Eagle Sauce: The 055 destroyer was launched into the sea just after the founding of the country?

Chapter 928

The Secretary of State's almost soul-searching question, "Who can tell me the solution?" echoed for a long time in the oval conference room, which felt as if all the air had been sucked out.

Even the air conditioner vents seemed to be covered with an invisible layer of frost.

In the corner, someone sat in an armchair in the shadows—a place that made people feel uneasy even when they weren't speaking. Someone slowly turned a page of a document.

"Actually, it's not really...unsolvable."

The sound was very soft, with a slightly hoarse quality, like sandpaper rubbing against an old record.

Everyone's eyes, like moths finding a source of light in the darkness, were instantly drawn to that spot.

CIA Director Allen Dulles (let's just call him that, meow) slowly closed the folder bearing the top-secret red seal. He was very thin, his sunken cheeks making him look somewhat like a well-maintained skeleton. His gold-rimmed glasses reflected a non-existent glimmer of light.

He didn't stand up, but casually twirled the pen in his hand.

“I’ve seen the photo Major Hansen brought back. It’s quite artistic, isn’t it?” He twitched the corner of his mouth slightly, as if he were smiling, but it also looked like a twitch of his facial muscles. “Those black metal sheets look familiar. If you’re not too old to remember those videotapes we saw in Kyoto, you should be able to recall something called ‘Heavenly Soldiers of China.’”

“That thing is white and smaller. And these…” He tapped the black-and-white photograph on the table with his pen cap, as if pinning an insect to a specimen, “are clearly downgraded versions. They’re bulkier, but also more suitable for those Cuban monkeys to operate.”

"Stop lecturing us on mecha appreciation!"

The hot-tempered four-star army general loosened his tie in frustration.

“Allen, we know that thing belongs to the Chinese. But the problem is, as you saw, my entire armored regiment of main battle tanks is nothing in front of them. Armor-piercing shells bounce off like cheese... Ordinary equipment? I’ve thought of all the big guns we can mobilize in Europe. Unless I want to sink half the Caribbean Sea, it’s hopeless.”

The other generals nodded in agreement, their faces filled with the helplessness of heroes who are now powerless.

"Indeed. Conventional chemical weapons are outdated."

Dulles nodded; he wasn't angry, and even seemed more composed.

"We can't break through that shell because we're competing with the hardness of a rock."

"But what if we don't compete with it in terms of toughness, but rather in terms of... 'survival'?"

He stood up. From his black leather bag—a small suitcase that looked a bit like those used by barefoot doctors in the last century—he took out another file folder.

The file folder was yellow. There were no markings whatsoever, except for a string of seemingly random numbers.

He didn't start with a long preamble like a politician would. He simply ripped open the seal on the file folder with a loud "rip," which was particularly jarring in the quiet room.

I pulled out a few photos. They were in color. But the colors were so vibrant they were almost nauseating.

He slid the photos one by one, like dealing playing cards, in front of the Secretary of State and the generals.

"vomit……"

The general, who had previously appeared tough, instinctively covered his mouth when he looked down at the first photo, and almost spat out his breakfast toast.

There are no high-tech precision instruments in the photo.

Instead, it was a huge room separated by transparent special glass.

The floor of the room was covered with a thick, moss-like, flesh-colored organic substance, and in the very center of it, something was lying.

It has a human-like shape. It roughly has four limbs and a protrusion that looks like a head.

But it had no skin. Bunches of dark red, thick muscle fibers, like pythons, were exposed directly to the air. On its back, there were not only those protruding bone spurs, but also several tentacle tubes that grew out of its spine, their ends dripping some kind of green mucus.

Even more terrifying was its mouth. The gaping maw stretched all the way to its ears, with two rows of serrated, shark-like teeth exposed without any cover, and a forked, dark purple tongue that was long enough to lick its own chest.

It was grabbing a bull. A fully grown bull, probably weighing half a ton, was being held in its massive claws, as large as an excavator bucket, like we were grabbing a hamburger. Half of the bull's body was gone, only its head was sticking out desperately. The bloody scene, coupled with the creature's expression of enjoyment, was so impactful that the black-and-white mecha photo looked like child's play.

"What's this?!"

Senator Thomas gripped the photograph with white fingers, as if he were holding a red-hot iron, his voice filled with pure, visceral fear, "This is... a monster that came out of that disgusting Halloween movie?"

"Code name 'Tyrant'... no, that's too common."

Dulles shrugged, his tone as nonchalant as if he were introducing a new lawnmower.

"Our scientists—of course, thanks in large part to Joseph's friends—prefer to call it 'Atlas,' the god in Greek mythology who was so strong he could lift the sky."

“Atlas? This thing?” The Secretary of State had regained some composure by now. He stared at the blood-soaked monster in the photo, his brows furrowing even more deeply. “It’s… a human in disguise?”

