031: Rescuing a Soul from the Frying Pan
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It took John some time to piece together what had happened.
First of all, the goods did not belong to him. This Shark Coin had been bewitched by greed and stolen raw materials from Owl Town. While attempting to smuggle and resell them, he had been accidentally taken down by Gino.
Then he had kidnapped the girl and tried to extort the stolen goods from the Black Gold Gang, only for word to leak out.
Owl Town had placed a bounty on his head.
The man had panicked and tried to run. So he sold Gino to the Ghouls in exchange for travel money. He had not even made it out of the shop before Tatsukawa blocked his way.
John listened with a deep frown.
Things had grown complicated.
Tatsukawa was displeased as well.
The upper ranks of Owl Town maintained a rigid hierarchy of contempt from top to bottom. They believed that petty thieves and lowlifes were beneath notice, yet turned a blind eye to the gangs’ unchecked expansion, caring only to preserve the dignity of the pyramid’s peak.
“You heard me. Get out, or stay here and keep him company.”
Tatsukawa issued his order for them to leave once again.
The man on the stool was convulsing nonstop, drenched in cold sweat.
[Leave the casino and search for clues about Gino. (Optional)]
[Obtain information from the trader. (Optional)]
The mission offered a choice.
Gino could become a corpse at any moment.
John’s brows drew together. In a hard voice, he asked, “I want information on the girl. Where was she sold, and how do I contact them?”
Tatsukawa’s eyes turned vicious.
“Are you new to this life, or what? Your employer never told you about the relationship between the Black Gold Gang and Owl Town? You’re in such a hurry to die…”
The alloy dagger in his hand reflected the light, its blade looking wet and razor-sharp.
“Is Owl Town ready for war?” John countered without fear.
“While you’re playing torture games here, the Black Gold Gang’s godfather is still expecting the little girl to come home. Let me put it more clearly: this can either be a transaction between underlings, or it can be the signal that the gangs of Eden City are going to war.”
Owl Town’s enforcers had already blocked the exits.
Tatsukawa frowned and studied John carefully. After several seconds of silence, he turned and flung the alloy dagger at the unfortunate man on the stool.
A howl of agony rang out. Blood poured from his unmodified left arm, which appeared to have been severed. It remained attached only because of the ropes binding him.
“Give him the clue he wants.”
Tatsukawa clasped his hands behind his back and returned to the sofa in the corner to rest.
John strode forward. He heard a faint voice and tilted his head, pressing his ear close to the man’s face. He committed every detail to memory.
Just before John left, Tatsukawa called after him.
“Hey. Are you with the Black Gold Gang?”
“I work for myself.”
John had no time to waste. He practically ran out of the casino. Silver Knight 577 had barely come to a stop before its engine roared again and it shot away.
[Mission objective updated]
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[Locate Gino. (Incomplete)]
Eden City was a gathering place for every kind of illegal activity, and within the underground world’s hierarchy of contempt, Ghouls were always at the very bottom.
People in the cybernetic age were willing to invest their wealth in themselves. For many street drifters, their bodies were their entire fortune.
The Ghouls had set their sights on that source of profit.
They attacked any citizen indiscriminately. Whenever they spotted an implant worth taking, they would ambush, abduct, or club the target unconscious, stripping away every prosthetic limb and removing any organ that could be sold.
Think that was the end of it?
The Ghouls’ standards varied wildly. If you happened to fall into the hands of a technically skilled piece of scum, they might torture you to death, record the entire process, and sell the raw footage to chip dealers. As for whether your remaining flesh and bones underwent further processing, no one could say.
They had no bottom line. They literally wrung every last bit of value from you, scattered throughout the city and carrying out the vilest deeds imaginable.
Gino had been taken for some time already.
All John could do was pray that she was tough enough to survive.
Following the clues, Silver Knight stopped along the waterfront of Sakura Cross Street. The area was filled with cheap sheet-metal buildings, their interiors resembling a mix of workshops and factories.
John did not even need his cyber-eye to scan the area. From far away, he spotted several suspicious trucks parked in an empty lot and three grim-faced thugs leaning against the waterfront railing, cracking vulgar jokes.
He circled around behind one of the metal containers and immediately smelled something rotten.
