I Have Returned, but I Cannot Lay down My Gun

Chapter 701

"Dragon 1-1, we are observing the Lickers gathered at City College of New York with drones. The estimated number is around 200. Currently... it is assumed they are recovering firearms and infrastructure previously owned by the Crips gang."

"Less than two hours after landing, they wiped out 500 people and are returning? Looks like the friends at Central Park are pretty good at this when they try."

"Everyone’s expression is completely shattered. It's like a comedy show... The eavesdropper is working without any problems. The analysis team should focus on the script."

6:55 AM, Upper Manhattan.

As the sun rises above the dim sky, a drone operated by a cleaner surveys the area above City College of New York, where a horrific massacre has taken place.

The scene below was far from dull, with the escapee gangs frantically checking how many bodies there were as they roamed the university campus. Their reactions were nothing short of spectacular.

It was understandable. The number was only 500. But for the gang members, what they feared the most wasn't the number of bodies.

• "This... what the hell... Not a single survivor, how... this doesn’t make sense."
• "You’re telling me they did this crazy shit in less than an hour? Who the hell did this? Even the Cleaners can’t pull this off."
• "I... I can’t do this anymore, I’m leaving!"

In just an hour, or even less, a small gang was completely crushed.

Even the 30 or so scouts who were patrolling the area to figure out who the perpetrator was were obliterated without a trace during Task Force's escape.

It wasn’t a messy gang fight. It was an extremely trained soldier, heavily armed, stomping over the opposition. The types of bullet casings scattered on the floor were entirely different from those used by gangs.

No one could even ask what had happened. There were only corpses. More than half of them had bullet holes in their heads and hearts. Some had been torn apart by explosives.

The raw fear in their voices. The two members of Dragon Squad who overheard it chuckled and murmured.

"They’re just good at shooting unarmed civilians and driving around shooting pistols. There’s no way they could do this."

"The rumors will spread fast. Wonder how they’ll react. If the friends at Central Park hit them four or five more times in the back of the head, I’ll have no complaints."

The words mixed with crude mockery.

In reality, it was no different. Since the outbreak of the Omega Virus, the criminals who joined the gangs had simply lowered their psychological thresholds for committing crimes to survive.

The mental resolve required to kill someone decreased over time, but that didn’t mean their skill in killing others increased.

And those pseudo-powerful individuals were dealt with by specially trained soldiers—human weapons developed with millions of dollars invested by the state, whose sole purpose was to figure out how to kill others effectively.

The result needed no further explanation.

The wiretap continued, and it wasn’t limited to City College of New York. Communications from escapees in Brooklyn, using their radios, were also being intercepted.

Unlike Manhattan, which had become a wasteland, the Licker Union members wandering the vast city of New York were truly acting recklessly.

"Do you think those mutants are learning anything from this situation?"

"If they had the intelligence to learn something, they’d be bowing their heads and heading into Central Park like that Zodiac guy."

Brooklyn Langon Hospital, Lower Manhattan, Fort Hamilton, and Upper Manhattan.

In the past few months, while the overwhelming power of the US military remained known to a few escapees who had survived being pounded into oblivion in New York, their numbers were incredibly few.

The reason was simple. In all the locations mentioned above, no one had survived, and the 20,000-strong Licker group in Brooklyn had been reduced by half in less than two months.

It wasn’t exactly annihilation, but it was close to obliteration. Because of this, the Lickers had moved on to the Bronx, full of gangs.

This meant that there were people who knew exactly what had happened, and people who didn’t.

"The ones who came from Brooklyn have only half the guts. I get they’re scared, but don’t stink like cowards now. If they come back after hitting a jackpot, we’ll catch them all and kill them."

"...Don’t underestimate them. These guys could even bomb us if things go wrong."

"A bombing in this neighborhood full of stone buildings? That’s pure comedy. Thanks to the police and the military running away, we’re the only ones left alive here, aren’t we? Worrying about bombing us... ridiculous."

The Lickers, who had come to drag the Bronx gangs into their mess, could only send out warnings without cursing.

On the other hand, the Bronx gang councils, who had never been beaten before, laughed mockingly.

It wasn’t over yet, though. Most of the Licker members had only experienced one or two of the four major strikes.

Considering that, the concept of cooperation was as difficult as making a ball out of sand without a single drop of water.

Meanwhile, the Cleaner reconnaissance team opened up the map to check Upper Manhattan and the Bronx.

Several gang territories were marked with dense, complicated notations. However, that wasn’t the important part. Dragon 1-2 took out colored pencils and began drawing a winding line cutting through the city.

