354 Chapter 354: The Search for Anastasia

"This is your plan?!" Redfield exclaimed after listening to my suggestion. He looked as if he was on the verge of erupting himself, much like a Space Construction Vehicle (SCV) being ordered to attack a swarm of Zerglings instead of mining minerals or vespene gas.

"Yeah." I nodded seriously, because Redfield didn't look like he was joking. "I'm suggesting that we use stasis. We can put her on ice and freeze her for as long as it takes to develop a treatment for her condition."

"That sounds like a good idea," Feng Hai spoke up, his tone approving. He nodded at me. "If we don't have time, we go make it. Excellent."

"Yeah, we'll get our doctors and healing mages to find a cure in the meantime." Brent seemed relieved. Despite being "magic", there was no miraculous spell that could conveniently cure Anastasia of her condition, or we would have done it already. Normal healing spells didn't work, and detoxification spells were ineffective – there was way too much poison for the spell to neutralize. If we wanted to cure Anastasia, we needed a much more powerful detoxification spell. A spell that had yet to exist.

"Still, stasis…where did you get that idea from?" Feng Hai looked at me, impressed. "We definitely have stasis magic. We can ask Glacia to freeze her and…well, put her on ice, as Richard suggested. Still, who would have thought?"

"I read a lot of science fiction novels…and watched more than a few science fiction movies. Stasis is always a big part of all of them. Going into cryo sleep and all that." Then I frowned. "There was also this recent manga that I read…what was it called again? World's End Harem? Or an anime called RErideD: Tokigoe no Derrida. Something like that, where the protagonists go in cryo-sleep and are held in stasis for years. I think it was World's End Harem where the guy was frozen for five or so years while they searched for a cure for him."

"Okay, I get the point." Feng Hai raised a hand to stop me, evidently because he didn't want to hear me go on and on about manga and anime forever. "It's a great idea, though. I'll go get Glacia, and then we move out within the hour. Go get ready, everyone!"

"Yes, sir!"

*

Even though Feng Hai told us to get ready, we didn't really have much to do. I didn't bother going back to the Aurora City hotel that the tournament staff assigned us students to, because there wasn't much stuff I was going to bring out into Aurora Forest anyway. Instead, I just took the standard fieldpack that the mercenaries were handing out, which included rations, water bottles, detoxification pills (to treat and detoxify water if we were forced to collect it from rivers or other sources) and other survival gear. I always had Hei Yue and Bai Ri on me, so I didn't need to go back and collect them.

So essentially I just followed Redfield around.

The red-haired mercenary turned and placed a hand on my shoulder after I collected the green camouflage-patterned fieldpack.

"Be careful out there, Richard. You and Ana are like my younger siblings. I don't want anything bad to happen to you out there."

"What are you talking about?" I raised an eyebrow, but Redfield shook his head, even as he heaved his fieldpack upward.

"Nothing. It's just me trying to play the big brother." He forced a grin and flashed a thumb's up. "Don't worry about it. If it comes down to it, I'll protect you and save Ana."

"Saving Ana is my job," I joked. Redfield actually laughed at that before he patted me on my shoulder.

"I won't deny that. What comes after you save Ana will be my job then."

"I thought that's Glacia's job. Aren't you a fire mage?"

"Aw…come on! You're making me look bad! That was my moment to act cool, you know!?" Redfield groaned, causing me to chuckle. The guy was deliberately playing the fool, so as to ease the tension and get me to relax.

"Well, we can always count on you to pull us out of the fire."

"Really now?" Redfield rolled his eyes before he strapped his spear between his back and bulky fieldpack. For some reason, he was also holstering a Glock 17 handgun and a shotgun.

"Huh? Don't you already have your spear? What are those guns for?"

"Oh, I didn't tell you?" Redfield puffed his chest out proudly and displayed a badge with stars on it. "My full name is Christopher Redfield. I was formerly part of a special tactics and response squad in a police department before Feng Hai recruited me for his mercenaries."

"That doesn't explain why you're bringing guns," I muttered under my breath. Redfield raised an eyebrow.

"Seriously? My name Chris? Special Tactics and Response Squad? They don't ring a bell?"

"Of course they do – we literally had two remakes over the past year. But other than your name, I'm pretty sure you bear no relation to any characters in any zombie game."

