Chapter 684: Operation ’Hydra’. Part-2.
Next Day, Morning.
"Err... are you sure this is the right place?"
Lia looked around at the deserted dark valley and couldn’t help but feel confused.
"I know it’s giving quite shady vibes but... trust me, this is indeed it..."
Rio opened a rusty-looking back door to an abandoned house and walked inside with Lia following behind him and spoke.
"I came here before when I was working on those criminal hunting missions last year..."
The insides of the abandoned building were charred black, as if some household fire had burnt the entire building and destroyed all furniture inside.
Pieces of broken glass bottles were scattered on the ground, and there was even some weird graffiti made on the walls, which was likely the handiwork of those urban exploration enthusiasts.
"It’s here..."
Ignoring the chaotic mess inside the building, Rio made his way to an old carpet, used his telekinesis to slide it aside, and revealed a small magic circle carved on the ground.
Without wasting time, Rio brought out his unique S-rank lieutenant general badge from his space ring and spoke,
"Open the portal to E3444567."
As if a mechanism had been triggered, the magic circle started glowing brightly, and a portal slowly opened in front of Rio and Lia.
"Let’s go..."
Once the portal opened, both Rio and Lia entered the portal without hesitation.
...
Walking through the portal, Rio and Lia arrived at a place that seemed like a massive underground parking lot.
But unlike a normal parking lot, there were powerful cages made up of rare metals that were placed in an orderly sequence.
"This is..."
Lia’s eyes widened as an expression of disbelief appeared on her face; she could see many broken and severed strings of destinies still lingering around those cages.
And her intuition and premonition told her that nothing good ever happened in this place.
"This is a hidden experiment lab’s ’storage room’... This lab once belonged to Neo Aldif..."
"During a mission, one of the S-rankers I was hunting turned out to have deep connections with Neo Aldif and in order to escape from me, he chose this place as a hideout..."
"Although he tried his best... I managed to locate him in the end and in the process, I also found this hidden lab too..."
Neo Aldif was a horrible person, and his ambition was to rule the entire human empire on his own.
In his pursuit of finding a method to deal with Ashtel Rex, he did many inhumane experiments and created many hidden laboratories that were either made through space-folding artifacts or were located directly inside stable dungeons.
Ashtel Rex cracked down on Neo’s entire project many years ago and punished him by restricting him from not going out of the nation, but Neo never stopped.
"When I came here, these cages were filled with bones and dead bodies of all kind of creatures; it seems Link’s father had it all cleaned up by now..."
At Rio’s words, Lia took Rio’s hand, stopped looking at those cages, and spoke.
"Due to my ability to see the strings of destiny... I can sense the agony and horror caged up in this place..."
"Sigh... Neo Aldif was a horrible person... just by looking at these empty cages, I can already deduce this..."
Rio nodded his head as he started walking forward while holding Lia’s hand.
"Well... that man didn’t even hesitate to kill his own child... If he can do something like that to his own children, then there’s no knowing how far he can go when dealing with others..."
Unlike Liam, Neo used to see his summoned beasts as tools, and thus he was ready to go to any lengths to upgrade his tools even if it meant doing horrendous things to them.
"This is likely just one of his many facilities... some of them are likely still out there and we don’t even know about them..."
Rio sighed and led Lia out of this depression-filled place in a hurry and took a spiral staircase that led to the upper floors of the underground facility.
On the upper floor there was a massive door that was made up of a sturdy metal alloy.
Rio placed his lieutenant general badge in front of the scanner, and the massive door opened right away.
"It’s a good thing they have installed proper security methods here now... last time I came here, it was all just a lousy mess and even the security was nothing too special..."
"I blew my way through with brute force and didn’t even encounter much resistance..."
Lia nodded her head at Rio’s words and replied while looking around everywhere curiously.
"Well, the place was owned by an SS-ranker who was a summoner... he likely had no need to worry about security as he likely placed some powerful monster here as a guard..."
Rio immediately nodded his head at Lia after hearing those words.
"Now that I think about it... I did meet a big greenish lizard monster that seemed like a chimera made out from a wyvern or something like that... but it was kind of weak..."
"I just threw a handful of miasmas at it and its head melted away on the spot..."
Hearing those words, Lia rolled her eyes.
"Of course, it seemed weak to you... miasma control is obviously a very overpowered ability!"
"Moreover, you have got insane control over it..."
Thinking about Rio’s list of overpowered abilities, Lia felt that her prediction ability was not as fragrant anymore.
"Haha, you don’t need to be jealous you know... You have the ability to control the strings of destiny now... Even I can’t do that; that’s something you should be proud of!"
Rio didn’t want Lia to feel sad and depressed, so he didn’t tell her that his control over miasma had in fact increased by hundreds of times since back then.
"You are here..."
Just when Lia and Rio were chattering with each other, the massive door opened and Link appeared in sight.
Rio went forward and shook hands with Link, who had a complicated look on his face at the moment.
Without wasting time on short-talks, Link directly got to the main topic.
"Let’s go... everyone else is already here..."
