What do you mean the games you make are all real?!

Chapter 82 The Escaped Biochemical Matrix (4400)

Nakajima Nobuyuki stared blankly at the phone that had just been hung up, then numbly raised his head to look at the messy research institute in front of him.

The research institute was littered with corpses: death row inmates in prison uniforms, researchers in protective suits, and Japanese soldiers.

The last riot at the research institute was caused by a malfunction in one of the isolation rooms. A dozen spore zombies squeezed out from the crack in the door, biting and killing several researchers in the corridor before being quickly suppressed by ground troops who arrived on the scene with heavy firepower.

But this time it was completely different. All the airtight doors of the seven isolation rooms were damaged at the same time, and more than one hundred spore zombies poured out of their respective isolation rooms at the same time.

They spread along the corridor to every corner of the research institute, and engaged in a fierce battle with Self-Defense Force soldiers who rushed to the scene in the narrow underground passages for several hours. They had just finished clearing out all the zombies.

Although the losses were extremely heavy, the biochemical laboratory was well prepared, and he was certain that no spore powder or zombies were allowed to leave the underground laboratory alive.

He didn't understand why a zombie outbreak had occurred in Kabukicho, and he wanted to know the answer more than anyone else.

"What exactly happened—" Nakajima Nobuyuki muttered to himself.

Just then, his recently promoted deputy, Ryosuke Onishi, reported with a mournful face.

"Reporting to the director, twenty of our researchers have died—"

Upon hearing this, Nobuyuki Nakajima felt his knees buckle and he almost collapsed to the ground.

He felt that everything he had was about to be completely ruined.

The spore zombies converted from the five hundred death row inmates have now lost more than a hundred, but that's not a big deal. Death row inmates are just consumables after all. As long as the experiment continues, we can find a way to get more later.

The most serious problem is that nearly a third of the researchers in the institute have been lost in the two riots. Everyone who works in this underground laboratory is a top elite in the fields of biology, medicine and genetic engineering. There are not many replacements in the whole of Japan.

This isn't a gap that can be filled in a day or two by simply posting a few job ads and conducting a few rounds of interviews. With so many researchers dying all at once, the progress of all subsequent research projects will inevitably be delayed.

He had originally thought that with Chambers backing him up, he could have the Stars and Stripes send a group of top researchers from their homeland to help fill the manpower gap after the current riots subsided.

Ultimately, the reason we've ended up in this mess is because Chambers ordered the deployment of 500 death row inmates, forcing him to conduct a large-scale infection campaign in a short period of time.

But then a virus leak occurred, and Chambers couldn't protect him anymore. The lab will most likely be shut down, and his career is completely over.

"Why did the virus leak?" Nobuyuki Nakajima suddenly straightened up from the wall, grabbed Ryosuke Onishi's shoulder with all his might, his face contorted with extreme fear and anger to an almost ferocious degree.

His career is over, and if the cause of the virus leak cannot be found, his life will also be over.

"We discovered that a tube of spores in the lab has disappeared. During the earlier chaos in the lab, someone secretly started the elevator that went up, so it's very likely that person ran away with the spores," Ryosuke Onishi continued to report.

"Who did this?!" Nobuyuki Nakajima was so angry his teeth itched.

"We've counted all the bodies on the ground and checked all the surviving researchers. Everyone's identity has been confirmed, and they're all in the research lab, except for one person, Yuma Takagi. His body isn't among any of the confirmed bodies, nor in any area where survivors are gathered. We've searched the entire research institute but haven't found him," Ryosuke Onishi said.

"Takagi Yuma? Wasn't he locked up?" Nakajima Nobuyuki was taken aback.

He had a memory of Yuuma Takagi; she was a very senior member of the research institute who had previously been in charge of the core research work of the Manipulator Project.

However, during the last riot, everyone in his experimental group except himself was bitten to death by out-of-control zombies.

At the time, everyone thought he was just lucky to have escaped death. But in the last few days, Yuuma Takagi's behavior has started to become strangely erratic.

Sometimes he would stand there in a daze for a long time, and it would take several times for him to react when someone called his name. Sometimes he would write down some incorrect data in his experimental records that were completely inconsistent with his professional level, as if he was extremely absent-minded.

Everyone assumed that he had suffered a mild infection from inhaling a small amount of spore powder during the previous riot and was gradually losing his cognitive abilities.

