Marvel: A Lazy-Ass Superman

Chapter 733: Chapter 733: The Captured Humans

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The Assassins had already switched off their ultraviolet spotlights, leaving only the bare minimum illumination. The Green Arrow Duck and the other mechs didn’t need any light at all. They could use other sensor modes to identify objects in the darkness.

The chamber thus returned to its original gloom. Just a short distance away from the group, there was nothing but pitch-black darkness.

From that darkness, a figure emerged unsteadily.

He had a hunched back and walked with a pronounced limp.

His appearance didn’t elicit much sympathy.

One of the Assassins harshly asked, ”Weren’t you the one trying to lure us into the vampires’ trap earlier? Who knows if this is another trap. Why should we believe you?”

”It’s true! There really are many more people being held in other places. It’s also true that we’re being used as food. We’re pitiful. We couldn’t fight back against those monsters until you appeared.”

Green Arrow Duck recognized the crippled old Black man.

He was one of the very few people in the sewers who had been logged by the Sparrow reconnaissance drones. He hadn’t been recorded during their recent survey of the sewers. Rather, Green Arrow Duck had encountered him much earlier while investigating that troublesome kid, Skye, and had seen the man interact with her.

The man lived in the area of the sewers known as ”Cannibal Street.” He wasn’t a good person.

Then again, anyone who could survive in the sewers to this age probably wasn’t a good person. At most, occasionally showing a little kindness was already an astonishing act of compassion.

But did one good deed by a villain make that person worth saving?

No matter how many reasons there were to say that such kindness should be positively encouraged, Green Arrow Duck still couldn’t be bothered with this man.

He wasn’t some impartial judge.

The fact that he himself didn’t break the law was already the greatest kindness he was willing to offer. All attempts at moral coercion could kindly stay out of his way.

For now, Green Arrow Duck remained focused on organizing the reconnaissance data from the sewers.

Five mechs, four routes of advance. The mechs themselves possessed reconnaissance capabilities comparable to the Sparrow spy drones, while three groups of Sparrows were still circling through the various passages.

The constantly updated information on the distribution of living creatures would help them clear out the remaining Reapers.

Green Arrow Duck wanted to flush these creatures out and completely eliminate the threat posed by the Reapers.

However, Alexei suddenly asked over the internal channel, ”Aren’t we going to release the humans who’ve been captured?”

”Oh? I thought you wouldn’t care whether Americans lived or died.”

”I’m not that much of an asshole, all right? Besides, what I’m fighting is the system, the evil capitalist system. It has nothing to do with ordinary people at the bottom. Standing by and watching people die isn’t my style.”

Alexei’s words made Green Arrow Duck reassess him.

Thinking about it carefully, it wasn’t difficult to understand how rational and positive his way of thinking actually was.

In Alexei’s mind, the symbolic conflict between ”America” and the ”Red Empire” didn’t mean that all Americans were evil.

It was simply a conflict between the working masses and the vested interests, and Alexei chose to stand with the weaker side.

As for the matter at hand, however, Green Arrow Duck replied, ”Unless you’re planning to recruit them and lead them in a revolution, I’d recommend leaving them alone.

”Once we clear out the Reapers, someone will naturally release whoever is still alive. This place has its own order and survival rules. Whether you intervene or not, it’ll eventually return to the same miserable state.”

Alexei asked, ”Do you really think everyone living in a place like this has fallen beyond redemption? That there’s nobody worth saving?”

”Maybe there were people like that at the beginning. But now, I doubt there are any left.”

Green Arrow Duck pointed toward a corner at the edge of the chamber.

Through the mech’s night vision, they could see a massive pile of human bones.

They were clearly not ancient remains. They had accumulated recently.

Green Arrow Duck asked, ”Do you think the people who died were the worst scum here, and they were eaten first? Or were the weak the first ones eliminated?

”Do the people who’ve managed to survive until now still deserve to be saved?”

”Hmm. You’re being too arbitrary by sentencing all those people to death like that. Maybe there are still some people among them worth saving.”

Green Arrow Duck spoke over the internal channel:

”I once thought the world wasn’t quite this bad. But after investigating the sewers in depth, I gave up on having any expectations for this place.

”Especially after what just happened, I can’t imagine the people living here choosing to protect the weak or sacrifice themselves for others.

”If you think you can find someone worth saving, I don’t mind you following that guy to take a look. We’re only handling the aftermath now, so there’s no particular hurry.”

The skeptical Red Guardian said, ”After hearing you put it that way, I really do want to take a look. Is there anywhere in this world worse than Siberia?”

”Suit yourself.”

They were merely cooperating with one another.

The main Reaper force had already been dealt with. There was no need to grab the Red Guardian by the ear and order him around, telling him what he could and couldn’t do.

The next operation consisted of the Great Bear mech following the crippled Willie through the sewers—Willie being the old Black man’s name—to rescue the surviving humans, while the two Eternal powerhouses worked with Green Arrow Duck to clear the sewers.

In fact, the operators of the various mechs already knew where the captured humans were.

This was because the mechs and Sparrow spy drones had sacrificed some reconnaissance precision in exchange for maximizing their overall scanning range. Combined with the complicated terrain of the sewers, the difficulty of reconnaissance increased dramatically.

Thus, on the original three-dimensional sewer map, they could only mark the locations of living creatures. Large concentrations could then be treated as main forces or important strongholds and targeted for attack.

But once they got close enough, they could distinguish whether the targets were humans or the Reapers they had come to eliminate.

And locations where large numbers of humans were gathered were naturally the holding areas where the sewer’s residents were being imprisoned.

The same situation occurred with the other three mechs besides the Great Bear.

During the operation to clear the remaining sections of the sewers, they often encountered Continental Hotel contract gunmen who were injured—sometimes so severely that they couldn’t even move.

Some had been abandoned by their companions and left to die.

Others had voluntarily stayed behind because they didn’t want to hold their companions back.

Regardless of their circumstances, Green Arrow Duck and the others took the injured with them and brought them to the sewer entrances guarded by police.

Of course, they couldn’t simply drop them directly in front of the police.

The mechs merely brought the injured near an entrance, where the wounded could call for help themselves or use some other method to attract the attention of people outside, prompting the police to enter and rescue them.

Naturally, some of these wounded had been infected by Reapers.

But the police already knew how to treat the infection.

Although the hastily developed serum had severe side effects, improvements during this period hadn’t achieved much progress.

Still, everyone understood the difference between being ”dead” and being ”sick,” so nobody resisted using the serum to save their lives.

Green Arrow Duck and the others never actually intended to wipe out every Reaper in the New York sewers.

Even if they moved as quickly as possible, excluding the Great Bear mech, which had its own mission, there were only four mechs involved.

The people brought by the Continental Hotel were the ones with the real numerical advantage.

Once the Continental Hotel personnel received word from the High Table Elder that the main Reaper force had been eliminated, the human cleanup operation became considerably bolder.

Watching this transformation, Green Arrow Duck knew it was time to withdraw.

For one thing, the Reaper groups of any significant size had already been eliminated by the mechs returning to sweep the area.

After sending out the retreat signal, every mech remembered to retrieve the small gadgets they had left along the way and erase their respective traces.

At last, Green Arrow Duck and the others left behind this filthy, stinking underworld beneath New York.

And they hoped they wouldn’t have to come back.

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