Sheyan and Zi hurried to the underground parking lot. Presently, the place had already been blockaded with police tapes. The people who fled the building crowded in the passage. In front of them stood about seven or eight security guards who stopped them from leaving. Some of the crowd were puzzled and questioned the guards loudly, and some were negotiating with the guards. The situation was noisy and chaotic.
Sheyan could not afford to waste time here. He identified the place where the quarrel with the guards was the most fierce, then went over to add fuel to the fire, and thus smoothly triggered a conflict.
The security guards must not be very popular among the employees of Cyberdyne Systems. As the conflict spread, those 8 guards or so found the situation completely slipping out of their control, yet they dared not stop the crowd with violence. Therefore, Sheyan and Zi effortlessly found a car and drove away in no time at all.
Sheyan heaved a sigh of relief when their car finally pull out of the Cyberdyne Systems headquarters. Then, he suddenly issued a groan. He let Zi take over the driving and pulled up his sleeve. A strange swelling could be seen on his right arm, almost making the sleeve burst. Above the biceps, the veins bulged like snakes, and a large mass of black and blue was rapidly spreading beneath the skin. The skin had thus become grotesquely bumpy.
“What’s going on?” Zi could not help but exclaim in worry.
Sheyan smiled while he took out a scalpel and answered, “The woman called Corina was pretty troublesome. Remember that skill where she used a few purplish-black floating light balls to bomb me? They were all filled with resentment and fear. I took all of them head on. What you’re seeing now is the residual effect from that skill.”
While he said that, Sheyan began to tie his arm tightly with his belt. The blood vessels on the arm became visibly swollen. Sheyan cut down on one with the scalpel in his hand.
A large amount of blood immediately oozed out from the wound. The bizarre thing was, the blood was in a gelatinous state. It completely melted while it was still in the air, and after landing on the ground, it formed small lumps as if it was mercury. The lumps were a mixture of red and black in colour and would move by themselves to merge into one.
It was not until Sheyan had squeezed out more than three liters of blood that all the contaminated blood was fully discarded from his body. The contaminated blood converged together into a large slime-like pile. A deformed face would float through the surface of the “slime” from time to time. Each time, the face would belong to a different person. It felt as if the pile of blood contained the resentment and agony of millions of people.
The contaminated blood rolled around on the ground for a long while before it evaporated. Countless ghosts floated up from the blood and flew around Sheyan for a while before they rose into the sky and disappeared from view. Only after that did Sheyan wiped the cold sweat on his forehead and relaxed.
He could not help laughing as he said, “Those two were actually pretty strong. Too bad… ….they met us.”
When Sheyan turned around and looked back towards the sunset, he was surprised to find smoke billowing out from several floors on the Cyberdyne Systems building. Who knew what could have caused them. Maybe there was a mistake in operation, maybe the Terminators were too difficult to handle, maybe there were people who took advantage of the chaos to plunder, maybe some other contestants had sneaked inside…. In any case, it was a clear sign that a disaster had befallen the LA city landmark building.
But by now, the Los Angeles citizens had already grown accustomed to Terminator invasions, so the incident did not cause widespread panic. Some people who were fed up with the top 1% in society were even secretly applauding in their hearts.
In contrast, the Los Angeles government responded like hornets that had their nest poked. A large number of helicopters rumbled over to the site, and the army was also dispatched. In some places, the roads were blocked for inspection. If all these had been planned beforehand, they may cause some troubles for Sheyan and Zi, but now, they were way too late.
After a while, Sheyan saw Mogensha beckoning towards him and Zi at the crossroads ahead in a black leather jacket and skeletal ornaments. They abandoned their car and followed Mogensha into a supermarket. After passing through the supermarket, they had successfully escaped the police blockade.
Two motorcycles were waiting for them at the other side of the supermarket. Sheyan’s arm was injured, so of course he could not drive a motorcycle and had to be a passenger instead. He climbed up the back seat of Zi’s motorcycle without any shame. Zi displayed no reaction to his action, so Sheyan simply wrapped his good arm around her waist and embraced her tightly. Her body felt tender and soft. While the motorcycles were moving, the bumpiness of the ride meant Sheyan could occasionally feel the elastic fullness above his hand.
This kind of behaviour was neither gentlemanly nor polite, but Zi remained as cold and as calm as usual. Emboldened by that, Sheyan’s hand kept getting naughtier until it was eventually pinched hard by Zi a few times. He finally behaved himself after that.
