Volume 4: Shadows Under the Neon Lights Chapter 206 Central Industrial Park
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Across the fan-shaped square is the entrance to the Arasaka Group's Central Industrial Park.
There were still some scattered rebel soldiers who had fled, but they were quickly cleared out by Victoria. She seemed to be venting her anger, and her fighting style became extremely brutal: first, she relied on her high mobility to quickly approach the target, and then fired with a large-caliber hunting pistol at a distance almost to their heads... As heads were blown up one by one, Victoria's newly replaced prosthesis was soon covered with red and white filth...
"Prepare for explosion, countdown to ten seconds, ten--" Ke Lan fixed a time bomb on the main gate of the Central Industrial Park , and then quickly ran back to the back of the building that served as a shelter.
"Nine, eight, seven... two, one."
"boom!!!"
With a loud bang, the electronic lock of the gate was blown to pieces, and a shrill alarm sounded... If it were in the past, a large number of security personnel would have rushed out of the industrial park as soon as the warning sounded. However, now, there was no one to be seen in the entire industrial park, and the alarm sounded continuously in the empty and silent industrial park, which seemed a bit out of place.
"It has been confirmed that all automatic defense systems have been dismantled. We can continue to move forward." Victoria walked out of the sentry post where the security guards were stationed. She had just used brute force to hack into the industrial park's defense system, but found that the park's backup energy had not been activated. When the power outage occurred, all monitoring equipment and automatic defense weapons in the entire park had stopped working and have not been restored until now.
At the entrance to the industrial park are two technology companies that are wholly owned by the Arasaka Group. Their R&D and production departments are all located in the same factory. One company specializes in the production of computer chips, while the other is one of the most famous companies in the field of Nino alloy applications.
"The security bureau has checked these two companies dozens of times and found no problems," Victoria said.
"Of course there won't be a problem... Whether it's computer chips or alloy materials, these things are basically produced for export. If there were any problems, they would have been discovered long ago... On the contrary, security companies like Rangers are the problem."
"Indeed... Every time we investigate the 'Rangers', the person in charge always shirks responsibility by saying that most of the employees are on missions outside the Ark... Even if we insist on investigating, those who remain are all low-level employees hired specifically to deal with the inspections. These people are doing peripheral work that has no access to company secrets, and they can't find anything at all." Victoria agreed with Ke Lan's words this time.
"But no one expected that these mercenaries would become believers of a heretical sect... Maybe their 'mission' outside the Ark was to disguise themselves as exiles and attack transit stations and field forces. Do you still remember how we ended up in the exile settlement?"
"Yes, those 'exiles' who attacked the warships were probably these mercenaries. Moreover, they were specially selected as those who had no records left in the Ark. Even if we bring back the bodies of the attackers, we won't be able to find out their identities."
"By the way, the top executives of the Arasaka Group should all right? Don't tell me they have escaped from the Ark... I can't wait to tear these people to pieces." Ke Lan said bitterly - if the attack on the battleship was also done by the Arasaka Group and the heretical sect, then the crash of the transport plane he and Hound and others were riding on was basically the same. From the glacial ruins to the present, the culprit of all that has happened is actually the same family. If Hound, with his violent temper, knew about this, he would definitely be jumping up and down and cursing the ancestors of the Arasaka family.
"As the key surveillance targets of the Security Bureau, the members of the Arasaka Group's board of directors and important members of the Arasaka Family, except for the number two figure, Ryuichi Arasaka, who disappeared two years ago, all live in the residential area around the Arasaka Tower. Until the power outage occurred, there is no record of them going out." Victoria said.
"That's good..." Ke Lan touched the holster on his waist, but at this moment, the Geiger counter on his body suddenly started beeping.
"There is radiation here." Ke Lan reacted immediately. He glanced at the screen of the counter. Fortunately, the radiation intensity was not high and had not reached the level where protective clothing must be worn. However, things like anti-radiation potions were always kept in the bag of every relic hunter.
"I also detected it, and the direction is over there." Victoria said, pointing to the chip company not far away.
"Could it be a leak?" Ke Lan swallowed two pills. "But... there shouldn't be a radiation source of this intensity in a factory that manufactures computer chips, right?"
"Go and take a look... If the radiation intensity continues to increase, you don't have to follow us, just stay where you are." Victoria said, and walked towards the factory first.
Soon, the two determined the location of the radiation source based on the strength of the radiation - workshop No. 3 in this chip factory.
The radiation intensity here was already three times what was initially detected, and Ke Lan had to take two more anti-radiation pills.
"There are no protective measures on the factory structure. It doesn't look like a place specially used to handle radioactive materials..." Ke Lan said as he walked around the workshop.
Victoria had already used a robotic arm to forcibly open the fire door on one side and walked in with a gun in hand.
"There's something going on here."
Hearing Victoria's voice, Ke Lan hurriedly followed in, but as soon as he stepped into the factory, he realized... this was not a building for producing computer chips at all.
The exterior structure of the factory building is a rectangular block, but the interior is a circular hall. At the edge of this hall, there are dozens of tall glass jars filled with orange-yellow turbid liquid. In these liquids, there are remains that look like humans but are not humans, and their limbs are extremely twisted - just take the remains in the jar closest to Ke Lan: this remains has a human-like torso, but the ribs in the chest cavity are arranged in a very chaotic manner. These bones are intertwined with each other, and some even pass directly through the shriveled organs. Just looking at it is enough to make people feel tingling... The upper limbs of the remains are very short, like an underdeveloped deformed fetus, but the lower limbs are abnormally enlarged and swollen, just like cancer cells that grow uncontrollably and randomly , occupying more than three-quarters of the volume of the entire remains.
Even the elephant leg disease that Ke Lan had seen in medical literature was not so exaggerated.
"Are these people... the products of the failure of 'that experiment' that Arasaka Yui mentioned?" Ke Lan couldn't help but ask.
But Victoria shook her head solemnly: "These remains... I'm afraid they are more than a thousand years old..."
"Thousand years?! These things... are they left over from the old era?" Ke Lan was a little stunned. Following Victoria's gaze, he noticed that there was a brass nameplate embedded on the ground in front of each glass jar. The closest one read: "Ghoul Sample No. 1332, collected in the area around Disaster Island in the year 2147 of the old era."
Shiki is a general term for people who suffer from severe radiation sickness but do not die, and eventually mutate into horrible monsters... As for the place name "Disaster Island", that's a long story.
In the year 2111 of the Old Era, the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant was hit by an earthquake and a leak occurred... This was originally an accident that could be controlled, but due to the extremely irresponsible attitude of the Tokyo Electric Power Company, to which the nuclear power plant belonged, the accident was elevated to the highest level of nuclear accident, level seven, in a very short period of time... And ten years after the accident, due to a series of problems such as the cost of post-accident treatment, the Tokyo Electric Power Company and the shameless Japanese government colluded and decided to discharge millions of tons of contaminated nuclear waste water into the ocean...
