Chapter Eighty-Six: An Unexpected Biomechanical Mech

"Miss Leanna..."
"This is the person Master Ye Hai entrusted me to protect..."
"Please come and take him away!"
At the shout, Leanna turned toward the zombie barricade.
A man came running toward her, carrying Nangong with evident excitement.
"Are you from the outer perimeter?"
The man nodded. "I'm a sentinel guard. Everyone calls me Baldy."
Leanna nodded and gave him a warm smile.
"Thank you, Baldy. You've done a great deed!"
Though Leanna had no idea how these tin cans had managed to break through,
she knew very well that Tiki and Nangong were now extremely important to the corpse-catcher organization.
This round of cooperation between the two sides concerned the development and expansion of the entire organization; there could be no carelessness.
Hearing Leanna's praise, Baldy's face split into a broad grin, his heart nearly bursting with joy.
He knew he had gambled correctly.
To receive personal recognition for such a major accomplishment from a corpse-catcher official—
if the organization could survive tonight, he would truly be set for life!
Just as Baldy was basking in delight,
the ground beneath his feet suddenly caved in.
He startled violently and looked down, only to realize he had fallen into the belly of a gigantic mutant.
He screamed at the top of his lungs.
But soon, while weightless, Baldy felt thin vines wrapping around his waist.
In an instant, he was yanked into a spacious, brightly lit room.
Still shaken from the darkness to the light, Baldy looked dazed and unsteady.
Meanwhile, Leanna casually summoned more vines to carry Nangong and the three mechs onto the anti-gravity platform.
As Baldy gradually recovered, he saw there was no danger.
Gathering his courage, he also climbed onto the platform.
After settling Nangong safely in place, Leanna sat down in a chair nearby.
She stared at the three mechs on the floor, a little troubled.
She had already tried using the immense force of her vines to pry them open.
But the iron shells would not budge at all.
Yet if she left these things here and ignored them, the moment those three woke up they would surely cause enormous destruction.
"What should I do?"
"I wish I could get a few more mechs..."
"This thing should be pretty valuable."
"Maybe Master Ye Hai will give me a lot of rewards."
"Then I could let my family live a little better!"
Suddenly, Leanna caught sight of a huge glass vessel on another laboratory table.
An idea flashed through her mind.
"Should I try the genetic fusion agent that Mister Donald mixed?"
The genetic fusion agent Leanna referred to was a catalyst made by Donald that could merge machinery with living tissue.
Lister's nanoworms were the product of using this catalyst to fuse machinery with the zombie virus.
This solvent had also been used heavily in the making of these biochemical fortresses, replacing biological bones with much harder alloy and perfectly integrating machine and flesh.
With a try-it-out attitude, Leanna used her tendrils to coil around one mech.

