips.
"Too bitter. Doesn't taste as good as the orange-flavored stuff from before."
Behind the operating table, a fat, balding man in a white coat was hiding behind a bulletproof glass wall.
He stared at the mangled corpses covering the floor, his fat trembling with fear, but he still clutched a microphone to bolster his courage.
"I don't care where you came from, you lunatic. You're dying here today!"
The fat man slammed a red button on the console, a crazed smile on his face.
"Let me show you the base's most perfect works of art!"
The laboratory ceiling burst apart with a crash, and two heavy metal stasis pods slammed to the floor.
The pod doors sprang open, and white condensation billowed out.
A tall man stepped out on the left, spreading a pair of impressive, broad feathered wings behind him. Every flap whipped up a small hurricane in the laboratory.
On the right was a muscular bald man, his body covered in crisscrossing red lines. The heat distorted the air around him, and scorching flames constantly spurted from his fists.
The fat supervisor shouted wildly into the microphone.
"Sky Lord! Flame Demon! Kill this intruder!"
These two trump cards were perfect mutants the base had obtained at the cost of over a thousand lives.
In his eyes, Chen Mo was already a corpse.
Chen Mo looked at the two men before him as they assumed fighting stances. He sighed helplessly and dug in his ear with his little finger.
"With those lousy names, you'd be a little outdated even as bosses in Tanwan Lanyue, wouldn't you?"
Chen Mo pointed at the winged man and went all out with his mockery.
"Where'd this birdman come from? You stick a couple of lousy feathers on yourself and dare call yourself a lord? You look like an oversized turkey to me. Pluck you and throw you straight into a stew, and there still wouldn't be enough meat to fill the gaps in my teeth."
Sky Lord flew into a rage. His wings trembled violently as he let out a shrill, drawn-out screech.
Chen Mo ignored him completely and turned to look at the bald man whose body was wreathed in flames, his expression even more disdainful.
"And you. What are those red lines on your arms for, pretending to be a mutant zebra? Did you pick up some cheap glow-in-the-dark stickers at a sleazy nightclub last night? Are those little flames of yours even enough to light a cigarette? Want to borrow a windproof lighter?"
Flame Demon was practically smoking with rage. He clenched his fists, and an orange-red ball of energy the size of a millstone rapidly formed in his palms before shooting out.
The terrifying heat instantly melted the floor tiles into magma.
With the force to destroy heaven and earth, the energy ball tore through the air and blasted toward Chen Mo's face.
The fat supervisor clenched his fists in excitement, staring intently at the scene beyond the glass as he prepared to watch flesh and blood fly.
Chen Mo didn't even move his feet.
He casually raised his right hand, and black-and-red viral fibers instantly wove themselves into a tower shield.
Boom!
The energy ball slammed into the shield and exploded into a sea of fire. The shockwave overturned and smashed all the surrounding instruments.
The dust and smoke slowly cleared.
Chen Mo stood where he was, still holding the shield up with one hand. Not even the edge of his clothes was singed, and he even had time to yawn.
"That's it? You set off a couple of bottle rockets and dare call yourself Flame Demon? Saves you buying firecrackers for New Year's, huh?"
The fat supervisor's smile froze on his face, and a gurgling sound came from his throat as though he'd seen a ghost.
That was a compressed energy blast that could destroy even a main battle tank in one shot!
Flame Demon was dumbfounded too. He looked at his still-smoking hands and fell into deep self-doubt.
Seeing things go badly, Sky Lord beat his wings and shot straight for the hole in the ceiling, attempting to open up some distance and suppress Chen Mo with fire from above.
"Trying to run? Did you ask me first?"
Chen Mo sneered and bent his knees slightly. The ground instantly collapsed into a large crater.
He shot out like a cannonball, instantly trailing a sonic boom cloud. He was more than ten times faster than Sky Lord.
In midair, Chen Mo appeared above Sky Lord and planted a foot on his back.
He seized both wings at their roots.
The muscles throughout his body suddenly strained.
The grating sound of bones shattering mingled with the tearing of muscle.
Sky Lord let out a bloodcurdling scream like a pig being slaughtered. The wings he was so proud of were torn clean from their roots, and blood gushed out like a fountain.
His body lost its balance and plummeted like a meteor.
Chen Mo rode the broken body swiftly downward like a burning meteor, smashing precisely into Flame Demon below.