"Aw…you hurt me, bro…"

Any chance to continue to banter was cut off when Feng Hai appeared in the parking lot where the mercenaries were unloading crates of supplies and handing out fieldpacks, weapons and ammunition. He raised a hand and shouted for everyone to gather around him.

"All right, ladies and gentlemen!" he bellowed. "I'll make this short. At 0812 this morning, one of our members disappeared. Apparently she is suffering from a condition called Woeful Poison Body…if you don't know what that is, read the briefing email I sent to you earlier for details. In any event, the toxin levels in her body have gone critical, and she's essentially a ticking time bomb, which is why she decided to up and leave us. To ensure that none of us get caught up when she blows."

Grim silence greeted Feng Hai at that, but he continued, unimpeded.

"However! We are soldiers! We leave no man or woman behind! We may be mercenaries, but our loyalty to each other is beyond any doubt! Our bonds, faith and values are what set us apart from other mercenaries! We are the Silver Wolves, all of us are of the same pack! Even though she is a recent addition to our team, Ana has proven herself by fighting beside us in numerous missions. She has saved the lives of many of us, including mine! She is one of us! We will not turn our backs on her! We will not abandon her! We will not leave her alone to die by herself in some godforsaken forest!"

"Hoo-rah!" the mercenaries roared, pumping their arms and weapons into the sky, as if to emphasize Feng Hai's point.

"Therefore we will go out and locate her right now, and bring her back! And find a way to cure her!"

"Yeah!"

"I'll be brief. The plan is to find Ana, and then put her on ice. If you've read the briefing email – and you had better start doing so if you haven't done so already – you'll know the situation. Long story short, Ana is a walking poison bomb who is about to blow, so we need to freeze her and put her on stasis. Then we bring her back here. Then Doc is going to find a way to cure her. That's it. Any questions?"

"Yes, sir!" One of the mercenaries raised a hand. Feng Hai raised an eyebrow, and looking as if he was going to regret it, sighed and nodded.

"Hudson?"

"How do I get out of this chickenshit outfit?"

"You secure that shit, Hudson!" Brent bellowed, jabbing his finger at the grinning mercenary. The guy called Hudson shrugged.

"Just making an Aliens joke, Cap. You didn't catch the reference?"

Feng Hai shook his head and sighed, rolling his eyes. "All right, ladies, hop into the hovercraft. We're moving out now! We've a flight to catch and a girl to bring home. Now move it!"

"Sir! Yes, sir!"

It took less than five minutes for over twenty mercenaries to scramble aboard the hovercraft and strap themselves in before the squat-shaped military vehicle lifted up. Plasma vented from twin engines before the bulky transport hurled itself into the sky, its gray metallic surface gleaming in the sun. Blue flames roared outward and it streaked across the clouds, creating a sonic boom as it surged in the direction of the forest.

Below, the trees on the edge of the forest rustled as the hovercraft dropped low enough to almost skim their canopies. Locating a clearing somewhere near the periphery of the forest, the pilot expertly guided his craft down, nestling it on a wide space of baked soil. The twin engines slowly spun in their apertures, vomiting out blue plasma fumes to slow the ship's descent before it landed heavily atop the scorched earth. What few grass that remained in the thin sleet of snow were blown away or incinerated into a crisp from the sheer heat.

"Go, go, go!"

The moment the ramp thudded down against the ground, the mercenaries were already unstrapping themselves from their safety harnesses and barreling down the ramp. The first few immediately knelt down the moment they touched ground, sweeping the area for any sign of monsters or enemies and covering their field of view with their weapons or spells.

I was the last to leave the hovercraft…well, what did you expect? I wasn't a mercenary. I didn't receive the same kind of training these guys did, and thus I was a second or two slower. Okay, maybe I was ten seconds slower. Same difference.

Once we established a perimeter, Feng Hai and his command staff gathered to discuss tactics. I was actually allowed to help out and stand sentry at the cordon, mostly because I could summon Corvus and send them to patrol the area. Thanks to that, I wasn't privy to the details that were shared between officers.

"Okay, listen up, people!" Feng Hai didn't take long to come to a decision. He clapped his hands and gathered all of us once more, his eyes raking through the group. "We'll be splitting up into fire-teams of twos and threes, with each fire-team assigned an area to search. If you run into any trouble, contact the other fire-reams immediately. Do not try and be a hero. Is that understood?"

