The Hardware Store

Tsk. Four—she didn't like that number either.

Too unlucky.

With a soft sigh, she resigned herself to blending into her ten-person squad, listening as the others discussed their strategy.

Where should they search for the alien? How should they deploy their forces? How could they capture it while minimizing harm to ordinary citizens?

Among the Executive Department guards temporarily assigned to Squad Four, a young guard stepped forward and handed them an electronic screen.

The screen's green glow projected into midair, visible to everyone.

On the display was a map—presumably of Regaken State—with over forty locations circled in bright red, painfully conspicuous.

The guard explained earnestly, "The forty-three spots marked here are where the victims' bodies were found."

He tapped one red circle randomly, swiping his fingers through the air. The circle expanded, revealing streets and buildings on either side. In front of what looked like a hardware store, yellow caution tape had been strung up, and a pedestrian happened to walk past the entrance.

Only then did Tu Ran realize they were looking at a surveillance feed.

The camera zoomed in further, even entering the shop, rendering a three-dimensional view of its interior.

Tu Ran guessed this wasn't real-time surveillance—after all, blind spots like the space behind doors were now perfectly visible. Perhaps this was the Federal Government's holographic photography technology, reconstructing the entire scene in 3D.

She thought of her own holographic recording ring; the final result processed by the Research Institute probably looked just like this.

From what she could see, this really was a hardware store—shelves and counters piled high with scattered, worn-out appliances.

The only difference from the hardware stores in her memory was that these shelves also held mechanical skulls, mechanical prosthetic limbs, and artificial eyes, with tangled wires snaking out and exposed.

These were things Tu Ran had never seen before.

The camera looped around the store, stopping at a spot on the floor in the corner.

The lens zoomed in.

It was a highly detailed corpse.

A sunken abdomen, bloodless lips, hollow eye sockets, a gaunt frame—ribs faintly visible beneath the oversized clothing.

With a single glance, Tu Ran concluded that all the organs in the abdomen had been scooped out. Judging by how deep the eye sockets had caved in, the eyeballs were gone too, and she suspected the brain matter had been sucked dry as well.

This must be the fate of those possessed by aliens—becoming nothing more than a hollow shell of bones.

The guard said, "This is the hardware store owner. He was found dead in his own shop by a customer this morning."

He manipulated the light screen again, pulling up a photo—a corpse in the same state as the hardware store owner. "This one we found in a cabinet under the owner's counter. Surveillance shows he was the first customer to enter the store yesterday morning."

Tu Ran was starting to piece things together. The alien had possessed the customer, walked into the hardware store, then taken a liking to the owner. It had seized the owner's body and stuffed the customer's corpse into the cabinet under the counter. Now that the owner was dead, it meant the alien had switched hosts again.