Horatio Cochrane suppressed the panic in his heart, immediately got up, placed the Female Hunter-Duke's legs on his shoulders, and pushed her back into the ventilation shaft from which she was about to fall.
Snap. With the click of the buckle as she loosened her belt, she successfully slipped into the ventilation duct.
Horatio immediately leaped onto the ruins and disappeared in just ten seconds.
"Hmm?"
Three Evil Cultists walked to the side where the noise had come from, only to find dead silence in the darkness, with no one in sight.
—
The two of them crawled closely in the narrow ventilation shaft; anyone more robust would likely not have been able to squeeze through.
The duct indeed stank, but it was considerably diluted by the fragrant scent emanating from the Female Hunter-Duke.
However, as soon as the distance increased slightly, the smell became quite unbearable, so Horatio could only stay as close as possible.
Adhering to the Gentleman's principle of 'see no evil,' he struggled to control his instincts, keeping his head down the entire time, avoiding looking at the round, wiggling buttocks in front of him, lest he too get stuck in the ventilation duct like the Female Hunter-Duke.
Not long after crawling forward, he felt a puddle of liquid. Using his headlamp, he peered down and saw that it was blood, and very fresh.
"Are you injured?"
"That's not my blood. The end is just ahead; I need to stop and pry open the grate. Don't stick too—"
"Hmm?!"
The Female Hunter-Duke stopped mid-sentence. Horatio Cochrane, who had been looking down almost the entire time, suddenly raised his head, and his thermal imaging device directly bumped forward, poking him in the eye socket.
After enduring a not-so-long but agonizing crawl through the duct, both landed safely.
"Ow, ow, ow!" Horatio Cochrane squeezed out, rubbing his red eye socket.
As the pain in his eye socket slightly lessened, the scene before him gradually changed from blurry to clear.
"Uh, that..."
He saw the Female Hunter-Duke's face flushed with anger, gritting her teeth, looking fiercely as if she wanted to devour him alive.
"Let me state first, I absolutely did not intend to take advantage of you. It's just that you hadn't finished speaking when you—"
Horatio Cochrane instinctively crouched down, dodging a punch, but was instantly kicked down by the Female Hunter-Duke, a silenced gun muzzle pointed directly at his face.
"Calm down! Calm down!" Horatio Cochrane spread his hands helplessly: "I apologize."
The Female Hunter-Duke stared with a cold, disgusted expression at Horatio Cochrane, who sat on the ground with a wronged, bitter smile. Her crimson lips moved slightly, wanting to curse, but she ultimately held back and holstered her pistol.
Horatio Cochrane had just let out a sigh of relief when—bang!
The Female Hunter-Duke suddenly turned, her pistol twirled between her slender fingers, and was instantly inserted into its holster.
Horatio Cochrane lowered his head towards the sound coming from beneath him. The soft earth in front of his crotch was mounded up, and a steaming black hole was clearly visible.
"Next time, the bullet will land five centimeters behind this spot."
[Five centimeters behind...]
Horatio Cochrane gasped, looking at the spot five centimeters behind, and said with a bitter smile, "Good marksmanship..."
He stood up, patted the dust off his clothes, and swallowed, looking at the large, ugly mutated bat corpse on the ground.
He wondered if it was due to long-term Lower Hive pollution or if it was simply the species.
This mutated bat weighed at least seven or eight pounds, and its size was like a baby's bolster pillow. Such a large mammal of the order Chiroptera would be impossible to see on Ancient Terra. Even if he had encountered it for the first time in such a confined environment, he probably would have screamed in terror like her.
Horatio Cochrane's gaze fell back on the Female Hunter-Duke, who was currently pressing against the wall, surveying the situation. This girl, born with a silver spoon in her mouth, performed excellently and was by no means a mere gilded ornamental pillow.
The Female Hunter-Duke outwardly dismissed Horatio Cochrane's praise, but a sense of pride had already welled up in her heart, as if silently expressing, 'Who am I? How could my marksmanship be poor?'
"What are you still standing there for? Come to the front," the girl's impatient urging came from ahead.
Horatio Cochrane became serious again, drew a silencer from his tactical pouch, screwed it onto the gun barrel, and walked ahead of the girl, pressing against the wall, on alert.
He frowned slightly, realizing there was a sweet, cloying fragrance in the air that, just by smelling it, made one's heart stir with desire.
Horatio Cochrane found it hard to say he hadn't felt some strange excitement.
He could clearly smell the mixture of the girl's perfume and incense, which considerably diluted the cloying scent in the air, and his heart didn't feel as itchy.
The Female Hunter-Duke remained serious, seemingly completely unaffected by the strange fragrance.
[Well, maybe she's just used to high-end perfumes.]
