Chapter 1679: No Sense of Public Duty, and a Chaotic Predicament
Far away in New York, Frank and Tony entered the team’s communication channel and received the information which Luke pa.s.sed on. They frowned and didn’t say anything.
This monster didn’t have a fixed form, and could regenerate after eating people. n.o.body had any experience dealing with something like that.
No matter how fast a person could think, there were still a lot of things to consider.
n.o.body was omnipotent or omniscient enough to come up with a solution as soon as they heard what the problem was.
However, Frank and Tony were both geniuses with their own specialties. After a brief discussion, they came up with a rough plan.
The plan was very simple. It was to create a situation to lure Shredder in and then kill him.
But just like that joke about how many steps it took to put an elephant in a freezer, many things didn’t depend on the outcome, but on the process.
The trickiest part of this plan was how to create a suitable situation to lure out Shredder’s real body.
Thanks to Luke’s tireless work in the last month, he had built a model of Tokyo’s main terrain, including s.h.i.+njuku as a hotspot.
Tony was in charge of getting Jarvis to find an area that could be used. At the same time, the tyc.o.o.n had to a.n.a.lyze the weapons and equipment which Luke had, and see how to create a suitable situation.
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Frank, on the other hand, looked into coming up with a strategy to lure Shredder into the trap.
With both parties working together, Luke turned into the executor of the plan who didn’t need to be distracted.
When all was said and done, it was useless for him to be anxious now.
Shredder had already planned to run, and it was almost impossible to catch him.
When he heard exactly what the situation was like, even Tony couldn’t help but mutter to himself that it was a good thing it hadn’t been like this in New York.
It was a good thing that Luke had instantly killed that Blood G.o.d Experimental in New York last time.
Shredder’s skills hadn’t been developed enough back then, and he hadn’t yet resolved the problem of fusing and then separating from the Blood G.o.d Experimental. In the end, he could only run in the body that had been cut into several pieces.
He was still running now, but he had the upper hand and was practically invincible.
If it wasn’t for the blonde’s nanotoxin, there really wasn’t anything for him to be afraid of.
Unfortunately, the nanotoxin was part of the blonde’s ability to control poisons, which was unavailable to Luke.
Just like how Luke couldn’t control men with Pheromone Control, his body didn’t have the fundamentals for controlling the nanotoxin.
Even though he knew how it worked, there was no way for him to control it at the moment.
However, Big Dipper’s A.I. program had been a.n.a.lyzing the principle behind this ability the whole time, which could be considered a backup plan for solving the problem.
Nevertheless, Luke didn’t regret taking care of the blonde first.
First of all, she was as slow as a tortoise compared with Shredder – she had no chance of catching up to Shredder and poisoning him.
Secondly, she was practically immune to Pheromone Control, so Luke couldn’t use her as a remote-controlled “tool.”
It could be said that once she poisoned someone, whether she died or not made no difference to the current situation.
Thus, Luke waited for his teammates to provide long-distance support as he silently followed Shredder, and never stopped pondering countermeasures.
A large part of s.h.i.+buya below was already in chaos.
If one was callous about it, Shredder had only swallowed a small number of pa.s.sers-by, which amounted to 200 or 300 of them.
For Tokyo, which had a population of tens of millions, this number was nothing.
The real problem was the “waste” which he “excreted” after swallowing them.
Shredder wasn’t someone with a sense of public duty. The rotting flesh that he casually abandoned immediately implicated two types of pa.s.sers-by.
One type was those who were too curious and got close to take a look, and the other type was those who absent-mindedly stepped into the range of the poison.
At first, Luke had been able to follow Shredder closely and collect the rotting flesh to prevent the poison from spreading.
But Shredder split himself up and Luke was distracted, and some traces of the contamination weren’t cleaned up.
A slight touch was enough for the poison to quickly spread through a person’s body.
Practically everyone who was infected collapsed and died after taking just a few steps.
A lot of people dropped when they got close, so most of them knew to stay away and warn those who got too close.
Ten minutes later, there were more than twenty “poison circles” along the No.3 s.h.i.+buya expressway, and there were at least dozens of bodies in each circle.
What made Luke even more speechless was that the police department hadn’t sent anyone yet.
He didn’t expect the police to fight Shredder, but they could maintain order.
NYPD had a.s.sumed a similar role during the Battle of New York.
Although they hadn’t taken part in the battle, they had saved a lot of people, thereby significantly reducing the number of casualties. After the incident, practically everyone had praised them.
As for the police officers in Tokyo… It had been almost 20 minutes since the start of the incident, and only a few patrol officers had shown up. Two of them had even charged into the “poison zone” on their bikes, and gotten themselves killed.
Seeing that, Luke didn’t know how to even start cursing.
He had sent information about Shredder to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department earlier to warn them.
Even if not everybody could be informed right away, the police officers should at least understand the danger and prevent casualties from the poison from increasing.
In the end, there was actually no activity on the police comms.
Luke couldn’t hack into the police comms and give the order himself.
This sort of high-level order would need to be confirmed by the office.
If Luke sounded the alarm on the other party’s behalf, the order wouldn’t necessarily be carried out immediately, and the bottom levels might instead await instructions from their direct superiors.
Later, all other orders that came over the police radio might then be treated with suspicion, and no one would take action before confirming anything.
So, it really wasn’t that simple to do good.
When it came to a large-scale crisis, it was always a complicated undertaking.
In this situation, it wasn’t about who did better, but about who made fewer mistakes. It was impossible not to make mistakes.
I gave you a chance, but you were useless! Luke sighed inwardly.
He had done everything he could. How many people died in Tokyo tonight wasn’t something he could decide.
But it was also because he was used to New York.
Thanks to the momentum created by Luke, NYPD had carried out several emergency drills, and there was a lot of content in the media related to survival skills and knowledge.
New York’s police officers were now seasoned veterans.
More than 100 officers had died in the line of duty when the test subjects rampaged through New York.
The casualties from this, the subway explosions and the Chitauri invasion had been huge.
Personal experience was always a more effective lesson than any words a person could say.
In comparison, not only were there a lot more people in Tokyo, there had never been such a destructive extraordinary incident like this before.
So, the police department’s c.r.a.ppy performance was to be expected.
That was why the “poison circles” were packed with so many pa.s.sers-by and police officers.
If this was New York, there would still be some unlucky people.
But a few people would collapse at most before the patrol officers and the people reacted and called for professionals to deal with the matter.
There was a much lower chance of so many people being killed in these “poison circles.”