Chapter 385: Chapter 219: The Land of the Fallen

[Sharing contact information]

Gino received Raphael’s contact details.

She was about to speak, saying it wasn’t necessary to be so urgent, but she swallowed her words.

John was dying.

Ten days were shorter than imagined.

When the “Maya couple” first approached him to discuss bar revenue, John was actually a bit scared, fearing his death would cause the hard-won life of the couple to collapse again.

From the moment he left the restaurant, something inside John was stirred.

Later, he coincidentally met the bartender Wenna, entrusting Jilead to take care of things, bringing him much comfort.

John decided to offer help to those around him as much as possible.

Even if his advice was not adopted, it was still their own choice.

“Thanks, John, I owe you.”

“Heh, it’s I who owe you. You didn’t need to get involved in these matters tonight,”

This made Gino feel somewhat uncomfortable.

She changed the subject.

“When I was decoding the project secret key, I found something, Bismarck was conscious during the operation…”

Their words and actions were all watched by Bismarck through cameras.

The reason for her hatred towards the company.

Yucca rope senior furry control’s vulnerability.

Including the violent intrusion of the security department.

All this happened under Bismarck’s nose.

If Iron Scorpion quickly settled the three of them, this project manager would absolutely not step in to mediate.

“I know,”

John had no surprise at all.

“Bismarck has thoroughly understood all of us; he’s just that kind of person.”

Even before the mission started.

The serum had already included Bismarck’s data and itinerary as part of the task details.

A project manager from Plato, having experienced that warehouse explosion incident, his position in the company was already precarious.

He was forced to leave the main company to seek a way out at the Source Equation.

And his coordinates appearing in Sakura Cross Street indicated he was still seeking help from Eastern people.

“European enterprises have poor relations with Eastern people, so you can imagine how poorly he’s doing, heh, a corporate dog, appearing glamorous, but struggling to scrape by just like street punks.”

John analyzed, then turned to find Gino staring at him.

“Uh, was that all your own thinking? Did you read the mission report too?”

“What do you think?”

John gave a bitter smile.

“I’m out here with a gun to work, intelligence boosts survival rates, why wouldn’t I look? Just look at that guy killed by the SAT on the road earlier, if you can’t calm down and use your brain, you’re just gambling your life… can life be tougher than a bullet?”

“You’ve grown quite fast. Hmm, no sarcasm intended.”

Gino shrugged.

She grew up on the streets of Eden City, often hanging around bars and boxing arenas, witnessing wave after wave of newbies making a name for themselves or dying from stray bullets.

The stories were all similar.

Street kids getting lucky, pulling off a big job, not dying, making startup money, then drinking, bedding girls, boasting, and inevitably stepping onto a career of gunfire to sustain their lifestyle.

That’s the behavior of edge-runners.

But most people don’t have a legendary aura.

“Their best bet was the perpetually grimy glass underground clinic, with the only way to get stronger being to buy a sufficiently new, cool prosthetic body, or increase the gun caliber by half a centimeter.”

Gino paused, then turned back around.

“You’re different, people who use their brain can go further.”

“Mercenaries aren’t exactly a high IQ group, almost every edge-runner has unforgettable experiences of being swindled.”

“Heh, maybe.”

Gino chuckled, continuing to gaze out the window.

As John turned off the highway and onto Sakura Cross Street, thoughts of Oulos suddenly came to him.

She was naturally brilliant at thinking.

Even the most deceitful and cunning wealthy and powerful couldn’t faze Oulos.

This middleman really taught John a lot about the rules of survival, and he thought—perhaps before dying, he should apologize to her.

Suddenly.

The view outside the window changed.

As the Silver Rider 577 tore down the main road of Sakura Cross Street, circumventing the blocks of skyscrapers, he saw low-cost apartments and factories covered in dense smoke.

[Sakura Cross Street – Cross-district Bridge]

The Silver Rider coupe was running on external circulation.

A highly complex airflow rushed into the car, instantly causing Gino and John to furrow their brows.

Ugh—

The sleeper in the backseat, Yucca rope, couldn’t hold it and awoke from the fumes.

John switched the ventilation mode, finally managing to see the on-site situation through the city-engulfing smoke:

The cross-district bridge of Sakura Cross Street had collapsed.

That city-famous “Raft Qi” advertising hovercar now lay as a giant heap of steel wreckage on the riverbank.

Its scattered skeleton half-melted, half-dismantled.

A large number of special event handling personnel gathered around—a city hall-established organization to handle such large public cases, mainly composed of ECPD officers, outsourced companies, emergency teams, temporary contractors.

This area had been cleared out.

With semi-lockdown city management, some residents lingered nearby, staring dazedly at their homes turned to ruins.

Workers close to the accident site wore gas masks.

The taste in the air was extraordinarily complex.

The scorched stench of aviation fuel igniting, the ozone from burned electrical wires, the metallic tang from the hovercar core slow-release liquid evaporating at high temperatures…

In addition.

Garbage and long-buried wastes unearthed by the collapsing giant “dug” up.

This smell could truly kill.

At this time, Silver Rider 577’s car radio was broadcasting.

Nearby citizens and rescuers who inhaled the lethal gas had already been rushed to medical attention, and casualties were still rising. Professionals warned citizens to double the government’s suggested “safe distance.”

John and the others were on an unblocked road.

Sakura Cross Street has significant architectural disparity.

From the car, they could oversee the accident scene.

Countless drones, hovercars were weaving in and out of the smoke, like flies around waste.

[Signal Transmission/ALW News Channel]

Gino shared a link with John.

His artificial eye blinked, projecting the signal source onto the car’s screen, windows, and glasses, displaying a window simultaneously.

ALW’s news drone swooped and spiraled.

Their HD camera was broadcasting the accident scene to the whole city live.

Through the jagged tears, the cockpit horrors were visible—the crew’s corpses embedded among the wreckage, their blood-stained black hair charred and curled, the protruding prosthetic eyes flickered continuously.

The installer’s vital signs had vanished.

The cockpit’s backup power, connected through prosthetic interfaces, supplied those eyes with ongoing, rhythmic scanning of the surrounding, seeking a responding signal in the shielded zone.

Sunlight couldn’t fully penetrate the smoke.

That prosthetic eye kept flickering among the red flesh and grease.

John suddenly spoke.

“Is this really unrelated to the serum?”

Gino didn’t respond.

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