Hugo, still connected to the internet, checked the encyclopedia and asked, "Are inhibitors used during Omegas' estrus? I see it says long-acting inhibitors have irreversible side effects, and short-term inhibitors aren't guaranteed to be effective, with a 10% chance of developing sequelae... Uh, there are quite a few Alphas on this ship, right?"
Igor didn't know what he remembered. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. After a while, he said, "Yes, so I want to solve it as soon as possible."
Then he noticed something was wrong: "The man who just left was a crew member? He didn't do anything to you, did he?"
Hugo: "I think you should ask Azathoth if he did anything to him."
Igor was stunned.
Azathoth had donned his hood again, emitting a gloomy aura. A tangle of dark, knotted tentacles surrounded him, twitching occasionally as they struggled to free themselves, a look of profound vigilance.
Igor thought for a long time why Azathoth's tentacles were tied in a knot, but to no avail.
Then, even though he was still furious, he tentatively pointed at the tentacles and asked, "Would you like me to help..."?
Before he could finish his words, the tentacles swarmed in front of him, struggling impatiently. Azathoth was still sitting upright in his chair. From Igor's perspective, he could only see his beautifully shaped jawline and tightly pursed lips.
“…”
For some reason, the anger and sadness in my heart subsided a bit, and I felt like laughing. Igor knelt on one knee and meticulously untied the intricate knots one by one. When he was done, he couldn't help but flick the tip of one of the tentacle with his index finger. The tentacle shuddered, and as if in disgust, it rubbed the spot Igor had flicked against his suit pants.
Igor's lips curled up for a moment, but his master quickly controlled his movements. He stood up and saluted, saying, "I will redeem them for their offenses one by one. Please wait a moment."
"The captain's cabin and cockpit are yours." Azathoth was sulking with himself—he would never tie knots for himself again. "I'll take care of the rest."
Hugo had lost his army of millions of bionic people. As a technician, he didn't dare to interrupt in such an occasion. He could only whisper, "Actually, I can do it too. Give me two."
Do you think you are cutting watermelon?
Igor responded calmly. His right leg was still bandaged, but it seemed as if he had no sense of pain and it didn't affect his movements at all. He quickly disappeared around the corner of the corridor outside the rest cabin with his saber in hand.
Hugo finally felt like the AI villain in a human-written movie. "The network on their ship has an internal positioning function, probably to determine the location of each crew member so the captain can arrange their positions." As he spoke, the map was projected again, dotted with flashing red dots. "The two closest to us are the ones next door. Azathoth, who do you want to start with?"
Azathoth's answer was also very straightforward: "It depends on who is more unlucky."
**
Kirk felt that he was quite unlucky today.
Being punched and unable to fight back was one thing, but now, lying in bed, he couldn't do anything. He'd been chatting with his roommate, Eddie, for a while, but ever since he came back from the next room and climbed onto the upper bunk, he'd been completely silent, as if dead. He called out a few times, but there was no response. With a headache too much to get out of bed, he simply grabbed the nearby mobile device and connected to the wireless network to check the news.
Checking the news is also annoying.
The Internet is now flooded with wanted posters for Marshal Igor Sullivan. People have dug up his life and past deeds and put them under a magnifying glass to comment on them. Hindsighters and keyboard warriors are emerging in an endless stream. In a day, there can be hundreds or eighty commentators analyzing the battle situation and questioning Igor's desertion.
The commentator's article Kirk was reading was titled "Analyzing the Inevitability of Igor Sullivan's Treason from His Conflict with Viscount Joyce Five Years Ago."
Bullshit. Kirk closed the article without even reading it.
He wasn't a fan of Marshal Sullivan. Quite the contrary, Kirk had loathed him immensely during Igor's reign, even going so far as to go to Marshal Sullivan's fan club with five or six other accounts and publicly spam him with insults against his entire family—even though Igor's entire family currently consisted of only the Marshal himself.
But rather than saying that he hated Marshal Sullivan, it would be more accurate to say that this interstellar pirate who lived at the bottom of society hated all people in high positions of power, including those commentators who made fortunes by talking big with their pens without doing anything.
"Damn Igor Sullivan." Kirk cursed, turned over in bed and threw the mobile terminal aside, "And this article, which is so wasteful that it would be a waste to print it on toilet paper..." He turned over a little too hard and accidentally swept the potted plant on top of the bedside table to the ground.
"Damn it!" His hand was numb from the pain of hitting the flowerpot. The floor of the rest cabin was a mess, covered with broken soil and stones, as well as Eddie's nosebleed. Kirk endured the throbbing pain in his forehead and sat up, shouting, "Eddie! Don't lie down anymore. Are you dead asleep? Come down and help me clean up!"
His roommate still didn't give an answer.
Kirk had to do it himself. The gauze on his face blocked half of his vision, and he couldn't find his shoes, so he had to go barefoot. Kirk bent down with an angry look on his face and tried to pick up the broken porcelain pieces on the ground.
At this moment, the ground beneath my feet suddenly shook.
"Hmm?" Kirk paused for a moment, sensing the vibrations. He realized it wasn't an illusion. The ground was indeed vibrating slightly but at a high frequency. He wouldn't have noticed it, but the dirt that had just fallen to the ground was being shaken up and bouncing around on the smooth deck.
Before he could straighten up and hold onto the edge of the bed, the dark green plant that had fallen to the side began to stir. Kirk looked over and was shocked to find that the dark brown branches of the potted plant, which had originally been only the thickness of a finger, had grown several times larger. Now the main trunk was as thick as an adult's arm and continued to extend forward.
It should have been a delicate and lovely plant, but when magnified, it was hideous. Its rough bark was covered with strange, tangled veins, and its nodes were covered with protruding, worm-like knots. Kirk felt his stomach turn sour just by looking at it through the gauze. He screamed and stumbled back in the opposite direction.
His shouting actually attracted the thing's attention, and a slightly smaller branch with dense knots changed direction and tentatively grew towards Kirk.
"Don't come over here! What the hell is that?!" Kirk roared, backing away to the bedside, where he slammed into the metal edge with a thud. Then the overhead light flickered, and his vision blurred as something heavy fell from the upper bunk, rolling softly twice on the floor.
——It’s Eddie.
Kirk's roommate lay motionless, his eyes wide open, his head bloodied and unresponsive despite falling from the upper bunk, over two meters high. Blood streamed from his face, filling the cracks in the floor.
Crew member Kirk's lips trembled and he could no longer utter a sound.
When the terrifying plant branches were right in front of him, he realized that it was not the potted plant that fell from the bedside table that had grown bigger, but the tentacles of some creature that had occupied this small cabin and was preparing to rapidly expand the entire spacecraft as its territory for the next period of time.
The moment he realized this, the taut string in his brain suddenly broke, and his consciousness gradually faded away. The last image reflected in his vision was a black mud-like life form that flooded the entire rest cabin. One of the tentacles came to his bed and picked up the mobile terminal with a screen that was constantly flashing with updated news from next to the pillow.
At the same time, Igor Sullivan, the protagonist who dominated the headlines, silently entered the password to open the door of the cab.
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