The Ultimate Evolution

“Finally. I knew you wouldn’t be able to help yourself.”

Sheyan watched the actions of the T-1000 with a sneer on his face.

He then spoke into the party communication channel. “The enemy has taken the bait. Move according to the plan!”

Hearing Sheyan’s order, Melody leaped up lightly and planted a privet tree seed at the top of the passage. A moment later, a green light flashed. The seed sprouted and grew at an incredible speed, easily breaking through the top of the passage and tearing open the thick steel ceiling.

Following that, Melody easily passed through the hole in the ceiling and smoothly climbed to the top of the offshore platform. In just seven seconds or so, the T-1000 caught up to her at the top of the offshore platform thanks to the terrifying buff provided by ‘Overload’.

But right when the T-1000 had rushed over, before it even had time to lock on to Melody, it could already see Mr. Darkness completing his chant in the distance. A black light shot out of his palm and crossed the air in a mysterious way, giving the impression of a snake twisting its body through the water.

The black light left a long trail in its wake in the form of a black spiral as it shot towards the T-1000 head-on!

Despite its powerful ‘Overload’ ability, the T-1000 found it almost impossible to completely avoid Mr. Darkness’ attack. It could only raise its arms to block in front of its body. Currently, the Terminator held an indifferent attitude to almost any attack.

When the black glow hit the T-1000, the anticipated impact and explosion did not appear. The black glow instead enlarged with a bang. A terrible sound of burning could be heard, and black smoke filled the air. It became so dark that one could not see their own outstretched hand.

The principles behind the vision of the T-1000’s mechanical eyes were (i) a light sensing mechanism, which took in visual signals by sensing light akin to human eyes, and (ii) an infrared sensing mechanism, which detected humans by sensing their body temperature.

Mr. Darkness’ move caught the Terminator off guard. The attack not only formed a mass of black fog around the T-1000, it also had an area-wide burning effect, which caused the temperature of the area to instantly rise. How could the T-1000 perceive anything after that?

So for a short period of time, the T-1000 was completely blinded. There was not much space on the platform; various structures scattered around the area, sometimes interlacing with each other, to turn the place into a complex terrain.

The T-1000 changed its hands into sharp blades and waved them around crazily, but all it could destroy were the surrounding structures.

Fortunately, the T-1000 that was in an ‘Overload’ state was really powerful. Not only was it immune to most abnormal statuses, even the black smoke could not get close to it. All the black smoke that got within a few meters around the Terminator’s body would be dispersed with a hissing noise by strong electric charges. Therefore, Mr. Darkness’ surprise attack only managed to delay the T-1000 for ten odd seconds.

When the T-1000 regained its sight, it saw that Sheyan and his group was already over 50 meters away, speeding towards the shore on a boat.

Of course the T-1000 would not just let them get away! It must be known that the power compressor it made was already more than 90% charged! More importantly, several of the parts used to built the instrument were taken from the body of an undercover Terminator, so it was impossible for the T-1000 to produce a similar instrument in the near future!

Therefore, the T-1000 could not easily abandon the power compressor. The Terminator jumped off the platform onto a motorboat, and went straight after Sheyan and his group.

********

Sheyan certainly would not fight with the T-1000 right now. When he and his group landed, they jumped straight into a nearby car. There was another woman sitting in the car, waiting for them. The figure of the woman was easily visible from behind the car.

In order to achieve Sheyan’s goal, he must make good use of the terrain, so he must lure the T-1000 into his pre-arranged trap. In order to ensure that the Terminator would chase after them, Sheyan had arranged for a woman to be disguised as Ms. Adess.

There must be some information and photos of Ms. Adess in the T-1000’s database. The woman Sheyan found had a similar body figure to Ms. Adess. When the T-1000 saw her, it would definitely compare her figure with the figure of the woman in its database. As long as the similarity exceeded 70%, she would be listed as a high-priority target.

Based on Dolittle’s simulation run, the silhouette of the two from the back had a similarity exceeding 90%. With the power compressor and the pirated version of Ms. Adess in the car with him, Sheyan was absolutely certain that the T-1000 would chase after them into the trap.

