Chapter Ninety-Four: I Could Tell at a Glance That You Were Not Human!

In the virtual battlefield known as Abnormal Sensing, at the Antarctic research station, everyone had returned indoors and stood there staring blankly at one another.

A leader had actually died.

He had been killed by a monster sealed in ice for a hundred thousand years, and in the most absurd way possible: devoured alive.

It was beyond ridiculous.

At that very moment, the man Zhou Shu had shoved out of the way a moment earlier, the one whose arm had still been brushed by the monster’s tongue, suddenly toppled from his seat to the floor. The stunned crowd jumped in fright.

Someone rushed to help him up, only to have his arm torn clean off.

The change horrified everyone into panic. The women screamed, and only Zhou Shu reacted fast enough. He kicked out like lightning, sending the severed arm flying out of the man’s grasp.

At the same time, he could not help but marvel at how real the Hunter System’s simulation was. Infection really could begin from nothing more than a graze against the skin. He had pushed the man at the crucial moment, and yet he still could not change the fate that had greeted him at the very beginning.

“Get away from the body. He’s already mutated!”

“Watch the arm. Don’t let it get away. You with the flamethrower, burn them!”

If the first shout merely drove everyone to scatter in terror, the second left them frozen.

What did it mean, don’t let the arm get away?

What did it mean, burn “them”?

The next instant, they understood.

The arm Zhou Shu had kicked away suddenly sprouted many sharp little legs, then let out a shriek and scuttled into a gap among the supplies like a giant centipede.

The corpse on the ground also moved. Its limbs rapidly warped, soon becoming something like those of a reptile, and it began to crawl across the floor while hissing and roaring.

Then the man’s neck split open again, turning into a gaping maw packed with fangs. It lunged at one of the people who had been frightened to the floor.

The others were too stunned to help, but Zhou Shu moved at once, yanking the man back and hauling him behind him.

“Ah!”

But just as he pulled the man to his feet, a woman nearby let out a scream. Only then did Zhou Shu’s alert sense finally activate.

Damn it, this unreliable warning sense!

Slow-Motion Vision, activate!

Whoosh—

Time slowed. He turned his head, and his scalp went numb.

Shit.

The chest of the man he had just dragged up had split open. Inside were rows of dripping fangs and writhing tentacles. The tentacles were gathering force, ready to shoot out and wrap around him.

Could he still endure this?

He immediately used the force of his own pull to hurl the man away.

Crack!

The monster slammed straight into a storage rack.

Damn it. Good thing these things had a clear “coming out” move before they attacked, which had startled the woman into screaming and given him time to use slow motion. Otherwise he would have been done for this time.

The brief but violent fight finally woke the terrified crowd from their stupor. Zhou Shu shouted at the right moment, “Stop freezing up. Use the flamethrowers on them! Everyone else back away!”

“Okay, okay!”

Everyone sprang into motion. Those with flamethrowers stepped forward; the rest retreated.

Zhou Shu also dodged the crawling monster’s neck-mouth as it lost its target and turned to bite him. He kicked it away, making room for the flamethrowers to do their work.

But at that moment, the monster he had thrown away rejoined the fight. Its chest split open again, and in addition to the mass of teeth and whipping tentacles, an extra-long elastic spike shot straight toward the crowd.

Meanwhile, the arm-centipede crawled out from a shadowy corner and lunged into the group.

Because Zhou Shu had just kicked away the crawling monster, the elastic spike attacked from a distance and in a different area, while the arm-centipede came from a blind spot. Zhou Shu had no time to support them, and in an instant two people were hit.

Chaos erupted in the crowd.

Zhou Shu realized they were not as rational as people in films. Faced with these bizarre happenings, ordinary people were just weaklings, even if they were scientists by profession.

But faced with such uncanny attacks, even scientists could do nothing in the short term. What was needed now was a warrior with a resolute mind.

Conveniently, Zhou Shu was exactly that—a super-soldier, no less.

