for Cache

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New Cache, but not the one veterans remember.
The hangar walls were damaged, yellow radioactive rust was growing through them. Something happened in Room "X", a classified laboratory hidden behind the destroyed wall of the A-site. In the leaked screenshots, it looked like a laboratory, with monitors and dynamic beams all around. And in the darkness behind the screens, a Desert Eagle pistol glowed with a yellow-green flicker, next to it a notebook with unfinished notes from an unknown scientist: "Protocol "GAMMA": activation via thermal markers. When the incident light and beam coincide, the penetration is increased by 300%..."

A broken monitor in room "X" where static is replaced by a frame in time - a hand in a protective glove charges a Deagle with something similar to a reactor rod... and... that same yellow-green light.
Lab tests will show: the weapon's metal has mutated. The crystal lattice has rebuilt itself into fractals that absorb light and amplify gamma radiation. Later, fragments of the Desert Eagle [Atomic Ray] that destroyed the wall of Plant "A" were noticed, its barrel stuck in the wall, and on the back of the sight a Geiger counter rhythmically crackled, which informed that the radioactive background had subsided, but a peak was recorded when the irreversible happened.

Valve kept silent, but the following lines were found in the code of the encrypted update:

"skin_deagle_atomic_ray_test_3_enable_geo_anomaly".

"The first step of evolution. Be a god or a Chernobyl rat."