After driving for a kilometer or so, the T-1000 could be seen chasing after them in another car.

The car the T-1000 drove was also prepared by Sheyan and his group. It had been modified to ensure that it could absolutely not surpass the speed and performance of Sheyan’s car…. There was only one car left on the beach, so the T-1000 had no choice.

“Good, the T-1000 is finally out of the high-intensity power area!” About six kilometers later, Sheyan heard a buzzing sound from the device on his chest, which was made by Dr. Dolittle to detect the remaining energy on the T-1000.

Previously, because the electromagnetic interference was quite strong in the wave power station, the device’s function was greatly affected, so it could not operate normally. Now that it was quite far away from the power station, it immediately returned to normal.

At this time, the T-1000 finally saw the pirated version of Ms. Adess in the back of Sheyan’s car. After scanning her image into its CPU chip, the chip immediately gave the Terminator a series of warnings!

[ Suspected key target found! ]

[ Commencing comparison…. The degree of similarity from the back is 92%. ]

[ Priority of suspected key target increased! Verify her identity as quickly as possible! This operation is upgraded to second-level priority! No interruption to the operation is allowed unless a situation that may endanger the survival of the Terminator occurs! ]

After it received the series of warnings, the T-1000’s eyes shined red. The Terminator’s own will was in conflict with the order forced upon it. The hatred program injected into it by Skynet caused it to hate Sheyan to the bones. The fact that Sheyan had plundered its power compressor only served to elevated this hatred to a new height!

The order the T-1000’s program forced it to execute was in conflict with its emotion of hatred, but because the factory settings of the T-1000 had prepared for this eventuality and the CPU was set to “read-only” mode, the will of Skynet won out in the end.

The red glow in the eyes of the T-1000 slowly faded away. It instead looked towards the fake Ms. Adess with eyes that would make one’s flesh creep, like an experimenter looking at a frog that was about to be dissected.

Sheyan, sitting at the passenger side at the front, picked up the detector made by Dr. Dolittle, turned his body back and aimed the detector like a telescope at the T-1000 behind them. He tried to keep the device in balance, and then pressed a button.

After about five to six seconds, the detector started to get really hot while it was collecting the current data of the T-1000. Evidently, Mr. Dolittle did not give much thought to the aesthetic and heat insulation aspects of the detector when he was making it. Sheyan could only grit his teeth and keep his grip on the detector painfully. His fingers even started smoking and hissing due to the heat.

After a while, the device finally made a beeping sound to indicate the completion of the data collection process. A series of notifications appeared in Sheyan’s vision.

[ Target: Liquid Metal Terminator T-1000 ]

[ Percentage of energy left: 27% ]

[ Amount of energy left: 1321 Strong Coulomb ]

[ This machine will reach a critical point and go into hibernation when the remaining energy drops below 5%. ]

[ According to the current (non-combat) energy consumption rate, the total time the machine can remain active is 113 hours and 18 minutes. ]

[ Hint: The electrical resistance of the left shoulder region of the target has increased to 892%. There is a 71.3% chance of functional damage. ]

Sheyan was pleasantly surprised by these data. The fact that only 27% of energy remained in the Terminator was truly unexpected. However, he immediately understood why. This result likely had a lot to do with the damage on the T-1000’s left shoulder.

Dolittle was sharing Sheyan’s data. At that moment, Dolittle’s voice transmitted over from the earpiece.

“I’m guessing you’re quite surprised too, aren’t you, my friend? Even my most optimistic estimation had the T-1000’s remaining energy at more than 50%. Oh yeah, is the prey still taking the bait?”

Sheyan faintly smiled as he looked at the rearview mirror. Two to three hundred metres behind them, the T-1000 was still pursuing them relentlessly with a cold expression.

“It seems our bait tastes good enough. By the way, what kind of attack would cause such damage to a monster like the T-1000?”

Dolittle’s voice turned grave. “A terrible power, my friend. First, you should know that the recovery ability of the T-1000 was actually created by Skynet by mimicking the human genome map.”

“The human genome map? How?” asked Sheyan in surprise.