"He used to be. A death row inmate. Strong, violent, with no superfluous thoughts in his mind. This is exactly the perfect breeding ground we need."

Dulles adjusted his glasses.

“You know what’s in that ‘refrigerator’ in Area 51. That thing dug out of the desert, even though it’s been dead for thousands of years, every single cell in it is still screaming. We and the Russian experts extracted a bit of that… what we call the ‘prototype’ gene fragment.”

"Ordinary viruses only cause runny noses. But this thing... it can rewrite God's code."

He snapped his fingers. The projection screen behind him automatically lowered.

A blurry black-and-white experimental video begins to play.

In the scene, the "Atlas," which was originally chained by more than a dozen alloy steel chains, was injected with a vial of that glowing blue liquid, and only a few seconds later...

Its muscles began to writhe wildly as if rats were burrowing beneath it. Its body instantly swelled up significantly, and the crisp sound of the steel chains being pulled apart could be heard even through the video recording.

Then, "Smack!"

A steel chain as thick as an arm was easily broken by it, as easily as tearing off a hair.

It jumped up. It jumped higher than the ceiling.

A staff member accidentally walked into the frame, holding a shotgun like the ones used in Counter-Strike, and fired two shots at its faceless chest.

Several bloody holes. The blood that spurted out was black.

But the monster only paused for a moment. The muscle fibers around those bloody wounds seemed to have a mind of their own, quickly intertwining like a zipper, closing and healing at a visible speed, until only a piece of newly grown pink flesh remained.

Then it pounced on it.

The footage was cut off. A wise edit, omitting the part that would keep me up at night the most.

“My God…” Patterson took off his glasses and rubbed his throbbing temples. “This…this thing…this is immoral. This is completely against human ethics. This isn’t a weapon, this is a sin.”

"When your enemy is about to trample your lawn with God-armed mechs." Patterson

For the first time, Dulles's voice gained some warmth, a warmth more terrifying than the previous coldness, carrying a rational fanaticism.

"Morality is the most expensive sacrificial offering."

"It doesn't need training. It has no fear. Its prefrontal cortex has been removed, leaving only the most primal killing instincts and the dog-like instinct of obedience guided by specific pheromones that we implanted in its cerebellum."

"Its skin looks soft, doesn't it? No. Its muscle density is fifty times that of a normal human. A regular rifle shot would be like a tickle. More importantly—"

Dulles pointed to the few wounds that had just healed in the video.

"When it's hungry, that's when it's at its strongest."

"Whether it's a dead cow, or... enemies on the battlefield, whether they're already dead or not quite dead yet."

"Just feed it. It can recover most of its injuries in about ten minutes."

"This is a perpetual motion machine. A perpetual motion machine made of flesh and blood."

The meeting room fell silent once more. But this silence was different from the despair of before. It was a complex emotion, a mixture of longing for new hope and an instinctive loathing for this beast released from its cage.

"You're saying it can deal with that kind of mech?"

Finally, the army general asked in a tone tinged with distrust and skepticism, "They can tear apart tanks. This thing... it's just a body covered in rotten flesh..."

“We’ve done simulations.”

Dulles produced the last chart.

"Its claws...those keratinized bone claws. Their hardness is close to 9 on the Mohs scale. Although not as hard as diamond, they are harder than most steel plates. And its explosive power—after that genetic lock that was locked at the limit of human strength was violently pried open by that alien gene—its pounce had an impact force of more than ten tons."

"Those mechs are indeed very tough. But the more sophisticated the machine, the more vulnerable it is to this kind of unreasonable violence. As long as 'Atlas'... or rather, our little darlings pounce on it."

He made a gesture of closing his ten fingers, like a carnivorous flower closing its petals.

"We don't need to break through its shell. We can disassemble its joints. Tear off its hydraulic lines. We can even pry the driver out of that shell... like prying a snail out."

"Aren't you just worried about not being able to make any progress in Cuba?"

Dulles laughed, a laugh that was even more chilling than the monster he had shown in the photograph.

“There’s a whole beach of… ‘meat.’ Both ours and theirs.”

"Moreover, this jungle environment is the best hunting ground for us to test these top predators."

“We have dozens more of these…test subjects. I think that should be enough to give Fang Yu’s toys a biology lesson on what ‘survival of the fittest’ means.”

The Secretary of State did not turn around; he faced the still-dark night outside the window.

His face, expressionless but with a certain bottom line completely broken, was reflected in the smooth glass.

He remained silent for about a minute.

Until the breathing in the meeting room almost stopped.

"Sign it."

He closed his eyes and waved his hand.

"Move that... damn 'zoo' over there."

"But I don't want to know the details. Nor do I want to know what they ate."

"I just want to see the results."

"See, the steel toys of the Chinese people have been reduced to fragments."