The voice repeated the announcement three times, echoing in the empty and silent branch hall in the middle of the night.
Xia Chujian and the others were in Gu Shanjun's office, which had excellent soundproofing, so they didn't hear the announcements at all.
However, their smart wristbands all received notifications that the mission was complete and they could collect their rewards.
Xia Chujian perked up a bit at this, secretly wondering what good things she would receive.
Just as the team members thought they could leave, Gu Shanjun stopped them again.
"Ye Shijie, right? One more thing."
"Yes, Director Gu, please tell us."
Gu Shanjun opened his system terminal, and a holographic 3D virtual display appeared in front of him.
Then, a very clear photo appeared before them.
The team members were all stunned.
This photo was taken more than ten days ago, when they carried out the mission to kill the traffickers and rescue the abducted victims.
"Do you remember this photo?"
Ye Shijie looked at it carefully and nodded, saying, "I remember. To be precise, I took it with my smart wristband, and I uploaded it to the Dark Night Hunter's Star Network cloud system at the Mulan City branch."
"Are you sure? Is this the original photo you took?"
"Director Gu, what do you mean? I don't understand."
Gu Shanjun reached out and cropped the photo, circling an area that showed the abducted victims in a comatose state.
"Look here, are you sure these people are the same ones in your original photo?"
Ye Shijie thought for a moment and said, "My memory might be wrong, but I have a local storage on my smart wristband that I can pull up for direct comparison."
"Oh? Then pull it up and let's take a look." Gu Shanjun tapped his fingers on the desk.
Ye Shijie opened his virtual display and found the photo in the local storage of his smart wristband.
In fact, he had taken many photos, but only uploaded a portion.
After the photo was displayed, everyone stood in front of the two virtual displays, comparing them.
Sure enough, whether comparing resolution, color saturation, or size, they were exactly the same.
It was definitely the same photo.
Gu Shanjun slowly leaned back in his chair, narrowed his eyes, and stroked his chin, thoughtfully asking, "So, this is indeed the original photo. You took it directly when you completed the mission, right?"
Everyone nodded nervously, wondering why Director Gu was asking this.
Thinking about the mission, which they didn't really complete, they felt a little guilty.
Because they didn't rescue those people before they left...
Song Mingqian tried to remedy the situation, "Director Gu, we killed those traffickers at the time, and we were going to take these victims away, but suddenly the Regular Army came. Our Association's rule has always been not to compete with the Regular Army, so we left first..."
Ping Qiong also nodded and said, "Yes, yes! At the time, I even said that if Ye Dui hadn't urged us to leave quickly, we could have squeezed them all in and taken them away."
"Take them all away? What would you do with dead people?" Gu Shanjun looked at them strangely.
"Dead people?!" The five members of the team exclaimed in unison.
"What's going on?"
"Impossible!"
"I checked with the detector at the time, they were all alive! Alive! They were just knocked unconscious!"
The last to speak was Xia Chujian.
She had indeed used the detector to check outside at the time, but she didn't go inside because she hated tentacles.
Gu Shanjun frowned, "You mean, when you completed the mission, before the Regular Army arrived, these abducted victims were all alive?"
"Absolutely." Ye Shijie said very confidently, "We were in a hurry to leave at the time and didn't take them away. We were worried that the Association wouldn't confirm the mission completion."
"That's right, because the mission was to kill the traffickers and rescue the abducted victims."
"But because the Regular Army took over immediately, all the traffickers were killed, including the Remnant Species, so we don't think this will be a problem. And later the Association also confirmed that our mission was completed."
Gu Shanjun listened silently to the team members chattering, and finally said, "The problem now is that they are not only all dead, but also the number of deaths doesn't match your photos."
As he spoke, he threw out another photo.
Another virtual display screen appeared in front of them, showing another photo.
In this photo, they could clearly see that those people were indeed dead.
They were lying on the ground, their bodies twisted, bleeding from all seven orifices.
This was significantly different from the photo uploaded by Ye Shijie, where they all seemed to be sleeping.
But this photo and his photo were taken at the same location, with the same group of people.
The dead traffickers were completely consistent with Ye Shijie's photo.
The difference was the abducted victims.
Xia Chujian was also silently comparing these three photos.
After a while, she frowned and said, "...Why are there only twenty-three victims in this photo? I remember there were twenty-four."
As soon as she said this, Ye Shijie, Song Mingqian, Li Fu, and Ping Qiong all nodded and said, "Yes, there were twenty-four people. Look at the photos we took, there are indeed twenty-four people, not one less, and they are all still alive."
In the second photo that Gu Shanjun took out, the victims who died were lying in the same positions on the ground as in Ye Shijie's photo.
After comparing them one by one, they found that the missing one was the victim that Xia Chujian had seen in the sniper scope, the one that the trafficker had first attempted to assault.
Xia Chujian pointed to the empty space and said, "At that time, I was a sniper on the twelfth floor, 1,200 meters away. I violated Ye Dui's order and shot to save this person."
In the photo taken by Ye Shijie, the victim was tilting her head, only showing half of her face, but this half of her face was covered by her hair, and the other half of her face was not in the frame at all, so it was impossible to see her appearance clearly.
Only her clothes and figure showed that she should be a little girl.
Gu Shanjun looked at this photo, the expression in his eyes gradually becoming fiery, seeming very excited, but also trying to suppress it.
He took a deep breath and asked, "Are you sure the missing person is this victim?"
He was referring to the little girl tilting her head in Ye Shijie's photo.
Her clothes were half pulled off, revealing her shoulders, and on her snow-white shoulders, there were hideous red marks from the trafficker's belt.
Xia Chujian nodded emphatically: "I'm sure, it's her. Because at that time... she was the first one the trafficker wanted to assault, I couldn't wait any longer, so I shot and killed the trafficker in advance."
Ye Shijie glanced at her, thinking that was indeed the case, and no wonder she was so sure.
The second update is here. See you tomorrow!
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