Arknights: I'm Pretty Strong With Minecraft — Chapter 47

Chapter 47: Old Cat, You Really Did Use Padding, Didn’t You?

“Wake up, Ivan! Are you alright? Ivan!”

Ivan groaned, struggling to peel his heavy eyelids apart. The harsh, sterile lighting of the Rhodes Island dormitory filtered through his blurry vision, slowly coalescing into the concerned, refined features of Rosa leaning over his bedside.

“Wh-What is wrong?” he mumbled, his voice thick with sleep.

Seeing him finally stir, Rosa let out a soft, elegant sigh of relief. “Doctor Kal’tsit is looking everywhere for you right now, and… well, she seems rather displeased.” She chose her words with delicate precision, attempting to subtly convey the sheer magnitude of the impending disaster.

“Seriously.” A second voice sliced through the room, dripping with unmistakable impatience. “If you did not wake up in the next ten seconds, we were going to drag the Medical Operators in here to shock you back to life.”

Ivan shifted his gaze toward the source of the hostility. Zima sat perched on his desk, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, her boots resting carelessly on his chair.

“Speaking of which…” Ivan rubbed the sleep from his eyes, his mind finally booting up. He blinked, registering the draft in the room. “Why are you two even in here?”

His gaze drifted past the two Ursus girls, finally landing on the entryway. The once-sturdy, reinforced metal door of his dormitory was now violently caved inward. The locking mechanism was a mangled mess of twisted steel and exposed wires, having clearly been subjected to a brutal, unyielding assault.

‘What the hell,’Ivan thought.’Can not anyone on this ship just use a keycard?’

“And what exactly happened to that… deformed piece of scrap metal next to you?”

Hearing the accusation, Zima hopped off the desk. She slammed her palm against the tabletop with a sharp bang that made Ivan flinch.

“How dare you ask?!” She jabbed a finger aggressively toward the ruined door. “Rosa and I came looking for you! We stood out in that hallway knocking for ages until our throats went hoarse! There was not a single sound coming from inside! If we had not finally heard you snoring, I would have assumed you just died in your sleep!”

She glared down at him, her fierce demeanor masking a flicker of genuine anxiety. “Do you have any idea how worried we were?”

Ivan looked from the shattered door, which would undoubtedly require an expensive requisition form to fix, to Zima’s fiercely self-righteous expression. He shrank back into his pillows, offering a weak, tentative smile.

“So, about that door… are you going to cover the repair costs?”

“Dream on! Not a chance!” Zima barked, her tone leaving absolutely zero room for negotiation.

Ivan fell silent. His internal monologue screamed in agony. His salary had not even been deposited yet, and his precious Lungmen Dollars were already slipping away. He mentally calculated how many gold ingots he would need to smelt and sell on the black market just to break even.

“Alright, Zima, let us calm down.” Rosa stood up, her voice smooth and placating, though her subsequent actions completely betrayed her refined tone. “We should still escort Ivan to Doctor Kal’tsit first. We truly cannot afford to keep her waiting any longer.”

With a terrifying, unspoken synchronicity, the two Ursus girls stepped forward.

Before Ivan could even process the threat, a hand shot out from either side. They clamped down mercilessly on the fluffy bear ears perched atop his head.

“Wait! Ow, ow, ow, ow!”

A sharp sting shot through his scalp as his entire upper body was hoisted upward by his ears.

“I expect this from Zima! But why are you grabbing my ears too, Rosa?! Stop learning these barbaric habits from her!”

His desperate protests fell on entirely deaf ears. Zima and Rosa flanked him, maintaining a vice-like grip on his sensitive Ursus ears as they half-dragged, half-carried him out of the ruined dormitory and down the pristine corridors toward the central hall.

As he stumbled along the metallic hallways of Rhodes Island, completely at the mercy of his two captors, a crisp, mechanical chime echoed in his mind.

[Stage Mission: ‘Lungmen Outskirts Rescue’ has been completed.]

[Rewards are being distributed…]

[MODs loaded successfully:]

[Xaero’s World Map]

[IndustrialCraft 2]

[Ex Nihilo]

Ivan’s eyes widened, the pain in his ears momentarily forgotten. A minimap! This system was leagues beyond the Doctor’s constantly lagging, archaic PRTS terminal. He mentally pulled up the interface, marveling at the clean, detailed overlay mapping out the ship’s corridor layout. Two little icons representing Rosa and Zima blinked right beside his own marker.

Teleportation, waypoints, resource generation… he just needed to figure out if he could bring other people along for the ride.

Completely lost in his grand, game-breaking fantasies of future tactical maneuvers, Ivan stopped paying attention to the physical world.

Thud!

A dull, heavy impact echoed through the corridor as Ivan walked face-first into the reinforced steel wall of a sharp corner.

