Chapter 110: Rescue Plan

Time passed by, and Marcus and the rest of the squad grew increasingly anxious. However, they knew a rescue op couldn’t be rushed. They had to be patient and methodically clear the area.

Four high-tensile carbon-fiber tethers were securely anchored to a sturdy metal strut outside the breach. The other ends were carabiner-clipped to the harnesses of four strike team members. Those four pushed back into the dark corridors to search, while the remaining four stayed outside to hold the perimeter and manage the lines.

If the search team fell under the hypnosis again, the perimeter team would physically drag them back out. It was a crude method, but it was safe.

If they couldn’t find the Captain within a few hours, they would have no choice but to contact Austin back at Command and request heavy reinforcements…

But Shane, Marcus, and the others knew that the interior was a death trap. Sending more bodies in would only increase the danger. What if the alien entity suddenly spiked its signal output and took control of an entire platoon?

Only those who had experienced the hypnosis understood how terrifying it was. The sensation of your own body no longer belonging to you was absolute nightmare…

That insidious psychic pull was something baseline human willpower simply couldn’t resist. Only Jason had been able to fight it off and remain fully autonomous.

“Did you find anything?” Marcus asked anxiously the second he saw Shane emerge from the shadows.

Shane’s face was grim. “I swept the primary corridor. It’s clear of hazards, but there’s a massive blast door blocking the end of the hall! It looks incredibly thick and the locking mechanisms are completely sealed.”

“Can we blow it open?” Marcus asked, his jaw tight.

“Negative. That alloy is significantly denser than a bank vault door. I ran a diamond-edged combat knife across it, and it didn’t leave a single microscopic scratch.”

Shane shook his head. “We’d need heavy ordnance bunker-busters or thermobaric warheads and even then it would take multiple direct hits, but I’m afraid…”

He trailed off, his brow deeply furrowed. He didn’t want to say it out loud, but using heavy explosives could easily kill anyone trapped on the other side! What if Jason was standing right behind that door?

Marcus paused, his mind racing, before a sudden flash of inspiration hit him. “…We can use acoustics! We detonate a series of micro-charges outside the door, tapping out our unit’s unique Morse code designation! That will signal the Captain to back away from the blast radius. Once he’s clear, we hit the door with high-explosives!”

His excitement grew as the plan solidified. He keyed his communicator. “Command! Have the flagship prepare heavy breaching charges and drop them to our coordinates! And tell the engineering bays to load up the heavy industrial plasma cutters!”

It’s a very strange sensation. Jason had been wandering the labyrinthine corridors for over two hours, constantly analyzing the conflicting neurological inputs flooding his brain.

His mind was currently split into three distinct, warring signals. The first was a blaring alarm of extreme, lethal danger, screaming at him to flee immediately.

The second was a bizarre, euphoric sense of relief, whispering that if he just kept walking forward, he would step right into safety…

The third was a magnetic, hypnotic attraction, physically trying to drag him in an entirely different direction!

Of these three sensations, two were synthetic illusions projected by the alien entity, and one was his genuine, organic survival instinct.

But the lines were completely blurred. He had no way to distinguish the real from the fake.

Jason stopped in his tracks and cautiously took a few steps backward. Both the sense of danger and the euphoric relief faded slightly. He took a few steps forward again, and both sensations spiked aggressively, sending his heart rate skyrocketing.

Impressive. His heavily modified, near-infallible sixth sense had been completely neutralized.

From a purely logical standpoint, it was impossible to deduce which signal was genuine.

If the path ahead was actually the exit, then the euphoric relief was real, and the sense of danger was a synthetic illusion designed to scare him away from escaping…

But if the path ahead was a lethal trap, then the danger instinct was real, and the euphoric relief was a psychic lure designed to make him lower his guard…

Jason was caught in a flawless psychological paradox.

He stood perfectly still for a moment, thinking hard. Suddenly, he slapped the side of his helmet. A brilliant idea had just formed. He quickly patted down Henry’s tactical webbing and, to his absolute delight, found a heavy-duty industrial marker!

