Chapter 514: Another Negotiation
Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation
A few hours later, when the sun went down completely and the entire New York City began to clean up the tragic battlefield, Chen Chen was standing high above the New York City Hall at this time.
Below him, thousands of soldiers stood guard in front of the city hall, with tanks lined up and guns poking out like a hedgehog’s quills.
However, to tell the truth, those people in the city hall would not believe that these soldiers could deter Chen Chen at all. They were more like self-deceiving ostriches, used to give them a bit of courage.
“Boom!”
With a dull landing “thud”, Chen Chen jumped from a high alt.i.tude and stood in front of the gate of the city hall guarded by countless soldiers. These soldiers seemed to be taken aback in fright. They raised their guns and aimed at Chen Chen.
“Lower your weapons, all of you, lower them now!”
The commander in charge only felt his scalp turn numb. He quickly called on his subordinates to put down their guns and steeled his nerves before walking toward Chen Chen.
When he was four or five meters away from Chen Chen, he stopped, and at the same time, raised his right hand to make a military salute, shouting, “Northern American Independent Division Commander, Colonel Gibbon Claire reporting to you. Please wait a moment. Our Mr. Mayor will come right away.”
As he was speaking, a white-haired man showed up at the gate with a group of city hall officials. Although they tried their best to keep calm, if one looked closely, one could still see the panic in their eyes.
This group of people walked in slowly, but when they walked to Claire, they would not go any further. Only the white-haired man heading them bit the bullet and walked in front of Chen Chen. He stretched out his hand stiffly. “I’m the Mayor of New York City, Sapir Ashburn, who welcomes you on behalf of Northern America...”
Seeing this, Chen Chen stretched out his hand and shook the other man’s hand lightly. When he did so, he could feel the man in front of him trembling.
“Ashburn, you may call me ‘the Watchman’.”
“So, so you’re Sir Watchman...”
Upon hearing this, Mayor Ashburn hurriedly said with a forced smile, “Now please come in with us. I’m in charge of the friendly negotiation between the two sides on behalf of Northern America.”
Chen Chen nodded and allowed the other man to withdraw his palm and then he walked towards the city hall at the servile invitation from Mayor Ashburn.
Although Chen Chen was now practically a humanoid nuclear bomb, he still needed to be cautious. Before entering the city hall, he used the Field to go deep into the city hall and only walked in after first making sure that there were no killer maneuvers in the city hall.
Under the mayor’s personal guidance, Chen Chen and a group of officials were taken to a conference room. Chen Chen took a seat on one side of the conference table and the rest of the people sat on the opposite side reluctantly.
“I wonder if you want coffee or some other beverage?”
Mayor Ashburn asked again.
“There’s no need for that.”
Chen Chen casually waved one hand. “I’ve shown you my sincerity to talk to you. Now, it’s enough that you tell me when I can get the other Ark.”
“This...”
Hearing that, everyone’s expression changed and Mayor Ashburn smiled bitterly. “If you understand our human civilization, then you should understand that the other Ark in the world is not in Northern America. Rather, it’s in Europe, which doesn’t belong to the same polity as us.”
“Of course, I know this.”
Chen Chen nodded. “But I also know that the European region has always followed Northern America blindly. If you ask them to hand over the Ark, they have no reason to refuse. Am I right?”
“This...”
Everyone hesitated.
Hearing this, Mayor Ashburn looked even more agonized. He was about to argue that this was not the case, but Chen Chen suddenly narrowed his eyes, and a cold glint shone in his gaze.
As if understanding that Chen Chen was not a gullible person, Mayor Ashburn shuddered all over. He nodded painfully. “I understand, I’ll report this condition to my superiors...”
“You’re wasting my time, Mayor Ashburn!”
However, as Mayor Ashburn said these words, Chen Chen’s expression turned to ice. He slowly stood up and an invisible force restrained the entire conference room.
In an instant, everyone’s throats were strangled. They kept touching their necks, but found that there was nothing there!
“If you can’t represent the Northern American government, then let someone else at a higher level, who can make decisions, do it.”
