This image of noble righteousness, of a man bravely facing death while entrusting his last wishes, was extremely moving.
As long as you ignored the increasingly bizarre expression on Su Yu's face.
"Pfft..."
In his earpiece, Bronie couldn't hold it in any longer and burst out laughing.
"BOSS, this old man actually isn't all that annoying. With acting like that, it'd be a shame for him not to star in some primetime tearjerker melodrama."
Su Yu ignored Bronie's commentary.
Professor Murata at this moment looked like a completely different person from before: his suit was wrinkled, his hair was a mess, and his face bore injuries.
But his back was still straight—the straightness of a father who, having finished entrusting his final affairs, was preparing to meet death with dignity.
Not bad.
It seemed he hadn't saved the wrong person.
Compared to that world's ball-traitor, this Ryusuke was at least somewhat of a man.
He looked at Ryusuke, who had closed his eyes to await death, then dropped straight down onto one knee, crouching before that ring of bombs.
Ryusuke froze. "You—"
Su Yu didn't look at him.
His attention was completely focused on the belt of explosives around the man's waist.
His hands hovered over the surface of the bombs without touching them, fingers slightly spread, maintaining a distance of five centimeters.
He closed his eyes.
In his mind, Fenghuang's voice rose up from the depths of the Spiritual Link, more focused than ever before:
"Below the belt there are two main wires, red and yellow. The sensor's signal circuit runs through the yellow wire. The red wire connects to the detonation module. You need to cut the yellow wire first to disable the sensor, and then—pay attention—cut the red wire. The order cannot be reversed."
Su Yu's fingers found the positions of the two wires.
The spiritual power tempered by Tai Xu Sword Qi became, in this instant, the most precise probe in the world.
He didn't need to look—the routing of the wires, the positions of the contacts, the pulse frequency of the signals, all of it was transmitted back to his brain through his fingertips.
"Uncle, don't move." Su Yu's voice was very soft.
Ryusuke's face tightened. "Do you know what you're doing? If you die here too, have you thought about what will happen to my daughter?"
Su Yu didn't raise his head.
"You..."
Watching Su Yu's movements, Ryusuke's eyes actually reddened slightly.
He knew there was no dissuading him, so he could only clench his eyes shut, his body trembling slightly from fear and agitation.
When a person believes they are certain to die, they always can't help but want to say something.
"Actually... I know Himeko finds me really annoying."
Ryusuke's lips quivered, his voice taking on a heavy nasal tone as he began his rambling.
"The reason she won't come home is because I, as her father, am too controlling. I'm always trying to arrange her life, wanting her to find a respectable family of equal standing..."
"All these years, I've neglected her far too much. I wanted to make up for it, but I always used the wrong methods..."
Ryusuke drew a deep breath, the muscles at the corners of his eyes twitching violently:
"Little Su... have you cut it yet? Have you actually cut it or not?"
But there was no response.
"Su Yu?" Ryusuke's voice trembled even more violently. He thought Su Yu was in the middle of some life-or-death decision. "Don't be afraid. If you really don't have it under control, there's still time for you to run..."
A full half minute passed.
Still no explosion, and still no sound from Su Yu.
Ryusuke finally couldn't take it anymore and slowly cracked open one eye.
Under the dim light, Su Yu was crouched in front of him, tossing and weighing in his hand the main body of the bomb that had originally been strapped to his waist.
That blood-curdling red LED light had long since gone completely dark.
And the look in Su Yu's eyes as he watched him was somewhere between a smile and not.
The upward curve at the corner of his mouth was harder to suppress than an AK loaded full of bullets.
The air froze once again—only this time, it was out of awkwardness.
"Uh..." Ryusuke opened his mouth, the tragic solemnity, the resolve, and that belated old father's repentance all instantly congealing on his face.
His cheeks flushed crimson at a visible speed, the red spreading all the way to the roots of his ears.
It was the kind of awkwardness that could make a man dig out a three-bedroom apartment in the cement floor of an abandoned factory with his toes.
"These words, I think it'd be better if you went back and told them to Sister Himeko yourself, Uncle."
Su Yu, barely holding back his laughter, stood up and casually tossed the dud bomb into the pile of scrap iron beside him.
Ryusuke opened his mouth but couldn't say a thing.
Su Yu fished a pistol off one of the fallen guards beside him, weighed it in his hand, then turned and handed it to Ryusuke.
