Deep in the night, at the Northern Bank.
Most of the bank staff had left by now, leaving only a few bookkeepers to verify the day's ledgers.
All of the Northern Bank's storage and business systems utilized manual labor, yet its security, under the surveillance of the Sky Eye system's Eye of the Watcher, was so tight it didn't miss a single corner, comparable to a restricted military zone.
Mr. Screws did not upload his consciousness to the Sky Eye system to scan the magnificent building from the inside out to ensure there were no flaws, as bank regulations dictated.
Strictly speaking, he hadn't done so for a long time because it was simply unnecessary.
The Sky Eye system had no blind spots; thirty-two Fenrir titans patrolled outside the bank, while hundreds of bionic blade-dancers stood ready inside.
Machine gun turrets, originally intended for aerospace carriers, were hidden beneath the floor every few dozen meters.
No fool would want to challenge the security system of the Northern Bank.
Unless they wanted to experience the taste of being roasted alive by bullets.
Even those prisms that refracted radiance wouldn't stand a chance.
Thinking this, Mr. Screws gave a satisfied smile and sat at his workstation.
The bionic blade-dancer girls gathering to chat had firm, springy buttocks, and their long, rounded mechanical legs reflected a metallic luster.
Bionics didn't have as many social hangups as humans, so clothes were just a burden to them, giving him a chance to feast his eyes.
He had to admit, the new models of blade-dancer girls were beautiful enough to reach his heart; they had mechanical yet warm voices and silver bodies with perfect curves.
Their three-meter-tall bodies were two-thirds legs, cold and sharp and tall, with Eka mantis blades embedded in their legs that retracted and extended with ease.
These blade-dancer girls were practically death weapons born for combat, their fighting postures more graceful and deadly than any dance.
Noticing the bank manager's gaze, the blade-dancer girls teased him, leaning forward slightly to perfectly showcase their exquisite metallic curves, causing Mr. Screws's circulating fluid to surge as he fell into a daze.
It took a while before he coughed and looked away, provoking a burst of laughter from the girls.
After playing an image of a clear sky over a wheat field ten thousand times in his heart's program, his overheating electronic brain rapidly cooled down.
Mr. Screws stroked his beard and looked out at the distant night.
He really was failing in his duties as a bank manager.
Who could have imagined that just this afternoon, a divine artifact capable of changing the fate of the world had quietly shattered?
If the people of the Chi family found out about this, they would definitely dismantle him and turn him into a barbecue machine.
Fortunately, it was impossible for a fourth person to know about this besides him and those two girls.
To the outside world, the Crimson Cloud had been missing since the Mihara City Battle; it was the Specter who had accidentally found this lost divine artifact but hadn't reported it to the Chi family.
Out of private loyalty to the little family head, the other party had secretly found him and sealed this divine artifact in the bank's basement, waiting for the day the little family head would take up her mission.
Who could have known such a thing would happen?
The forces in the shadows were already restless, and waves of calamity were flowing beneath the shifting clouds; once Pandora's box was opened, the world would face an unprecedented catastrophe.
He was the sole guardian of the key, and he could hold the secret until he rotted away, or he could personally open the box and release the torrent of disaster.
At the thought that the fate of the post-human civilization that created him was in his hands, was he, in a sense, like the Miserere, becoming an existence that dominated his own creator?
Strange emotions inevitably emerged from the cracks in the walls of his heart.
Mr. Screws was startled by his own thoughts and quickly stopped those terrifying notions.
Emptying his mind, just as Mr. Screws was thinking about how to brag to his companions after uploading his consciousness to the cluster network today, an anomaly suddenly occurred!
Red lights suddenly began to flash above the bank, and a piercing alarm dragged him back from his thoughts.
In the blink of an eye, all dormant titans activated, heavy alloy doors dropped, countless passages were urgently sealed, and machine gun turrets with cold black muzzles rose.
"This is!" Mr. Screws immediately felt that something was wrong.
"Warning, illegal intrusion," a cold mechanical voice echoed.
Mr. Screws's mechanical eyes constricted sharply as he looked around; the blade-dancer girls and the bookkeepers were looking at each other with equal bewilderment.
