Luo Yang’s knuckles popped as he clenched his fists, dried bits of blood and grit falling from the gaps under his fingernails.
The night wind whistled through the cracks in the dilapidated factory building, carrying a thick, putrid stench that dug deep into his nostrils.
The soles of his boots stepped into a semi-congealed puddle of blood, the sticky sensation crawling up his ankles.
He was torn, and he was furious.
Two paths, each involving human lives, diverged before him, and time was the most miserly of chips.
“Cough... cough-cough!”
Leaning against the crumbling wall, Qian Yao suddenly broke into a violent fit of coughing. Large mouthfuls of pink, bloody foam surged from his mouth, dripping down his chin and onto his tattered dark blue uniform.
His whole body convulsed forward. Forcing his dilated pupils to focus, his blood-stained fingers gripped Luo Yang’s pant leg tightly.
“Go... go east.”
His voice was as broken as a leaky bellows, every word accompanied by the thick, wet sound of fluid in his throat.
“Forget about my useless leg... go save the people from the Third Section.”
Qian Yao’s knuckles were white from the effort, his nails almost digging into the muscle of Luo Yang’s calf.
“They’re facing... aberrations over there. None of them are at the Clear Heart rank... they can’t hold... Go!”
Aberrations.
The word slammed into Luo Yang’s throbbing eardrums, bringing with it a surge of irritation.
They were the products of unknown mutations in ordinary Level 1 or 2 mutant beasts. Stripped of their original biological forms, their appearance was reduced to irregular masses of flesh.
They had no concept of limbs; they moved entirely by wriggling and dragging themselves, and their speed was sluggish.
But these things were thoroughbred predators.
They possessed incredibly powerful regenerative abilities. If a blade sliced through their flesh, it would fuse back together in seconds.
Those heaps of rotten meat were filled with the purest predatory instincts, possessing an insatiable hunger for the flesh of anything that wasn't their own kind.
Most disgusting of all, the mutation didn't just twist their bodies; it also kneaded the energy cores within them into a mass of highly unstable explosives.
If an external force struck the core area, a violent sympathetic detonation would occur within seconds.
You couldn't cut them down easily, they bit hard, and if you did manage to hit them, they exploded.
A group of Punishers who hadn't even reached the Clear Heart rank being surrounded by these walking bombs—one didn't need a brain to guess the outcome.
Luo Yang stopped agonizing. Or rather, reality no longer allowed him to.
He reached down and pried Qian Yao’s hand from his pant leg, forcing it back to the man's side.
“Old Qian, save your strength for breathing.”
Kneeling on the broken bricks, he rolled up the shredded sleeve of his left arm.
The wound where the Silver Moon Dog had bitten through was still seeping blood. He unceremoniously pressed his right thumb against the edge of the wound and squeezed hard toward the center.
The newly scabbed flesh tore open again. Dark red blood, mixed with refined blood energy, flowed down his forearm and dripped into Qian Yao’s dry, slightly parted mouth.
As the blood entered his throat, Qian Yao gagged and retched repeatedly, but that domineering blood energy still forcibly sustained his rapidly failing organs.
Luo Yang stood up, his knee joints letting out a dull crack.
The continuous overexertion made his calves tremble uncontrollably, but he simply wiped the cold sweat from his brow and turned to look at Yan Zhi, who was still crouching nearby.
“A-Zhi, stay here and watch him.”
Yan Zhi looked up, her pitch-black eyes showing no reflection even in the firelight.
“If something gets close,” Luo Yang pointed to a half-collapsed crack in the wall behind Qian Yao, “stuff him into that gap. Don’t let him get eaten. Can you do that?”
“I can,” Yan Zhi nodded, her gaze falling on Qian Yao’s blackened, severed leg. “As long as he doesn't die, right?”
“Right. As long as he doesn't die.”
Luo Yang didn't have time for detailed instructions. He clipped Night Owl’s scabbard back onto his belt, pressed his palm against the hilt to confirm its position, and lunged forward.
He kicked off the ground, leaving a shallow crater in the asphalt as gravel sprayed backward.
The rags of his white shirt danced wildly in the night wind. His figure turned into a dark shadow, plunging deep into the ruins toward the alloy factory to the east.
The wind tore at his ears.
Luo Yang pushed the extraction rate of the golden tree in his Sea of Consciousness to its absolute limit.
