Chapter 553. The Collective

Chapter 553. The Collective

"Containment Breach Level Two: Mobile Task Force—the Collective. Awaken."

The voice that echoed throughout the factory reached everyone's ears as if it were a bomb that had exploded next to them. Clearly, the Foundation had left more than one task force behind.

Everyone wished that they had two extra legs. They had already discarded every single deadweight except for their weapons.

Thud!

A dull noise echoed as Norton collapsed to the ground. Norton's face was pale as he used his trembling right hand to hold the bleeding wound on his waist. He had been shot during the earlier gunfight with the Black Beavers.

"Get up!" Charles exclaimed, and a tentacle rushed toward Norton, lifting the latter up to his feet. The tentacle belonged to Charles.

Charles' right leg was injured, so he could only rely on his invisible tentacles to move; he appeared to be levitating in mid-air in the eyes of other people.

The shining crack in the welded iron door was already visible and was just less than three hundred meters away from them. Charles' nerves remained taut, and he'd look behind him from time to time.

Fortunately, the Black Beavers had already fallen behind them.

Just as Charles and his group were halfway to the welded iron door, a shrill friction noise pervaded the factory as a black wall rose from the cold floor.

It instantly shrouded the light coming from the crack, and the disappearance of the light cast a shadow over the hearts of Charles and his crew.

Eight figures emerged from the black wall, and they were all dressed in the same black, unique combat uniforms representative of the mobile task forces.

The figures looked human, but their limbs were either abnormally swollen limbs or as thin as wooden sticks; it was as if they were monsters born from inbreeding.

Their heads weren't round, resembling flattened balls instead. They had no eyes, and their mouths were extremely large, with lips extending all the way to the corners of their eyes.

Their grotesque appearance was terrifying enough to instill fear in just about anyone's heart.

There seemed to be both men and women among them, but it was incredibly difficult to distinguish who among them was a man or a woman. Every single one of them had an icon of sea waves tattooed on their right arm.

The members of the Black Beaver Mobile Task Force exhibited the same icon, so it didn't take long for Charles to deduce that the horrifying monsters before him had to be members of the so-called Mobile Task Force: the Collective.

Charles could already imagine just what kind of terrifying human experiments the Foundation had conducted in the past just by looking at these disfigured monsters.

The eight members of the Collective stood motionless, seemingly not planning on making a move. It seemed that they had come here to stop Charles and the others from reaching the exit.

They could wait, but Charles couldn't afford to do so. He could already hear distant footsteps behind him. The resurrected members of the Black Beaver Mobile Task Force were making a beeline for them.

When the gust of wind struck Charles, the Collective turned in Charles' direction.

Having been exposed, Charles couldn't care less about being sneaky. He raised his gun and fired rapidly while retreating toward his crew.

A wave of blue light burst out of a small-framed Collective member; the white bone bullets came to a screeching halt before them.

Charles became certain of it just then. The members of the mobile task forces were like Alice and had several relics implanted in them by the Foundation.

The Collective kicked off of the ground, and their figures left afterimages as they rushed toward Charles.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Gunshots rang out as the crew members provided cover fire for Charles.

However, bullets were completely ineffective against the Collective. They did not stop for even a brief moment as they engaged Charles and his crew in hand-to-hand close combat quarters like beasts on a rampage.

The Collective had thick and hard blackened fingers. The crew members couldn't defend themselves at all against such monsters. In just a few seconds, three crew members had already been dismembered.

Agonized screams, gunshots, and explosions pervaded the air in a chaotic cacophony of noises.

Charles and Bandages worked together and finally managed to decapitate one of the Collective, but the corpse simply vanished into thin air. It turned out that these monsters were capable of resurrecting like the Black Beavers!

Meanwhile, the Black Beavers were fast approaching.

They were about to be surrounded!

At the critical juncture, Charles turned to his second mate and roared, "Charlie, it's time! Use your relic!"

Charlie was in pain, and his head was bleeding, but he wasted no time and forcefully bent his right index finger with his left hand. A grotesque cracking noise echoed, and everyone's right index fingers snapped at once.

Everyone froze, seemingly becoming frozen statues. Roughly three seconds later, the Collective could finally move once more, and they raised their guns, rapidly firing at Charles and his crew.

A noise akin to a bursting bubble echoed one after another as Charles and his crew burst into nothingness. It turned out that their figures were mere illusions; the real versions of them had already escaped.

The members of the Collective and the Black Beaver were dumbfounded. Then, they turned toward the distant crack in the welded iron door and made a beeline for it.

Upon their departure, a vigilant eye moved slowly away from a window inside a workshop within the same factory.

"They're gone. Good thing we knew that the first thing they'd do upon coming back to their senses is to block the exit." Charles let out a sigh of relief and turned to look at his injured crew.