The piercing wail of police sirens finally tore through the desolate night on the city outskirts.
The flashing red and blue strobe lights cast the mottled rust on the outer walls of the abandoned heavy-machinery factory in a ghostly glow.
Lewis pushed open the door of the armored riot vehicle, her black tactical boots stomping heavily onto the gravel-strewn ground.
This Devil Instructor of Arc City's SWAT team was, at this moment, fully armed, the round already chambered in the assault rifle in her hands.
"Squad One, breach through the main entrance! Squad Two, lock down all the loading docks!"
"Heads up—the targets are desperados from the Tiger Claw Gang, armed with heavy automatic firepower. The moment you meet resistance, you are cleared to fire at will!"
Lewis barked the orders into her tactical headset, then kicked open the factory's rust-encrusted sheet-metal gate.
She had braced herself to face a brutal, grinding battle.
After all, anyone bold enough to publicly kidnap a heavyweight on the level of Murata Ryusuke—this gang of mobsters had to be fighting with a do-or-die resolve.
And yet, when Lewis charged into the outer perimeter of the factory with her gun raised, holding a textbook tactical stance—
She froze.
There was none of the dense suppressive fire she'd imagined, no frenzied shouting from desperate outlaws.
In the dim corridor, several thugs lay sprawled every which way, eyes rolled back into their heads.
And many more were scrambling and crawling, sprinting madly toward the gate.
When these thugs saw the fully-armed SWAT officers, far from raising their guns to resist, they acted as if they'd just spotted their own fathers—throwing away their weapons, bawling for their parents, and flinging themselves face-down right at Lewis's riot boots, hands clasped over their heads, tears and snot streaming everywhere.
"Officer! Save me! There's a monster in there! Hurry up and arrest me! I want to go to prison! I want to go stay somewhere safe in a jail cell, aaaahhh!"
A thug with a scorpion tattooed on his neck clung desperately to Lewis's calf, crying like a two-hundred-pound baby.
Lewis kicked him away, her brows knotting into a dead knot.
Had these little punks hallucinated themselves into a frenzy on something?
She made a hand signal, ordering her men to cuff all these thugs who had lost the will to resist, while she herself, gun raised, led a few of her elite squad members carefully advancing toward the core area in the deepest part of the factory.
The further in they went, the more pungent and overpowering the acrid smell of gunsmoke in the air became.
When Lewis stepped over the last derelict generator unit and the beam of her tactical flashlight swept across that open clearing—
This battle-hardened, iron-blooded female instructor, who had served for years in an elite special forces unit, halted her steps dead in their tracks.
She slowly lowered the assault rifle in her hands, those sharp eyes instantly going wide, the muscles at the corners of them twitching uncontrollably.
What unfolded before her was a tableau of disaster capable of demolishing the basic understanding of physics held by any carbon-based lifeform.
The ground was littered with brass-colored shell casings, laid out like a golden carpet.
The hard concrete floor had been forcibly shaved of an entire layer of its surface, pockmarked everywhere with bullet scars.
Several load-bearing steel columns had been riddled into honeycombs, teetering on the verge of collapse.
And in the very center of the clearing, there was, astonishingly, a meteorite crater over two meters in diameter and half a foot deep!
Cracked fissures spread outward in all directions like a spider's web.
Amid that wreckage, several thugs who appeared to be the ringleaders lay limp on the ground like burst sacks of rags, their fate—alive or dead—unknown.
Lewis swallowed a mouthful of saliva. She gave a rough sweep of her eyes over the weapons carelessly tossed about on the floor—submachine guns, pistols, even a few AKs.
Judging by the density of the shell casings on the ground, this had absolutely been a crossfire volley that had unloaded hundreds of rounds.
Then.
Her gaze swiveled stiffly, landing on a corner not far away.
At the edge of this wreckage—which looked as if it had been through a small-scale war—there were three people.
Murata Ryusuke, this big shot who normally commanded the wind and rain on the financial news, was at this moment slumped in tattered clothes onto a broken folding chair.
His one remaining lens of gold-rimmed glasses sat askew, his eyes vacant as he stared at that enormous meteorite crater, muttering to himself, like a senile old man whose entire worldview had shattered and who was now questioning the meaning of life.
And right beside Ryusuke.
Su Yu was patting the dust off his clothes.
And that white-haired girl, Kiana, whom she had specially recruited as a Vigilante, was standing right next to Su Yu.
Her sportswear didn't have so much as a loose thread out of place.
On those legs, you couldn't find even a single red scrape mark.
The two of them were not only completely unharmed—they were even chatting and laughing!
Lewis's brain had completely crashed.