“Perfect.” Jason smirked. The odds had just tipped back in his favor…

The UFO wasn’t actually that massive, only about 5 kilometers in diameter. If you subtracted the outer hull sections and the core, the navigable inner ring was only about 3 kilometers across.

In such a confined space, if it weren’t for the psychic disorientation and the constantly shifting blast doors, Jason would have easily mapped his way out hours ago.

But with this marker, the game changed entirely. He could mark the bulkheads as he walked, mapping out the maze and completely negating the enemy’s spatial disorientation!

Jason smiled to himself, his morale instantly rebounding.

Trying to mind-game me won’t be that easy.

Over the next hour, the UFO remained oppressively dark and silent. There was no light, no sound only the heavy thud of Jason’s heartbeat and the steady crunch of his boots on the metal deck.

It felt like walking through a purgatorial nightmare.

However, Jason’s adrenaline was pumping. He adopted a grueling, exhaustive exploration algorithm: he would pick an unmarked corridor at random, walk down it until the psychic pressure peaked to agonizing levels, and then stop right before crossing the threshold.

Because he couldn’t tell if the threshold hid a trap or an exit, he simply marked the wall…

Then, he would turn around and choose a different, unmarked path.

Using this brute-force method, his lack of direction no longer mattered. Even completely blindfolded, he could systematically map the entire sector!

“…Wait. Isn’t this the main blast door?” Jason crouched down, shining his light on a cluster of scorch marks and spent 5.56mm casings scattered across the deck. He had walked in a massive circle and returned to square one!

By this point, he had successfully mapped the majority of the inner ring. And not once during his entire circuit had he been physically attacked.

This confirmed his theory: as long as he didn’t physically cross the threshold into the central core, he was safe. The enemy was relying entirely on psychological scare tactics!

Aside from their impressive telepathic jamming, they seemingly had no kinetic or energy-based defense systems online.

Though Jason would never admit it out loud, he knew that this telepathic interference was a devastating weapon in its own right; a standard infantry battalion would have been mind-wiped and marched to their deaths within minutes. But he was an Enhanced Superhuman… he was the anomaly!

“One, two, three…” Jason counted the markers on his makeshift map. There were exactly five thresholds where he had stopped due to overwhelming psychic pressure.

He hypothesized that if he just fired a single high-energy shot into each of those five thresholds, it wouldn’t matter if they were traps or exits, the resulting blast would rip the illusion apart and reveal the truth!

He gently patted the heavy receiver of his Gauss Rifle. “With firepower like this, I make my own exits. Thank you, Lily.”

If he didn’t have the Gauss Rifle, he truly would have been trapped at the blast door, passively waiting for Marcus and the team to dig him out, a sitting duck…

What if the squad outside is still compromised?

“Captain, we finally got a lock on you!” A voice dripping with relief suddenly crackled over his earpiece. It sounded exactly like the command officer from Noah. “That main corridor is permanently sealed, but we found a secondary ventilation shaft… Just follow the recon drone, and it’ll lead you right out!”

Jason looked up. Tucked in the upper corner of the corridor was a spider drone, its twin optical sensors glowing a bright, sterile white.

“…Copy that. Lead the way,” Jason replied smoothly into his mic.

The spider drone immediately scuttled down the wall and darted down a side passage… Jason subtly checked the map drawn on his armored glove. The drone was heading straight toward the central core!

A cold, predatory smile spread across Jason’s face. He hoisted Henry back onto his shoulder and followed the machine.

True skill breeds absolute confidence. Now that he understood the enemy’s game, he felt zero fear.

He had known for hours that his communicator were compromised. Now, he only had one objective: let the enemy lead him straight to the mastermind behind this psychological warfare, and blow it to hell!

If… I can eliminate the hostile entities barricaded inside this ship, then the Federation can claims this entire vessel intact! This is an opportunity I can’t pass up!

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