Chapter 067: Electrolytic Ozone

“Although it was Maya and Jason who met you first,” Willie began, but as he drew near, Bai Yuxi suddenly caught a faint, fishy stench. The closer Willie came, the stronger the smell grew.

“But in the end, wasn’t it me who found you later and invited you to join our Seventh Squad?” Willie continued. “I’m basically your 'referrer,' right? You can’t keep this amazing finishing move a secret from me!” He rambled on, but then noticed Bai Yuxi’s peculiar expression and the way he shifted uncomfortably, edging away. Willie paused, confused. “What’s wrong?”

“Willie, um… do you have body odor?” Bai Yuxi, holding his breath, twisted awkwardly. “I’m not quite used to it…”

“Nonsense! I’m one of those rare Black guys without the smell gene!” Willie, suddenly indignant, raised his arm and exposed his armpit. “If you don’t believe me, smell for yourself—”

Before he finished, his expression changed. He suspiciously leaned in and sniffed at his own armpit, baffled. “That can’t be right. I put on deodorant before I left today.” Perplexed, he sniffed both armpits repeatedly, back and forth, almost making Bai Yuxi gag.

“See? It’s not me!” Willie exclaimed. “Smell for yourself, it’s not my odor!” After a few more sniffs, he started sniffing around like a police dog, and suddenly brightened. “It’s coming from around us!”

Bai Yuxi took a cautious breath and realized Willie was now several meters away, yet the rotten fish smell lingered, only growing stronger. The two exchanged a look. Bai Yuxi frowned. “Willie, are there any mutated or extra-dimensional creatures that give off a stench?”

“I… I don’t know,” Willie admitted. “On my previous extermination missions, I only ran into local mutated creatures.”

“I’ve never encountered any extra-dimensional creatures, so how would I know if they stink?” He paused. “Unless it’s a mutant skunk? But that doesn’t make sense. Skunks are native to North America. There shouldn’t be any in Yan territory.” Willie scratched his head. “Unless someone kept a skunk as a pet and it mutated and escaped? But who would keep something like that as a pet?”

“Wait! That’s ozone!” Bai Yuxi sniffed carefully, his face suddenly changing. “There might be a transformer nearby, or an underground cable leaking electricity. That’s the smell of electrolyzed ozone!”

Willie jumped in fright and instinctively hopped back to Bai Yuxi’s side before realizing, “But that can’t be! The mission intel said power has been cut here for ages due to demolition issues. Where would a cable be leaking?”

“Look,” Bai Yuxi said gravely, gesturing around them.

They were on the outskirts of Iron Shoal Village, which had a population of nearly a thousand. The surrounding open land was filled with abandoned vegetable plots and ponds that had once been reclaimed by villagers. In the lush height of summer, wild plants still flourished there.

Yet now, the path encircling the village was shrouded in a faint, bluish mist under the moonlight.

Worried about toxins, Willie scrambled to pull a thin isolation mask from his pouch and put it on, regardless of its efficacy. He urged Bai Yuxi to put on a similar dust-and-gas mask, then used his personal info terminal to alert the rest of the Seventh Squad.

But strangely, though the personal info terminal should function within the bio-magnetic field of an Overlimit Warrior, it failed. The squad’s communication channel was dead silent—Willie’s calls were met with nothing but static.

Through the data mask’s high-definition display, Bai Yuxi felt a vague distortion, as if something was interfering—not enough to blind him completely, but enough to unsettle.

The two stood motionless, pulling their weapons and standing back-to-back, tense and alert. When they inadvertently brushed against each other, a sharp static crack popped between them.

“Static field?” Bai Yuxi turned to look at Willie, whose tightly curled hair now stood out in all directions, resembling a dandelion about to explode.

Instinctively, Bai Yuxi raised his hand to touch his own hair, but before he could, Willie whispered, “Bai, do you hear anything?”

Bai Yuxi paused and listened, but at first, he heard nothing unusual—just the constant croaking and clucking around them. The fields and ponds were full of frogs calling in the summer night. In the wilds near Iron Shoal Village, that was hardly strange.

“No, listen closely!” Willie shook his head, gripping his combat knife tightly. “It’s only frogs—no insects.”

Growing up in the city, Bai Yuxi had overlooked that detail. Indeed, apart from the frogs, the night was silent—no trace of insect song, which was odd. If their conversation had frightened the insects into silence, surely the frogs would be just as wary?

They exchanged a glance. Willie looked down and activated the detection radar and particle counter on his info terminal, forcing a scan of the area. Bai Yuxi, meanwhile, expanded his own bio-magnetic field, intending to use “super-magnetic sensing” to probe their surroundings. Since they were facing extraordinary creatures, not Overlimit Warriors, there was little risk of revealing his position.

But Bai Yuxi was unprepared for what happened next. The moment he expanded his bio-magnetic field, the cacophony of frogs that had filled the night went abruptly silent, as if snuffed out, leaving the world in a tense hush.

The sudden shift unsettled Bai Yuxi, and he grew instinctively tense. But Willie, watching the radar, relaxed. “It’s fine. Seems like just a group of mutated frogs—danger level only 0.1 to 0.3, the highest barely 0.5.”

“Mutated frogs? You’ve seen them before?” Bai Yuxi, reassured by this “veteran’s” response, leaned over to look at Willie’s radar. “Are all mutated creatures animals?”

He watched as the radar’s cursor swept the screen, revealing only faint, barely discernible dots. The energy signatures of these extraordinary creatures were so low that without the highest sensitivity and forced scanning, they would have been undetectable at all.