Star Rank Hunter
chapter-285-1

Chapter 285: The Might of Purgatory Thunder Snake S [Part 1]

Wheeze circled the robot once before flicking its ears, saying, “This isn’t right.”

“This definitely isn’t right.”

Cillin strongly agreed with Wheeze’s comment, but at least he was able to confirm something. Sigma’s master must be related to Black Viper, or he wouldn’t have encountered only one pseudo-Sigma robot since he came to Mist Bodhisattva Empire.

At first, Cillin thought that the robots here would possess more of Sigma’s designs and circuitries, but reality was vastly different from expectation. This robot and the robots he encountered earlier were better at emulating the human consciousness than the robots made by the Robert Family from GAL, but they were still nothing like he had imagined them to be.

“Who is your master?” Cillin asked the robot, eliciting a thoughtful, reminiscent look from the latter. The robot replied, “I have many masters.”

Many masters?

Wheeze jumped onto Cillin’s shoulder and looked at the robot, asking, “Do you know Sigma then?”

Sigma?! The robot’s eyes lit up as if it recognized the name, but it was quickly replaced with doubt instead. The name felt familiar to it, but it couldn’t remember anything about Sigma no matter how it tried, which was strange. Logically speaking, a robot’s memory should be phenomenal enough to store everything they’d seen and heard. If they needed to recall a specific memory, all they needed to do was to look inside their memory bank. However, the robot couldn’t find any memory regarding Sigma no matter how it tried.

It should be familiar with Sigma, but the memory simply didn’t exist in its brain.

“Sigma... I should know this name, and yet I have no memory of it at all. Strange, how strange...” The robot muttered to itself.

Cillin shot Wheeze a look, and the latter shook its whiskers in reply. This robot must be experiencing dementia!

Wheeze scanned the robot in front of it carefully again before saying to Cillin, “Let’s go, we aren’t getting any answer from it. When this is over, we can seek out the creator of this robot directly and maybe get some answers from them.”

“I suppose that’s the only way.” The robot in front of them was still trying to recall its non-existent memory. After inspecting the surroundings once, Cillin and Wheeze left the underground network.

Things above the ground were starting to return to normal after Cillin had turned off the underground earthquake generator. The mess that was left behind was slowly repairing itself as well. When Cillin returned to the base, he saw Gu Xin, Tu Ba and Orville cleaning up the corpses in their territory, burning or storing those that could be processed into meat. There were still a dozen or so days left before the end of the trial, and no one wanted to starve before then.

Of course, the animals who were shot with the toxin bullets were completely inedible. The corpses must also be scanned with a scanner Neo created last minute to check for their viability as food. The safety level was set based on Neo’s constitution. If the scanner returned a value that exceeded the safety level, then the animal must be disposed of no matter how tasty they were.

On the other side, Hei Dou, Hua Li and Monde were chatting with a couple of strangers. A long-faced Neo was also present on the light screen projected from Hei Dou’s bracelet. Obviously, it was another group looking to cooperate with them.

Two of these strangers belonged to Black Viper, although they probably hadn’t arrived on this planet together. The strangers they brought with them all looked like pretty good fighters. One brawny man in particular was covered in beast blood, but didn’t look like he suffered any wounds of his own.

It started while the earthquake was still ongoing. Everyone was busy shooting animals, killing white mice, cleaning and so on when a communication request had appeared on Hei Dou’s bracelet. The girl was supervising the base’s defense systems at the time.

The caller was someone who knew the ropes, deducing immediately from the returning signals that Hei Dou’s place was safer than theirs the moment she accepted the call. After that, they and their group of candidates headed straight for Neo’s base.

Hei Dou was put in a difficult position because this was Neo’s base, not hers. Before she could even explain things properly with the group, a new caller had contacted her through her bracelet again. Hei Dou was a person of good character, and she was very good at what she does. It was why most Black Viper members would rather contact her that exchange spits with the likes of Neo and Monde.

The mind of a Black Viper member was often unimaginable. Some of them were twisted beyond imagination, and some seemed to have a screw loose permanently. As a result, any meeting between these people normally resulted in a huge argument. That was exactly what was happening right now; Neo exchanging verbal bullets with the outsiders through Hei Dou’s bracelets. For once, even Monde was on Neo’s side.

One crazy plus one crazy equals two retards, and everything that came out of this retarded duo’s mouths made people feel like slapping them with the sole of their shoes. The Black Viper “natives” were able to retort calmly by picking out the grammatical errors in Neo and Monde’s statements, but the non-natives looked like they were about to burst a vein.

Erty and one of the people in Orville’s group sat together as they listened to the ongoing argument happily. Before today, they were the ones who had to suffer the abuse, so all they could feel was jubilance when the two crazies joined forces to fight against their “common enemy”. They laughed so hard that a cramp threatened to settle in their stomachs.

Already buckling under pressure even before they returned, Hei Dou ran towards Cillin like he was her only hope.

“Please don’t move your bracelet while I’m speaking, Hei Dou. It makes me very uncomfortable...”

Neo was complaining again because Hei Dou had moved her bracelet away while he was in the middle of an argument regarding the theory of molecular patterns. He was now facing Cillin instead of his “enemy’s”.

At this point, Hei Dou couldn’t care less about consoling Neo. She broke off the connection on her bracelet on the spot and told Cillin everything that had happened roughly.

The two groups who trekked hard to get to Neo’s base were very surprised by Hei Dou’s action. When they looked at Mon De and Hua Li—the other two Black Vipers of the group—and found that they were approving of Hei Dou’s decision, their curiosity only grew even bigger. Why were these Black Vipers with different personalities and attitudes listening to and obeying an outsider?

For example, Monde had accepted Orville’s group to his base earlier, but it was only because the latter had saved his life once. Internally however, he hadn’t truly accepted them. He had categorized it as a mutualistic relationship formed under the pressure of a special environment. If Orville’s group had tried to order or limit Monde’s actions, he would’ve grown unhappy and rebelled against them. It was exactly because Orville’s group knew what kind of person Monde was that they decided to use a milder method to use Monde and his network to survive in this unfamiliar environment. They didn’t disagree even when Monde had suddenly asked to be the captain on the spur of the moment.

Survival was the most important thing right now. If the boy wants to play captain, then they’ll let him play.

But things at Cillin and Neo’s side were different. Monde was inclined to trust Cillin, especially after he had gotten to know his abilities. However, he didn’t tell the others that Wheeze was the one he really trusted because he could see that the gray cat was making the “right” choices. It was something to do with his ability. Wheeze believed in Cillin, Monde chose to believe in Cillin as well.

After listening to Hei Dou’s explanation, Cill mulled things over for a moment before saying, “Tell them to wait outside for a bit. I’ll go speak with Neo right now.”

“Okay. Thanks, Cillin.” Hei Dou let out a sigh of relief immediately, glad that someone else was bearing the difficult task instead of her.

Cillin and Hei Dou walked back to the base together, but almost ten mice suddenly burst out from the underground not far away from them. Every single one of them was in a berserk state with sharp spikes on their backs, thick scales around their claws and ring-shaped spikes all around their tail. It looked like a thorny whip.

The defense system had failed!! Someone had tampered with it! But who?