She remained vigilant at all times, using advanced technological devices to determine if there were enemies around the corner and the probability of risk.
After a patrol of dozens of Evil Cultists noisily walked by.
She used the vital signs augury to confirm the safety of their path, then patted Horatio Cochrane's shoulder, and the two began to tiptoe slowly forward.
Beep beep—dee-doo-doo
Ahead was a room, with the words 'Monks' Restroom' vaguely carved on an old, decaying wooden sign, but it had clearly been repurposed, and constant radio waves emanated from within.
Suddenly, Horatio Cochrane raised his right fist, which meant 'Stop!'
An Evil Cultist was walking towards them. Horatio Cochrane moved his index finger from the trigger guard to the trigger, ready for action.
The person entered the room. The door wasn't fully closed, leaving a narrow gap, and the lights inside were bright.
Horatio Cochrane made a circular motion in the air with two fingers, indicating the danger was clear, and signaled the Female Hunter-Duke to follow.
Upon reaching the wall beside the door, Horatio Cochrane pushed his thermal imager up to peer through the door crack, while the Female Hunter-Duke maintained front and rear vigilance.
[This is... a dispatch room? It seems to be a dedicated line, so it wasn't interfered with.]
He gestured to indicate the room's function: four people, and he suspected there might be some clues inside.
'Enter, be mindful of noise.'
She patted Horatio Cochrane's back twice and gave a thumbs up.
Horatio Cochrane carefully moved to the other side of the door, forming a cross pattern, looked at the Female Hunter-Duke, and nodded slightly, which meant 'countdown.'
Three...
Two...
...
One!
Horatio Cochrane elbowed the door open, extended his gun barrel into the room, and rapidly pulled the trigger. Three soft clicks accompanied three thuds of bodies falling.
Almost simultaneously, the Female Hunter-Duke pulled her trigger from the opposite side, killing the remaining radio operators who had just reacted with two shots.
'Safe, enter,' Horatio Cochrane gestured.
The wiring inside was complex, with cables laid everywhere, like a data center in a mining rig factory.
Horatio Cochrane entered first, pushed aside the radio operator silently slumped on the desk, confirmed he was dead, and immediately checked the communicator.
The Female Hunter-Duke inspected the three people Horatio Cochrane had killed and couldn't help but take a deep breath.
All were hit precisely in the head within less than three seconds of reaction time, clean and precise, dead with one shot.
Thinking about how she had just shown off her marksmanship in front of this guy, it now seemed like teaching a fish to swim.
Horatio Cochrane only started speaking after confirming there were no ongoing communications in the entire room for the moment.
"My marksmanship isn't bad either, is it?" he said with a deliberate chuckle, seeing the Female Hunter-Duke's reaction to inspecting the bodies.
The Female Hunter-Duke's face flushed, her crimson lips parted slightly, but then quickly bit down, trying to diminish the sense of shame lingering in her mind.
Horatio Cochrane cleared his throat and immediately returned to a serious demeanor, saying:
"These are dedicated lines, routed to another receiving station, and then manually transferred to the target from there. So we can't use this to call the Adeptus Arbites. A distress call would be filtered out and expose our whereabouts. Usually, there's more than one dispatch room."
"Get that storage board next to the dead guy, don't throw it away!" The Female Hunter-Duke stood thoughtfully before an old, bulky Thinker Array.
Horatio Cochrane raised an eyebrow, pointing to something shaped like an oversized graphics card.
"This?"
"Yes."
He was unsure, but very shocked. In the 41st Millennium, humans actually made storage boards as big as large bricks!
Considering the setting of this world, perhaps there really was a human brain inside this thing serving as wetware.
[Alright, no wonder she said not to throw it away. Afraid the brain would get dizzy, huh?]
"So, you plan to copy all the communication records from inside?" Horatio Cochrane inserted the large brick into the slot.
'++ Command: Access Data ++'
'++ Command: Process Data ++'
'++ Command: Encrypt Data ++'
'++ Command: Retention Start ++'
'1%...'
'3%...'
'6%...'
"I'm going to root out all the corruption related to today's incident," the Female Hunter-Duke said coldly, "and then execute them personally."
"This thing is too big, it's not conducive to our future operations."
The Female Hunter-Duke clearly didn't take Horatio Cochrane's advice seriously, continuing to input the copy code.
Horatio Cochrane sighed, turned around, and looked at the vast number of communication scrolls before him, a sudden idea sparking in his mind.
Since the Precognition Shard could help him foresee how events would unfold, could it also guide him on which key information to collect?
With a 'let's try it' mentality, Horatio Cochrane closed his eyes and entered the dark space.
