Dragon Raja 3; Chapter 244: Attack of the Rat Team (6)

Dragon Raja 3

Suddenly, a heavy airlock door on the pipe wall opened, and a man in a white lab coat hurried out. He rushed past the guards to the metal canister, spraying it with alcohol, indicating the cargo was both important and dangerous. He couldn’t allow the guards to touch it. In his haste, he forgot to close the airlock door, which was the only passage through Genji Heavy Industries.

“Here’s our chance!” Caesar whispered.

“The guards are all focused on the dock and the canister. We’ll take that yellow spiral staircase and go through the airlock. Be quick, but don’t run—sounds echo very clearly in this enclosed space!” Chu Zihang warned softly.

Lu Mingfei was about to voice his opinion, but Chu Zihang was already seven or eight meters ahead. Once he made a decision, he rarely stopped to discuss it with others, which was why everyone in the Execution Bureau called him a lone wolf. Caesar followed silently, moving with surprising agility for such a well-built man, almost as quiet as a cat. Lu Mingfei had no choice but to sneak along behind them. The maintenance passage was above their heads. They had to walk carefully along the metal grating that held up the filtration nets, and it would take at least a few dozen seconds to reach the passage entrance. During those seconds, if any of the guards turned around… there would be no option but a firefight.

Caesar and Chu Zihang moved quickly, climbing the spiral staircase and reaching the maintenance passage in no time. They were only a few meters from the airlock. In his haste, Lu Mingfei took a jump… and the sharp clang of metal echoed through the tunnel, as if someone had rung a small bell.

Chu Zihang’s warning had been right—one step, and Lu Mingfei had caused a problem. A bolt had come loose, falling onto the pipe wall below.

The guards immediately drew their guns, equipped with laser sights. Red beams of light scanned the area as one of them switched on a flashlight. Lu Mingfei’s sweaty hand gripped the Beretta pistol in his jacket. His shooting scores were excellent, but the problem was he had never trained in taking bullets… Chu Zihang could at least enhance his physique through Blood Rage, surviving a few shots was entirely possible. But if Lu Mingfei took a hit from a Colt Python, he’d be dead with just one shot. Caesar and Chu Zihang quickly slipped through the airlock. The guards found nothing in the maintenance passage and instead directed their flashlights downward, the beams slowly moving toward Lu Mingfei’s hiding spot.

“There! In the water!” one of the guards shouted.

Several beams of light simultaneously pointed at the water, where a long, sleek black shadow was silently gliding through the current. Originally, its target had been the water’s edge where Lu Mingfei was standing, but the bright lights startled it, causing it to turn and swim into the darkness.

Gunfire erupted as the guards fired shot after shot. They were no ordinary security guards; they were likely hardened criminals from the underworld, now working for Genji Heavy Industries. They had no qualms about firing freely, aiming to destroy the threat without hesitation.

A hand reached down from above, grabbing Lu Mingfei and pulling him up. It was Caesar, with his long arms extending like an ape’s.

The three of them panted heavily as they leaned against the door. Lu Mingfei was drenched in sweat, realizing that if the guards had shone their lights on him first, he would have been gunned down, even if Caesar and Chu Zihang had come to his rescue immediately. Chu Zihang and Caesar turned and peered through the narrow gap in the door. The water in the pipe had turned blood-red, and a four- or five-meter-long great white shark slowly floated to the surface, riddled with bullet holes. The two of them exchanged another glance and shook their heads. It was unbelievable—a shark in the main conduit of Iron Dome, where the water was five or six meters deep and connected to the sea. While it wasn’t impossible for a shark to swim in these waters, a large predator like this should be roaming the open ocean. What could have lured it into this web of sewers?

“Let’s go. They’ve misidentified the target,” Chu Zihang said.

Caesar patted Lu Mingfei’s shoulder, preventing him from looking back. White sharks could survive in the air for several hours, sometimes even swimming up to shore and leaping out to hunt baby seals, only to return to the sea with the tide. The shark had likely mistaken Lu Mingfei for prey, but there was no need to tell him that. If Lu Mingfei knew he had been seen as a tasty baby seal, he might be too scared to move forward.

“Damn, damn, damn… What luck! That was way too close!” Lu Mingfei kept patting his chest in relief as they got into the elevator.

“Undoubtedly, if we’re going to stay lucky, it’ll be thanks to you,” Caesar said, patting his shoulder while exchanging a knowing look with Chu Zihang.

Ahead of them was a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor. There were no windows, only slowly spinning ventilation fans. The walls were painted a heavy rust-red, with white-painted path markers that none of them could read. This was the inner zone, a place that made them feel slightly suffocated, the air thick with tension. Caesar gripped his Desert Eagle in both hands, focused on any danger that might appear, while Chu Zihang, with his sword ready, took up the rear. Lu Mingfei, walking between them, passed one white light after another. The whole place felt like a mix between a mysterious research lab and an endlessly extending maze… one that gave off the eerie sense that at its end, they might stumble upon a giant humanoid weapon.

They successfully traversed the corridor, which ended in nothing more unusual than an elevator. Surprisingly, the inner zone didn’t have any special security measures in place, perhaps because Yamata no Orochi believed it was impossible for anyone to infiltrate this deep, so they hadn’t bothered installing any extra entry controls here.

“Boss, which floor should we go to?” Lu Mingfei asked, staring at the dense cluster of floor buttons.

A new problem arose: this skyscraper had more than fifty floors, along with various parking levels, equipment levels, and mezzanines without numbered labels. In such modern buildings, an elevator usually only serves specific floors to prevent stopping dozens of times between the bottom and the top. However, this elevator seemed to access almost all the floors in the inner zone.

This felt like something out of a video game—after narrowly escaping twenty hell-riding demons by sheer dumb luck, the hero suddenly faced over fifty paths. The system prompt would say, “You can skip levels now. Do you want to start from the first level, the second, or the third? Or do you want to rush straight to the final boss?” And regardless of which path you chose, you couldn’t level up, gain experience, or upgrade your equipment. Lu Mingfei thought, Is this Super Mario?

“Oh, didn’t consider that…” Caesar frowned.

Lu Mingfei thought to himself, I knew it! Of course, you wouldn’t plan this out in advance.

There was a reason Caesar hadn’t made a concrete plan. He hadn’t expected to strike at the heart of Genji Heavy Industries tonight. His goal was simply to scout the sewer routes, and once they reached the area beneath the building, they would decide what to do next. If that mini-submarine hadn’t shown up, they’d probably be back enjoying champagne by now.

“So, do you have the floor plan for this building?” Lu Mingfei asked Chu Zihang.