The ambulance’s tires crushed the shards of glass at the entrance of the South Viaduct ramp, causing the vehicle to jolt violently.
Li Xin gripped the steering wheel with both hands. The wound on the web of his hand, which had just been wrapped in gauze, tore open again from the vibration. Blood soaked through the edges of the gauze and dripped onto his dark gray cargo pants.
He didn’t look down, keeping the accelerator floored.
“Turn right at the next intersection. Don’t take Changhong Avenue; the service road there was blown apart.”
The female nurse in the passenger seat held the navigator up against the windshield.
The rear compartment was packed to the brim.
Qiu Shubai sat on a folding chair on the left. The seatbelt buckle pressed against the stitches on her waist, and every bump sent a jolt of pain through her, like a blunt knife carving through flesh.
Tang Xuan was squeezed in to her right. The blueberry-flavored bubble gum in her mouth had long since lost its flavor, so she just toyed with it using the tip of her tongue.
Li Qiang crouched next to a stretcher, his hands pressing down on two first-aid kits. The hemostatic forceps and rolls of gauze inside rattled loudly with every jolt.
“Is the one behind us keeping up?” Li Xin glanced in the rearview mirror.
“They’re with us,” Li Qiang said, peering out the rear window. “Less than twenty meters away.”
Two large ambulances wove through the ruins, the road ahead riddled with craters and cracks.
The deepest crack spanned the entire four-lane road, its edges curling with chunks of asphalt and revealing broken drainage pipes beneath.
Li Xin jerked the steering wheel, the tires grazing the edge of the crack as he turned. The sharp angle of the turn sent everyone in the back sliding to the right simultaneously.
Tang Xuan’s head hit the metal wall of the compartment with a dull thud.
She clutched the back of her head and cursed something under her breath. The bubble gum flew out of her mouth and stuck to Qiu Shubai’s sleeve opposite her.
“Sorry.” Tang Xuan reached out to pick it off, but it wouldn’t budge after two tries.
Qiu Shubai didn’t say a word. She used her own fingernails to scrape the gum off and flicked it into the trash can by her feet.
“Something’s up ahead,” Li Xin suddenly whispered.
Everyone’s gaze shot toward the windshield at once.
The headlights pierced the night, revealing a pile of private car wreckage blocking the middle of the road fifty meters ahead.
Seven or eight cars were smashed together. The one in the center had been burned down to its frame, its tires melted into rubber pancakes stuck to the road.
In the gaps between the wreckage, several grayish-white shadows were squirming.
“Level 2 bone lizards.”
Qiu Shubai’s gaze moved past Li Xin’s shoulder and settled on the shadows. Her hand gripped the hilt of Bloodfall, the blade emitting a low hum.
“Can we bypass them?” Li Qiang asked.
“No. There’s a collapsed high-voltage tower on the left, and nothing but ruins on the right.” Li Xin gritted his teeth. “Should I charge through?”
“Yes.” Qiu Shubai unbuckled her seatbelt and said to Tang Xuan, “Open the hatch.”
Tang Xuan reached up and pushed open the small sunroof hatch on top of the ambulance. The night wind, thick with the scent of smoke and rot, immediately rushed in.
“Tap the brakes when I’m in position.”
Qiu Shubai gripped the edge of the hatch and flipped herself out onto the roof like a grayish-white cat. Her boots hit the steel roof with a muffled thud.
Bloodfall materialized in the night, its white blade gilded with a warm yellow glow from the distant fires. She held the sword with one hand, her grayish-white long hair whipped into a straight line by the wind.
Li Xin tapped the brakes, dropping the speed from a hundred and twenty to about eighty. Using the momentum of the deceleration, Qiu Shubai lunged forward and leaped from the edge of the roof.
The sword light slashed down from above the wreckage.
The first bone lizard had just poked its head out from the car wreckage when its skull was split down the middle by the blade.
Before its green fluid could even spray out, she twisted her wrist and pulled the blade across, severing the forelimb and half the shoulder blade of a second bone lizard.
She landed with her boots on the hood of an overturned car, bending her knees to absorb the impact. She rolled forward, performing an upward slash that pierced the jaw of a third bone lizard, the tip of the sword emerging from the top of its head.
The remaining two pounced at the same time. Qiu Shubai stepped back half a pace with her left foot and drew an arc with her blade.
The white light of Bloodfall flashed for an instant in the night, and the heads of the two bone lizards were severed along with their cervical vertebrae.
She flicked the green blood off the blade and glanced back. The ambulance had just squeezed through the gap in the wreckage, with the second vehicle following closely behind.
She ran a few steps, hooked one hand onto the frame of the open side door of the rear compartment, and flipped herself inside.
Her landing was light, with only the crisp sound of her knees hitting the steel floor.
“Beautiful!” Tang Xuan reached out to steady her.
Qiu Shubai sat on the folding chair, her chest heaving. A bit of pale red blood seeped through the stitches on her waist.
Li Qiang knelt beside her, a silver light mist gradually appearing in his palm.