Coming to another lab table,
she lifted the lid of the cylindrical glass vessel before her, three meters in diameter and five meters high.
Then she dropped the mech inside.
After watching for quite a while and seeing that the mech was doing nothing but releasing bubbles,
Leanna finally remembered that she seemed to have heard the lecherous old man mention this before.
This was only a vat of pure solvent.
To make machinery become living matter, a sufficient amount of virus still had to be added.
Fortunately, among all the corpse-catchers, the one who could produce the most virus the fastest was Leanna.
The original Veronica virus's ability to breed derivative strains was outrageously powerful.
Leanna immediately mobilized all the Veronica-derived virus in her body and began reproducing it frantically.
Then, through her pores, she expelled it and continuously injected it into the vessel.
Once a vast quantity of virus had been added to the catalyst,
the mech's outer shell suddenly began to undergo a strange reaction.
The shell was corroded at astonishing speed.
And within those countless corroded holes, blood vessels and nerve tissues were rapidly forming.
Soon, the blood vessels and nerves emerged from the eroded openings,
searching for other vessels and tissues in the surrounding holes before linking together.
Thus, to Leanna's astonishment, the mech actually began growing flesh out of thin air.
Where the eye could not see, the solvent and virus continued to erode inward.
At last, under the corrosion of this biological acid, the sturdy mech was effortlessly dissolved into the cockpit.
Immediately, the solvent flooded into the cockpit and enveloped the driver's body.
The moment it touched the virus-laden liquid, the driver woke abruptly.
Terrible pain flooded his entire body, driving him mad with struggle.
But it lasted only a single second.
Under Leanna's terrified gaze, a living human being was dissolved like that.
Yet... not completely dissolved.
Guided by the Veronica-derived virus,
the driver's flesh and blood were thoroughly broken down and absorbed into the newly formed tissue.
Meanwhile, some organs remained, gradually merging with the machinery.
The process proceeded with remarkable smoothness.
Before long, the inside of the cockpit became a strange cavity in which organs and machinery were fused together but remained separated in position.
One of the driver's eyeballs, together with its nervous system, was wrapped in other tissues and placed toward the back.
The brain was enclosed in thick alloy, and outside it another layer of soft tissue secreted by the virus was added, protecting it as much as possible from damage due to violent shock.
In just ten minutes,
the alloy mech Leanna had placed into the solvent was completely transformed into a biological mech capable of independent thought.
The mech's outer layer was covered in thick chitin, dark and glossy, resembling the shell of an ant, yet extraordinarily hard.
What had originally been a three-meter lump of metal, because of the grown muscle tissue, expanded to more than four meters.
It became a headless, humanoid bio-mech,
its entire body covered with ferocious spines.
The mech's original melee weapon had been a long-handled axe.
The haft, originally two meters long, had now grown by more than another meter.
And the blade, once only about thirty centimeters wide, had swelled directly to a full meter.
A slit opened at the very center of the axe head, and within it was the driver's other eye.
Although it was not as gigantic as the G virus,
it had become eerily strange—without any whites, only a field of black, impossible to notice unless one looked closely...
On closer inspection, the eyeball seemed divided into countless tiny grids.
This... was actually a compound eye!
Seeing such drastic changes in the mech, Baldy was not the only one who had gone completely stiff with terror.
Even Leanna, the one who had caused it all, now had nothing left in her mind but blank emptiness.

After the transformation of the biological mech was complete,
without waiting for Leanna's command, it slightly bent its legs and leapt out of the container.
More than four meters tall, headless, dark all over, its body bristling with horrifying spines.
On both sides of its shoulders were what seemed to be two enormous ant mandibles, opening and closing incessantly.
Standing quietly before Leanna with a sharp axe and a massive shield in hand, it radiated overwhelming pressure.
Yet Leanna could clearly sense it...
this bio-mech had utterly submitted to her.
Just like those infected mutants, it would never harbor the slightest thought of resistance.
Only, this bio-mech was different from the mutants.
Because the driver's brain had been preserved during the fusion process,
as long as that brain remained intact, this thing was a combat unit capable of independent thought.
And with a thought from Leanna,
the bio-mech started from the abdomen and contracted outward to both sides.
A space opened in the middle, large enough for Leanna to enter.
At that moment, Leanna suddenly forgot the intense nausea she had felt when the driver was being dissolved.
This was Leanna's first time killing someone, though not intentionally...
yet she had personally witnessed a living human being die in an utterly horrific manner...
Leanna, whose throat had nearly been filled with bile, instead felt the mech before her soothing her gently.
Her surging emotions instantly calmed.
As though under some mysterious influence, Leanna walked into the interior space of the bio-mech.
Once the mech closed again, several strands of nervous tissue lightly connected to her forehead, her temples, and other points.
In an instant, Leanna entered a most peculiar world.
Through the eye in the bio-mech's back, she could see the scene behind her.
She could also see everything the compound eye on the long-handled axe saw.
It was a black-and-white world composed of countless tiny points, where even the slightest tremor of every point could not escape that eye's capture.
At the same time, Leanna could feel the high-energy reactor beneath her body.
With only a single thought, the reactor began to spin madly...
At that moment, Leanna felt an inexhaustible force erupt from within her body.
She could not help murmuring to herself, "Just how powerful am I after putting on this mech?"
Suddenly, an unfamiliar voice rang out in Leanna's mind, answering:
"Honored Queen, if I were to use the reference points in my understanding..."
"you now possess the ability to fight the eighth-stage mutant beneath you!"
"Who are you?" Leanna asked in astonishment.
"Replying to Your Majesty, I am this mech's brain..."
"You may call me... Raiden!"