Chaos and Turmoil

The wide tires of the off-road vehicle rolled over the asphalt road, which was riddled with gullies and cracks, letting out a dull, creaking groan.

Luo Yang kept his speed low, barely pressing the edge of the accelerator. The needle on the dashboard sat nearly at the zero mark.

He saw a checkpoint set up not far ahead.

Two young soldiers in camouflage uniforms held assault rifles, half-crouched behind a few makeshift concrete barriers.

Their blood energy fluctuations were negligible—at most, they were at the Awakening rank. They were likely new recruits who had only recently been assigned to the auxiliary defense force.

The collars and cuffs of their camouflage gear had long since hardened into crusts of dust and dried, blackened blood. Their faces beneath their helmets were smudged with soot and bruises from the smoke of battle.

The window rolled down, and the scorched air from outside instantly flooded into the cabin.

“Stop! Engine off!”

The taller soldier on the left alertly raised his muzzle, his voice cracking with strain.

“Which unit are you from? The road ahead is blocked!”

Luo Yang didn't rush to answer. He lazily rested his left elbow on the edge of the lowered window and tapped the outside of the door with his right index finger.

The logo of the Yuanxing City Ability Bureau was spray-painted there, glinting coldly under the dim streetlights.

The soldier stepped closer, squinting at the emblem under the glow of the headlights.

His gaze then shifted through the window, darting between Luo Yang’s excessively young face and Yan Zhi, who was in the passenger seat, hugging a large bottle of cola and looking around with wide, curious eyes.

In this landscape of chaos and turmoil, the pair looked utterly absurd.

“You’re from the Ability Bureau?” the tall soldier asked, licking his cracked, peeling lips. His tone held a hint of hesitation.

“It’s a mess up ahead. Several main roads have been overrun by mutant beasts. If your bureau is sending people now...”

“To plug the holes,” Luo Yang said.

The rhythm of his fingers tapping the steering wheel didn't stop—tap, tap, tap—falling into an unexpected sync with the distant, rumbling thuds of artillery. “The defensive line is short-handed, isn't it?”

The two low-tier Punishers exchanged a glance.

Everyone knew the situation in South City; the further you went, the closer you were to jumping into a meat grinder.

The tall soldier didn't press for transfer orders or identification. He took half a step back, his mud-caked combat boots clicking sharply against the ground.

His back snapped straight, and he propped his rifle against his side to deliver a crisp, firm military salute.

“Clear for passage!” he roared in his gravelly voice, then looked at Luo Yang inside the car. “Brother, take a few of those bastards down with you!”

“I’ll take that as a blessing.” Luo Yang tapped the accelerator, and the off-road vehicle merged back into the night, leaving the roadblock far behind.

Once they reached the viaduct, the road conditions became completely appalling.

The once-smooth bridge surface looked as if it had been churned repeatedly by some massive plowing machine. The metal guardrails of the central median had been torn out by the roots, their twisted rebar thrusting into the air like some desolate, jagged totems.

Overturned private cars—some completely upside down—were everywhere. Thick columns of black smoke billowed from some of the cabins, occasionally accompanied by the crackle of bursting sparks.

Antifreeze and engine oil were spilled everywhere, mixing with bright red human blood and the multi-colored fluids of mutant beasts to form a greasy sludge on the bridge.

When the tires rolled over it, they made a sickening squelch, like tearing a giant piece of adhesive tape.

Luo Yang drove carefully.

The steering wheel seemed to be divided into countless tiny increments in his hands as the large vehicle wove a crooked S-pattern through the haphazard obstacles, avoiding sharp metal shards and scattered stones.

A few scattered civilians were still moving along the edges of the ruins, dragging their families and supporting one another as they shuffled toward the end of the bridge. Their eyes were vacant and dull.

No one had the energy to pay attention to this off-road vehicle driving against the flow. The instinct to survive had overridden all curiosity.

However, the mutant beasts on this section of the bridge seemed to have already been cleared by the vanguard.

Only a few mutilated corpses of Level 2 bone lizards remained, hanging off the guardrails with their fluids dripping down onto the service road below.

“It’s flat.”

In the passenger seat, Yan Zhi shook the plastic bottle in her hand. The bottle made a dry, crinkling sound in her arms. Not even a proper bubble would rise to the surface of the black liquid inside.

Luo Yang glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. “Just deal with it or throw it away. There’s nowhere to find a convenience store for a new one right now.”

“Oh.”

Yan Zhi pulled the half-flattened bottle back into her arms. Her slender fingers picked at the edge of the plastic label, making a scratching sound. “It’s so noisy here.”

The speed really wasn't picking up. Luo Yang tapped the brakes a few times in frustration and decided to divert some focus, pulling back the massive mental power net he had spread eight kilometers out.

As the range narrowed, the mesh of the net grew finer. A four-kilometer radius was just enough to cover the combat zone ahead.

At this distance, the precision of Luo Yang’s perception multiplied. The city ahead was like a boiling pot of oil—firefights were breaking out everywhere, and the shockwaves of energy collisions transmitted through the ground, making the car windows hum.

