Pardofelis padded lightly across the rooftop, searching the surroundings: "Is there really a monitor?"
She considered her scouting ability to be quite good; even the slightest disturbance would put her on guard for a long time. But she couldn't see a single shadow, which made her doubt whether Lin was truly lucid.
"But… I still feel like someone is watching me." Pardofelis rubbed the goosebumps on her arms, shrinking her neck in fear. "It must be the things Bro Lin said that are making me paranoid."
Meanwhile, on the slope hundreds of meters away, in a sinister shadow, the sniper's scope was aimed at Pardofelis's unguarded head.
The command was to immediately shoot and kill her if she made any drastic move or attempted to attack the monitor.
Wind direction, illumination, bullet drop… As a sniper for Fire MOTH, he had all the techniques memorized.
Should I take the shot here?
His finger gradually squeezed the trigger, tightening the pressure.
The girl in the scope suddenly flinched and looked up in his direction.
"Thump!"
"Huh? I felt a stinging sensation just now. Was that my imagination?" Pardofelis scratched the dark hair near her ear. She looked around in confusion at the direction she had just glanced. In the previous instant, a certain intuition had maxed out its warning and then suddenly plummeted.
But Pardofelis was not a warrior. She didn't realize she had just walked past the gates of hell, and that sense of danger was dismissed as her imagination.
The sniper lay unconscious on the ground. A person stood behind him, taking out a syringe and injecting it into his neck.
After seeing Lin on the surveillance screen of the house, this person pondered for a moment, then lifted the sniper and the sniper rifle onto their shoulders.
"Erwin, what are you doing here?"
Danzhu, who came to the Medical Department to retrieve experiment materials, immediately saw her sneaking friend. She walked up behind him and patted his shoulder. Erwin jumped in fright, nearly leaping up to hit his head.
"Are you trying to scare me to death?" Erwin snapped, hands on his hips, after seeing Danzhu.
He only had a bit of nerve in front of his friend. Since being transferred to Ato's squad, he felt the atmosphere in the team was extremely oppressive, and Ato was too preoccupied with the recent events to bother with integrating the new team.
"You're the one trying to scare me to death… Shhh, quiet down, this is the Medical Department." Danzhu noticed the Medical Department staff looking at the two people making noise, so she led Erwin out to the corridor.
After checking that all the materials were present, Danzhu asked Erwin, "I heard you were transferred to Ato's team. How have things been lately?"
"Don't even mention it. Something unexpected happened during the 5th Eruption… Forget it, I can't say." Erwin wanted to tell Danzhu about how Fire MOTH intended to send them to their deaths during the 5th Eruption, but feared getting Danzhu involved, so he held his tongue.
When he heard that Fire MOTH planned for them to die, he ran away like the others. He was just an ordinary person. If it was an actual mission, Erwin believed he could barely keep up with the team, but his own organization was only planning for them to die, so his inner fear wouldn't lie to him.
However, unlike others who blamed Lin, Erwin actually admired Lin for going alone to intercept the 5th Herrscher. Lin did what they were afraid to do, so they had no right to criticize Lin.
Erwin didn't want to talk about the topic, so he changed the subject and asked in return, "What are you doing at the Medical Department?"
"Dr. Mobius needed some medication for an experiment, so she sent me to fetch it." Danzhu wasn't in a hurry either. The lab had been excessively idle lately; they couldn't find anything to do. The experiments Mobius conducted weren't something clumsy assistants like them could participate in. "The Doctor has been very mysterious lately, always tinkering with various drugs. Before, she was clearly doing things that looked very dangerous."
"Oh…"
Erwin's mood seemed off. Danzhu thought the pressure from the new team might be too much, so she planned to chat with him longer to find a topic. But before she could speak, Erwin spoke first: "Yesterday… two more people were killed."
"Two more—" Danzhu clamped her hand over her mouth. Her eyes widened. Only after regulating her breathing and heartbeat did she lower her hand. "No wonder the atmosphere in the Medical Department is so strange today."
"You didn't know?" Erwin looked at Danzhu in confusion. Logically, Danzhu usually knew about this kind of intelligence before anyone else. She was a gossipy person who loved to browse forums and chat. How could she seem like she just found out about such a major event?
Danzhu lowered her head awkwardly: "I… I stayed up late making models the day before yesterday, basically slept all day yesterday, and the Doctor yelled at me this morning…"
"…"
Understanding his female friend's unreliable nature, Erwin shook his head and said, "Someone sounded the alarm last night. Two bodies, both high-ranking officials of Fire MOTH, were retrieved from the artificial lake. Another soldier was severely injured and is currently in emergency surgery."
"It is said that the seriously injured soldier has crucial clues."
The atmosphere was slightly solidified.
Kevin restlessly paced in front of the operating room. His expression was visibly awful.
The red warning light made him feel uneasy.
Ato's expression was no better, but his age and experience were greater than Kevin's, so he was considerably calmer.
The injury of Lin's subordinate plunged their already heavy hearts, burdened by the assassination, straight to the bottom.
Hua sat dejectedly on the cold bench. She drew one leg up, rested her face on her toned thigh, and covered her head, lost in thought.
"Dip."
The warning light turned from red to green. The three simultaneously fixed their eyes on the operating room door. A doctor emerged, removed his mask, frowned, and said to Kevin, who was standing closest: "He's out of danger, but the severe blood loss and abdominal puncture will keep him unconscious for a period. We will move him to the Healing Pod."
"I see…" Kevin was immediately relieved to hear that Immer life was not at risk.
He had failed to protect Lin, so he had to at least protect Lin's subordinate.
"Unconscious for a period?" Ato focused on another matter. "Then we won't be able to verify that information."
"What?"
Hua, just recovering from her dazed state, asked without thinking upon hearing their conversation.
Ato glanced at her and said, "Before losing consciousness, Immer left a message stating the killer's physical characteristics."
"A tall male wearing a fox mask."