Chen Chen said in a deep voice as he walked step by step to Ashburn, “I’ve shown enough sincerity and even condescended to come to meet you, but you said, ‘report to my superiors’...
“Are you kidding around with me?”
As Chen Chen spoke, Ashburn only felt his throat tighten. He could not help but gasp, but no matter how he gasped, the air seemed to be solidified and he could not draw any air into his lungs at all!
“Uhh... Ughh...”
Ashburn kept scrabbling at his throat with both hands. He wanted to explain, but there was no sound in the depths of his throat. He could only show a pleading expression and stare at Chen Chen’s eyes.
When Ashburn felt that he was about to die from suffocation, finally, his throat suddenly loosened, and then he collapsed to the ground as his body turned limp, gasping for breath!
“Huff, Sir Watchman... Huff, I’m really sorry...”
Ashburn quickly justified, “I a.s.sure you that you’ll get that European Ark in 30 days. 30 days and I will do as I say!”
“No, not just one.”
Chen Chen continued to speak and he stared at the other man condescendingly from above. “There are two. You must also dismantle the one on Mars, transport it back, and hand it over to me.”
“... Yes!”
Seeing this, Ashburn had no choice but to nod.
“Very good, so the deal is concluded.”
Seeing this, Chen Chen smiled again. He pulled the other man up from the ground and looked around at the horrified group. “If 30 days later, I still don’t get what I want, then I promise that the entire human civilization will suffer from an unprecedented attack...
“And this time, it won’t be as easily resolved as today...”
With that, Chen Chen cracked an icy smile at all of them, then turned around. The window behind him suddenly shattered.
Then, Chen Chen stepped forward. His figure took off directly and flew out of the window.
“Boom!”
As a deafening wave of air came from outside the window, Chen Chen went directly into a supersonic state and disappeared into the night sky.
It was not until Chen Chen left that everyone crawled out from under the table in pathetic embarra.s.sment. At the same time, there was a commotion of running outside the door. The next second, a crowd of soldiers with live ammunition rushed in.
“You can stop being on guard. He’s already left.”
Ashburn’s face looked stormy. He waved his hands at the many soldiers and asked them to withdraw. Then, he sat down on the chair in front of him in dazed shock.
In the next second, the screen in front of the conference room automatically turned on, revealing the scene in another conference room.
“It looks like you failed.”
In the video, it was the figures of the previous group of high-ranking officials in the White House. Obviously, the previous negotiation had been under observation.
“It’s terrible, Mr. President.”
Ashburn shook his head with a dejected expression. “The countermeasures we prepared for various situations didn’t come into play at all. Even the best negotiators, psychologists, and behavior a.n.a.lysts didn’t come in handy because he didn’t have any intention of negotiating with us at all. He was only here to state his request.”
“We understand that he does have such a right when there’s a huge gap in our power.”
In the video, the middle-aged man sitting in the first seat nodded and then he looked at everyone again. “His previous words pointed out that the attack before this was just a show of strength. If we can’t hand over the Arks within 30 days, he’ll take more drastic measures...”
“All this is secondary. I’ve noticed something even scarier.”
Suddenly, the Secretary of Defense, who had been silent, said in a low voice, “You should’ve also seen that the strange armor that he had on before was not worn during the negotiation, but he can still fly around to such an extent. Doesn’t that mean...”
The Secretary of Defense was silent for a while before continuing to say with some difficulty, “Doesn’t that mean that he didn’t rely on science and technology to fly? Could it be that the previous destructive power that readily demolished tall buildings was all his own?
“If this is the case, it’d be too frightening...”
The president of Northern America wore a more solemn expression. “Superpowers? Or is it the ‘spiritual powers’ he mentioned before? Can the Department of Defense a.n.a.lyze this?”
“I’m afraid that we’ll have to wait for experts to arrive on Wall Street and Times Square before we can judge.”
The Secretary of Defense replied, “Now the only shame is that he didn’t drink water, let alone contaminate any objects on the negotiating table, otherwise, we can extract his DNA for a.n.a.lysis to find out the secrets of this ‘Watchman’...”
“He was also guarding against all that. It seems that we can only contact the European authorities.”
