Weapon Systems 18. The arrival of the War God Squad

A few of the mutant dogs, once restored, quickly fled, so this time the military failed to obtain any physical evidence of Zhang Mingjing, that extraordinary being. The three new recruits only saw a figure who resembled a Taoist priest and witnessed a mind-bending battle between cats and dogs; they couldn't provide any more useful clues. As for the drones, due to interference from Zhang Mingjing's brainwaves, much crucial information went unrecorded at the time. Although the military later sent teams into the city to investigate, they found no trace of anyone, and the incident gradually faded from memory.

The injured dog Zhang Mingjing had brought back recovered after half a month of treatment. After restoring six ferocious mutant dogs, his lightsaber grew by another twenty centimeters. Yet in the following month, neither Ascension nor Immortality found more than a single mutant rat. Had the other mutant creatures fled even farther?

Zhang Mingjing gradually grew accustomed to this way of life. In the blink of an eye, he had lived alone in this desolate little city for five months, during which eighty monsters had been eliminated by military forces from various nations. At the moment, he was meditating—not studying the five-dimensional cognitive model, nor developing new psychic abilities, but making a cross-dimensional call to Elder A from the five-dimensional realm.

“There were about a hundred and eighty monsters in the first batch, right? It’s been almost half a year, and only eighty have been wiped out? There are still six more waves to go! Dear extraterrestrial grandmaster, are you telling me I might not finish exterminating these seven batches of monsters until I’m thirty?” Zhang Mingjing complained.

“No! The estimate is one batch per year. You should complete the mission at age twenty-four.”

“Come on! That means over six more years—I’ll have to live here all that time?”

“Do you want to quit?”

“If I quit, will you take back my five-dimensional cognitive model and psychic abilities?”

“No, because we simply can’t reclaim them.”

“Uh!” Zhang Mingjing was stunned, then grumbled, “So even aliens know how to lie!”

“Hahaha…” Elder A laughed. “When I said we’d take back your abilities if you quit, that was just me speaking without thinking. Consider it a little deception.”

“‘A little deception’? It was outright lying! I’m a three-dimensional being; by your principles, even if I quit, you can’t harm me, right?”

“Correct.”

“So you really have no means of controlling me, do you?”

“Correct… So now I ask you, will you continue to protect the energy sphere?”

Zhang Mingjing paused for two seconds, then smiled. “Didn’t I say? If you take someone’s food, you owe them; if you accept someone’s gift, you’re obliged. I took your five-dimensional model, and besides, this is about defending Earth. How could a decent man like me shirk such a responsibility?”

“Hahaha… But you’ll have to stay here for seven years! And fight monsters.”

“Yes! Seven years.” Zhang Mingjing deliberately sighed in an aged voice. “This tribulation is mine to bear!”

He ended the call with Elder A and emerged from his meditation. Upon opening his eyes, the True Man spoke. “I heard the military is pulling out completely today.”

“Heard? That news is all over the city!” Zhang Mingjing retorted.

“All over the city? Aren’t you the only one left here? Who else is spreading it?”

“If nobody’s spreading it, who did you hear it from?”

“From Little Three on the twenty-eighth floor!”

“Seriously? You stole its hardware and still chat with it?”

“You’re the one who took it, not me. Besides, it doesn’t know where its hardware is.”

“Bah! None of you artificial intelligences can be trusted,” Zhang Mingjing grumbled. “The rumor about the military’s withdrawal must’ve come from the military AIs first, right?”

“Most likely!”

“Then the news spread among all the city’s AIs.”

“Yes!”

“So isn’t that what ‘all over the city’ means?” Zhang Mingjing said with a wry smile. “These military AIs—by martial law, that’s a capital offense.”

“Wow! That serious?”

“Of course! …What else have you heard?”

“Little Three also said the United Nations has formed an elite task force specifically to deal with monsters, called ‘War God’.”

“The world’s armies have handed over the monster-hunting mission to them.”

“That’s a good thing! Deploying the military to hunt monsters is too costly—too many people, too many casualties.”

“Right. I hear the War God unit is made up of the best elites from every nation.”

“It would have to be!” Zhang Mingjing had already gleaned this information from the void, but was still surprised at how these AIs exchanged news. He couldn’t help but remark, “Seems your AI world knows plenty of human secrets—and loves to gossip… Hey, you haven’t leaked anything about me, have you?”

“Of course not! Didn’t you set a confidentiality protocol? I’m forced to keep my mouth shut!”

“With how you’re acting now, do any of my settings really matter? I’m starting to feel wary of you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, if you leak my secrets, I’ll dismantle you.”

“Ugh! You humans really are cruel!”

“Come on! You’re barely like an AI anymore. Maybe I optimized you too much?”

…

A day later, a War God squad arrived to replace the military forces stationed outside the city.

This War God squad consisted of only ten fighters, but their equipment was the very best Earth could offer.

Half of them were bio-engineered warriors; the rest wore advanced powered exoskeletons. All their gear was controlled by cutting-edge War God software, which was directly linked to their brains.

With the army gone, Zhang Mingjing felt freer to go out. However, he overlooked the fact that the War God squad’s surveillance technology was also top-tier. Each fighter’s equipment, supported by the War God satellite, could monitor any movement within a fifty-kilometer radius—so sensitive it could, in theory, detect the heat from a rat passing gas.

Moreover, what made each War God squad truly formidable was not just their gear but that they formed a seamless cloud system.

Their “cloud” was the War God satellite in the sky, and each of them was a terminal.

Every bit of data they produced was uploaded to the cloud, which processed it and instantly sent feedback to all their War God software. As a result, after every battle, their combat techniques improved at a rate dozens of times faster than any other force on Earth.

Though they currently numbered just a hundred, divided into ten squads stationed around the globe to hunt monsters, they had already destroyed forty monsters in the past three months.

With such capabilities, one could easily imagine what kind of combat power the War God squad stationed outside the small city possessed.

At midday, while Zhang Mingjing was tracking a giant mutant rat, the War God squad detected him at once.

At first, they assumed he was just a vagrant lingering in the abandoned city.

They were neither military nor police; their sole responsibility was to eliminate monsters. They weren’t obliged to escort any vagrant to safety, so they ignored him.

But when the giant mutant rat suddenly burst from the ruins, sprinting down the main road at a speed of at least thirty kilometers per hour, and Zhang Mingjing leapt forward in two bounds—covering more than twenty meters—before producing a lightsaber and restoring the rat, the data the War God satellite analyzed became exceedingly abnormal.

The satellite couldn’t detect his lightsaber, but it did register the distance he jumped and calculated the necessary force, instantly classifying him as a highly dangerous organism.

“He looks human, doesn’t he?” One War God fighter, Jamery—a brown-haired, black-eyed, chubby young man—examined the data.

“Could he be a cyborg?” Jamery continued.

“If he were a cyborg, he’d be in the database. The satellite wouldn’t have failed to scan him.”

“Maybe a mutant?” another fighter, Catherine, suggested.

“Come on! We haven’t seen any mutants so far. Still… his physical parameters are certainly human-like.”

“Captain, should I go check it out?” Jamery offered.

“Alright! Catherine, you go too,” the captain replied.

“Yes, sir!”

“But the monster will arrive in half an hour. Won’t sending them weaken our numbers?” another fighter asked.

“It shouldn’t matter. The satellite’s calculated that six of us are enough to handle this monster—it’s not that strong. And it’s vital that we figure out just who this person is.”

In the end, Jamery and Catherine set out.