Volume 16 Tower of Babel Chapter 970 Bianca
Bianca had been hiding in the East 9th District for four days. In order to avoid detection by the men in black, she had to remove her cyborg prostheses that used energy crystals as a power source, and dragged her severely disabled body around in the dilapidated abandoned residential area.
She lived in a half-collapsed ruin, and smeared cold and smelly mud dug out from the sewers on her body to lower her body temperature to avoid thermal infrared detection equipment. Even though the temperature control system of this residential area had long been scrapped, the temperature was only around zero degrees both during the day and at night, and Bianca could only grit her teeth and endure the cold.
She didn't want to die, not to mention that her life was bought by her teammates who she had been with day and night.
It's not that Bianca didn't want to stop her, but she knew very well that even if she wanted to stay, they would not agree - the result of not being decisive enough would be a waste of precious time, making them pay a greater price, or even paying the price in vain, making those sacrifices meaningless.
When they suggested that Bianca escape first and they stay behind to cover their retreat, Bianca knew she couldn't persuade them. She could only hold on to the chance of survival that her companions had fought for her and live on with their obsession.
Her life no longer belongs to her alone, so she must not die.
Even if she couldn't avenge her companions, at least she had to get the news out.
Although mercenaries sell their lives for money, they have an unwritten rule - even if they die, their death must be meaningful, whether that value is money or something else.
Being beaten to death like a stray dog and abandoned on the street corner is the most despised way of death for them. Even if they can't resist, they will at least bite a few times... Even if they can't bite, they will at least bark angrily at those people.
Bianca huddled behind a half-broken low wall, wrapped in a deliberately dirty blanket. There was a large gap at the joint of the blanket, and the biting cold kept pouring in from the outside through this gap... However, Bianca, who only had one hand, could only hold one end of the blanket - if she held the upper end, her lower body would be numb from the cold, and if she held the lower end, the cold wind would keep blowing into her collar.
Her consciousness was already in a semi-dissociated state. She felt cold, tired, and hungry... If she were a character in an MMORPG game, the negative states would probably be so numerous that the status bar would not be able to accommodate them all.
Her crossbow was thrown not far away. It had been severely damaged in the daytime battle, and with only one hand left to use, she was unable to repair it... In fact, the crossbow was now equivalent to a pile of scrap metal, but even Bianca herself didn't know why she still carried it with her.
Perhaps it is to pursue that elusive sense of security?
She couldn't help but think of the "last mission" that caused her to lose her right eye, right arm and right leg... At that time, she also thought she was going to die, but at that time, she did not have the fear of death, but only a sense of relief that she was about to be liberated.
However, the doctors at the rear hospital pulled her back from the brink of death, but because of this, the cost of rescuing her had exhausted the military's compensation budget. After that, Bianca could only receive a very meager retirement compensation and the lowest level of disability compensation every month. This amount of money, apart from the cost of subsequent maintenance treatment and daily medicine, could only provide the minimum living expenses - protein blocks with a strange taste, synthetic food that was difficult to swallow, and cheap vitamin supplement tablets. She ate this diet for a full six months, and during this six months, in order to completely heal her injuries, she even owed the hospital a lot of money.
She had no money to install prosthetics, and being able to take care of herself with this crippled body was already an amazing perseverance - even daily life was full of troubles, not to mention making money. In the dead of night, Bianca thought about ending her life more than once.
She remembered the first words the doctor at the rear hospital said to her after she woke up: "You are lucky that you didn't die... But the rest of your life may be more painful than death."
The pain and the difficult days made Bianca realize the fickleness of human nature - almost all of her good comrades died in that mission, and their families had to face a tight financial situation while suffering huge pain. No one could help her... Someone once suggested that she rely on the media for help, but the messages she sent to various media outlets received no response at all.
Those emails clearly show "read", but the people who read them seem to have forgotten about them after reading them.
In order to survive, she once worked a very "special" job in the black market - many women with a little bit of beauty would choose to sell their bodies when they were desperate. Bianca, who had been tortured by life and had no dignity at all, did not care about the things that normal women valued, but her mutilated body and horrible scars made many male customers stop in their tracks... She stayed in the small building painted with ambiguous pink paint for a month and did not complete a single "deal".
However, the "boss" of the small building did not drive her away, but introduced her to a group of very special... no, perhaps it would be more appropriate to use the adjective "very perverted"...
Not only did those people not lose their "appetite" because of her disability, but they became even more excited... However, their methods were even more unscrupulous. Within half a month, Bianca was tortured half to death.
She finally escaped from that place, but she still kept in touch with one of the people in that group... He was a man who made money by lending at high interest rates. She borrowed a loan from that man with an outrageously high interest rate. With this loan, she installed a set of the cheapest second-hand prostheses for herself.
This second-hand prosthesis is removed from corpses and can be purchased from incinerator workers at a very low price. After simple cleaning and refurbishment, it flows into private clinics on the black market that perform illegal transformation surgeries on people.
After putting on this set of mechanical prostheses that can only be described as "rubbish", Bianca felt as if she was alive again. She found someone she knew in the army, bought a pistol that was about to be scrapped, and then stepped into the wilderness.