Seeing this, the middle-aged man in charge, as the president of Northern America, finally made up his mind. He looked at the Minister of Foreign Affairs and said, “Contact Europe as soon as possible and convince them to give up the ‘Ark’. And here in New York City, you can continue to think about how to contact the other party and see if you can find any new opportunities...”
“Yes...”
Ashburn nodded.
Immediately, the screen in the conference room flashed again and completely shut down.
...
At this time, after a period of flying, Chen Chen crossed a distance of several thousand kilometers and returned to the sky above Papoose Lake in Nevada.
The reason he had to use a roundabout way to attack the Doom dimension and capture the “Ark” instead of taking the most usual way of directly extracting the “Ark” from the USB flash drive was that there was no specific equipment for the “Ark” in the movie.
At most, there was the “water ball” that appeared in the movie. As the “Ark” activated, the water ball would wrap around the pa.s.senger in front of it and then vanish directly with a “whoosh”.
When the pa.s.senger came back to their senses, they had already arrived at the other Ark on Mars.
As the Ark was not shown from beginning to end, Chen Chen could not use the first method of direct extraction, so he opened the portal and used the second form of the USB drive to enter the world of Doom and seize it himself.
Now it seemed that all this was going well. He also discovered a shocking secret. It turned out that not every world opened by the USB flash drive was post-apocalyptic. This could be said to be Chen Chen’s biggest discovery after obtaining the USB flash drive.
At this time, Chen Chen came back to the sky above the Ark Experimental Base. As the underground pa.s.sage opened again, Chen Chen took the elevator back to the interior of the base.
“Sir Commander, I know everything you’ve done through the Internet.”
As soon as he returned to the Ark Experimental Base, the voice of X-112 came again. “At the same time, Northern America is constantly trying to wrest back control of the Ark Base and also wants to establish contact with us to test things out.”
“Don’t pay attention to them.”
Chen Chen said nonchalantly, “Let’s wait for 30 days. If they haven’t gotten the Arks by that time, I need to use memetic weapons to teach them a lesson.”
“Got it.”
X-112 responded, “In addition, I also found the so-called C24 chromosome technology from the laboratory database and discovered that although this technology may not be usable on a large scale, it can be used on the Black Knights. This will further strengthen their ability to continue combat and recover.”
“It’s true, the Black Knights won’t turn good or evil because they don’t even have brains.”
Chen Chen suddenly remembered. “The Black Knights are completely immune to the side effects of the C24 chromosome. In that case, let’s take it away with us.”
Judging from the movie, this C24 chromosome effect could only be said to be rather conventional. Even the protagonist of the movie only had three aspects that were enhanced, namely strength, responsiveness, and resilience. The enhancement was roughly equivalent to that of Alice infected by the T-virus and even slightly inferior.
In the past, Chen Chen would have done anything to obtain this sort of enhancement, but to the current him, it was only icing on the cake, because this C24 chromosome technology could not be used on Chen Chen himself.
Now Chen Chen had asked to pack it up and take it away, only to study it further. Maybe if he was lucky enough, he could develop something more valuable.
In addition, X-112 had also invaded the national defense network systems of various countries in the world and picked out some useful technologies from them such as the “BFG Bio Force Gun”, which was a kind of weapon in the movie that could punch a two-meter-diameter hole in the half-meter-thick steel wall. There was also the “nanowall” technology mentioned before.
The nanowall, as the name implied, was a wall made of nano-materials. It usually existed as a door. In this state, any object could pa.s.s through the nanowall.
However, once a certain switch was triggered, the nanowall would suddenly change from its fluid state to become a solid wall. The nanowall in this state was indestructible and even bullets would bounce back while the wall remained undamaged.
In addition, there were many modern technology applications unique to this world. These technologies could be adapted to reality and make Chen Chen’s scientific research projects even more comprehensive and efficient.
Finally, Chen Chen directly issued an order for the group of researchers held hostage to start dismantling the “Ark” in the experimental base. He wanted to first transport this Ark back to reality. When the other two Arks were also paid up, he was going to put one in the Spire Experimental Base and one on Mars.
As for the last one, Chen Chen intended to secretly place it on the back of the moon and build a helium-3 mining field there.