Mercer took a few deep breaths, regained his calm, and stepped forward. As he pushed open the server room door, the only thing he saw was an Arasaka agent seated with a calm expression.
"I've got two pieces of bad news. Which one do you want to hear first?" The Arasaka agent leisurely took out a cigarette and lit it.
Mercer's helmet visor opened: "Give me one."
The Arasaka agent unhesitatingly took out the cigarette box and tossed it to him. Mercer caught it, looked at it: "You Japanese always have to smoke this bizarre flavor."
"Special mint flavor, refreshing and invigorating." The agent said, taking a deep breath and exhaling a puff of smoke: "You don't look anxious at all... I recognize your face, Mercer, ha..."
He sighed with emotion.
But Mercer merely smiled and casually inserted a chip into the server's interface, then sat directly at the room's computer, focusing on the data on the screen, beginning to work on decrypting.
"Tell me the bad news you know?"
"The ignition program has been initiated; your plan has failed." The agent smiled and did not even try to stop Mercer's actions—he knew he didn't have the capability to do so.
"What's the second one?" Mercer asked curiously, as the program chip had already cracked the server's permissions by this time.
He took out the brain-computer interface cable, officially connected to the server.
"The self-destruct program for the base has already been activated, and in 3 minutes we're going to die here together... Do not think about escaping; there's no way out."
As the agent finished speaking, the roaring sound of explosions was heard in succession — this was the sound of the elevator Arasaka Saburo was riding being blown up.
The path to the launch site has been completely destroyed, and the rocket launch can no longer be stopped.
Mercer smirked, gesturing for him to look at the surveillance footage not far away.
Then, the agent saw V sprinting down the corridor.
Her speed was astonishing, even the ultra-high frame rate of the camera could only catch her afterimage.
At this moment, V was returning the way she came, cursing: "Mercer! That idiot has sealed the way! You better think of a way and come up!"
In the voice channel, she cursed and ran: "Lucky I'm fast enough! I almost got buried in the elevator!"
Mercer smiled: "That's great, go on, give Saburo a surprise, don't worry about me."
But V's expression turned serious in the call, emphasizing her tone: "I'm not joking! Hurry up and find a way out now! You might have been buried alive!"
Mercer only smiled and said: "I said, don't worry..."
The successive explosions around made Mercer sigh.
"You better finish it up, then we need to figure out a way to get away! Didn't you hear? The base is glowing red now, the alarm sound is huge, I suspect it's about to blow up!" V said urgently, then disappeared from the surveillance view.
More accurately, the surveillance lines had been completely cut off — Mercer could judge from the successive explosions around him.
At this moment, the path from moon base's lower level to the upper level was probably already blown up by pre-buried bombs.
This also means that Mercer is now deeply buried under Arasaka's moon base, and in three minutes, bigger bombs will flatten here.
"I'm working on it."
After Mercer finished speaking, there was no immediate reply in the communication.
He took a deep breath from the minty scent of Arasaka agent's cigarette: "Looks like we don't have time to chit-chat."
The agent casually took out his pistol: "I'm curious... what are you busy with now? Did you hear these explosions? We have been buried alive, if I were you, maybe I'd consider leaving some last words or something."
"Me?" Mercer looked at the flickering numbers on the server and slowly smiled.
"I'm looking for your moon material pusher... found it."
Mercer's gaze was fixed on the server's data content, then he let out a cold laugh.
The Arasaka agent seemed to still have something to say, but Mercer had no time to chat with him anymore, with just a thought, the Arasaka agent convulsed and fell to the ground.
And Mercer, without hesitation, took off the cover from the back of his head, grabbed a deep dive connection cable from the server room, and plugged it into his head.
When Mercer deep-dived into the Cyber World, the first thing that appeared beside him was a completely black cat with red glowing eyes.
This was Black Light, who also hacked into the base network.
Perhaps due to the influence of Venus, or its own analysis of Mercer's interests, or because its core intelligence source code also came from Bartmos' 'Desire for Death', anyway, it was another cat.
"Master, is there anything I can help you with?"
Black Light's tone was calm.
"The moon material pusher is indeed near the base, directly connected to the server, but the problem is... Arasaka has provided computational power protection from Earth.
Now, we have to race against speed."
Mercer calmly said, making a decision.
Now, he needed to both disarm the timed bombs in the underground facilities and break through the moon material pusher's ICE to gain usage rights for the moon material pusher.
As for escape?
Mercer rationally judged — at this moment the path to the upper level had to be all blown up, if the bombs couldn't be disarmed in time, digging a path out in few minutes would be an impossible task.
Without further words, Black Light's prosthetic eye flashed with blood-red light: "Please allow Venus to provide computational power support."