At first glance, it looked like a simple scribble, but anyone familiar with the subway and route maps of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and New Jersey knew it was a kind of map for routes.

"Beehive, Syndicate, The Numbers... There are many gangs blocking the way. Quite the competition."

"Obstacles. You know that, right?"

"Yes."

Several gang territories overlapped on the route map.

Every time it overlapped, Dragon 1-2 marked the gang’s territory with an X. What that meant didn’t need to be explained. The line drawn on the map eventually led to New Haven, 100 kilometers to the east.

President Henry had decided to prioritize normalizing the railroads first, with plans to quickly repair the Northeast Corridor (NEC) connecting Boston in Massachusetts to Washington D.C.

The number of people in Central Park was about the size of a regiment, and while supplies could still be handled by transport planes, it was unlikely to last long.

In other words, if the railroad is blocked, the lifeline to Central Park will be severed.

"Upper Manhattan will be filled with corpses."

"Neither side will back down. Central Park will never allow this. They’ll turn the Bronx into a sea of blood to complete their mission."

"I like that part."

Clik.

Dragon 1-1 closed the laptop and spent a few minutes recovering the drone that had been hovering in the sky.

The morning sunlight bathed the area, but since it was still full of criminals, the two-person reconnaissance team didn’t go down to the observation point below the apartment.

Instead, they pulled out their radios and muttered before turning it on.

"Our base is on Randall’s Island… the critical point we need to secure in Central Park is right at the point where the underground subway route meets the above-ground lines."

"Yes. Once the troop deployment order is given, we’ll arrive in ten minutes."

"Some of the troublesome guys will be dealt with later, but I’m happy with how the operations are going. Let’s give our friends at Central Park a bit of a boost. Our goal now is to burn all the gangs near the subway route. Sounds good, doesn’t it?"

"That sounds fun."

"I just hope Central Park responds well."

Once the strategy was decided, there was no more hesitation.

He contacted the Cleaner headquarters on Randall’s Island – an island 3 kilometers east of Central Park, home to a large water treatment plant and the New York Fire Academy – and relayed the upcoming mission.

The biggest victims of the Omega Virus, those who were burned alive while incinerating corpses, felt no sense of reward, but the defectors hadn’t crossed the final line.

The next target for these armed groups was the trash in the Bronx.

"I thought someone would eventually react if something big happened, but it’s just as expected. The Cleaners, who had been lying low for a moment, took the bait again. With the operation time clearly set, it seems we’ll be meeting them often."

"I guess sleeping at night is out of the question for a while. I didn’t want my days and nights to get mixed up like this."

"No choice."

And as expected, after waking up, the team saw the next set of tasks piled up in envelopes.

The first button in what would later turn out to be a total kill count of at least 90,000 enemy combatants had been fastened.

The air quality report: "The levels of hydrogen sulfide and ammonia gas in the air have slightly increased."

"...The fact that this can be detected is terrifying."

Late May, Manhattan.

The bone-chilling cold had long passed, but the freezing cold still had its advantages, particularly in preserving corpses to prevent decay.

However, that was no longer the case.

The average temperature of Manhattan between late May and June hovered between 20 to 25 degrees Celsius, and New York weather was only getting warmer, not colder.

It was enough warmth for corpses to decay.

Barely twelve hours after the operation ended, an enormous number of rats and flies began to swarm around City College of New York.

But no one would be cleaning it up. Unless they were family— and even then— they wouldn’t clean up the bodies. Besides, that kind of 'clean-up' was far worse labor than it seemed.

Just like the tens of thousands of civilians killed by the Lickers at LaGuardia Airport.

"If I have to walk a thorny path, then I’ll walk it. I’ll crush everything."

"The coordination with the Cleaners is still ongoing. The final operation plan should be out in three or four hours."

"Good. We still have a long way to go. Anyone trying to disrupt the rebuilding of our country can have their spine bent backwards legally, at least for now. No military police coming for me yet."

"I would actually recommend that, haha."

As planned, they weren’t hesitating anymore.

He contacted the Cleaner headquarters and relayed the next mission. The next target was the gang members roaming around the Bronx.

As expected, Central Park showed no sympathy for any escapees or gangs.

The only criminals who seemed to have any semblance of goodwill toward them were Zodiac, and even then, it wasn’t complete goodwill.

The only fortunate thing was that Zodiac wasn’t the type of person to believe that kindness would come her way simply because she had played the role of a whistleblower a few times.

That’s why Zodiac never stopped trying to elicit positive responses here, and she was gradually blending into Central Park.

She, despite being half an outsider, knew more about the upcoming operations in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Upper Manhattan than most others.