Rosa and Zima, who had finally let go of him a few paces back, jumped at the sudden noise and spun around.

“Ivan! Are you alright?” Rosa hurried over, her aristocratic composure breaking into genuine concern.

Zima simply crossed her arms, staring at him with utter disbelief. “Seriously? Are you still sleepwalking? How do you manage to walk straight into a wall on a brightly lit ship?”

“I am fine, I am fine…” Ivan groaned, rubbing his bruised forehead. “Just woke up. Still a bit groggy. Did not see the turn…”

“Right.” Zima eyed him with heavy skepticism, then jerked her thumb toward the heavy blast doors at the end of the hall. “Doctor Kal’tsit is waiting in the central hall right through there. You go face the music.”

Rosa nodded, offering a gentle, sympathetic smile. “We will wait for you right here.”

The two girls exchanged a knowing glance, both entirely unwilling to step into the blast radius of Kal’tsit’s impending wrath.

Ivan took a deep, steadying breath, bracing himself for the storm.

The moment the automatic doors slid open with a pneumatic hiss, the temperature in the room seemed to plummet.

Kal’tsit stood in the center of the hall, her arms crossed over her pristine white coat. Her piercing feline eyes locked onto Ivan the second he crossed the threshold, her gaze so sharp and analytical it felt as though she were dissecting him on an operating table.

Ivan instantly felt a cold sweat prickle the back of his neck. His eyes darted nervously around the room, suddenly finding the architectural design of the ceiling light strips incredibly fascinating.

“Operator Ivan.”

Kal’tsit’s voice was perfectly measured, devoid of any inflection, which only made it infinitely more terrifying.

“I hope you clearly understand that Rhodes Island is a pharmaceutical company. We are a medical organization dedicated to solving the Infected crisis. We are not a refugee shelter.”

She paused, letting the silence stretch until it became suffocating. “Do you have any idea what the Operators from our other departments are whispering about in private? They are saying Rhodes Island has been successfully occupied by the Reunion Movement.”

She took a slow step forward. “Care to explain that massive horde of gifts you brought back to my ship?”

“Ah, hahahaha… Well, um…” Ivan rubbed the back of his neck, his mind racing to formulate a gamer-approved defense. “Doctor Kal’tsit, just think about the logistics! We have all these people, directly incorporated into our base infrastructure! They do not demand high wages, we just have to feed them! It is a massive influx of free, high-tier labor!”

He gestured wildly, warming up to his own pitch. “Mining operations, the processing stations, the factories… our production efficiency is going to double overnight!”

Kal’tsit slowly raised a hand, pressing two fingers hard against her temple as if trying to physically massage away a sudden, violent migraine.

“…Forget it.”

She abandoned the argument entirely, deciding her sanity was worth more than debating ethics with a walking anomaly.

“Operator Ivan, we have an urgent situation. One of our forward reconnaissance teams has suddenly gone dark. The final transmission before their signal vanished was a distress code indicating an ambush by an unknown hostile force.”

Her gaze sharpened, all traces of exhaustion vanishing into pure, commanding authority. “I need you to immediately assemble Amiya, the Doctor, and those members of the Ursus Student Self-Government Group you so generously recruited earlier. Deploy to the coordinates of their last known signal. You are to search the area, provide immediate combat support, and ascertain the situation. Am I understood?”

“Understood! Consider the mission accomplished!” Ivan snapped to attention, delivering a crisp, confident salute.

Glad to have escaped a severe reprimand, Ivan spun on his heel to make a swift exit. But just as he reached the door, a terrible, intrusive thought crossed his mind. He stopped dead in his tracks.

Slowly, he turned back around. A mischievous, utterly suicidal curiosity crept onto his face. He leaned in slightly, lowering his voice into a conspiratorial whisper.

“Oh, by the way, Doctor Kal’tsit. I just have one last question. Just one tiny thing I have been really curious about…”

Kal’tsit raised a single, elegant eyebrow, silently permitting him to dig his own grave.

“That… your…” Ivan vaguely gestured with both hands in front of his own chest. “Surely it is… padded, right?”

The moment the words left his mouth, the ambient temperature in the central hall did not just drop, it shattered into absolute zero.

Kal’tsit’s expression darkened into a terrifying void. The already oppressive, cold aura radiating from her condensed into a suffocating, physical pressure that made it hard to breathe.

When she finally spoke, every single syllable sounded as though it had been dragged from the deepest, darkest depths of a frozen abyss.

“Mon3tr.”

A horrifying, crystalline screech tore through the air as a massive, jagged shadow erupted from her spine.

“Eh?! Wait, wait, wrong! I misspoke! I did not say anything! I am leaving! I am leaving right now!”