Chapter 4: The Contaminated Zone

District 103 Cleaning Center, Technical Support Department.

A technician was busy eating potato chips while his screen displayed the interior of Sewer A7 in District 103.

An aquatic contamination incident had occurred here once before. A Demon Hunter had already swept the area an hour ago; for a mere E-class mission, it usually took them twenty minutes to wrap things up.

Now, it was the Cleaners' turn. Cleaners—essentially a sanitation crew—what could possibly be dangerous about that?

Every technician knew that while you had to be on high alert when a Demon Hunter was working, the time when the cleaning crew was on duty was the perfect opportunity to slack off.

The technician chewed his chips, one hand typing away to chat with his girlfriend, occasionally glancing up at the screen.

Suddenly, his munching stopped. He stared at the screen in disbelief. The contamination levels on the display had shot up, forming a sharp peak.

Was the data glitching?

No, the numbers kept climbing: 30%, 40%, 50%... 70%!

"D-Class Contamination Zone." Six blood-red letters appeared on the screen, pulsing rhythmically.

D-class? Wasn't it E-class?

Had the zone been misclassified from the start? The technician threw his chips aside and his fingers flew across the keyboard, but the result remained the same.

It was still a D-class contamination zone.

"It's over," the technician stood up abruptly, "it’s over." He quickly switched to the sewer feed. Every cleaner's helmet was equipped with a camera to help headquarters monitor the situation.

The footage was shaky. A flashlight beam cut through the depths of the sewer, revealing a merman-like pollutant—a real, living pollutant.

The technician scrambled to contact the cleaning squad, but the moment he opened the public channel, he heard a loud *bang*.

Someone had opened fire.

...

Sewer A7, District 103.

"Report, we have a live pollutant, requesting permission to—damn it!"

Li Nianchuan didn't even have time to finish his sentence. It was too fast. The merman’s speed was terrifying; in the blink of an eye, it was right in front of them.

"Authorization granted, you are cleared to fire!" Xu Meng’s anxious voice crackled through their helmets.

*Click.* Weapon safety disengaged.

*Bang!*

The moment the authorization went through, Zhu Ning pulled the trigger without a second’s hesitation, leaving even the panicked Li Nianchuan stunned. The bullet struck the merman’s face with pinpoint accuracy, the sheer force snapping its head backward at a 180-degree angle.

Stillness.

The charging merman stopped in its tracks for two seconds. Zhu Ning didn't dare to relax. Was it dead?

"Hahahahahaha—" A low, gravelly laugh emanated from the merman.

It slowly raised its head. Its fish-like eyes had been blown out, and its face was shredded by the impact, slick with blood.

It was still alive.

Headshot, yet still alive. Zhu Ning made a split-second judgment. Unlike zombies, whose weakness was the head—once destroyed, they would lose the ability to move—this merman could still move after being shot in the head. In a way, it was very fitting for a fish.

Li Nianchuan finally snapped out of it. He drew his pistol from his waist. He had been a cleaner for a year and a half and this was his first time seeing a live pollutant. His heart hammered against his ribs, and his grip on the gun was clumsy.

He raised his weapon and opened fire.

*Bang! Bang! Bang!*

Li Nianchuan fired wildly. He had no accuracy, but the suppressive fire managed to slow the merman down. Its head was already mangled by Zhu Ning, and one of its legs had been blown off, causing it to drag itself across the ground.

Its vitality was so tenacious that it kept crawling toward them, even while maimed.

"Do... you... know... where... the No. 1... the last... the last train... is?" The merman, bearing a riddled, fishy head, crawled on all fours like a creature from a nightmare.

It tilted its neck, scales curling at the edges. "I'm going to miss it... the No. 1... last... last, last, last train..."

Li Nianchuan felt his sanity fraying.

*Bang!*

Zhu Ning fired another shot. The merman jerked and began to twitch, its movements stuttering like a glitching frame. "Last... last, last, last train..."

Zhu Ning asked, "Is it dead?"

Li Nianchuan, still in a state of shock, stammered, "I don't know."

When cleaners entered an area, the pollutants were usually long dead. This was his first time seeing a live one. He had only come out for a breather while slacking off; no wonder he had felt so unsettled today. The more relaxed he tried to be, the more anxious he felt—it was because there was a live pollutant here.

Zhu Ning observed the creature for a moment. It only twitched. She asked a crucial question: "How long after death do the spores start to release?"

Li Nianchuan’s brain buzzed, and he finally realized. "Immediately. The spores release the second there are no vital signs. That means it’s not dead yet!"

Li Nianchuan raised his gun again, aiming directly at the merman’s corpse. There was no reaction from the creature yet.

Not a single spore. The merman was dead, but not entirely.

Zhu Ning was a complete newcomer. Today was her first day on the job, and after only thirty minutes of "picking cotton," she had run into this mess.

Zhu Ning wanted to be a salted fish, not deal with a literal, rotting fish.

She turned to her senior for advice, "What are we supposed to do in a situation like this?"

Li Nianchuan: "Wait for rescue."

Zhu Ning: "..."

Li Nianchuan was equally depressed. "First, the odds of us running into this are astronomical. I’ve been in this business for a year and a half, and I’ve never even heard of a Demon Hunter leaving a survivor behind. Second, our training is nothing compared to a Demon Hunter’s. Acting rashly will just get us killed faster. All the protocols tell us to stay put and wait."