A former Licker, and once a member of the Hyena Council. This was the reason she had been called upon several times to speculate about the enemies’ behavior, and in the process, she came to understand the current situation.

The conclusion was simple.

Without any embellishment, Central Park was planning to launch an annihilation operation against the Lickers and the gangs.

And there was a reason for telling her this.

The senior operations officer, muttering to himself, turned his head toward the mutant sitting in the corner of the office, resembling a wolf.

"I’m not trying to make you uncomfortable, you know that, right?"

"...Do you think bringing me back into this mess with the Lickers is going to make me more comfortable?"

"Now that you mention it, I suppose it could. My bad."

"It’s fine. I’m just happy I’m allowed to sit here even though I’m not an operations officer."

As she said, she wasn’t an operations officer, yet Zodiac stayed in the command center, and almost no one was unaware that she was being groomed to become something close to one.

An Alpha-tier mutant was far too valuable a resource to leave with nothing to do.

Zodiac wasn’t ignorant of this fact, and though she grumbled about it, whenever she had a chance, she read training manuals to pass the tests to become an operations officer.

Back to the present.

On the desk in front of her was a draft of an operation plan for systematically eliminating the faction she had once belonged to and establishing a foothold. There were still a few sections that hadn’t been finalized.

Zodiac felt an unsettling chill as she read through the plan.

She could vaguely recall the bodycam footage from yesterday and the faint smell of horrific decay that seemed to hang in the air of Central Park. She didn’t show it, but the urge to vomit suddenly surged.

It was the moment she hated her newly enhanced sense of smell that came with her mutation.

She closed the draft, having only partially read it, and added another comment.

"...Are we using white phosphorus again for this one?"

"If necessary, yes. But we won’t be throwing it around recklessly like last time. We don’t need to burn such a wide area this time. The main reason is… we’ve almost run out of the stockpiled supplies from the last bombing."

"Now that you mention it, Lapland, you haven’t been eating much meat lately... Is it because of that?"

"..."

She didn’t want to admit it, but the truth had already been revealed.

Without saying a word, she turned her head and gazed through the window at the unnecessarily bright Central Park outside. The HQ hadn’t removed all the trees during its renovation process, so it was possible to see this view.

Unknowingly, her eyes wandered back. It was 4:21 PM. The outside looked as if nothing had ever happened—fresh and green. It almost seemed like if she went outside now, Manhattan, filled with people and cars, would welcome her.

But that sight could never be seen again, at least not for half a century.

Thinking this, she finally spoke.

"9 hours and 49 minutes until the operation begins… It hasn’t even been a full day since we finished the last mission, and you’re already preparing the next one?"

"That’s the weight on the shoulders of the field operators."

The senior operations officer added casually, or perhaps with a tone of resignation, as though nothing could be done about it.

"Once we submit the operation plan and it’s approved, there’s nothing we can do. We just pray that those people don’t end up dead somewhere."

"..."

"No matter how much they can change things during the operation, it’s only because the field operators trust the locations, sizes, and firepower of the enemy forces we’ve outlined."

He ended his words calmly.

"Every letter and number we type means someone’s life is on the line. Don’t forget that, Zodiac."

"...I won’t forget."

"Good. That’s all that matters for now. Don’t worry about the details; they’ll be updated as needed. What you should focus on is understanding what system all this is based on. Get used to it quickly."

With those words, the senior operations officer swiftly exited the room.

It had only been one day, but Lapland had already figured out what the senior operations officer had been up to. Every time he went out and came back, he reeked of cigarette smoke, so it was impossible not to know.

She sighed and looked outside.

The weather was still nice, but just a few hundred meters away, the field operators were probably preparing for the next mission, working hard and quickly.

"...Hmph."

Though she had quit smoking after becoming a mutant, she suddenly felt like smoking again.

It was a day in May, with a brilliant sunlight, but a heavy, lethargic pressure weighed on her, one that couldn’t be chased away by the sunshine.

And then—

"Wind speed 3 meters per second, no clouds, 90% moonlight, Icarus system all green. Flame thrower flames identified 150 meters from the LZ. I’ve confirmed the Cleaners are on their way."

"Great. Let’s have some fun. We’re authorized to engage all enemy forces within the operation zone until mission completion in 48 hours."

"Move, move! Clear Lincoln Medical Center and establish a bridgehead within one hour!"

2:07 AM, at a football field about 600 meters north of Lincoln Medical Center, located 5 kilometers from Central Park.

Eleven operators stormed the hot zone again.

It was the beginning of an all-out battle—no, an extermination mission against the gangs.