***
When they returned to their temporary base, Sheyan fished out the things he obtained one by one in front of the expectant Dolittle. Dolittle was initially quite calm, but after a while, he started to be surprised. In the end, his jaw had dropped to the floor.
“Oh, God. Is this a track tungsten steel accelerometer? Is that a radioactive particle target? And this! Is this a concentrated osteopeptide cavity compressor? I can hardly believe my eyes, my friend. Did you rob a top secret vault in Cyberdyne Systems?”
Sheyan looked at Dolittle’s reaction with satisfaction. He smiled and said, “I’m glad you’re satisfied. Apart from all these, there’s also a box I’d like to show you. I deliberately baited a Terminator that had lost control into a lab to wreck havoc. Not long after that, an old man rushed out holding the box. I guessed the box must contain something very important, so….”
Dolittle pried opened the box with trembling hands. When he saw the content, he screamed in excitement like a teenage boy who had just seen Kate Upton in bikini.
“This is clearly the acronym of old Hava! You’ve plundered all his research in one go! That’s brilliant! A problem that has been bugging me for three years will be solved with these! If you can get me some liquid alloy, I can instantly evolve it into the new type of alloy that has the ability to devour!”
After that, Sheyan and his party let Mr. Dolittle indulge himself in his ecstasy. He would probably need some time to recover from this semi-hysterical state. The party gathered in another room to read the information about the T-1000 on a computer.
The official information kept by Cyberdyne was indeed much more comprehensive.
According to the data obtained from their investigation, the T-1000 had made six possible appearances in recent years, but only two of those could be confirmed. Four videos had been recorded from those two incidents. Of those, the most memorable incident was when the T-1000 raided the Ritzway thermal power station. The T-1000 was surrounded by an army of over 300 soldiers which possessed 17 taser guns, but they ended up completely wiped out. The T-1000 had truly displayed its terrifying offensive power in this fight. A video was recorded of this battle.
Although the video material was quite fuzzy, it was enough to show how formidable the ruthless killing machine was. In front of the T-1000, the well-trained fighters armed to the teeth were just sheeps waiting for slaughter!
While Sheyan was watching the video of this fight, he suddenly pressed the pause button, then pulled out another video. After watching that video for a while, he frowned and asked, “Did you guys notice anything suspicious?”
No one spoke. Zi stirred her coffee a few times before she said, “We can now basically confirm that the extraction and synthesizing of the T-1000 liquid alloy is difficult even for Skynet, and the raw materials are quite scarce too. That’s why it’s impossible for this Terminator model to be mass produced. We can thus infer that the T-1000 will only be mobilised to play a key role in extremely important military operations, the kind that may even affect the survival of Skynet. But for some reason, the locations that the T-1000 has assaulted so far don’t seem to be very important.”
Sanzi suddenly said, “Maybe we can consider the problem from another angle. The time displacement sphere is a one-way portal. Since we can confirm that the T-1000 has invaded this era before, where did it go after it completed its mission?”
Sanzi’s train of thought made their eyes light up, but Zi immediately raised her doubt.
“Skynet likely gave it a self-destruct order. It’s true that one of the reasons Skynet sent Terminators to invade this world was that it hoped the humans in this era can grasp some basic theory from studying the Terminators in order to hasten the creation of the technologies which formed the foundation of Skynet, thus accelerating its growth in this world. However, the T-1000 was quite an advanced technology even for Skynet. There’s no way Skynet would want humans to possess that kind of technology. If the humans become too strong, it’s definitely not a good thing for Skynet.”
Sheyan narrowed his eyes in deep thought.
After a moment, he said, “Zi is right. In this era, Skynet is still a fetus that’s just starting to take shape. It’s absolutely not a good thing for it if the humans acquire technologies that are far too advanced. Skynet should be equally afraid of being eliminated before it has the chance to be born. Besides, even if a T-1000 was not destroyed after its mission, it can take the form of any human it touches, so it can safely hide among the humans. Searching for it will be like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
Mogensha frowned, “Then we can only be sure that a T-1000 will appear if we follow the plot of Terminator 2. But Sarah Connor’s dead now. John Connor survived, but he’s still a developing embryo right now. In such vastly different scenario, will Terminator 2’s plot still happen? Even if it does happen, it’ll be 12 years later….It’s not like we can wait for 12 years.”
“That’s why we have to figure out why those two locations were so important to Skynet that it would mobilise something as important as the T-1000 to raise the operations’ chances of success!” Sheyan said decisively.
“If we can understand the reasons behind this, we can lure the T-1000 out.”
