This lady called Haze is Blue Crystal's right hand man. She is the one whose power is arousing people with pheromones. She can make almost anyone beg her with everything they have just so that she will touch them.
Her bounty is the second highest after that of Blue Crystal himself. She is worth 500,000 dollars. That price tag made him tense up.
He looked around and asked, "This is not right. I thought this was a low-level gang war. What is this kind of bounty doing in this kind of gig?"
Someone replied. It was a skinny man. He said, "It is a low-level gang war. We are just the cannon fodder. Most of us won't make it to get paid. We are here to support the ones who are to get rid of the big shots on the other side.
And who knows? We just might get lucky."
"So we have a big shot on our side? I am guessing they are worth around 500,000 dollars too."
The thin man nodded. "Yeah. This is a narcotics game. They have a lot of money to throw about. They can afford to buy quality and quantity. We are the quantity."
That set him at ease a little, but he didn't like it at all. He thought this gig was a low level skirmish between two bit gangs. It is only now that he finds out that things are bigger than they appear to be.
He mused to himself, "I'm guessing this is why they didn't give us all the information on the terminal."
If he wasn't confident in defeating this lady and the money wasn't so tempting, he would have decided to drop down this instant.
The money is indeed tempting. There were other officers much stronger than Haze but were only worth 200,000 dollars.
Blue Crystal himself is worth a million dead, 10 million captured. He is the source of the blue dust, so his bounty is understandable.
If not for her critical role in personnel acquisition and management, Haze wouldn't be so valuable. After all, in a gang war, lives are the cheapest resources. They can be easily replaced even without money. Just the temptation of money will draw a bunch of them. His present company is proof of that.
He stopped focusing so much on the dossier after 10 minutes into their journey. His attention was taken by the sights of the environment. It was an interesting sight too.
There were weird rocks with various colors everywhere he looked. The ground had soils of different colors every few distances apart. Animals and plants with odd mutations littered this multicolored landscape. Clouds of various colors roamed the sky, and there was a constant aurora in the sky. It looked like a fairytale.
Wrath eyed the surroundings with melancholy and said, "Earth didn't use to be like this. It was the incursion that caused it."
It didn't make much of a difference to him, so he shrugged. He had seen pictures of earth before the tower of destiny appeared, so he knows that earth didn't used to look like this. But he thinks earth looks better than this.
In the pictures and videos he saw of Earth, everything looked so boring and drab. The environment was subdued, and there was this weird green color everywhere. Now trees had purple, red, or yellow leaves, not the same monotonous green.
The animals were also boring too. Apparently, four limbs was the major number of limbs that animals possessed. That has increased to six now. He considers that an upgrade.
If there is something he can do without, it is that any creature affected by the incursion and doesn't die becomes very aggressive. This is the main danger of the incursion, apart from the influx of otherworldly creatures.
Otherworldly creatures can be aggressive or not. But most of them are just frightened after suddenly being displaced to a whole new world. The creatures who suffer from the incursion, on the other hand, are always violent.
Even now, many of them are crawling or shuffling over to the trucks. He can see what used to be humans among them. Their bodies have turned into a weird hybrid between flesh and rock.
It is a colorful hybridization. If only it didn't rob them of their mind and make them aggressive toward anything that moves, they wouldn't be so bad.
Wrath said to him, "They are incursion zombies. If the incursion doesn't kill you, it will either turn you into them or make them eat you."
"I read that incursions are caused by the collision of Earth-11 with the other earths."
He was speaking to Wrath, but the others took it as a sign to weigh in.
Someone far off to his side added, "Yeah. The collision of different worlds causes matter, energy, space, and time to go bonkers. The space tears are the least of our concerns with the incursion. It is this incursion zombies that we have to be careful of."
"I read that Icon was supposed to fix it, but he became greedy for power. What a useless guy."
"I'm impressed with him, though. He acted like a hero throughout the games, only to turn his back on the world when it mattered. I don't have that kind of talent. Makes me wonder how many heroes are out there pretending."
Another person shrugged and said, "Maybe he wasn't pretending. Maybe the power was just too tempting."
Someone snorted and said with disdain, "How great is the power if he can still be killed? He is just a good for nothing guy. He is a failure."
They were villains themselves, but they were quick to condemn Icon. Anyone would. It is a common thing to do after the betrayal of the whole world.
Back then, heroes and villains came together to help him; now they can come together in agreement that Icon was a shitty guy who deserved what he got. Heroes condemn him as a failed hero and villains condemn him as a failed villain.