Ghouls

Lu Yuan pulled open the door.

Standing outside was a Nightwatcher.

It was not a face he had seen before. The man was young, in his early twenties, but his expression was tense and his lips were pale.

Dust clung to his coat, and there was a fresh scrape on his forehead with beads of blood still hanging from it, which he hadn't even bothered to wipe away.

"Mr. Lu Yuan."

He spoke extremely fast, yet managed to enunciate every word clearly.

"Oral order from the Vice Director. Bronze City is under a large-scale eerie attack. All combat-capable units are being conscripted for an emergency assembly."

He paused, taking a breath.

"You have been temporarily appointed as the Captain of the Ninth Team. You will lead eight Nightwatchers to the North Ward district to repel the eerie things emerging from a breach in that area."

"The order is effective immediately."

Lu Yuan's hand was still resting on the doorframe.

He didn't ask why.

The moment Laurina had knocked on his door, the outline of the situation had already formed in his mind.

And at the edge of his vision, the greyish-white prompt that had been hanging there since earlier still had not disappeared.

【Environmental Perception: Massive amount of weak pollution sources... Continuous detection in progress... It is recommended to stay away.】

Lu Yuan glanced at the line of text.

Stay away?

Stay away to where?

"Where is the team?"

The Nightwatcher stepped aside.

On the street outside the door, eight figures stood in two rows.

Their grey robes swayed slightly in the night wind, their hoods pulled low, revealing only the lower halves of their faces.

Standard-issue shortswords and firearms hung at their waists, and more equipment was faintly visible beneath their robes.

All of them were veterans.

Lu Yuan scanned their positions; their spacing was even, their centers of gravity were stable, and their breathing was synchronized.

This was a team tempered by actual combat.

The man at the head of the group took a half-step forward. Beneath his grey hood, he revealed a face with sharp features, appearing to be around thirty years old. An old scar ran from his cheekbone down to his jaw.

"Captain Lu, please give your orders."

His voice was steady, without hesitation.

The seven people behind him looked up simultaneously, their gazes falling on Lu Yuan.

Lu Yuan noticed there was no doubt in their eyes as they looked at him.

Either Kraus's orders carried enough weight, or the situation had become so urgent that no one cared who the captain was.

Of course, there was another possibility: his reputation preceded him.

It was most likely the latter.

The young Nightwatcher who had delivered the message had already turned and was running in another direction.

His grey robe flashed at the corner before disappearing into the light.

He had another stop to notify.

Lu Yuan withdrew his gaze and looked at the street before him.

The entirety of Bronze City was lit up.

It wasn't just the faint glow of the runes on the city walls.

Everything that could be lit had been lit at this moment.

Streetlights, electric lights, gas lamps.

Dim yellow light seeped from the windows of distant residences, where people had lit their kerosene lamps the moment the gunshots rang out.

Light connected to light, spreading from the inner city to the outer city, like a giant net laid over the darkness.

In the distance, sporadic gunshots continued to ring out.

They didn't come from just one direction, but from all sides.

Some were dense, some were sparse.

Some would suddenly erupt for a moment before quickly falling silent.

The residual light of those bronze runes on the city walls remained, but it was much dimmer than usual.

Lu Yuan took a deep breath.

The night wind filled his lungs, carrying a faint scent of burning and a fishy stench.

【Sanity: 45/120】

Unfortunately, his Sanity was too low at a time like this.

"Move."

Lu Yuan stepped down the stairs and merged into the formation.

The eight people adjusted their positions with tacit understanding, forming a mobile array centered around Lu Yuan. Two were in front scouting, four protected the flanks, and two brought up the rear.

There was no need for Lu Yuan to give commands.

They moved on their own.

They walked briskly north along the gravel roads of the outer city.

They passed several alleys along the way, where other teams could be seen moving at the entrances.

Some headed south, some east, in various formations and numbers.

No one spoke.

Everyone was in a hurry.

After crossing about three streets, the scarred man at the front slowed his pace and walked alongside Lu Yuan.

"Captain Lu, I am Bo Er."

His voice was kept very low, audible only to the two of them.

"The Ninth Team was temporarily formed by the branch. Except for me, the other seven were pulled back from outside outposts. Our coordination won't be an issue."

"Are you the vice-captain?"

"Yes," Bo Er nodded. "I was previously under Hoguer's Outer City Inspection Group, so I'm quite familiar with the terrain around the North Ward."

Lu Yuan noted this.

"Tell me the situation."

Bo Er didn't stop walking, speaking as he moved.

"I don't know what went wrong tonight, but about half an hour ago, the eerie-suppression effect of Bronze City suddenly surged. Simultaneously, the ground collapsed in multiple locations."

His speech was rapid but organized.

"The inner city is the worst, with at least three large-scale collapses where the ground split wide open. The outer city is slightly better, but there are several spots in the north and southwest."

"What's coming out of the collapse points?"

"Mainly scavenger ghouls and ghouls." Bo Er's voice dropped a pitch. "There's a lot of them, especially in the inner city. I heard dozens of them poured out instantly."

Scavenger ghouls and ghouls.

Lu Yuan was no stranger to these two things.

He had flipped through the 《Primary Strange Tales》 in the Nightwatchers Library back in Gelimu Port, and it recorded them clearly.

Scavenger ghouls were low-level eerie things attracted to decaying matter. They had an extremely strong sense of smell and were photophobic. Individually, they weren't much of a threat, but in groups, they produced a resonance effect that accelerated the Sanity loss of living people nearby.

Ghouls were half a grade higher than scavenger ghouls. They possessed a certain level of intelligence, could set ambushes, and had venomous claws. Most importantly, they ate.

They ate corpses, and they ate living people.

There was one more thing.

Lu Yuan remembered it clearly because the greyish-white prompts had provided extra information back then.

Copper had a very strong restraining effect on the scavenger ghoul lineage.

Copper had once harmed the mutation source of the scavenger ghouls, so the material itself constituted a deterrent to them.

And Bronze City...

Lu Yuan instinctively glanced at the bronze runes on the distant city walls that were currently flickering.

The walls of the entire city, the runes, and even part of the architectural structures contained a large amount of copper.

Tonight, these things had become natural barriers.

This also explained why, despite the high number of eerie things indicated by the greyish-white prompts, they hadn't spread out immediately.

The aura of copper was suppressing them.

As long as the light sources were sufficient and the copper structures remained intact, it would be difficult for scavenger ghouls to spread across the city on a large scale.

But the problem was...

The collapse points themselves.

Those cracks had been torn open directly from underground.

And despite the presence of copper, based on Bo Er's words, quite a few scavenger ghouls and ghouls had still managed to crawl up.

"Where is the breach we're responsible for?"

"The North Ward." Bo Er pointed toward the front left. "It's a smaller collapse point in the northern part of the outer city. Intelligence says the number of eerie things emerging there isn't high. The main force is holding the line in the inner city, so we're essentially on the flank."

"How small?"

"I don't have the exact numbers," Bo Er said truthfully. "I only know it's much less than the inner city."

Lu Yuan fell silent for two seconds.

At the edge of his vision, that line of greyish-white text from Environmental Perception was still hanging there.

【Environmental Perception: Massive amount of weak pollution sources... Continuous detection in progress... It is recommended to stay away.】

'Massive'.

Not 'a small amount', not 'moderate'.

It was massive.

Yet Bo Er said the number at the North Ward was "not high."

There was a massive gap between these two pieces of information.

Either the intelligence was outdated.

Or... those things hadn't all come out yet.