Stop sleeping, get up and party!

When it comes to dealing with abnormal beings, just how terrifying is someone like Laura, a mutant? In a mere ten seconds, an entire gang of armed thugs was reduced to scattered remains, and even Jos barely escaped being slashed to death three times.

"What are you doing, huh?! You can't die anyway—what's wrong with letting you take a few bullets for the team?!"

Even as Laura chased him around, Jos didn't feel he'd done anything wrong. Little Black, after glancing at him, decisively turned away to interrogate the fat man they had intentionally left behind.

It wasn't that she was suddenly awed by Jos's domineering aura, nor that Jos had finally managed to tame her. It was simply that Little Black wanted to get this ridiculous mission over with as soon as possible, so she could go home and veg out in front of the TV.

"When I used to be parasitic on Eddie, I thought life wasn't exciting enough. Now I know how precious that kind of life really was..." Little Black sighed, then continued carving tally marks into the fat man's skin with her small knife.

"Hmm, I don't know why, but the method Jos taught me is strangely satisfying."

Unbeknownst to herself, something within Little Black was awakening.

Even Jos hadn't imagined that his offhand remarks would one day lead to the world gaining a master of tally mark torture!

After a while, Little Black emerged from the house, found Jos—who was being pinned to the ground and pounded by Laura—and relayed what she'd learned.

"What he said wasn't entirely a lie. There really is a pyramid ruin nearby, much like the one you described, but it's completely buried underground. Coincidentally, a group is planning to explore it soon."

"Is that so?" Jos narrowed his eyes, then activated an ability he hadn't used in ages: the Useless Omniscient.

The criteria for this power were exceedingly strange. Simply put, it could never provide Jos with information he wanted, but anything else was fair game. Since the system determined whether he "wanted" the information, Jos couldn't simply trick himself into getting key info by pretending not to want it.

However, after previously discovering that the power could be used to locate his own position, Jos had experimented with several different uses. Most of these attempts had ended in failure, but he'd still found a few clever applications.

One, for instance, was verifying the authenticity of something.

Take the underground chamber before them now, and the pyramid ruin beneath it. A true archaeologist might rely on murals and architectural techniques to identify the civilization. Jos, however, had a more convenient—if not necessarily easier—way.

He first confirmed how many times per day one of the pyramid's builders went to the bathroom, then used that clue to discover that the overseer was a masochist, and eventually uncovered that their foreman had a foot fetish.

Where others would extract a crucial clue from a tangled mess of information, Jos did the opposite—he wrapped a simple, clear fact in endless layers of useless detail.

Yet, as these seemingly unrelated threads intertwined, the resulting chaos ultimately pointed directly to the truth Jos sought.

This was indeed the pyramid where Apocalypse was entombed!

"That's right—this is the place!"

After traveling through several cities over the past week, the three of them couldn't help but feel a surge of excitement upon finally discovering their target.

"So what do we do now? Should we dig up that Apocalypse guy?" Little Black peered into the pit, then turned to Jos in confusion.

"No way. We have no idea what the conditions are like down there. There's no way I'm going in," Laura replied immediately, her interest clear but her answer firm. She might not care much about the mission itself, but she was definitely intrigued by the legendary, ancient mutant Apocalypse.

It was like unearthing a living Peking Man—irrelevant to her personally, perhaps, but most people would be curious to take a look.

Still, Laura was well aware of the risks; in a deeply buried pyramid ruin, someone like her was at a serious disadvantage. Should the structure collapse or a fight break out, the ruins would bury everyone inside.

If that happened, only Little Black's liquid body would be unaffected. The other two would be finished.

Though Laura wouldn't die from such an ordeal, she could be trapped underground for untold years, her immortality turning into a curse.

But although Jos was notorious for reckless behavior, he wasn't stupid. He simply shook his head at Little Black's question. "Of course we can't go down there. Even if we had the professional gear, oxygen and light would still be issues, and once we wake Apocalypse, escaping would be a massive headache."

If he recalled correctly, the group that woke Apocalypse in the movie all died. Jos had no intention of trying that himself.

"So what do you want to do? If we don't go down, we can't see Apocalypse, can we?"

"No need. We'll wake him from here," Jos replied with a grin.

"You mean you can wake him up from here?" Little Black craned her neck to peer into the shadowy pit. The pyramid was at least a hundred meters below the surface—no way shouting would rouse a slumbering Apocalypse.

"Exactly. That's why I brought this." Jos flashed a toothy grin and pulled about fifty kilos of C4 and two detonators from his backpack.

"See? I saved this from when we blew up the base. It's not much, but it should be enough to serve as a wake-up call."

"Enough, my ass! You want me to take this stuff down there? I've only just gotten myself back together, you know!" Little Black protested immediately.

Seeing her reaction, Jos could only sigh and pull something else from his bag. "Tch, what a pain. Here, there's a fuse—just set the explosives below and come back up."

"You should've shown me this in the first place! Why did you assume I'd be blown up?!!"

...

Minutes later, the residents of the city experienced the same terror that had swept the news the previous week—the fear of a mysterious, massive explosion at a certain base.