Was this a joke? Someone was forcibly breaking into the Northern Bank?
"Warning, intruder detected in Sector D4, unidentified biological signatures are breaching the defensive lines!"
When the unthinkable happened, Mr. Screws was the first to react, waving his hand: "Don't just stand there, girls, enter stage one alert mode!"
As if a starting pistol had been fired at their foreheads, the bionic blade-dancers instantly entered combat mode; Yaksha masks automatically covered their faces, and Eka mantis blades snapped out from their hands and feet as they scattered at a speed of a hundred meters per second.
Beneath the circular dome, a magnificent dance of death began to unfold.
A humming lullaby drifted from the darkness; there was only one attendee, the deep blue sapphire on her chest glowing brilliantly.
With green hair and a blue robe, layered sleeves and a ruffled collar, she was dressed like an elegant noble.
She ignored gravity, walking on the glass dome; behind her, the fluorite lamps went out one by one, and the corridors turned black segment by segment, as if even light could not escape from her side.
A giant cross-shaped shadow swept overhead.
The security robots below only noticed her presence then, raising their heads one after another, but their vision could not scan any information about the opponent.
They saw her in a free fall, crushing a titan into scrap metal and shattering the glass and the ground.
"Quite a lively welcome, then I should show a bit of sincerity as well."
"Warning, intruder detected in Sector D1, target is breaching the Li Cangxuan corridor."
"Warning, target has breached the Rachel corridor. Warning, target is breaching the Elias corridor!"
"Alarm, target has destroyed the Elias corridor, entered the administrative district, and is stopping at the Arian corridor."
"Alarm, target..."
A series of alarm sounds made Mr. Screws's head ring.
One must know that the distance between these corridors was at least one kilometer, and they were heavily guarded all the way; this meant the intruder's breakthrough speed had already reached Mach 5.
He couldn't think of any word other than 'monster' to describe her.
If she continued at this speed, it wouldn't even take ten seconds for her to reach the central sector!
No... five seconds.
Mr. Screws's fingertips touched the air, and a cross-section of the entire bank expanded before him.
He had already interfaced his consciousness with the Eye of the Watcher system, his computing power entering an overclocking mode as tens of millions of data streams rushed past his eyes every second like throbbing blood vessels and nerves.
While mobilizing all the bank's security forces, he expanded his consciousness to every corner of the bank, compiling himself into an invisible ghost that traveled between stone pillars, swept through long corridors, and poured into every hall.
A kaleidoscopic vision bloomed before his eyes; dots of light wove together into lines, lines climbed into images, and images fitted together to construct space.
Where?
Where?
Where was that person?
Mr. Screws confined himself in a room composed of a torrent of data; every wall around him spun rapidly like a Rubik's cube, and a hillside made of old televisions flashed all the scenes he was personally experiencing.
Where?
The Rubik's cube spun faster and faster.
He couldn't find her.
The world was filled with massive noise, his vision flying across the corridors.
Where on earth was she?
The static on the televisions hissed and flickered as the vision surged around a corner.
In just a brief microsecond, he had swept through all the VIP areas and administrative districts of Sector D4 and entered the main lobby.
In another microsecond, his consciousness filled the lobby, detailed down to the carpets, the glass display cases, rising from the concrete pillars to the dome, attaching to every rib structure, not even missing a floating speck of dust.
This time, he captured a deep blue figure, but in the very next microsecond, the electronic ghost heard a voice.
The voice wasn't loud, but it exploded in Mr. Screws's consciousness like thunder, as if mocking all human technological achievements to date.
His consciousness was instantly hurled to the horizon; a chaotic sense of disorder poured into his mind like a flood of ferocious beasts!
The Rubik's cube deconstructed in the void, and the televisions exploded with arcs of electricity and sparks!
That deep blue figure was passing through walls built of concrete and dragon-steel copper at an unimaginable speed, strolling through the dust of collapsed space, dismantling tall titans with her bare hands, and dancing in an embrace with the blade-dancer girls while the gun muzzles flashed with fire; the metal storm composed of armor-piercing rounds was slower than floating dust before her!
Rate on N.U.