Three people. Facing the crossfire of dozens of automatic weapons.
Not only unharmed, but they'd scared this gang of desperados into throwing down their guns and crying and begging to go to prison.
And... what the hell was up with that crater?! Did someone detonate C4 indoors?!
Lewis felt her entire worldview crumbling.
She was beginning to seriously suspect that her several decades of SWAT career had all been lived in vain, gone to the dogs.
She even reflexively glanced up at the factory's dilapidated dome ceiling, just to confirm whether she'd accidentally wandered onto the wrong film set and stumbled into some Marvel universe full of superpowered beings brawling it out.
Just as Lewis stood there questioning her entire existence.
Kiana turned her head and saw the dumbstruck Lewis.
The girl's heterochromatic eyes—one a grayish-blue, the other a golden yellow—instantly lit up.
That lingering aura of pressure around her vanished in a sweep.
"Auntie Lewis!"
Like a large dog spotting a familiar face, Kiana bounded lightly across the shell-casing-strewn ground and went straight up to Lewis.
She stopped right in front of Lewis, tilting her head up slightly, hands clasped behind her back.
"So? How'd I do?"
A brilliant smile bloomed across Kiana's face, her tone carrying undisguised pride and anticipation.
"This time I subdued an entire gang with my bare hands! And I rescued that hostage completely unharmed too—I must've earned some serious merit, right?"
She blinked, looking exactly like a student who'd scored a 100 on a test and was begging an elder for candy.
"Is there a reward? Is there a reward? Can the bonus be doubled?"
Lewis looked at this pretty little face in front of her, written all over with "praise me, quick."
She took a deep breath.
And then.
Lewis abruptly raised her hand, crooked her index and middle fingers, and rapped them down without the slightest mercy onto Kiana's smooth forehead.
"Bonk!"
An extremely crisp, muffled thud.
"Owww!"
Kiana clutched her forehead, staggering back two steps in disbelief, tears practically welling up from the pain.
She looked at Lewis, full of grievance: "What'd you hit me for?! I was doing a good, righteous deed!"
"Reward, my foot!"
Lewis finally snapped out of that absurd sense of dissonance.
She grabbed Kiana by the collar, yanked her in front of herself, lowered her voice, and roared like an enraged lioness.
"Do you have any f*ing idea how big a deal this is?!"
Lewis pointed at the bullet holes all over the ground and that exaggerated meteorite crater, her finger trembling.
"One person! Bare-handed! Took down dozens of armed felons! Look at this crater on the ground! Look at that sheet metal that's been turned into a sieve!"
Lewis gritted her teeth, the veins on her forehead throbbing and bulging.
She wasn't furious because Kiana had caused trouble—she was furious because this destructive power, so far beyond reason, would absolutely draw the attention of those official agencies lurking in the shadows.
"How am I supposed to write this report?! Do I write that you're impervious to blades and bullets, or that you descended from the heavens and stomped out a meteorite crater with your foot?! Are you terrified that someone won't realize you're a monster, that you want to get dragged into some research institute by those crazy scientists to be sliced up for study?!"
Lewis released Kiana's collar and irritably rubbed her temples, feeling like her blood pressure was rising in a straight vertical line.
She suddenly turned her head, those sharp eyes locking dead onto Su Yu, who was standing not far away.
In the eyes of this SWAT big sister, there were three parts fury, seven parts headache, and a kind of despair that said "you'd better give me a perfect explanation."
"Su Yu."
Lewis ground her teeth, practically squeezing the two words out from between them.
"You'd better, right now, this instant, this very second, fabricate me a perfect story that complies with Newton's Third Law—otherwise, today I'm cuffing you both and hauling you back together!"
"Captain Lewis." Su Yu walked over. "I'll handle the report. There's surveillance and comms records—we can do technical de-identification on them."
"The official line is that the criminals had already collapsed into chaos from internal strife by the time you breached, and that Professor Ryusuke and I were hostages who'd been moved to a safe zone ahead of time."
Lewis turned to look at him.
"You think cleaning up this mess is that simple?"
"It's not simple, but it beats letting Kiana end up on the news. She's a Vigilante, not a superhero. Once she's on the news, there's no coming back."
Lewis fell silent for two seconds.
Her gaze swept back and forth between Su Yu and Kiana.
Kiana was still crouched on the ground, secretly peeking at Lewis's expression through the gaps between her fingers, gauging whether the storm had passed.
Su Yu stood at her side, his posture relaxed and natural, but his eyes full of trust.
Lewis gave a snort through her nose.
"I'll figure out a way to patch up the report." She jerked her chin in Ryusuke's direction. "That esteemed professor over there is an important hostage. This case is heinous enough in nature that the higher-ups won't fuss too much over the details, but—"
She bent down and looked at Kiana again.
