Free Web NovelChapter 149: Chapter 139: More Valuable Dead Than Alive
The strongest fortresses are always breached from within.
But even when breaching from within, you have to choose the right point of attack.
Guan Tong’s objective was to first secure the surveillance room. Making a move elsewhere would risk being discovered and setting off the base’s alarms.
According to the reconnaissance he conducted via shadow infiltration, the surveillance room was in the upper-level sector of the base, not far from Manager Han Ling’s office.
First, secure the surveillance room, then swiftly seize control of the base manager, Han Ling. That was Guan Tong’s strategy.
The time to strike... was set for after dinner at the base.
Guan Tong silently waited for the right moment.
Inside the base, a few employees from the surveillance room returned after dinner, chatting complainingly.
"Feels like the food has gotten a lot worse lately."
"You should be grateful we have anything to eat at all. Who knows how long the sweep outside will last? If it takes too long, our supply lines here could be in real trouble!"
"I wouldn’t worry about that. Manager Han will find a way to get food. Besides, if we really run out... don’t we have plenty of ’emergency rations’ locked up down below?"
"Damn, you’ve been watching too many twisted movies? You want to eat people?"
The men chatted idly, completely oblivious to the pitch-black mass of shadow lurking in a corner of the room.
They sat down in their chairs, staring with utter boredom at the monitor wall formed by dozens of small screens pieced together.
Staring at it from morning till night every day—you can imagine the boredom. It would have been better if something had actually happened, but the problem was, ever since they’d been on surveillance duty, not a single incident had ever occurred at the base.
Although this was a result of Han Ling’s competent management, for these surveillance operators, it was utterly dull.
However, the remaining balance of their "dull" lives was running low.
Split Shadow Lines slithered silently up the chairs and onto the backrests. Then, before the men had a chance to notice, WHOOSH—they shot out and wrapped around their necks!
"Urk?!"
The surveillance operators were choked by the resilient Shadow Lines without any warning. They instantly couldn’t breathe, their eyes bulging. Some of them reached up, trying to pull away the Shadow Lines around their necks, but they couldn’t get a grip; the lines were both too thin to grasp and too tough to break.
After just a few seconds, all the surveillance operators’ bodies went limp in their chairs, falling silent.
The Shadow Lines that had choked them to death quickly retracted. The next moment, they vanished without a trace, and in their place, a young woman appeared in the room.
It was Guan Tong, who had used Body Shifting to arrive.
That’s right, he had come to the base in person this time. Constantly controlling Shadow remotely consumed a lot of Psychic Power, and weapons like the Silver Hunter couldn’t be used from a distance.
But the most important reason was that he wanted to destroy this evil place with his own hands.
Guan Tong glanced at the corpses in the surveillance room, took the uniform off one of them, and put it on as a disguise.
Then he glanced at the monitor screens.
Except for the room of the base manager, Han Ling, which wasn’t monitored, everyone else was under surveillance.
Even managers like Liu Yuqiang and squad members like Chen Na were no exception.
Guan Tong thought, ’Chen Na must have known her room was monitored, which is why she pretended to be asleep when she used the Communication Secret Scroll. She’s pretty sharp.’
He didn’t leave immediately. Instead, he took out his phone and snapped a few pictures of the room.
After that, he left the surveillance room and headed for the manager’s office on the same floor.
Han Ling was working in her office when a crisp DING suddenly sounded from her body. She shot to her feet and whipped her head around to see an almost imperceptible black line deflecting away from her back.
’An enemy!’
Han Ling immediately understood that someone was trying to attack her. Otherwise, the defensive equipment she wore, which could automatically repel attacks, would not have made a sound.
The black line, having failed its attack, quickly retreated to the door, turned the lock from the inside, and opened the bolted door.
Han Ling’s pupils contracted. She immediately snatched the phone from her desk and pressed a button on the side.
That button was connected to a transmitter hidden inside the phone. A single press would send a signal and trigger an alarm throughout the entire base.
CLICK.
The button was pressed successfully, but the alarm she expected did not sound.
"What’s going on?!"
She exclaimed under her breath. Just then, Guan Tong walked in through the doorway the shadow had opened, holding the Silver Hunter.
He glanced at Han Ling, then at her phone as she frantically mashed the side button. ’Good thing I fired an Electromagnetic Pulse Bomb from the Silver Hunter beforehand,’ he thought. ’Otherwise, she really would have succeeded.’
But...
As Guan Tong looked at Han Ling, he thought, ’I’ve run into a familiar situation again.’
’My shadows can’t touch the enemy’s skin. I encountered something similar with the Curved Saber Man on Holy Grail Island. Both of them must have special defensive items that guard against Psychic Power-related attacks, which is why even my ethereal shadows can’t penetrate their bodies.’
"Who are you?" Han Ling’s icy face was full of vigilance as she watched the woman in the surveillance operator’s uniform walk in holding a gun.
She couldn’t understand how this woman had managed to infiltrate the base. Could it be...
Recalling the thin black line that had just tried to ambush her, Han Ling had a vague feeling it was connected.
But Guan Tong had no intention of wasting words with her. With a single thought, his shadow on the floor extended several solid, long arms, reaching for Han Ling.
"You’re Shadow!"
Han Ling cried out in alarm. She had also participated in the Holy Grail Island competition and had personally witnessed Shadow manipulating these black shadows, shaping them to kill hundreds, even thousands, of contestants.
Wasn’t this scene exactly the same as what she’d seen back then?
SWOOSH!
Faced with several large black hands grabbing for her, Han Ling gritted her teeth and raised a hand to summon a disc-shaped item.
She threw the disc, and countless sharp teeth unfolded from its edge, slicing at the shadow hands that were grabbing for her.
