allendalepharm Chapter 1315 SRT Coordination
Chapter 1315 SRT Coordination
Bang, bang, bang.
Several gunshots rang out in succession.
The bullets struck the chubby boy's body, exploding bloody holes in the motorcycle.
When they reached a point less than 200 meters from the camp, the chubby boy's body finally gave out.
His legs buckled, and he fell forward, landing face down on the grass, splashing up a small patch of dirt and grass clippings.
The small pair of scissors hanging from his ear fell off when he fell, spun a few times in mid-air, and then stuck diagonally into the ground, the blade buried in the soil, with only the handle sticking out.
A few seconds later, the outline of the scissors began to blur, like a painting soaked in water, and finally disappeared completely.
The camp was quiet for a moment, then someone let out a long sigh of relief.
"He's dead already?" The female sniper pulled the bolt, and the scalding hot cartridge case ejected from the gun, tumbled a few times in the air, and landed on the grass with a slight clattering sound.
She cleared her throat, feeling a bit uncomfortable, as if something was stuck there, and she wanted to cough but couldn't.
She swallowed, but the discomfort didn't disappear; instead, it became more and more pronounced.
Before long, it felt like I had a fishbone stuck in my throat, and I could feel the foreign object rubbing against my throat every time I swallowed.
The nameless saint noticed her unusual behavior. His gaze shifted from the direction where the chubby boy had fallen to the female sniper, pausing briefly at her neck.
His pupils contracted slightly as he saw a clear scissor-shaped bulge beneath the skin of the female sniper's neck.
The scissors slowly opened and closed under the skin, like a person breathing rhythmically.
Each time the scissors open wider than the last, the bulges on the skin's surface can be clearly seen moving along with the blades as they move under the skin, like a snake slithering beneath the skin.
"Deer Hunter, slowly back away, don't come near anyone."
All the contractors distanced themselves from the Deer Hunter.
Some people scattered to the sides, some retreated, and some ran directly into the spaceship's hatch.
No one felt they were overreacting, because on the battlefield, keeping your distance from those marked as targets is not cowardice, but a survival instinct.
The deer hunter clutched her throat with one hand and pulled a dagger from her calf with the other.
She knew something was wrong; without needing anyone to remind her, the feeling of something stuck in her throat already told her the answer.
She used a dagger to pry open the skin on her neck. The blade encountered little resistance when it cut into the skin, like cutting through a thin sheet of paper.
Blood seeped from the incision, trickling down the neck and staining the collar, leaving a small patch of dark red.
She pinched the scissors under her skin with two fingers. The surface of the scissors was very smooth and covered with a layer of viscous fluid. She slid them between her fingers before gripping them firmly.
The deer hunter pulled the small scissors from her neck, the blade drawing a thin line of blood as it was withdrawn. Blood droplets splattered in the air, landing on her sleeve and spreading into tiny dark red dots.
The blade of the scissors was stained with dark red flesh and blood. She threw the scissors a distance away. They landed on the ground, bounced once on the grass, and then lay there motionless.
The deer hunter began to gasp for breath, a thin wound on her throat, the skin at the edge of the wound rolled back to reveal pink muscle tissue underneath.
Blood gushed from the wound, flowing down the neck and pooling into a dark red wet stain on the collar.
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, leaving a bloodstain, but she didn't pay any attention to it.
"I'm alright now. This is an instant death sentence. That madman wanted to trade his life with me." The deer hunter's eyes still held lingering fear, her pupils were much larger than usual, and the whites of her eyes were covered with fine blood vessels.
Her judgment was correct. If she had been a fraction of a second slower, the small scissors would have closed completely and severed her throat from the inside.
By then, even if Lin Yi stood beside her, he couldn't save her, because the scissors weren't severing the body, but the connection between the soul and the body.
The body can regenerate, but the soul cannot be rebuilt.
"Keep backing away, quickly, away from the spaceship." The nameless saint swung the mining shovel in his hand, the shovel head flipped, the shovel handle retracted, and it transformed from a mining tool nearly a meter long into a spear nearly two meters long.
"What are you doing here?" The deer hunter looked around, her tone tinged with anger.
But she found that the people who had been talking to her just moments before were now standing far away. Some had retreated to the side of the spaceship's gangway, while others had simply run into the spaceship's hatch.
Some people, though they hadn't run far, had their weapons pointed in her direction. It wasn't intentional aiming, but rather an instinctive act of pointing the most dangerous direction at the target most likely to become the enemy.
"I'm alright now, don't point your weapons at me." The deer hunter's voice rose several octaves.