With a temporarily clear target, Zhou Shu went all out. Sharp weapons and blunt force were useless, and using them would only create more monsters, so he activated slow motion again, snatched a flamethrower from someone’s hands, and dragged the man around while sweeping fire across the room.

“Ahhhhhh!”

In the end, Zhou Shu burned all the clearly identified monsters to death, but the result was that the others began to keep their distance from him.

He was too strong, far too strong to seem human.

The man who had been dragged around by him, unable to control himself at all, had the most right to speak on the matter.

Still, compared with the monsters that killed people, Zhou Shu had saved lives, so it was tolerable.

At the very least, the heroine looked at him differently.

And because Zhou Shu had connections to paleontology, fought with formidable strength, and proved reliable at critical moments, she developed a sense of trust in him.

Of course, part of it was also because, compared with those unshaven middle-aged men, Zhou Shu was very handsome.

Now that they were temporarily safe, the scientists began to take charge.

Someone suggested leaving immediately and seeking help from the military, but the scientists rejected the idea.

Though everyone still wore a human face, they could not rule out the possibility that monsters were mixed in among them. If they entered the bustling human world at this point, the consequences would be unimaginable.

The best response to a contagious outbreak was quarantine. Only after treatment could they come into contact with others again, or else it would spread everywhere in no time.

But quarantine was for treatment, not for waiting to die. Monsters were not the same as viruses.

If someone were infected by an actual virus and died, the virus would die with them. These monsters were different. Even if every human here died, the monsters could still disguise themselves as people and enter human society to infect others.

So the top priority now was figuring out how to distinguish monsters from normal humans.

Watching their companions transform into monsters, some people were already scared out of their wits, yet they did not dare draw near their comrades to seek comfort or support.

Then Zhou Shu said, “The first thing we should do is not that. We need to make sure the helicopter and snow vehicles can’t start. We have to prevent any virus from slipping out of the quarantine zone when no one’s paying attention, or our quarantine will be meaningless.”

The sensible people felt Zhou Shu had a point, and some of them began looking at him differently.

“But what if destroying the escape vehicles traps us here and the humans can’t get away, leaving us all to be slaughtered by the monsters?”

That sounded reasonable enough, but the true intention behind it was obvious.

Hearing that, Zhou Shu narrowed his eyes at the speaker, trying to see whether he could detect anything suspicious.

Unfortunately, he found nothing unusual, and even his alert sense did not trigger.

The man was startled by his stare and deliberately said, “Why are you looking at me? What I’m saying could very well happen, and monsters usually have an intense desire to attack.”

Just as things were beginning to settle down again and tensions were about to rise once more, someone hurried to mediate. In the end, they voted to destroy the vehicles.

Once safety was confirmed, they could figure out how to repair them, or call for reinforcements by radio.

At this point, the heroine had to be mentioned. She was still the first to notice the problem, and proposed dissecting and sampling several of the corpse fragments to determine exactly what they were.

Under normal circumstances, someone would surely have objected, but now everyone was terrified, so they all agreed.

Zhou Shu naturally had no objections, and even personally carried the remains.

He watched the heroine and her friend Adam dissect the remains without wearing masks. They did wear gloves, but because they were nervous and sweating, they used the same gloves that had touched the monster’s internal organs to push their hair aside, and he could only shake his head in silence.

They had sounded so professional a moment ago—talking about viruses, quarantine, and all that—and when it came time to actually do it, this was all they managed?

Besides, he remembered how it happened in the film. The system had made changes in other places, but not here. Presumably it wanted to raise the infection rate or the level of suspense, making his training that much harder.

After the dissection, they successfully discovered that these monsters could not replicate inorganic matter, and that their cells devoured normal cells. From that, they came up with a method: first check the fillings in the teeth for a rough distinction, then draw blood for testing to make a more precise judgment.

The others felt that method was useful, but for Zhou Shu, it was useless.

What he needed to train was the kind of ability that let him tell at a glance that something was not human.