He himself picked up a steel pipe off the ground and spun it once in his hand.
"Uncle, you know how to use a pistol, right?"
Ryusuke mechanically took the gun.
He had served a few years in the reserves; handling firearms was a basic skill.
But at this moment his mind was still replaying that "final testament" he'd just delivered, and the sense of embarrassment sawed back and forth like a dull blade.
"Stay close to me." Su Yu shouldered the steel pipe and glanced toward the north exit. "Whatever you've got to say, say it after we've escaped."
Ryusuke gripped the gun tightly and followed in Su Yu's steps.
He looked at the back of the young man ahead of him—the shoulders weren't broad, but there was a kind of reassuring reliability to them.
After taking a couple of steps, Ryusuke suddenly spoke.
His voice was very soft, soft enough to be almost drowned out by the wind whistling through the factory hall:
"...You, just now—you'd already finished defusing it the whole time, hadn't you?"
Su Yu didn't turn his head. "Uncle."
"Hm?"
"No chatting while we're on the run."
"...Okay."
As it turned out—an old man who could carve out a bloody path in this dog-eat-dog capital market and sit firmly at the top of Arc City University's venture capital scene was absolutely not some frail, feeble scholar with no strength to truss a chicken.
In the gloomy factory corridor, Su Yu was like a black panther gliding low along the ground.
A Tiger Claw Gang thug who had just poked his head out from a corner didn't even get a chance to pull the trigger before he was knocked out cold by a muffled blow from the pipe.
At the very instant this thug collapsed, in the shadows a few meters behind him, another hidden sentry suddenly raised the gun in his hands.
"Bang!"
A crisp gunshot rang out, and that hidden sentry let out a miserable scream, clutching his pierced thigh as he dropped to his knees.
Su Yu didn't even turn his head, merely sticking up a thumb behind his back.
Three meters behind him, Murata Ryusuke gripped the gun with both hands, maintaining an extremely textbook Weaver shooting stance.
It was an extraordinarily uncanny rapport.
Between the two of them there wasn't a single word of unnecessary communication.
Su Yu took the lead, using the superhuman perception granted by "Tai Xu Sword Qi" to sweep mines and clear obstacles, while Ryusuke, like a cold-blooded harvesting machine, followed behind and precisely plugged the gaps.
Whenever Su Yu signaled with a hand gesture, Ryusuke would execute it without the slightest hesitation.
No questioning, no wavering.
"This old man... when he was young he definitely ran with some gang behind his family's back, didn't he?"
While ranting wildly in his heart, Su Yu darted aside and ducked behind a massive abandoned generator.
The class antagonism from earlier, when they'd wanted nothing more than to slice each other into a thousand pieces with their glares, had—after going through the "fake bomb social-death incident" together—miraculously transformed into a battlefield bond forged through shared near-death.
As long as I don't bring up your sniveling cowardice while you cried out your last words, and you don't bring up how I almost laughed my ass off, we're the best of comrades-in-arms.
"The number three loading dock is right ahead." Su Yu lowered his voice, his back pressed against the generator's cold iron shell. "Past it is an open lot, and past the lot is the perimeter wall. Bronie's already hacked the electronic door lock over there."
Ryusuke leaned against the other side and drew a deep breath.
He didn't speak, just expertly ejected the magazine for a glance, then with a "click" shoved it back in.
Five rounds left.
"Go." Su Yu barked in a low voice, and the two of them shot out of the passage like arrows loosed from a bowstring.
However.
At the very moment they had just stepped out of the loading dock, the instant their feet touched the open ground—
"Clack! Clack! Clack!"
Blinding glaring light tore through the night without warning.
Three high-powered searchlights blazed to life simultaneously from different directions, their ghastly white beams like three sharp swords pinning Su Yu and Ryusuke dead center in the open lot.
The sudden glare sent a stab of pain through Su Yu's pupils, and he instinctively raised his arm to shield his eyes.
Then came the scalp-prickling sound of metal scraping:
"Ka-chak, ka-chak, ka-chak—"
From behind the abandoned shipping containers all around, and atop the scaffolding above, dozens of fully armed Tiger Claw Gang members surged out like a tide.
The pitch-black muzzles—submachine guns, pistols, even several old-fashioned AKs—were all trained on the two people standing in the center of the ring of light.