"Did you send the distress signal?" Zhu Ning asked. Even if they were waiting, someone needed to know where they were.

Li Nianchuan: "I sent it the moment the merman appeared."

But there was no response. He tried to act like a senior and soothe her nerves. "The signal is out. We just need to wait patiently."

He sighed again. "It’s all my fault. If I hadn’t come out for a breather, you wouldn't have been dragged into this."

Zhu Ning glanced at him. "Save it."

Meaningless talk was a waste of time.

Zhu Ning asked, "Have you noticed anything wrong?"

Li Nianchuan had already noticed that Zhu Ning seemed much sharper than he was. She had reacted to the pollutant a full minute before he did—she was practically a human radar.

At her words, Li Nianchuan nearly jumped out of his skin, fearing there was another pollutant. He gripped his gun tighter. "What's wrong?"

Zhu Ning: "Xu Meng hasn't contacted us."

When the merman first appeared, Zhu Ning only heard the team leader authorize the use of weapons, then Xu Meng’s voice went silent.

Their channel was public; as the team leader, Xu Meng should have been able to hear everything happening on their end. When Zhu Ning and Li Nianchuan were suspecting each other of being contaminated, Xu Meng might have been assessing the situation, but now there was not a sound.

Zhu Ning asked, "Did she get attacked?"

Li Nianchuan’s face was hidden behind his helmet, but he was deathly pale. "It's worse."

Zhu Ning frowned.

Li Nianchuan: "This proves that the contamination zone has fully expanded. We are in the core of the zone. Outsiders can't get in for the time being, and the mental corruption has severed the channel. Xu Meng can't reach us."

"We're just two rookies picking up trash. We have no gear, the channel is dead, and we can't receive any information from the outside."

Li Nianchuan spoke rapidly, then took a deep breath, looked at Zhu Ning, and delivered the final verdict: "Zhu Ning, we're done for."

...

"Zhu Ning? Li Nianchuan? Respond if you can hear me!" Xu Meng was calling for them, but there was no response.

When the gunfire suddenly broke out, Xu Meng had been busy containing pollutants. She initially thought one of them had been mentally corrupted. When Zhu Ning pulled her gun for the first time, Xu Meng hadn't thought much of it.

She still had contamination spores to contain. If those spores spread to the rest of District 103, the entire area could be infected.

Xu Meng knew how to prioritize. No matter what happened, her first duty was to contain the spores. She listened to the commotion on their end while she worked.

If this were truly a routine cleanup of an E-class zone, everything should have been under her control. But things were becoming chaotic on their end, and the channel was filled with static.

She immediately sensed something was wrong. Her intuition told her this wasn't a simple E-class mission.

When Li Nianchuan reported a live pollutant, she knew they were in trouble. Zhu Ning might be a rookie, but Li Nianchuan was an experienced worker. Unfortunately, it was too late. She soon received a message from the technical department.

A once-in-a-decade stroke of bad luck: the contamination zone had been misclassified. This wasn't an E-class zone; it was a D-class zone.

D-class missions weren't difficult for Demon Hunters, but inside were two logistics workers tasked with cleaning up. The Demon Hunter, thinking the job was done, had long since left.

They didn't know that if a contamination zone was a devil's nest, the Demon Hunter had merely cleaned up the trash at the doorstep; the true nest was deep inside.

It would take at least half an hour for a Demon Hunter to return. In a contamination zone, every extra second was a death sentence, especially with Zhu Ning being a newcomer.

Xu Meng tried to contact them, but no matter how she called, there was no reply. She immediately guessed that the D-class zone had fully unfolded, and the mental corruption had severed their communications.

Xu Meng had lost contact with them.

...

Zhu Ning took a deep breath. Could a person really be this unlucky? Was this even scientific?

When Fang Ying signed her contract, she said that it was rare to encounter pollutants and that it was a low-probability event.

During the employee training, the instructional videos didn't teach how to kill pollutants, only how to "pick cotton," because it was a low-probability event.

When Li Nianchuan gave her the gun, he said she wouldn't usually need it, because it was a low-probability event.

Now, all three low-probability events had collided. Zhu Ning hadn't just encountered a live pollutant—she didn't even know how to kill it.

She had spent her past life fighting zombies; why did she have to end up killing fish in this one?

The good news was that she had a gun, and the air-pressurized cartridges could fire thousands of rounds without needing a reload. The bad news was that the gun couldn't kill a pollutant outright.

Zhu Ning tried to save herself. "How do you kill a pollutant?"

In the zombie world, the golden rule was a headshot. In the wasteland, there must be a golden rule for killing pollutants, or humanity wouldn't have survived this long.

Li Nianchuan stood there in despair. "I don't know!"

The merman’s corpse was still lying there, and they had no idea what it would mutate into next.

Zhu Ning looked at the bewildered Li Nianchuan. "Think."

She didn't have the knowledge to deal with pollutants, but Li Nianchuan did. For a moment, he couldn't tell who was the real newcomer, but Zhu Ning’s aura was too intense.

Zhu Ning: "You wanted to be a Demon Hunter, didn't you? You must have studied this."

Li Nianchuan felt embarrassed. He usually didn't like to admit his past—he had once tried to sign up to be a Demon Hunter, but they had rejected him, leaving him to rot as a trash collector. How did Zhu Ning know?