Luo Yang could even distinguish which street was using heavy machine guns and which building had a fire-type ability user hurling fireballs.

Within this chaotic stream of information, several familiar signals suddenly popped up on his mental radar.

They were clusters of intense, violent, and bloodthirsty energy sources. They were the very same Level 3 mutant beasts that had craftily slipped away after sensing his ten-sword clearance back on Changhong Avenue.

They had taken a long detour and gathered together again, refusing to give up.

Luo Yang couldn't help but chuckle.

“Tsk.” He pressed his tongue against his cheek and tapped his fingers cheerfully on the steering wheel.

“What is it?” Yan Zhi tilted her head to look at him.

“Nothing. Just ran into some old acquaintances.”

He swung the steering wheel hard with one hand, forcing the car to turn at a sharp angle.

“These guys are quite considerate, gathering together to save us some gas money. If I don't wipe them all out at once, I’d be doing a disservice to the dozens of kilometers they wasted running here.”

The screen of the car’s navigation system had long since blurred into a mess of flickering static. The magnetic interference naturally emitted by high-level mutant beasts had turned the device into nothing more than a glowing paperweight.

But Luo Yang didn't need a map at all; his four-kilometer absolute perception was the highest-definition live radar available.

The off-road vehicle veered sharply at the nearest off-ramp, tires crunching over a pile of broken glass as the car plunged toward the pitch-black city streets below the bridge.

A fallen utility pole blocked the entrance to an alley. Luo Yang didn't even touch the brakes, shifting into low-range four-wheel drive to grind right over it.

When ruins from collapsed residential buildings blocked the way, he wove through whatever level stretches of debris he could find.

The car bucked like a broken ship in a storm. Yan Zhi was tossed from side to side, her head nearly hitting the window several times, but she didn't make a sound. She just hugged that bottle of flat cola as tight as she could.

The abandoned streets and alleys receded quickly under the sweep of the headlights, and the coordinates of his destination grew brighter and brighter in Luo Yang’s mind.

Boom!

A dull explosion of artillery fire erupted almost right against their eardrums, making their scalps tingle with the vibration.

The off-road vehicle burst out of a narrow alley, and the view ahead suddenly opened up.

It was another intersection, another human defensive line, but the scale here was entirely different from the ramshackle temporary blocking point on Changhong Avenue.

The line here was a literal iron wall forged from reinforced concrete and heavy metal. The military engineers had clearly spared no expense; a two-meter-high blast wall stretched in a perfect arc, reinforced with sandbags and steel plates so tightly that even a fly would struggle to get through.

Two heavy armored vehicles were wedged at the street entrance, one on each side. The autocannons on their roofs were frantically spitting tongues of fire half a meter long.

Amidst the deafening roar of gunfire and explosions, golden shell casings rained down on the asphalt like hail, clinking and clattering into a thick layer.

The scent of gunpowder in the air was so thick it felt like it could burn right through one's lungs.

At the very front of the line, over thirty Punishers were engaged in a desperate slaughter against an overwhelming swarm of mutant beasts.

Military camouflage and the dark uniforms of the Ability Bureau were intermingled, the lights of various abilities flashing in the night until they made one’s eyes swim.

With heavy fire providing suppression from behind, the people in front rotated like gears in a machine, their coordination extremely tight.

Luo Yang stepped on the brakes, parking the car in the shadows behind the blast wall. He reached over and killed the engine.

“Get out. Stay close to me.”

Yan Zhi pushed the door open, her white sneakers making a crisp crunching sound as they stepped onto the shell-cased ground.

Luo Yang’s hand rested on the hilt of the blade at his waist. His gaze pierced through the searing firelight and thick smoke, landing on the very front of the battlefield.

The number of mutant beasts was terrifyingly large—Level 2s and Level 1s mixed together like a pack of starving, rabid dogs.

But the human line held firm, pinning the swarm of monsters in the middle of the street.

In the midst of that chaotic, blood-soaked melee, a streak of white sword light suddenly pierced the dim night.

The sword light was too pure, clean and sharp like the surface of a frozen lake in winter, without a hint of impurity.

The longsword swept upward from below. A Level 2 bone lizard attempting to pounce from a blind spot didn't even have time to shriek before its throat was slit open.

Before the green blood could even spray, the swordswoman had already nimbly stepped aside to avoid it.

Her figure twisted in mid-air with the grace of a swallow. With a vicious backhand horizontal slash, she sent the half-head and bone armor of another mutant beast flying.

Her long, grayish-white hair took on a warm yellow hue under the reflection of the battle fires.

The academy uniform she wore, once clean and tidy, was now covered in bloodstains and dust. A patch of wet, dark red soaked through the fabric on her left shoulder.

Yet the sword in her hand was remarkably steady, her movements as fluid as flowing water without the slightest hint of stagnation.

Luo Yang watched that cool, aloof silhouette weaving through the beast swarm. He used his thumb to lightly pop the guard of Night Owl, letting out a crisp click.

“We meet again, Miss Chief,” Luo Yang muttered, his brow furrowing slightly.

“But you... hasn't that wound on your left shoulder healed yet? And you still came to join the fun in a meat grinder like this.”