"Next time."
Her voice dropped low.
"If you pull off this kind of spectacle for me again, I don't care whether you can catch bullets or not—I'll lock you in solitary confinement until you grow mushrooms."
Kiana exposed half an eye through the gaps between her fingers.
The left eye.
The sky-blue one.
She asked, ever so cautiously.
"...So is there still a bonus?"
Lewis took three deep breaths.
This girl—had she fallen straight into the money pit? Did she even understand how huge a catastrophe she'd unleashed?
Stay calm.
Think of the positives.
At least she really was rooting out evil and upholding social order, earning her money in this manner.
Honestly, a superhuman possessing this kind of power—if she truly decided she "didn't want to eat beef," Lewis didn't even dare imagine how vile, how terrifying a disaster she could cause.
"There is. But it'll have to wait until I've written the report. First, you go think about how to explain this one-meter-twenty crater on the ground—and don't tell me it was a ground cave-in. The foundation here is poured solid concrete."
Kiana finally stood up, patting the dust off her knees.
"That... was it a concrete quality problem?"
Lewis shot her a look.
Then shot Su Yu a look.
Su Yu spread his hands, his expression reading "See? I can't keep her in line either."
Lewis left.
This time, she didn't look back.
Her deputy behind her saw her shoulders give a shudder.
He couldn't tell whether she was laughing or sighing.
Probably both.
While the SWAT officers were busy dragging out the remaining terrified-witless thugs one by one, Su Yu and Kiana found a spot and sat down, with two SWAT officers Lewis had assigned tagging along beside them.
The looks in their eyes as they gazed at Su Yu and Kiana were brimming with fervor.
They looked exactly like obsessive stalker-fans who'd just laid eyes on their idol.
Su Yu noticed these two were familiar faces—back when Kiana had gone to the Police Station to handle her ID Card, and when she'd had a little sparring session with Lewis.
These two had been right there on the scene.
If it weren't for Lewis having given the order telling them not to run their mouths.
They'd probably have transformed into little fanboys by now.
Su Yu said nothing, lowering his head to look at his phone.
It was a message from Bronie.
"I'm on the job, so relax. I've already done a full-spectrum scan of this whole area with the drone's thermal imager. Coordinated with Lewis's SWAT squadron, not even a fly is getting out of here."
First came the report on the arrest situation.
"Also, BOSS, how much longer are we playing this undercover mission? Honestly, I think Kiana's more or less caught on that something's off, right?"
Bronie sighed. Almost the very instant Su Yu had set out, she'd told Kiana of Su Yu's whereabouts—though the excuse was that she didn't trust that dimwitted Senior Brother of yours, so she'd employed a few technical means.
But no matter how you sliced it, surely she could see something, right? This white-haired dummy—she couldn't have actually been fooled into believing it, could she?
Su Yu looked at the message Bronie had sent, fell silent for a moment, then replied with a single line.
"She probably—genuinely hasn't caught on."
Su Yu noticed Kiana's fingers tapping a few times on her phone. About ten-some seconds passed.
Bronie sent an emoji.
The sweating soybean.
[Bronie: She was just thanking me a second ago, saying I have great foresight.]
[Su Yu: Makes sense. You're her external brain, and unconditionally trusting your external brain is perfectly normal.]
[Bronie: How on earth did you spoil this kid into being like this? Doesn't she have any sense of wariness at all?]
[Su Yu: Go ask your Counterpart in that other world. She's one of the chief culprits.]
[Bronie: And the compensatory literature?]
Inside the miHoYo game studio, in Hack Bunny's little den.
Bronie chewed on a piece of bubble gum, her face, lit by the fluorescent glow of the screen, written all over with a certain helplessness.
She felt like she was honestly about to deflate.
"Sometimes I really feel like."
Bronie typed out a line in the text box.
"I'm just the kinky roleplay PLAY between you two."
Then she clicked send.
Less than three seconds passed.
Su Yu replied with a new message.
[Su Yu: Don't go making a new account.]
Bronie rolled her eyes and spat the flavorless bubble gum into the trash bin beside her.
"Can't even be bothered to roast him."
The commotion this white-haired super-strength girl had kicked up this time was huge. Once the bonus came through, it'd be more than enough to buy a new graphics card, right?
Then she'd be able to shake off this exhausting double-agent identity.
Ah, no, that's not right.
She was undercover on Theresa's side too.
Is this ever going to end? She was a hacker, not some infiltration investigator!
Bronie leaned back against her chair and let out a deep, heavy sigh.
Life is hard. The little bunny sighs.
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