The air froze completely in that instant.
Death seemed to have already raised its scythe.
Su Yu's brow furrowed.
His body was far stronger than before, but he wasn't Kiana.
If all these guns fired at once, then even if Fenghuang poured every last essence of the Tai Xu Sword Qi into his head, there was no way he could dodge them all.
Not to mention Ryusuke was still right beside him.
Just as Su Yu was pondering a countermeasure.
The crowd parted to make a path.
A man walked out—just past fifty, gray suit, somewhat lean in build, wearing a pair of silver-framed glasses.
Unlike Ryusuke's gold frames, these silver frames looked much cheaper.
But the eyes behind those glasses were colder than those of anyone present holding a gun.
Black Tiger, the leader of the Tiger Claw Gang, stood respectfully half a step behind him.
"Professor Ryusuke." The silver-framed glasses' voice wasn't loud, but it came through clearly amid the buzzing of the searchlights. "It's been a long time."
Ryusuke's jaw tightened. "...Professor Huang."
He spoke the name aloud.
Su Yu stood beside Ryusuke, shoulders relaxed, one end of the steel pipe propped against the ground.
He didn't cut in.
Because in his comms device, Bronie's voice was continuously updating:
"BOSS, Kiana's on the way. Three kilometers from you—two kilometers—she's running faster than a taxi—wait, is she doing parkour? She just vaulted over a building—"
Su Yu didn't respond.
From the corner of his eye he swept over the layout of the encirclement.
In every direction at least four guns simultaneously covered his and Ryusuke's position; there was no blind spot.
Su Yu murmured in a low voice, soft enough that only Ryusuke could hear: "Stall for time as much as you can. We've got reinforcements coming."
Ryusuke's eyelid twitched.
He didn't turn to look at Su Yu, but his mouth kept moving: "Hiring a hitman—are you insane? All for that seat on the board of directors? Back then it was the team under you that committed academic fraud, falsified the data! When I kicked you out, I was just playing by the rules!"
"The rules?" Professor Huang sneered. "In this circle, whoever controls the capital is the rules! You destroyed half a lifetime of my hard work, drove me to the brink of leaping off a building under a mountain of debt—and now you want to talk to me about rules?"
He straightened up, the smile vanishing entirely from his face, replaced by the indifference of someone looking at a dead man: "Stop wasting your effort stalling for time, Ryusuke. Did you really think some police or special forces would come to save you?"
Professor Huang waved his hand. "Even if they came, the hidden sentries on the perimeter would be enough to hold them off for ten minutes. And in those ten minutes, it'd be more than enough for the boys down here to riddle you into a hornet's nest, then toss you into the blast furnace and burn you to ash."
He turned his head, looking toward Black Tiger standing to one side, his voice cold and cruel: "Do it. Clean it up properly."
With this command, the dozens of pitch-black muzzles all around rose half an inch in perfect unison.
Ryusuke's complexion went a shade paler.
He'd heard it—this wasn't a threat, this was an execution notice.
They really did intend to kill.
Ryusuke looked at Su Yu beside him.
This young man's performance the whole way had already far exceeded his imagination.
But no matter what, a body of flesh and blood facing the crossfire of so many guns—no one could walk out of here alive.
Ryusuke let out a long breath. "Kid."
Su Yu turned to look at him.
The corner of Ryusuke's mouth twitched, an expression somewhere between a bitter smile and resignation:
"If we make it out alive, I think it's not impossible for us to become friends."
He paused.
"In the next life, that is."
Su Yu looked at him.
A hard-to-describe smile appeared on his face.
Like a gambler who knows what's in his hand, hearing his opponent declare, "If you can beat me with seventeen cards, if you can beat me with seventeen cards I'll eat my computer right here on the spot."
"Uncle, talk of the next life—you're saying it too soon."
He drove the steel pipe into the ground.
"Kiana is in position, estimated to arrive at the coordinates in twelve seconds."
Bronie's voice came through the comms device, carrying a kind of indescribable awe.
"This speed—it's just not human at all—BOSS, is this the true power of a Valkyrie?!"
Su Yu didn't answer.
The true power of a Valkyrie? If this world had Honkai energy, then you'd probably get to witness exactly what it means to say, "I don't eat beef."
"Ten."
A single, utterly flat syllable spat out from Su Yu's throat.