The gap between the backs of the buildings and the embankment was crammed full. His scan revealed a pile of corpses, hastily wrapped into bundles.
Cockroaches crawled freely among them.
There were armed guards standing watch in the distance. Under the tarps lay volatile fuel. The Ghouls were probably planning to burn down the entire site and erase the evidence when they left.
The sheet-metal buildings along the street were all cheap construction. Regardless of their size, they shared public transformer boxes and signal towers.
The Ghouls gathered here were simple-minded degenerates. It had never occurred to them to assign anyone to guard their own signal circuits.
John skillfully plugged in a data cable.
Most of the factory’s surveillance system had been dismantled. But at the very back was a blood-soaked operating room. Because they recorded sensory chips there, the cameras and emotion sensors had been left intact.
John hacked into the feed and took in the entire scene.
The good news was that there were fewer Ghouls than he had expected. Most of them were probably busy clubbing people unconscious elsewhere in the city.
The bad news was that several corpses were visible, and an open-chest subject still lay on the operating table.
After scanning the enemy positions, John slipped into the sheet-metal building, keeping to the blind spots.
He had scanned the surrounding building materials. The Ghouls often tortured and killed their captives in the workshop, so the walls had all been soundproofed. Clearly, they did not want gangs—or bored police officers—with nothing better to do showing up at their door.
“Hey, you!”
A burly man carrying a corpse spotted John. He had only just begun to shout when a rifle round tore through his mouthful of rotten teeth.
The sound of two bodies hitting the floor at once drew everyone’s attention.
John mounted his rifle on a crate and aimed in advance, taking advantage of his superior information. The next second, several heads cautiously emerged from inside the room. Gunfire erupted, and flesh exploded across the walls.
Rapid footsteps thundered on the steel staircase.
John swung around, charged an electromagnetic penetrator round, and fired through the thin metal door. The bullet pierced the thug just as he was about to open it.
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat!
The Ghouls standing guard began firing back.
Sporadic muzzle flashes appeared outside the windows. Several panes of glass shattered, and bullets struck piles of debris and corpses.
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John weathered the barrage.
Just as he was about to rise and return fire, the enemy abruptly fled after emptying their magazines.
[Take Gino away before reinforcements arrive. (Incomplete)]
“Damn, they know how to call in backup.”
John cursed as he stood.
He pulled back the white sheets covering the nearby carts. The scans of several corpses did not match.
John kicked open the operating room door.
Two Ghouls armed with surgical instruments tried to ambush him, but bullets mercilessly turned them into sieves.
The corpse on the table stared blankly into death. Its vital signs had fallen completely to zero.
Fortunately, it was not Gino.
John could only continue searching along the route he had taken. Then, by chance, his scan caught a half-open cold-storage room in the corner.
He ran inside at once.
Cold air continuously seeped outward. There was no ice inside the metal chamber, only pools of water beneath his feet. Several stripped corpses hung from hooks like slabs of meat.
John followed the cables deeper into the building.
There he found a soaking pool resembling a bathhouse. White sheets of floating ice drifted amid several naked corpses.
“Damn it. You filthy bastards.”
John had heard about what they did.
They loaded excessive amounts of software into living people’s brains until their nerve endings burned out. The Ghouls recorded the entire process and sold it to other degenerates.
[Name: Gino]
The best and worst possibilities had come true.
John found Gino in the pool, barely breathing. He carried her toward the operating room, first locating emergency medication to paralyze her nerves, then pulling the junk chip from her neck.
Gino’s vital signs continued to decline.
John was about to do something when the distant sound of braking came from beyond the shattered windows.
“Damn it!”
John wrapped Gino in a white sheet and hoisted her over his shoulder. The moment he emerged from the blood-soaked factory, a dense rush of footsteps echoed from the steel staircase.
Without looking back, he dove into the car, floored the accelerator, and sent the roar of the engine reverberating through the streets.
[Mission objective updated]
[Return Gino’s body to the Black Gold Gang. (Optional)]
[Save Gino’s life. (Optional)]
Headlights flashed across John’s face.
Through the rearview mirror, he saw several modified cars racing toward him. Gino was dying beside him, while the Ghouls pursued relentlessly from behind.
This was truly a race for life and death.
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