She wasn't afraid; rather, having spent so long in Apocalypse Paradise, she had become accustomed to being treated as a teammate rather than an enemy.
Now her teammates are pointing weapons at her, and this feeling is even worse than being pointed at with weapons by the enemy.
“The things on you don’t look like you’re alright.” The nameless saint’s voice came from above the gangway.
The deer hunter looked down at her body and saw a mass of black, rotten flesh on her arm.
The lump of rotten flesh was about the size of a fist, with a pitted and uneven surface, like a piece of mud that had been repeatedly kneaded.
This lump of rotten flesh seemed to be alive. Its surface was slowly writhing, like a pot of porridge boiling, with each bubble rising and bursting causing the surrounding skin to tremble slightly.
It clung tightly to the deer hunter's arm, with a fine layer of granulation growing at the edge where it met the skin. These granulations, like countless tiny tentacles, burrowed into the skin's pores and spread downwards along the direction of the blood vessels.
A sharp pain shot through the deer hunter's arm. It wasn't the sharp sting of skin being cut open; it felt like something was gnawing at her flesh, tearing away small pieces of tissue with each bite.
She could feel the rotten flesh drawing nutrients from her arm; the granulation tissue that had burrowed into her skin's pores was absorbing her blood, converting the blood's energy into its own nourishment.
With each bit of absorption, the lump of rotten flesh swelled a little more, and her arm grew a little thinner.
The deer hunter was decisive enough; she raised the dagger in her hand, the tip aimed at the shoulder joint of her left arm, ready to cut off the entire left arm at the shoulder joint.
When the dagger was raised to its highest point, her body suddenly froze.
Her body suddenly stopped obeying her brain's commands. Although her right hand was still gripping the knife handle, her fingers had lost their grip strength, and the dagger slipped from her hand, smashing to the ground with its tip embedded in the soil.
With a thud, the deer hunter collapsed to the ground, lying on her side on the grass, her legs curled up and her arms hanging limply at her sides.
Her eyes lost their luster, and she died on the spot.
There was no struggle, no screams; there was no transition from being alive to dying.
The atmosphere in the camp plummeted to freezing point at that moment.
The contractors of Apocalypse Paradise looked at the corpse of the Deer Hunter, their expressions changing from shock to fear.
That fear is not the instinctive dread when facing a powerful enemy, but a primal fear that arises when facing something unknowable, unpredictable, and uncontrollable.
"What the hell is that? What kind of thing is that?" A red-haired boy's voice trembled slightly.
He instinctively took a step back, his boots rustling on the grass.
His gaze shifted from the deer hunter's corpse, then he couldn't help but glance at it again, and then again, each glance bringing an extra layer of cold sweat to his back. Just as he took that step back, he felt a binding sensation on his torso.
The feeling wasn't like being hugged from behind or tied up with ropes, but rather a sense of oppression spreading outwards from within, as if something was expanding in his chest cavity, pushing his ribs outwards.
He looked down and saw that the mass of black, rotten flesh had somehow wrapped around his torso.
The surface of the rotting flesh was more active than the mass on his arm, with granulation tissue growing wildly on the skin like countless tiny snakes wriggling.
His health points were dropping at a visible rate, the health bar starting from full and decreasing to one-fifth, one-third, one-half, each drop taking away a large portion of his health points.
The red-haired boy collapsed and died suddenly.
From feeling confinement to feeling death, it takes less than two seconds.
His body lay on the ground, his eyes half-open, his mouth slightly agape, his face still bearing the last expression of his life—an expression of shock and fear, like the look on the face of someone who has lost their footing on the edge of a cliff and is falling.
This scene terrified the other contractors even more.
"Everyone, don't move," a man wearing glasses said.
He stood in the middle of the crowd, with no one else within two meters of him, not because he was isolated, but because he had distanced himself from the others the moment he realized something was wrong.
"This is a Stand ability. As long as we don't move, it can't do anything to us. And this thing is almost impossible to destroy; it can detect nearby moving targets."
He was confident of victory because he had obtained a comic book by killing a contractor of the Paradise of Reincarnation.
The comic book was about Stand abilities, and the Stand abilities in the story were extremely similar to what he was seeing.
He had studied those seemingly unsolvable Stand abilities and knew they had a fatal weakness—when you stop moving, the Stand can no longer pinpoint your location.
His judgment was based on his understanding of the abilities of the Contractors of the Paradise of Reincarnation, as well as his research on that comic book.
However, he overlooked one problem: the contractors of the Paradise of Reincarnation never play by the rules.
Their abilities are often honed through countless life-or-death battles, and are formed through continuous failures and improvements; they cannot be summarized in a comic book.