Black Tiger, standing opposite, suddenly widened his eyes.
He stared at this young man—pointed at by dozens of guns, yet still showing no fear on his face.
For some reason, from the very moment Su Yu began counting down, Black Tiger suddenly felt the air around him grow extremely viscous.
A substantial killing intent, as though it had crawled up out of a sea of blood and corpses, spread out silently in every direction with Su Yu at its center.
It was the aura that Sirin had carved, by sheer force, into Su Yu's soul through a thousand deaths within his consciousness space.
The few underlings nearest to him instinctively swallowed, their Adam's apples rolling with difficulty.
A few of the more timid ones—even their hands gripping their guns began to tremble uncontrollably, the infrared beams from their muzzles tracing chaotic trails across Su Yu's chest.
"Nine."
"Eight."
"Bluffing!" Black Tiger felt as though his heart were being clenched tight by an invisible hand.
He roared in a fury, trying to use his voice to drive away the fear in his heart: "Fine! I'd like to see just what the hell kind of trick you can pull off!"
"Three."
"Two."
Black Tiger could no longer endure that suffocating pressure.
He abruptly raised the Beretta 92F in his hand, the pitch-black muzzle locking from a distance onto the space between Su Yu's brows, and pulled the trigger without hesitation.
"One."
"BANG—!"
The instant the gunshot exploded, Su Yu's countdown ended at exactly the same moment.
Time seemed to stretch out infinitely in that instant.
That nine-millimeter Parabellum round spun as it tore free of the barrel, ripping through the air, hurtling toward Su Yu with lethal heat.
And at this critical, hair's-breadth moment—
"KA-BOOM—!!!"
The skylight canopy of glass atop the factory, more than ten meters up, shattered explosively without any warning!
Countless razor-sharp glass shards poured down like a torrential rainstorm.
Moonlight tore through the darkness, falling from the zenith to shine upon that white figure.
She was like a meteor plummeting from beyond the heavens, carrying violent kinetic energy that ripped through everything, slamming down with precision onto the open ground between Su Yu and Black Tiger.
"BOOM—!!!"
A deafening, thunderous crash.
The ground of the entire abandoned factory shuddered violently.
The hard cement floor cracked and caved in an instant like fragile biscuit, smashed into a shallow crater more than two meters in diameter.
A terrifying shockwave radiated madly outward with the landing point as its center.
A gale laden with crushed stone and dust instantly flipped over the few thugs nearest to her who were holding their guns.
They didn't even have time to scream before, as if struck by a heavy truck barreling at full speed, they were sent flying backward and slammed hard into the abandoned shipping containers far away, their fates unknown.
Amid the dust filling the air, a girl knelt on one knee.
Her white hair was blown back in the residual airflow, then slowly settled down again.
An ordinary athletic jacket, ordinary running shoes—no armor, no weapon, not a single piece of equipment that belonged to a "Valkyrie."
Just a girl in sportswear, fallen from the sky, who had smashed a crater into the ground.
She slowly stood up and opened her right hand.
Palm facing up, five fingers spread open—and lying in her palm was a single bullet.
The copper casing intact, the bullet head undeformed, even still carrying the residual warmth from the moment it had left the barrel.
Kiana relaxed her palm, and the bullet slid from it, falling to the ground with a "ting."
In the deathly silent factory, that sound was nonetheless clearly audible.
Black Tiger's gun was still raised, his index finger still on the trigger, but his entire body had already gone rigid.
Bare-handed—she'd caught a bullet fresh out of the barrel?
How was that possible?!
His brain refused to process the scene before his eyes.
Not out of fear, but because of "impossible."
Humans can't fall from the sky and shatter the ground, humans can't catch a bullet with their hands, and even more, humans can't—
The white-haired girl ignored his terror and merely turned around slowly.
"Sorry, Senior Brother."
Kiana said, the girl's voice crisp and pleasant, echoing through the cavernous factory.
"I didn't come too late, did I?"
After receiving Su Yu's reply, she withdrew the smile from her face and turned sideways to look at the Tiger Claw Gang members before her, her gaze cold to the absolute extreme.
The dust filling the air had yet to disperse.
Those golden pupils were like burning molten gold under the glaring light; the searchlights' dazzling white glow reflected off her, yet couldn't draw out even a trace of warmth.
Kiana descended from the heavens, wrathful and ferocious.
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