So they put Yuma Takagi in an isolation observation room according to the standard emergency plan, and prepared to arrange a comprehensive examination to see how far the fungal hyphae in his body had spread. If it was discovered early, it might be possible to reverse the spread.

But before he could be examined, a second, larger-scale riot broke out.

"I don't know, but we found mycelium in the crack of his isolation room door. It's very likely that these mycelium made the opening, and he may have really been infected and turned into a zombie," Ryosuke Onishi said.

"Have you ever seen zombies use elevators? There's definitely something wrong here," Nakajima Nobuyuki roared.

The main reason this laboratory is built underground is that even if everyone below dies, the monsters below won't take the elevator up.

It's ridiculous that a researcher who seems to have turned into a zombie can still use an elevator.

Just then, another researcher rushed in, panicking, and reported, "It's terrible, Director! The controller is dead!"

"What?" Nobuyuki Nakajima hurriedly ran towards the isolation room.

That was the first special infected entity with hive-like thinking and command capabilities that he had cultivated with great effort, and it was the core of the entire spore weapon project.

If the controller dies, all the experimental data and grand plans for a controllable zombie army that he showed Chambers will vanish in an instant.

Those zombie legion blueprints are basically the only thing that can save his life right now.

A group of researchers stood around the door of the isolation room at the end of the corridor, each with an expression as if they had seen a ghost.

Nakajima Shinichi pushed aside the people blocking his way, squeezed to the observation window, and then froze on the spot as if his bones had been removed.

The dense network of gray-green mycelium that once covered the walls of the isolation chamber has now withered completely, as if its nutrient supply had been cut off at the root by something. Large patches of it have peeled off the metal walls and piled up on the floor as a thick layer of dry, ashes-like powder.

The three-meter-tall corpse of the controller, covered in pustules-like fungal fruiting bodies, sat slumped on the metal floor in an extremely contorted posture. It was still wearing the specially made metal control helmet on its head, but there was a hole in its head, and its brain was gone.

"Where is the brain? Where is the most important brain of the manipulator?!" Nobuyuki Nakajima felt as if the sky had fallen.

The next moment, he suddenly turned around and roared at Ryosuke Onishi behind him.

"Surveillance! The surveillance footage from the operator's isolation room! Pull it up! Now!"

This sudden riot was highly unusual. After the last riot, they reinforced the doors to the isolation chambers, and it was expected that the zombies would not be able to open them.

Now, there's the defection of the imprisoned researcher and the death of the manipulator; everything is too bizarre.

Ryosuke Onishi was so startled by his roar that he trembled, then nodded frantically and ran towards the monitoring room.

Soon, all the surveillance footage from the past few days was retrieved, and they finally understood why all of this had happened.

Two days earlier, Yuma Takagi had already begun tampering with the electronic lock on the airtight door of his isolation room. Using a thin metal wire hidden in his clothing, he pried open the cover of the door lock control panel during a shift change and tampered with several key components inside.

He also implanted timed trigger commands into the controller program of the operator.

Shortly after they noticed something amiss and arrested Yuma Takagi, locking her in an isolation room, the manipulator successfully broke free from some of the control device's commands through a tampered program.

Later, the manipulator began to control the deceased in several isolation rooms next door, forcing them to rush out through the doors that Takagi Yuma had tampered with beforehand.

However, what no one could understand was that after the controller made the zombies rush out of the isolation room, he did not order them to open the door of their own isolation room, but instead directed the zombies to open the door of Takagi Yuma's isolation room.

The zombies did not harm Takagi Yuuma after opening the door. They simply lined up in two rows on either side and followed him through the corridor in an almost escort-like manner, toward the isolation room where the controller was located.

When Yuma Takagi walked alone into the controller's isolation room, a scene appeared on the monitor that sent chills down everyone's spine.

The enormous controller, covered in pustules-like fungi, actually used its mutated and swollen claws to open its head, revealing a giant brain covered in gray-green mycelium.

Then Yuma Takagi stepped forward, bent down, and began to eat the brain bit by bit.

Then, under the cover of the zombies, Yuma Takagi took a vial of spores and escaped by elevator.

After understanding the whole story, Nobuyuki Nakajima was trembling all over, not with anger, but with deep fear.

This riot was premeditated, but he didn't know whether the planner was Yuma Takagi or the manipulator.