At the same time, she quickly drew a gun from her waist and pulled the trigger, aiming at Guan Tong.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
The bullets were all blocked by a rising wall of shadow. At the same time, the disc item Han Ling had thrown was pinned down by several shadow hands. Other shadow hands gave her no time to use any more items, grabbing her limbs and slamming her to the floor.
"It seems your defensive item can only be used once, or maybe it has a cooldown," Guan Tong said, looking at Han Ling, who was pinned motionlessly to the ground.
Han Ling struggled and managed to speak. "You’re Shadow? Shadow is actually a woman? But according to our intel, Shadow is supposed to be a man in his sixties!"
Huh?
Her words gave Guan Tong pause.
’A man in his sixties... isn’t that the disguise I used when I went to Skytop Mountain?’
’That long-haired, heavyset guy back then said he would leak intel about Shadow using a Communication Secret Scroll. Looks like he wasn’t bluffing; he actually did it.’
’But what’s even more ridiculous is that this information actually spread, and some people really believe it—this Han Ling right in front of me is clearly a victim of that fake intel.’
However... Guan Tong glanced at the phone clutched in Han Ling’s right hand and saw that she had activated the recording function. Pretending not to notice, he said, "Shadow is never just one person. Shadow is a collective. Everyone in the collective is Shadow."
"What... are you saying?"
Han Ling didn’t understand what he meant. Could it be that Shadow wasn’t a single person, but a group?
It was good that she didn’t understand. Guan Tong was deliberately releasing more false information to obscure his true identity.
This way, in the future, if he needed to use other disguises or have Shadow appear in his place, it would further corroborate this false intelligence, leaving all his enemies confused about who the real Shadow was.
Although Han Ling wasn’t sure, she quickly collected herself and said, "We can talk! Our Commander-in-Chief has been looking for Shadow, hoping for a chance to cooperate. The terms will absolutely be to your satisfac—"
"I have nothing to talk about with scum like you." Guan Tong controlled his shadow to land a heavy punch on Han Ling’s face, knocking her unconscious.
He didn’t kill Han Ling right away; he wanted to uncover more people later. Based on what Chen Na had said before and the implication in Han Ling’s own words, the true decision-maker of this organization was someone else—likely the person she called the "Commander-in-Chief."
He then touched the Storage Ring on his finger. Its one-cubic-meter space was large enough to fit several Han Lings. Unfortunately, the space lacked an atmosphere, and any living creature placed inside would suffocate.
Guan Tong first split off some Shadow Lines to bind Han Ling securely and lock her in the room. After the operation was over, he would take her away using the sanctuary and then interrogate her to find out about the mastermind.
Having dealt with the base manager, Han Ling, Guan Tong took an ID card from her desk. It had the highest level of clearance, granting access to anywhere in the base.
’Next up are the accomplices... I won’t let a single one of them go.’
Guan Tong considered himself someone who didn’t anger easily, but once he did get angry, he always had to vent it.
Just as he’d told Han Ling she was scum, it wasn’t just her. In his eyes, everyone in this base who knew the truth about the prison yet still worked for this organization was scum, the dregs of humanity that needed to be completely eradicated.
Even if every life was more precious in the era of the Apocalypse Rules, Guan Tong firmly believed that these accomplices in the base would be more valuable dead than alive—that their deaths would be a greater contribution to the world.
’From the top down, one level at a time.’
Once Guan Tong made up his mind, he saw things through to the end. He walked out of Han Ling’s office.
Soon, the employees in the nearby offices all died at the hands of his shadows, without making much of a sound.
When Guan Tong arrived at the office of the Head of the Materials Management Department, Liu Yuqiang was working on a spreadsheet. It wasn’t until Guan Tong swiped the card and entered that he realized something was wrong.
"Who are you?"
Liu Yuqiang demanded with a frown. He was familiar with everyone in the base’s upper-level sector and had definitely never seen the woman before him.
"You don’t know me, but I know you." Guan Tong didn’t attack right away, as he was a little curious. "You’re the chairman of Jule Technology, Liu Yuqiang."
Liu Yuqiang’s brow tightened. He had been a business magnate before, famous throughout the country, so it was perfectly normal for someone to recognize him.
"You haven’t answered my question. What department are you from?! And how could you swipe open my door?!"
"What I’m curious about is why you’re the Head of the Materials Management Department in this base," Guan Tong asked. "The leader of this base, or should I say, the Commander-in-Chief—do you know him?"
Hearing this, Liu Yuqiang knew something was wrong.
No one from any department in the base would ever ask such a question.
He was silent for a moment, then suddenly charged out from behind his desk. A pair of grayish-white gloves appeared on his hands.
It was his exclusive Psychic Power item, the Giant Power Gloves.
Through his relentless development, the power amplification from these gloves had become absurd. He had once tested them, and a single full-power punch while wearing them could shatter a large rock taller than a man’s waist.
"Hah!"
Liu Yuqiang let out a low shout and threw a punch at Guan Tong, hoping to gain the upper hand by striking first.
But in the next moment, a horrifying scene unfolded before him: countless black shadow hands shot out from Guan Tong’s collar and sleeves, easily stopping his fist and grabbing his arm.
"Liu Yuqiang, it seems your Psychic Power isn’t very high. There’s no strength in your punch."
"Could you be... the legendary Shadow?"
Liu Yuqiang stared at Guan Tong in shock. He had heard a little about Shadow’s abilities and knew that the most typical one was manipulating shape-shifting shadows.
"As a member of the management, you’re different from the small fry. I’ll ask you again: do you know who this Commander-in-Chief Han Ling mentioned is?" Guan Tong had a shadow hand wrap around Liu Yuqiang’s neck. "You have five seconds to talk. Otherwise, I’ll snap your neck."