On a distant mountaintop, Miyu lay prone on a flat rock, her sniper rifle propped against the edge, the muzzle pointing towards the Apocalypse Paradise headquarters.
She wore a gray-green camouflage cloak made of a special material that could reflect the colors and light of the surrounding environment, allowing her to blend completely into the background from a distance.
She observed the Apocalypse Paradise Contractors gathered together in the camp through the scope.
They stood very close together, less than two meters apart. Some were squatting, some were standing, and some were kneeling on the ground, but all of them remained still.
They were following the bespectacled man's instructions: not to move, not to run, and not to make any movements that might be detected by the Stand.
Miyu's finger rested on the outside of the trigger guard, but she didn't pull it.
She was waiting, waiting for the wind direction to stabilize.
Snipers need to consider many factors when shooting at long distances, such as distance, wind speed, humidity, and light refraction, each of which will affect the trajectory of the bullet.
The physical attributes of sixth-tier contractors make their reaction speed astonishing; if you miss the first shot, you won't have a chance to fire a second.
The wind direction has stabilized.
Southeast wind, wind speed of three meters per second, moderate humidity, and negligible angle of light refraction.
Miyu moved her finger into the trigger guard and pressed it onto the trigger.
boom.
A muffled gunshot rang out in the night sky.
The bullet shot out of the gun, tracing an invisible path through the air, and struck precisely in the head of a contractor in the crowd at Apocalypse Paradise.
The contractor swayed slightly before collapsing to the ground with a thud, his body hitting the grass with a dull thud.
The crowd around instinctively tried to scatter the moment the gun went off. Their bodies reacted instantly, muscles tensed, center of gravity shifted, and feet moved.
But as soon as their feet left the ground, a feeling of constraint appeared on several of them.
The mass of black, rotten flesh had somehow wrapped around their torsos, and granulation tissue was growing wildly on their skin, causing their lifespan to plummet at a visible rate.
The bespectacled man realized he was in trouble the moment the gun went off.
Now, moving or not moving also means death; being single-minded has become a dead end.
He felt a binding sensation coming from his legs. Looking down, he saw that the mass of black, rotten flesh had wrapped around his calves, and the fleshy growths were spreading towards his knees.
His reaction was quick enough; he drew a short knife from his waist with his right hand and slashed at his calf, slicing off the flesh and skin along with the rotten flesh.
Blood and flesh splattered everywhere, and dark red blood gushed from the wound, splashing across the grass in a dark red hue.
His body lost its balance under the force of the blow, and he fell to one side, his shoulder hitting the ground, rolling over before coming to a stop.
He gritted his teeth, pulled a bottle of healing potion from his pocket, bit off the stopper with his teeth, and poured the potion onto the wound.
The medicine made a sizzling sound the moment it came into contact with the flesh, and white foam gushed out from the wound, washing away the blood.
He treated the wound on his leg in a few seconds, got up from the ground, hopped two steps on one leg, and leaned against the spaceship's landing gear.
"Damn it, there's a sniper. If we don't move, we're dead."
The other contractors in the surrounding Apocalypse Paradise also realized how embarrassing the situation was.
In reality, this is not a Stand ability, but an ability called 'Fear Transmission'. This lump of rotten flesh has no mind, and its triggering conditions are very demanding.
1. The host dies, and the host can suppress it, that is, suppress the subject of 'fear transmission', the Black Demon.
2. The host needs to use some kind of object as a medium to establish contact with the killer.
3. Dark Elves can only prey on living creatures.
4. The Black Demon can be destroyed. Its nemesis is Snow Salt, whose high-purity holy energy can suppress its hunting speed and range.
5. After completing a hunt, the Black Demon seeks out its next prey by sensing mental fluctuations: fear, anger, and the will to survive. These three mental fluctuations are all captured by the Black Demon and used as a medium to appear in the next prey.
6. The Black Demon needs to be fed. If it doesn't eat for more than ten days, it will eat its host unless the host has a strong enough willpower.
7. After the Black Demon kills three enemies, the host can rebuild their body using the Black Demon's life force. If no more than three prey are killed and the enemies' life force is not strong enough, the Black Demon will devour the host's soul.
The Black Demon is very powerful and will not stop until it is full. However, it also has many limitations. If it is used improperly, the first to die will be the host, Little Fatty.
The other members of the Suicide Squad also understood Black Demon's weakness, which is why they had Miyu take action, so that the opponent would misjudge Black Demon's abilities.
If the direction is wrong, the destructive power that the Dark Demon can inflict will increase exponentially. (End of Chapter)