The leaves swayed frantically, pumping what remained of his blood energy into his limbs, forcibly suppressing the dull, knife-like ache in his muscle fibers.
He had traveled less than two kilometers from Qian Yao’s position when a series of muffled booms echoed from the east.
Thud! Thud-thud!
The sound was muffled, not like the firing of standard weapons, but more like a liquid-filled bladder being stomped on in an enclosed space.
The ground trembled, and the steel structures in the distance let out a piercing sound of twisting metal.
He was there.
Ahead was a vast alloy smelting plant. Most of the factory’s roof had long since been torn away.
Thick load-bearing columns had collapsed and crisscrossed, forming a large area of complex terrain.
Luo Yang didn't take the main entrance. His gaze swept over a tilted gantry crane outside the building. He leaped onto the slanted steel supports, using the momentum to jump successively higher.
Rusty metal flakes showered down as his boots struck the steel.
He gripped the edge of a remaining precast slab on the third floor with one hand, his core muscles snapping tight as he flipped himself up and crouched on a broken crossbeam.
From this height, the view opened up instantly.
The moment he saw the scene below, Luo Yang ground his teeth together.
The open space in the center of the factory was crawling with dense clusters of wriggling meat-clumps.
The large ones were the size of a minivan, while the smaller ones were as thick as water vats.
These aberrations had no fur or skin; their exteriors were covered in a layer of slimy, dark red fascia. Beneath the membrane, greenish-black blood vessels pulsed like thick earthworms.
They moved by contracting and rolling the meat at their base, leaving behind trails of foul-smelling, acidic slime.
With a quick glance, he estimated there were nearly a hundred of them.
Aberrations were supposed to be extremely rare. Where did so many Level 1 and 2 mutant beasts undergoing simultaneous mutation come from?
The thought flashed through Luo Yang’s mind but was immediately severed by the tragic sight before him.
In the very center of the open ground, within a circular perimeter formed by several scrapped numerical control machine tools and collapsed brick walls, over twenty people in Ability Bureau uniforms were pinned down.
It was the Third Combat Section.
Their defense line had been compressed to the limit. On the outer edge stood a dozen or so Punishers who could still barely hold their blades, each of them covered in blood.
One man’s shoulder hung limp, forcing him to slash desperately with one hand.
Another had large, bone-deep sores on his leg from the acidic slime, staying upright only by leaning against a broken machine tool behind him.
In the inner circle lay five or six heavily wounded members who were no longer moving. Two medical auxiliary-type Punishers were releasing their abilities on them with blood-slicked hands, their faces a mess of tears and gore.
“Don’t retreat! If we retreat, we all die!”
A Core Consolidation Level 8 deputy captain roared, his voice hoarse. The blade in his hand was notched like a saw as he hacked at an approaching aberration.
The blade sliced through the thick fascia, carving out a half-meter-long gash.
A massive amount of dark yellow pus sprayed from the meat-clump, splashing onto the deputy captain’s forearm. His uniform immediately began to smoke, and his flesh sizzled as it burned.
Having taken the hit, the meat-clump didn't retreat. Instead, the gaping wound acted like a toothless mouth, surging forward and swallowing the notched blade whole.
Slimy granulation tissue rapidly interlaced at the edges of the wound, looking as if it were about to stitch the blade permanently into its body.
The deputy captain gritted his teeth and tried to pull the blade back, but a sudden flash of piercing red light ignited inside the meat-clump.
“Crap! The core is about to blow! Scatter!”
The warning came too late.
Boom!
The water-vat-sized aberration exploded. A dark red energy shockwave, mixed with high-temperature chunks of meat, swept outward in all directions.
The deputy captain bore the brunt of it. He was thrown back by the blast wave, slamming into the brick wall behind him. Half his body was riddled with bloody holes from the flying meat, and he didn't even have the strength to cough up blood when he slid down.
A three-meter-wide gap was blown into the very front of the defense line.
The aberrations crowding the perimeter smelled the scent of fresh meat, and several massive clumps of flesh immediately began wriggling toward the gap.
The slimy bases scraped against the ground, making a nauseating squelching sound.
“It’s over,” someone whispered, dropping a broken half of a long staff in despair.
On the crossbeam, Luo Yang looked down coldly at the meat-clumps surging into the gap.
His right hand reached for his waist, his thumb pushing against Night Owl’s guard. A crisp “click” echoed—a sound that, in this chaotic factory, was as faint as a falling needle.
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