'+ Activate: Precognition Shard +'
'+ Energy: 3 / 6 +'
'+ Psionic Power: 3 / 6 +'
'+ Corruption: 3 / 6 +'
'+ Soulfire: 3 / 20 +'
Horatio Cochrane looked at the panel and noticed some clues.
It seemed that as long as he personally wielded a weapon to kill enemies, he would also absorb the Soulfire of the deceased.
Moreover, judging by the still ample Psionic Power reserve, the original owner seemed to have entered a high psionic environment, even without Horatio Cochrane himself realizing it.
[Let me see what information would be more helpful to me.]
Three scenes flashed before Horatio Cochrane's eyes.
Two of them revealed letters placed in different corners of the room, while the third scene showed the patrol discovering the horrifying scene in the carriage and raising the alarm.
Horatio Cochrane took a deep breath, his brows furrowed tightly, and immediately turned to ask the Female Hunter-Duke, "How much longer?"
"Ten minutes, probably."
With no time to think, he immediately moved, searching for the location of the letters in the first two scenes.
They were all anonymous letters.
'Those supplies are ready; all that's left is for you to fulfill your promise to us.'
[This looks like a letter from a port gang.]
Horatio Cochrane pinched his chin, his brows deeply furrowed.
It was too common for Evil Cultists to buy supplies from port gangs. The gangs might not even know these people were Evil Cultists; as long as there was money to be made, they were willing to take risks.
Was this really valuable information?
Horatio Cochrane threw the letter back, but it made a muffled sound that paper shouldn't make.
Picking up the envelope again, he found a silver coin inside. The coin was imprinted with a bizarre vulture-man, leaning on a cane, with empty eyes, exuding an unspoken horror.
[Privately minted silver coin?] Horatio Cochrane examined the silver coin at his fingertips.
No, this thing looked more like some kind of token, rather than being minted to counterfeit currency.
Although he didn't know its purpose, he decided to pocket the silver coin first.
Next, Horatio Cochrane came to a locked cabinet, aimed his gun at the keyhole, and pulled the trigger.
Inside, it looked no different from an ordinary storage cabinet, but Horatio Cochrane saw the hidden small mechanism through the Precognition Shard.
He reached into the cabinet and twisted the knob on the top of the cabinet.
Click—
A small storage cabinet opened on the wall.
With this level of disguise, it would be difficult for an ordinary person to find this mechanism, after all, who opens a cabinet and then feels around on top?
"What's that?" The Female Hunter-Duke heard the movement and walked towards the hidden cabinet.
"I don't know, it should be a very crucial secret letter."
The Female Hunter-Duke looked suspicious, casually took out one of the scrolls from it, and opened it.
"Holy Emperor..." She immediately gasped.
Horatio Cochrane leaned in beside her. The content made his brows furrow to the extreme.
"Horatio Cochrane will be escorted from the prison to the Adeptus Arbites fortress in three days. The transport vehicle has been dispatched, tail number XXXXXXX, two escorts, Adeptus Arbites Specialist: Farida Hood."
Just two short lines, but the amount of information was already immense.
Farida Hood stood still, her pupils trembling with disbelief.
Even without a signature, the sender's position was self-evident, given how detailed the information about this seemingly insignificant Adeptus Arbites escort operation was.
Farida Hood took two steps back, exhaling a long, rapid, muffled breath.
"I didn't expect to have been completely calculated three days ago..." She sat on the table.
Horatio Cochrane retrieved the letter from her hand.
Even though he knew there was an internal mole in the Adeptus Arbites, she certainly wouldn't believe him if he, as a prisoner, told her. If he were escorted back to the Adeptus Arbites and told others, he would surely be immediately dealt with for various reasons.
Now, it was good. She had seen it with her own eyes, and the evidence was conclusive.
Whoosh—whoosh—
Suddenly, the emergency lights came on, and a rapid alarm sounded.
"What happened?! Did they find out we were copying communications?" Farida Hood stood on alert with her gun, her composure broken by the sudden alarm.
"No."
Horatio Cochrane, who already knew about this situation, remained quite calm: "They just found that transport vehicle. We've got the intelligence; we need to retreat."
Suddenly, a sharp, evil, and undulating speech blared from the broadcast.
"My dear brothers and Sisters, those two sacrifices escaped after killing several of our comrades, but they surely won't get far! The Dark Prince will curse them! Take up arms and find them! Exchange their hearts and bodily fluids for the blessings of the Lord of Pleasure!"
"They've started mobilizing."
"Almost! Just wait!"
Farida Hood lay prone before the Thinker Array, her emerald eyes reflecting the light, and beads of sweat constantly rolled down her gracefully curved chin.
'91%...'
'93%...'
Horatio Cochrane stood behind the door, holding his gun on alert. He could already hear the dense, hurried footsteps coming from the corridor.