For some reason, his eyes lingered on me when he said that last line. Damn. Feng Hai must have known about my tendency to rush forward and try to be a hero on my own. He probably knew my fighting style and personality from the reports he read about me.

"Yes, sir!"

However, I showed no sign that I noticed, and responded just as enthusiastically as the others. Placing my hands on the hilts of my two swords – a movement more instinctive than conscious – I looked around and wondered whose fire team I would be assigned to.

"Richard, you're with me." Redfield waved me over. I nodded and jogged over to the red-haired spearman's position, then glanced around.

"Where's Jill?"

Redfield blanched. "Who?"

"Jill Valentine. You know, the last member of our fire-team."

"There's no such person in the Silver Wolves!" Redfield threw his hands up in exasperation.

"Uh, okay. Then where's Sheva? Sheva Alomar?"

"We do not talk about 5 and 6. For any games after 4, we only talk about 7 and the remakes. 5 and 6 do not exist in our eyes."

Redfield's tone was so vehement that I nodded dumbly and decided not to argue. I felt as if I had just poked a hornet's nest.

"So who's the third member? It can't be that there's only the two of us in this fire-team?"

Somehow this felt familiar. Usually, when I was helping the Silver Wolves out with their missions, I would be alone with Anastasia. But that was because of…actually, why was that? I couldn't think of any reason other than "plot" and "fanservice (romance)" for the Silver Wolves to assign only Anastasia to partner me in our missions. Putting that aside, I shouldn't be surprised if it was just the two of us.

"Only two of us? Are you kidding me?" Redfield threw his head back and chortled loudly, almost drawing some stares from the other mercenaries. "It's you we're talking about here. You're the equivalent of an entire platoon!"

"You know I'm not that strong, right? I can't beat a single person here…"

"I'm not talking about combat strength or experience," Redfield hastily corrected me. "No, I'm talking about your summoning magic. You might think there's one of you, but as a summoner you're pretty much carrying a platoon's worth of personnel in terms of numbers. Don't forget, we're not here to fight, kill or defeat an enemy. We're here to look for Ana. And your multiple Soul Beasts will get the job done more easily than any number of soldiers."

"That makes sense." I nodded thoughtfully. If he put it that way, then I understood what he meant. When we talked about usefulness, it wasn't always about fighting or combat strength. In reality, there were so many different types of abilities and a vast variety of roles that needed filling. A civilization couldn't function on soldiers or military strength alone. You needed farmers to feed the soldiers, blacksmiths to forge the weapons to arm them, logisticians to maintain the smooth running of an army and ensuring an unbroken chain of supplies, drivers to transport food, weapons and ammunition, cartographers to draw maps vital for strategizing, commissars for maintaining morale, scouts who exceled in stealth rather than direct fights, etc. A machine didn't just run on a single type of cog. It ran on many different types of cogs.

This was why all those stupid martial arts or xianxia stories made absolutely no sense. The main character can't learn martial arts or is bad at martial arts? Then he is trash! Fuck that bullshit. Who cares if he can't learn martial arts? What if he had a great business sense and made the family rich? Who was going to maintain the treasuries of the famililes and ensure their wealth? The martial artists? How? Or what if the guy chose to become a scholar, take the civil exam and become a government official? Then we shall see how "trash" he was… Or what if he was good at medicine? Then he could become a doctor, and treat the injuries of the martial artists or cultivators after their many fights. Let's see if any of these so-called talented warriors dared to call the doctor whose hands they put their lives into "trash."

It was utterly ridiculous how a person's worth in xianxia was judged entirely on his martial arts talent, and completely disregarding the possibility that he might have talents in other areas, and could contribute to the family in other capacities. Like, seriously, who the fuck went around calling students "trash" just because they failed math or science? What if they were good at history or literature and went to the art stream instead?

"All right, people! We don't have much time! Once you're in your fire-teams, spread out and start searching! Move!"

"Yes, sir!"

At Feng Hai's orders, we immediately split up and rushed toward our respective areas. While I followed Redfield, who was consulting a map, I prayed that we wouldn't be too late. This particular portion of the forest seemed unaffected for now, with no sign of being poisoned, but that didn't mean anything.

Hopefully Anastasia was still alive somewhere…