It took her four years to pay off her loan sharking debt and get a set of military-grade prosthetics. Although they were not as good as the high-end products produced by big companies, the price of military-grade prosthetics was already out of reach for ordinary people.
Few people knew about Bianca's story of retiring and becoming a mercenary, but she quickly gained a reputation after becoming a mercenary. Everyone knew that there was a severely disabled retired soldier who had a terrifyingly high completion rate for difficult tasks and whose income crushed most of her peers... In four years, she went from a disabled person who was almost crushed by life to a rising star in the mercenary world.
But only Bianca herself knew that the reason she was where she is today was simply because she was not afraid of death and was lucky enough.
This time, it seems her luck has run out.
Scenes flashed through Bianca's mind, and the timeline of the scenes went from recent to distant, from the scenes that happened at the beginning of her mercenary period, to the dark days that she was most reluctant to recall, to the various things that happened when she served in the field legion... In the end, she even recalled her childhood.
She once thought that she had forgotten all those things.
She has always remembered the rest, and those memories are sealed in her head, but she just doesn't want to recall them.
Is this what is called a revolving lantern? Bianca thought to herself... I heard that a revolving lantern will appear before the eyes of a dying person, playing back the person's life scene by scene like a slide show...
But when I was seriously injured and on the verge of death on the battlefield, I didn't seem to have seen the revolving lantern...
Is it possible that I am really going to die this time?
Just when Bianca wanted to stop thinking, a strong sense of crisis suddenly gripped her heart - this sense of crisis was like giving her a shot of cardiac stimulant. Her heart, which had been beating very slowly, suddenly began to beat violently. Bianca took a deep breath and her slightly closed eyes suddenly opened wide.
The revolving lantern disappeared, and although the two remaining limbs were frozen stiff, she could still feel their presence.
"I'm still alive," Bianca said to herself, "I'm not dead yet... I can't die!"
The sense of crisis that awakened her was still approaching. She struggled to get up from the ground, knelt on her only left knee, leaned her bare right shoulder against the wall, and observed the situation outside through a gap on the upper edge of the low wall.
"Those things... are here again?" Bianca pulled out a bayonet with a broken front end and cracked blade, and held it in her hand. She tried her best to control her breathing frequency, and at the same time took out a grenade from her pocket, and gently put the index finger of her left hand through the pull ring.
This bayonet and this grenade were her last weapons. During these four days of escape, she had really run out of ammunition and food... The reason why the revolving lantern appeared just now was probably because she had not eaten for more than 40 hours and had hallucinations caused by hunger...
She discovered something very puzzling: these men in black who were searching for her seemed to know her very well, from her action plan to some inconspicuous habits, such as her preferences in choosing routes and hiding places, to some subconscious movements in battle, they all knew her clearly.
For example, on the first night, the men in black found Bianca's hiding place, but at that time Bianca was not as defenseless as she is now - or rather, that place was the battlefield she had chosen, and she was lying in ambush there, waiting for these men in black to come to her.
She set up a large number of booby traps in the surrounding buildings and buried four pieces of clay explosives under the two load-bearing walls of the building. As long as the men in black entered the building, she would detonate the explosives and bury them all in the ruins.
However, those men in black seemed to know her plan and did not enter the trap at all. Even those extremely hidden booby traps were not triggered... When they appeared in front of Bianca like ghosts, Bianca had no choice but to run away .
They didn't seem like enemies that were encountered for the first time, but rather like old rivals that had been fighting for many years... or close comrades-in-arms who had been together day and night.
Could it be that some of those who stayed behind to cover our retreat...had betrayed us?
No, it's not possible.
Bianca shook her head vigorously. She didn't believe those people would betray her... If they were that kind of people, they would never choose to stay.
Since they chose to exchange their lives for Bianca's life, they would never surrender, let alone help those men in black.
Could it be that someone couldn't stand the torture after being captured? That was even more impossible... Bianca trusted these comrades very much, just as they trusted her. Both sides were people who could trust each other with their lives, and they would never do such a thing just because they couldn't stand the torture.
The most crucial point is that these men in black know too much about me... This level of detail is even not inferior to Bianca's understanding of me. Even if someone really confessed, it is impossible for the confession to make these men in black so familiar with my tactical thinking and action patterns.
Bianca had an illusion that the ones chasing her were not the men in black who killed her comrades, but her own comrades who were killed by the men in black!
Thinking of this, Bianca shuddered... She remembered one thing. When she was in the field corps, she heard that the research institute had a device that could read the memory of the human brain. Even if the person was dead, as long as the death was not long, this device could also extract memories from the dead person's brain.
Could it be that... those men in black have such equipment in their hands?
Regardless of whether this speculation is true or not, at least the reality is in front of Bianca, which forces her to consciously change her thinking mode and use a completely unfamiliar fighting method to deal with those pursuers...
I have to say, it's a miracle that she is still alive today.
"Is this a kind of luck, or another form of misfortune?" Bianca asked herself in her heart, "Perhaps, at that time, it would be better to die on the battlefield?"
But since I am not dead yet, I must live on, even if it is only for one second, I must strive hard.
She could already see the shadowy figures of the men in black. They had surrounded the ruins and were shrinking the encirclement inwards.
