Slime Evolution

Chapter 454 - System Compromised

Inside the cramped, dimly lit cabin of the armored vehicle, three men dressed in MedPharma’s dark gray uniforms kept their eyes fixed on the tracking monitors, the atmosphere heavy with a tension that grew with every minute that pointless chase dragged on.

One of them, the tallest of the three, still bore a swollen purple bruise around his left eye, a painful and humiliating reminder of the punch he’d taken minutes earlier.

”Damn it, now a Porsche showed up to help these tramps too,” he grumbled, slamming his fist against the console in front of him. ”What kind of criminal scheme are these two mixed up in to have access to a vehicle like that? That’s not a car regular people from the Low Zone drive.”

”I don’t know, maybe they stole it,” the second man suggested, without much conviction, his fingers sliding frantically over the control panel, trying to recalibrate the main cannon’s aim for the third time in a row.

”Doesn’t matter where it came from,” the third man cut in, his voice irritated. ”What matters is we can’t hit a damn thing, not those bikes, not that son of a bitch car cutting back and forth.”

He squeezed his own eyes shut, trying to focus on the targeting screen that kept losing its lock repeatedly, the red cursor sliding back and forth without ever managing to fix onto either vehicle long enough for a clean shot.

”Recalibrating for the fourth time,” the second man muttered, more to himself than to the other two, sweat already visible on his forehead despite the cabin’s air conditioning.

Even with the constant support of the tracking drones, which kept each target’s exact location updated in real time, the vehicle’s shots kept missing by a frustrating margin, whether because of the black car’s impressive maneuverability, or because of the coordinated, unpredictable movements of the silver motorcycles.

”Drone seven lost signal,” an automated alert announced over the internal system, quickly followed by another. ”Drone three lost signal.”

”Damn it, they’re taking down the drones faster than we can launch new ones,” the second man complained, slapping his palm against his own console with growing frustration.

”This is ridiculous,” the man with the black eye grumbled, pressing his fingers against his own temple. ”We’ve got a state of the art armored vehicle and can’t hit two bikes and a luxury car.”

He glanced quickly at the digital clock blinking in the corner of his own panel, the minutes piling up in a way that only fed his irritation. Twenty three minutes had already passed since that pointless chase began, and every extra minute meant one more risk of superiors questioning the team’s own performance.

Even though the Low Zone was a complete mess, if they kept causing a disturbance for that long, there was no way the local police, corrupt as they were, could keep turning a blind eye without ever showing up to interfere, so they had to wrap this up as fast as possible.

”If we come back empty handed after all this, Miller’s going to lose it,” he muttered, more to himself than to the other two.

It was at that exact moment that a shrill alarm blared through the main panel, red lights flashing furiously around every monitor in the cabin.

[ALERT: CRITICAL FAILURE DETECTED IN FUEL COMPARTMENT]

The three men froze for a moment, looking at each other in genuine confusion.

”Wait, is that serious?” the second man asked, frowning at his own monitor. ”We didn’t even feel a single shot fired at us.”

”And even if we had,” the third one added, even more confused, ”this armored unit is tough enough to take pretty much anything short of a real cannon. This has to be some kind of system error.”

”Our telemetry isn’t showing any external impact,” the second man confirmed, his fingers sliding quickly through different tabs on his own console. ”No explosion, no projectile detected, nothing. It’s like the problem just came out of nowhere, from the inside out.”

”Old systems fail like that sometimes,” the man with the black eye commented, without much conviction of his own. ”And the boss never invests enough in decent maintenance for the equipment we use down here.”

Trying to ignore that warning, since no physical evidence backed it up, the man with the black eye turned his attention back to the targeting controls, determined to keep up the chase despite the unsettling alert.

It was then that the entire vehicle suffered a sudden blackout, every internal light switching off at once, plunging the cabin into a momentary darkness that lasted only a few seconds, but felt like it stretched into an unsettling eternity.

The armored vehicle’s own flight wobbled dangerously, the vehicle losing altitude sharply before the power came back, the lights flickering back to life with a visible instability.

”What the hell was that?!” the second man shouted, gripping his own seat as the vehicle stabilized again, though still shaky.

The three of them stayed silent for a moment, all visibly shaken, exchanging nervous glances with each other, the hum of their own systems resettling around them sounding ominously unstable.

”This isn’t normal,” the third man said, his voice coming out lower than before. ”Armored units like this don’t just black out on their own in the middle of an operation. Something’s wrong with this vehicle.”

”I think... I think we should consider pulling back,” the second man suggested, his voice carrying a hesitation that hadn’t been there before.

”What about the backup we called?” the man with the black eye asked, turning to the third teammate. ”How much longer are they going to take?”

The third man scoffed, an old frustration spilling out in his response.

”Stan’s team is stalling on purpose,” he complained, slapping his own knee. ”They probably don’t want us capturing these two girls for our recruitment team in Elysium. If we bring in good recruits, that counts against their performance this month.”

The man with the black eye felt an instant rage burn inside him at that revelation.

”You’ve got to be kidding me,” he snarled. ”We’re risking our own necks out here in a chase that’s already lasted twenty minutes, and the reason we’ve got no backup is some stupid inter team competition?”

”Basically, yeah,” the third man confirmed, bitter. ”I heard it over the internal radio before we left. Someone from the morning shift mentioned Stan’s been complaining to management about us ’stealing’ potential recruits from his territory.”

”His territory, my ass,” the man with the black eye shot back, indignant. ”We didn’t even know these girls existed until that scanner went off. That’s nobody’s territory.”

”Try explaining that to Stan’s inflated ego,” the third man muttered, rolling his eyes.

”That’s typical of this shitty company,” he added, spitting the words out with contempt. ”Everybody pulling the rope their own way, nobody actually working as a team.”

Faced with that information, and given the increasingly unstable state of their own vehicle, the man with the black eye felt whatever resolve he had left evaporate quickly.

Capturing those two girls no longer seemed worth the growing risk that situation posed, especially with their own vehicle behaving so unpredictably.

”Screw this,” he decided, slamming his own panel to trigger the withdrawal protocols. ”Let’s turn back before this heap of junk drops out of the sky with us in it.”

Outside, still connected through the shared consciousness with the small fragment of biomass that kept systematically devouring the vehicle’s internal components, Lohan caught every word of that nervous conversation between the three men.

Instead of feeling any satisfaction at that sudden surrender, a cold, silent question formed in his mind.

’You really think I’m going to just let you leave now?’