As the person in charge of all the projects, he naturally knew that the controller possessed a certain level of intelligence, which is why it was able to transmit instructions to other spore zombies through the hive mind.

However, the hyphae irreversibly damage the host's cerebral cortex during the parasitic process. The manipulator's thinking ability has been greatly weakened during the mutation process, at most reaching the level of a child of a few years old, making it impossible for them to formulate such a plan.

The fact that Takagi Yuuma was selected to work at this research institute shows that his family background has undergone the most rigorous review by the Sky Hunting Group, and he has never shown any abnormalities during the years he has worked at the institute.

The only unusual situation was that I was slightly infected a few days ago due to the first riot in the laboratory.

Mild infection?

Nobuyuki Nakajima's pupils contracted sharply, as if he had finally figured something out.

A mild infection means that the spread of mycelium in Yuma Takagi's body will be greatly slowed down, and it will take him much longer than a normal infected person to completely lose consciousness and become a zombie.

This means that his intelligence will not be significantly impaired by the mycelium in the short term.

But at the same time, the hyphae that had entered his brain gave him a new ability: he could communicate directly with the manipulator through the hyphae.

So it was these two individuals—one a mildly infected individual who retained full human intelligence, and the other a manipulator with diminished intelligence but the ability to control the hive—who together orchestrated this riot.

Was the first riot really just a simple accident?

Thinking of this, Nakajima Nobuyuki felt an unprecedented chill surge up from the depths of his bones.

According to the surveillance footage, Yuma Takagi inherited the controller's abilities after consuming the controller's brain.

He didn't know when Yuuma Takagi's intelligence would start to decline, but the process of fungal hyphae eroding the brain was irreversible; it was just a matter of time.

But if Yuma Takagi's intelligence remains intact for a considerable period of time, then things will be serious.

If Yuma Takagi really did go to Kabukicho and release the virus, and then manipulate the thousands of zombies there, then that would be a force to be reckoned with.

However, Takagi Yuma was not in Kabukicho as Nakajima Nobuyuki had imagined; he was on a ship bound for the Northern Alliance.

Smirnov stood on the ship's railing, one hand gripping the cold metal railing, the other holding a freshly lit cigarette, frowning as he looked at the Japanese man curled up on the deck next to him.

After Captain Vasily ordered him to bring the Japanese researcher named Takagi Yuuma back to Japan, he took the guy and boarded the cargo ship that was already docked outside Kyoto Port to meet the Giant Bear Squad, and began their return voyage.

But this guy started acting strangely as soon as he boarded the ship. He first said he was cold and asked for a blanket. Then he curled up in the rough gray blanket and started talking to himself incessantly.

His voice was so low it sounded like a mosquito buzzing, but if you listened carefully, you could tell he was constantly changing his name and identity, as if several people were speaking through his mouth in turn.

However, the captain only said not to let the Japanese die, so he didn't bother to find out what was going on. But now that they were almost at the Northern Alliance, he had to wake the Japanese up.

As soon as he squatted down, he heard the Japanese man's insane words.

"I am Yuma Takagi—no, I am Yuichi Okada—no, I am Hiroichi Ide—"

"I'm telling you, you've been babbling on and on since you boarded the ship. What are all these names? What are they called? When will you stop?" Smirnov asked in a heavily accented Mandarin, his tone full of impatience.

The Japanese man wrapped the blanket even tighter, squeezing himself into the corner like an insect curled up in a cocoon.

"I don't know—I really don't know—I thought I was Takagi Yuma, but there are too many other people's memories in my mind—they are all talking in my head, and I don't know which one is me—"

"Alright, you should shut up now. We're about to dock." Smirnov, too lazy to pay attention to what this Japanese guy was doing, simply pulled back the blanket.

But the next moment his pupils suddenly contracted, because under the blanket, Takagi Yuma's body was covered in gray mycelium, his eyes had turned grayish-white, and mushrooms were starting to grow on his body.

"Zombies!" Smirnov was about to fire, his finger already on the trigger, but he didn't pull it.

It wasn't because he hesitated, but because the fingertips of his right hand were completely frozen.

A thin layer of grayish-green mycelium had somehow climbed up his wrist, spreading upwards along his skin like a growing moss. The tips of the mycelium had already pierced his combat glove and were drilling into his skin.

At the same time, a large number of spores were also sprayed out from the mushrooms on Yuma Takagi's body.