3/5

“Hey, is there anything I can help you with?”

Renji approached the homeless man to start a conversation. The homeless man glanced at Renji, looking like someone who had lost all will to live, a complete failure with life shrouded in darkness, not even bothering to speak, just waving his hand.

“I’d advise you to stay away from me.”

“Otherwise, when the people from Kael Technology come to kill me, you’ll be targeted by them too.”

After a self-mocking laugh, the homeless man got up from beside the trash can and staggered away, intending to continue wandering.

That was until he heard the next sentence from the young man behind him.

“That’s quite a coincidence.”

“Kael Technology is also looking all over for me right now.”

Watching the stunned homeless man turn around, Renji shrugged his shoulders.

Then, under the homeless man’s dazed gaze, Renji had 86 remove the optical fake human face mask from his face, revealing his original appearance. After the homeless man took a good look, he immediately opened his mouth wide.

Although he didn’t have any electronic devices on him, as long as he wasn’t blind or deaf, he should have at least heard about the terrorist attack at Kael Square and the currently sought-after Dr. Renji.

“You’re that person!!”

“Right, it’s me.” Renji admitted generously.

Afterward, the homeless man seemed to finally see a glimmer of hope, suddenly becoming excited. He didn’t care about Renji’s identity or the high reward for his capture but urgently asked:

“So…so the mecha at the scene was really driven by you? You can unleash the true power of the Witch’s Brand?”

Seeing Renji nod, the homeless man seemed to find confirmation, happily grabbing his messy, unwashed hair for many days, continuously muttering to himself:

“I knew it… I knew the Witch’s Brand couldn’t be that simple, it was the mecha all along, damn, I really want to study the principle again!”

Towards the end, the homeless man seemed to come back to reality, realizing he wasn’t a researcher but a fugitive being hunted, instantly deflated, and even after reacting, he became a bit scared:

“Doctor, you…you’re not going to kill me, are you?”

After all, typically, no one would so readily admit their public identity unless they had already planned to silence someone.

Renji wanted exactly this; he intentionally smiled without saying anything, first to intimidate this homeless man with quite a story, and then he asked, “Alright, now that I’ve laid my cards on the table, isn’t it your turn to share why you said you’re being hunted by Kael Technology? What’s the reason for the chase?”

“I’ll tell you Doctor. My name is Famas, and I’m a new employee at Kael Technology, having joined less than half a year ago. Due to my capabilities, I was recruited into the Fantasy Special Operations Department.”

“The so-called Special Operations Department actually involves the company hiring a large number of illegal dream explorers to ‘enter dreams’ into Dream Zero. My job was as a dispatcher, helping dream explorers avoid the Miasma monsters tides and reduce loss rates.”

“Wait, hold on.”

Hearing this, Renji interrupted, asking in bewilderment, “A dispatcher, you can observe the changes inside the dream from reality?”

“No, we can’t, but it’s possible with the help of servant machines.”

“With the help of servant machines?”

After nodding, Famas explained, “Kael Technology, without permission from the Fantasy Supervision, diverted some of the servant machines’ chip computing power. Using this portion of computing power, the company could not only create similar androids but also monitor the location and status of some servant machines in the dream.”

“As long as we notice a large gathering of servant machines and subsequent deaths, it indicates that a Miasma disaster has erupted in that area. So, we could direct dream explorers to stay away from that area, avoiding the danger of the monster tide.”

“And at that time, I detected a Miasma tide of at least B-level through the death of servant machines. But the supervisor at the time, you should know him, William, forced me to delete the records. I didn’t comply, so William suppressed me and had me thrown into prison on charges of betraying company secrets.”

Famas seemed a bit guilty towards the end, indicating the reality of the situation might slightly differ from his description. However, judging by Famas’s gritted teeth and his current destitute state as a homeless person, the latter part about being sent to prison is undeniably true.

This is precisely why Renji curiously asked:

“You were sent to prison, so how are you… here?”

“Heh, I still underestimated Kael Technology, a bunch of damn scoundrels! They never intended to lock me up; they just used the imprisonment as a pretext and then took me out of prison to hand me over to the Blackfire Gang! They wanted to use the gang to silence me by killing me!”

‘Blackfire Gang…’

Hearing this familiar gang name, Renji now understood how Famas managed to escape and why he happened to encounter him.

“I thought I was a goner, but who would have thought it was karma? The Blackfire Gang actually got targeted by that legendary killer!”

“Killer?” Renji couldn’t help but recall the scene when he investigated the Blackfire Gang’s headquarters, which had been slaughtered.

“Yes, the killer, no, no, no, it should be said… a rogue servant machine!”

“I had secretly looked at Kael Technology’s internal documents before and knew that among the many servant machines in dream zero, one erroneous servant machine was born. That servant machine awakened its own consciousness, unwilling to continue the endless killings within Dream Zero, and also noticed that the company was using their servant machine data. Thus, it broke the initial agreement, broke through from the dream to reality, and returned to the real world.”

“This servant machine then became the killer, hunting down those robots created by the company using stolen servant machine chip computing power, through this method, to reclaim those computing powers.”

“The leader of the Blackfire Gang was one of the robot created by the company using servant machine data. That’s why the killer targeted the Blackfire Gang during their terrorist attack on Kael Square, when their defenses were down internally, directly killing their leader to reclaim the data.”

“I also took advantage of the chaos, thanks to the killer, to escape from the Blackfire Gang. After that, I just kept heading towards a safe place, thinking the farther away from Kael Technology, the better, so I ended up here.”

After Famas finished speaking in one breath, his eyes still carried a bit of fear and gratitude, as if he hadn’t yet recovered from that series of thrilling life-and-death escapes.

Renji, on the other hand, fell into thought, pondering over this unexpectedly important piece of information.

‘So it turns out the malfunction and lack of computing power in the servant machines indeed originated from a fundamental issue. Kael Technology did not store and safeguard the chips of those servant machines honestly but rather pilfered them for themselves, diverting a portion of the servant machines’ computing power to create similar androids.’

‘And the killer is a special existence among the servant machines, a real-world servant machine, aiming to hunt down the company’s robots to reclaim the stolen data computing power of the servant machines.’

After clarifying the information from Famas, Renji immediately modified his original plan.

He quickly asked, “Since the existence of the killer is only to hunt down robots, then conversely, could these robots be used to lure the killer?”

“In theory, that’s correct.” Famas was a bit confused about what Renji meant by this question.

Until the next moment.

Renji took off the optical invisible dream terminal by his ear, and the terminal, like a transforming mecha, became a maid in front of the astonished Famas, appearing beside Renji.

“Does this kind of robot work for what you mentioned?”

𝘳𝑎.𝒸ℴ