The tremendous impact caused an explosion, and the entire basement shook violently.
A crater five meters deep was smashed into the floor.
Flame Demon's chest caved in, and his internal organs were reduced to pulp. He couldn't move at all.
The fat supervisor's legs gave out, and he collapsed onto the floor. Yellow liquid ran down his trouser legs and pooled around him.
What kind of monster was this?
Why was he here?
Chen Mo stood at the edge of the crater as countless fine black-and-red tentacles spread from beneath his feet, instantly wrapping tightly around the two mangled bodies at the bottom.
The greedy sounds of devouring were enough to make one's skin crawl.
Flesh and bone, along with the mutated superpower genes, were analyzed and absorbed by the Blacklight Virus bit by bit.
Chen Mo closed his eyes, feeling the frantic restructuring and evolution of the cells within his body.
The muscles in his back writhed violently, and a pair of broad, long dark red flesh wings burst out. A chilling metallic gleam flickered along their edges.
Violent orange-red energy danced restlessly at his fingertips.
Flight acquired.
Energy blasts perfectly integrated.
Chen Mo opened his eyes, his dark red gaze full of satisfaction.
He casually flung a ball of light at the bulletproof glass.
The sturdy specialized glass instantly vaporized.
The fat supervisor behind it didn't even have time to cry out before he and the console were reduced to ash.
Chen Mo walked over to the temperature-controlled cabinet, grabbed a laboratory backpack, and swept all the remaining Compound V into it.
This was important food.
He had just fastened the backpack when a tremendous crash came from overhead.
The battered alloy door was blasted apart by a tremendous force, and its fragments smashed several tanks.
Dust billowed through the air.
Two swaggering figures strode through the dust and smoke.
The Deep wore his tight green scaled suit, his hands on his hips and his chin held high, his face full of arrogance.
The air beside him shimmered. It was Translucent.
Vought Tower had received the distress signal and sent these two members of the Seven, who were closest, to the rescue.
The Deep kicked aside a stone on the floor. He frowned when he saw the corpses strewn everywhere.
"Where'd you come from, kid? How dare you cause trouble on Vought's turf?"
He planted his hands on his hips, thrust his pelvis forward, and pointed his nose at the ceiling.
"Kneel down now, put your hands on your head, and let me break your limbs. Maybe then you'll get to die in one piece."
Translucent chimed in.
"Don't bother struggling. In front of the Seven, you don't even deserve to beg for mercy!"
The two had clearly taken Chen Mo for one of the laboratory's mutant monsters and intended to score an easy achievement.
Chen Mo slung the backpack over his shoulder. Black-and-red viral armor covered his entire body, leaving only his red eyes exposed.
Looking at this pair of clowns,
He couldn't hold it in and burst out laughing.
His laughter echoed through the ruins, full of ridicule and mockery.
"Wait, are Homelander, Queen Maeve, and Black Noir all dead or something? What made them send you two pieces of trash?"
Chen Mo raised a finger, pointed at The Deep's green suit, and let loose without mercy.
"The Deep, you're a loser whose superpower is talking to fish. I can smell that salted fish stink on you from three hundred meters away. And you've actually got the nerve to talk big? What, are you planning to stuff me to death with your fish friends?"
The Deep's arrogant expression froze. His entire face turned a deep red, and veins bulged on his forehead.
Those words were vicious, striking right where it hurt.
Chen Mo ignored him completely and turned his gaze to the naked Translucent, looking at him with extreme disdain.
"And you. Your superpower is having really tough skin and running around naked? You actually made it into the Seven? Hell, I could find a patch of air that can turn invisible too, couldn't I? Oh, right, you were pretty much like air in the Seven's movie."
Translucent looked as if he had been struck by lightning. He instinctively clenched his teeth, trembling all over with rage.
"You're asking for death!"
The two members of the Seven roared at once, their reason utterly destroyed.
The Deep swung his fists and charged like a mad bull.
Translucent immediately turned invisible, preparing to launch a sneak attack from the flank.
The fight was about to erupt.
Chen Mo twisted his neck, his joints cracking like popping beans.
The broad, dark red wings on his back suddenly spread open, and a fierce wind swept across the entire area.
In both hands, orange-red spheres of energy burned fiercely, illuminating his face and its cruel smile.
"Today, I'll use you two worthless nobodies to give my new move a proper test."