“Don’t.” Qiu Shubai pressed his hand down. “Save your blood energy for now.”
The compartment grew quiet again, leaving only the low growl of the engine and the crunch of tires over gravel.
“Two kilometers left.” The nurse wiped the sweat from her forehead. “The navigation has failed. This is all factory land ahead; the road signs are gone, and I can’t tell the exact route.”
“Just keep driving along the service road.” Qiu Shubai closed her eyes, letting her blood energy circulate slowly through her body.
“The ore processing plant in the industrial park is on the far east side, near the riverbank. There’s a broken blast furnace there; you can see it from a distance.”
Li Xin floored the accelerator again.
The outline of the ore processing plant ruins gradually became clear in the night. That blast furnace, snapped at the waist, slanted into the air. The steel frame on the furnace body was twisted and deformed, and dark red embers still smoldered at the break.
Qiu Shubai leaned half her body out of the hatch, her gaze sweeping over the raw blood ore scattered among the ruins, the overturned bulldozers and transport trucks, and the corpses of mutant beasts strewn across the ground.
Limbs of bone lizards, severed bodies of Silver Moon Dogs, and shattered pieces of bone armor covered the entire outer perimeter of the plant.
In the densest areas, the corpses were piled several layers deep. Their body fluids seeped into the cracks in the ground, glistening with an oily sheen.
“Behind that broken factory building on the left,” she shouted down into the driver’s cabin.
The ambulance turned past the ruined wall of the factory, its headlights illuminating a relatively open area.
A black off-road vehicle with Ability Bureau markings was parked there, its body caked with dark red blood-mud.
Beside the vehicle, Yan Zhi sat on a slanted precast concrete slab with her knees pulled to her chest. Seeing the headlights, she raised a hand to shield her eyes.
Qiu Shubai jumped down from the roof, her boots crunching on the broken bricks as she hurried toward Yan Zhi.
The four members of the medical team jumped out almost the moment the vehicle stopped. Li Xin ran at the front with the first-aid kit, followed by Xiao Wang and Xiao Zhang carrying a stretcher.
“They’re over there.” Yan Zhi stood up and pointed her small hand toward the other side of the off-road vehicle.
Qiu Shubai went around the front of the car and saw them.
Luo Yang was sitting on the ground with his back against the front wheel of the off-road vehicle, one leg stretched out straight and the other bent, his right hand resting on his knee.
His eyes were half-closed, and his plain glass spectacles were smeared with a layer of dark red blood. The frames hung crookedly on the bridge of his nose.
His white shirt was no longer its original color; the entire garment was soaked in various body fluids, clinging to him and outlining several wounds that were still seeping blood.
Beside him was Qian Yao, equally covered in blood. His deep blue uniform was torn to shreds, and his entire right leg was bent at an extremely distorted angle at his side. The flesh at the wound had turned completely black, emitting a strong scent of gangrene.
His head rested on Luo Yang’s shoulder, his face so ashen that not a trace of color remained.
The way the two of them leaned together was so quiet they looked like two corpses abandoned in the ruins.
Qiu Shubai’s footsteps faltered. The night wind rushed in through the gap in the factory ruins, blowing her grayish-white hair and brushing against her suddenly tightening throat.
She had seen Luo Yang’s composure on the South Viaduct when he controlled eighty swords at once, and she had seen his calm when he slashed through a Level 4 man-faced lion in the Rift’s core area.
Although this man was full of mysteries and even had a bit of a bastardly temperament, seeing him now in this state where his life was uncertain still caused an uncontrollable wave of panic to rise in her heart.
This school beauty, who was usually as cold as eternal ice, had not been good at partings ever since her father left.
Even for someone like this, whom she didn’t even know if she could call a friend.
Li Xin was already kneeling beside Qian Yao. The latches of the first-aid kit were snapped open, and hemostatic forceps and surgical shears spilled onto the ground.
“The leg can’t be saved. Apply the hemostatic forceps immediately! Xiao Wang, check his vital signs! Xiao Zhang, the stretcher!”
Qiu Shubai forced herself to look away and knelt in front of Luo Yang. She reached out and gripped his shoulder, her movements light, as if afraid of breaking something fragile.
The fabric at his shoulder was cold and slick to the touch. She couldn’t tell if it was soaked with the fluids of mutant beasts or blood from his own wounds.
Luo Yang suddenly opened his eyes.
His pupils focused on Qiu Shubai’s face in the very first instant. His left hand shot up with a speed almost impossible to catch, his fingers gripping her wrist with such force that her joints emitted a faint creak.
At the same time, his right hand had already reached for the scabbard at his waist.
The action stopped halfway, as if he finally recognized who was in front of him.
Qiu Shubai looked at him, and he looked at Qiu Shubai. The two of them remained frozen like that.
“I wondered who it was.”
Luo Yang released her wrist, placed his hand back at his side, and leaned back again with his eyes closed. His voice was hoarse, a sticky drowsiness dragging between every word.
“...Why is it you?”
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