88. The Invasion Succeeds

After obtaining the information he needed, Joe, disguised as the exiled warlord, had no trouble reaching the outskirts of the Life Foundation’s factory site, deep within an extraordinarily dense forest.

Though the journey was not short, he had not chosen to drive. He had come on foot.

An ordinary car would have been far too conspicuous, and on roads like these, no common vehicle could possibly have moved faster than his own two legs.

"Hm… patrols already from here?" Hidden among the treetops, Joe watched a small squad of guards passing below and silently calculated the distance.

After a brief moment of thought, he gave up on attacking them.

It would have slightly weakened the enemy, but compared with the risk of alerting them, that benefit was far too meager.

Besides, one of the optional objectives was to keep casualties as low as possible.

One hundred thousand points, with one thousand deducted for every death, and five hundred deducted for anyone not killed by his own hand. By any reckoning, he had to keep the death toll under two hundred for this mission.

The system had not said so explicitly, but Joe had no doubt it would happily drive the total into the negative.

Annoying as it was, he could understand the reason. If everyone in the Life Foundation were simply gunned down one by one, there might well be innocents among them; but if he killed every other person, there would surely still be some who slipped through the net.

One could not say they were all accomplices to human experimentation, but there were certainly very few good people here.

If the system had not imposed such a restriction, Joe would have taken out the benevolent micro nuclear battery and shown them what a personal nuclear weapon looked like.

"Well, even if I don’t lift a finger, those two should be fine, right?" After watching the guard patrol disappear, Joe continued onward in stealthy, high-speed bursts toward the Life Foundation base.

The two he was referring to, of course, were Tornado and Blackie.

Yes, he had sent Blackie with Tornado.

If he was going to do it, then he intended to do it as well as possible. His plan was simple: he wanted all three optional objectives.

The first two were not difficult if he paid a little attention, but the last one was somewhat troublesome.

After all, Blackie’s combat performance was inferior to that of Riot. Even after following him for this long, aside from her improved appearance, her strength had seen no real, substantive increase at all—at most, she had become more refined in her methods of attack.

Yet Joe could not assist her, because with his current power, defeating Riot would actually be fairly easy.

In the end, things had developed like this: Tornado, now possessed of the strength to soar far and wide, and Blackie would team up against Riot. Their chances of victory were not low, and it would not cause the mission to fail.

Moreover, Tornado needed a real battle to adapt to her new power and identity, making this mission especially suitable for her.

Still, though their strength seemed considerable on the surface, Blackie, as a former symbiote, remained vulnerable despite the changes in her life form after modification. Infrasound and flames were still her most troublesome weaknesses.

If the enemy failed to notice her true form, that would be one thing. But if they did, then what followed might well become a tragic scene centered on Blackie’s suffering.

Tornado was an even greater problem. Forget being as strong as a true storm; even sending her back to deal with a gang of thugs might not guarantee an injury-free victory.

So Joe had set them a plan focused first and foremost on survival. Even if the mission failed, he could not let the two of them fall here.

As for survival, Joe actually had considerable confidence in them. In the film, Eddie had escaped from here alive when he had only just fused with the symbiote; if these two were to flee with everything they had, the Life Foundation’s people were not qualified to stop them.

With no worries holding him back, Joe was happy to focus entirely on his own mission.

Exposing the Life Foundation and freeing the symbiotes looked like two separate tasks, but in fact they were one and the same problem.

He simply had to rush in, release all the symbiotes, and let them enter human hosts. Whether it succeeded or not, the first objective would be complete.

And as long as he filmed the symbiotes consuming humans inside the Life Foundation, then released that footage to the public, the second objective would be accomplished as well.

Infiltrating the Life Foundation was not difficult. Whether it was due to overconfidence in their chosen location or something else, their security measures were shockingly poor.

It made sense, really. This was a place Eddie and some ditzy female researcher—two entirely unprofessional people—had managed to infiltrate, so naturally it would not be that hard.

For reasons he could not guess, perhaps fear of electronic intrusion or something similar, there was not even a single surveillance camera here. Joe encountered almost no resistance at all before entering the central hall.

"Let me see… the laboratory should be this way, right?" After pausing in the hall for a minute, Joe memorized the layout of the surrounding rooms. Just as he was about to continue, however, an unexpected change occurred!

"Who’s there?!" A shout rang out behind him, followed by the click of a pistol being cocked. Turning around, Joe saw a slightly heavyset black security guard staring at him warily.

Joe narrowed his eyes, then suddenly let anger rise across his face. "You don’t even know who I am? What are you being paid for?"

His rebuke was so righteous and so fearless that the guard was stunned for a moment, blinking three times before replying shakily, "S-sorry, sorry. You’re… a doctor, right?"

"That’s right. I am… a doctor!" Joe answered with his chin raised.

"Uh… so which doctor are you, exactly? Sir, I need to check your ID card."

The guard immediately saw through Joe’s attempt to bluff, and the doubtful look in his eyes hardened once more.

But the instant he reached out for the ID card, Joe had already become a streak of darkness, flashing behind him. One hand clamped over the guard’s mouth while the other drove a dagger into his back.

"Shh… you’re already dead."

With one strike, he dealt with the passerby guard. Joe glanced around, then casually stuffed the body into a cabinet.

A certain assassin had once told us that as long as you dump the body in here, it absolutely will not be discovered.

After confirming that no one else was nearby, Joe quickly opened the laboratory holding the symbiotes and the abducted people, then slipped inside.

As the door closed behind him, a space with a distinctly futuristic feel spread out before Joe.