The thought, once it crystallized in Michael's mind, was stark and simple, stripped of all pretense or calculation: I'm in. This is happening.The sheer, suicidal nobility of the mission, the generations of sacrifice embodied by the weary-faced Captain Liu and the grimly determined Zhang Tiezhu, left no room for his usual mercenary hesitations. The field, as they said, was one he simply had to back.
Time, however, was a luxury they didn't possess, precluding any grand, theatrical declarations of solidarity. "Alright," Michael said, his voice cutting through the tense silence of the cavernous chamber. The words were direct, devoid of his characteristic bluster. "Lay it out for me. What's the actual plan, and where do I fit in?" His sincerity was palpable, a genuine offer in the face of what seemed like certain doom.
Captain Liu responded by carefully unrolling a large, laminated map on the impossibly smooth, cold surface of the cryo-stasis pod. The paper was brittle and faded, its creases worn soft from decades of anxious study. It was a pre-war map of Detroit. Liu's finger, calloused and steady, landed on a point labeled 'Wayne State University'. "According to the archives left by our predecessors," Liu explained, his tone that of a lecturer outlining a bleak theorem, "there is a bio-research laboratory here, approximately ten meters underground. It should contain the specialized cryogenic fluid we need."
He traced a hypothetical line from their current location deep in the wastes to the heart of the ruined city. "We fight our way here, locate the precise entrance to the lab, excavate it, and retrieve the fluid. Then, we can safely revive the General."
Michael's eyes followed the traced route, and his knees felt momentarily weak. The university wasn't in some isolated corner; the map showed it nestled within what had once been a dense urban sprawl. Suburbs?he thought with a surge of incredulous panic. You call that a suburb?More critically, such a high-value research facility would have been a primary target. The level of destruction, the residual radiation… it would be a hot zone in every sense of the word. And where radiation festered, the Infected congregated. Finding a single lab in that vast, skeletal graveyard would be like finding a needle in a haystack, if the haystack was also actively trying to kill you.
Even committing his entire, fledgling militia seemed like sending a pebble to stop a landslide. They'd be swallowed whole before they even reached the city limits.
Zhang Tiezhu, seeing the silent dread on Michael's face, spoke with a heartbreaking resignation. "Hu Mi Gao, we know. The odds are… astronomical. This is not a path we would ask any outsider to walk. It is the duty fate assigned to our fathers, and their fathers before them. We brought you here not to recruit you, but to entrust you with Li Hao and the other children. If we fail… we beg you, as a son of the same ancestral land, to give them a chance at a normal life."
The selflessness of the plea was what ultimately tipped the scales. Had they tried to guilt-trip him or appeal to some grand sense of heroism, Michael might have found an excuse—the sows are farrowing back at the pig farm—and fled. But this raw, desperate honesty, this willingness to march to their deaths without demanding he join them, dismantled his defenses. The comfortable life he was building, with its simple trade and semi-civilized company, suddenly felt shallow in the face of such profound commitment.
Agitated, he leaned over the map again, his mind racing, searching for any sliver of hope, a safer route, a better way. The dim emergency lights of the chamber cast long, dancing shadows across the paper, making the city's grid look like a necropolis. There were no safe routes. The concept was a joke in a place leveled by atomic fire.
His finger absently traced the shattered streets, skirting around zones marked with radiation symbols. Then, it stopped. A name, printed in a faded but legible font, jumped out at him: JPMorgan Chase Bank. Not a small branch, but what the map indicated was a major headquarters. A cold, sharp thrill, entirely separate from the mission's altruistic core, shot through him. JPMorgan Chase. A leviathan of the old world. A place where paper wealth, the very "useless green paper" he coveted, would have been stored in unimaginable quantities. Billions, surely, to grease the wheels of a major city's economy. And with luck… gold. Safety deposit boxes filled with the real, heavy stuff.
The potential reward now glittered alongside the overwhelming risk. Fortune favors the bold,the old adage whispered in his ear, its voice suspiciously similar to that of a greedy, pragmatic salesman. Perhaps the two motivations—saving a national treasure and looting a financial one—weren't mutually exclusive. The monstrous danger of the venture suddenly seemed… balanced by an equally monstrous potential profit.
With this new, electrifying incentive, Michael's mind, previously clouded by fear, snapped into a state of hyper-clarity. Plans, half-formed and previously dismissed as too risky, began to coalesce.
He looked up, meeting Captain Liu's expectant gaze. "If you trust me," he said, his voice now firm with a newfound purpose, "give me two months. I can get us proper firearms, ammunition, and heavy engineering equipment. With those, our chances increase dramatically."
Zhang Tiezhu's eyes widened with a flicker of desperate hope. "Can you… can you get 12.7mm ammunition? And lubricants? Engine oil, hydraulic fluid, grease? If we had those, our success rate could jump by twenty percent!"
"Why?" Michael asked, perplexed by the specificity of the request.
In answer, Zhang Tiezhu sprinted to a dark corner of the chamber where a large, bulky shape was hidden under a heavy canvas tarpaulin. With a grunt, he grabbed a corner of the canvas and pulled. The cloth slid away with a rustle, revealing what lay beneath.
Michael blinked, sure his eyes were deceiving him in the poor light. But there it was. A mechanical giant, standing over five meters tall, its armored plates scuffed and worn but its silhouette unmistakably humanoid. It was a hulking testament to lost technology, a war machine from a bygone era.
No wonder the old Nationalist rumors always insisted, "The Communists have Gundams,"Michael thought, a hysterical laugh bubbling in his throat. They weren't entirely wrong.The sheer, absurd spectacle of it—a pre-war combat mech hidden in a mountain, waiting for oil and bullets—cemented his resolve. This was no longer just a rescue mission or a treasure hunt. It was turning into something far grander, and far more insane.