The crushing grip of gravity did not last long.
Ten seconds—that was the maximum Fenghuang had estimated.
But in reality, the terrifying resistance of the Argent Knight: Artemis far exceeded expectations.
At the seventh second, that invisible gravity field had already begun to emit the strained, cracking sounds of something buckling under a load too great to bear.
"Crack… crack…"
A noise like ice splitting apart echoed through the abandoned, half-finished building.
At the center of that massive crater, Rita Rossweisse slowly lifted her head.
There was not a single ripple of emotion in her eyes—only a coldness that regarded the world as one would regard a dead thing.
The armor's engine let out a piercing roar, and those caved-in alloy outer layers, driven by the forced surge of internal energy, actually began to swell back and restore themselves inch by inch.
Suppressed at the bottom of the pit, Skadi Ondurgud's blade edge once again flared with a dazzling, ghostly blue light.
Dragging a body that barely obeyed her, Sirin stumbled and staggered until she hid behind a thick, load-bearing pillar.
This was the darkest corner of the building's ground floor, piled with rusted building materials and cement debris.
"Hold your breath. Do not mobilize even the tiniest sliver of Honkai energy."
Fenghuang's uncompromising voice sounded in Sirin's mind.
"The armor on her body is equipped with a top-tier energy-detection radar."
"You have completely wrung yourself dry of power. Escaping this building is impossible. With the burst speed of an S-rank Valkyrie, in open ground you wouldn't even make it twenty meters before both your legs were severed."
"The only option is to use the terrain here to hide yourself and stall for time."
Hide? Stall?
Those two words were like a pair of sharp knives, stabbing viciously into Sirin's proud, arrogant heart.
She bit down hard on her lower lip, and even when her teeth split the tender flesh and she tasted the rust-like tang of blood, she felt nothing at all.
She was the lofty, exalted Herrscher of the Void—a deity who regarded all of humankind as ants beneath her!
And yet now? Now she had to curl up like a rat clinging to its last breath in a sewer, cowering behind this heap of moldy, stinking construction trash, dodging the pursuit of a human's running dog?
This overwhelming psychological gulf and humiliation made Sirin's body tremble uncontrollably.
Her dust-covered, scraped fingers clawed desperately at the rough cement floor, the grime packed deep beneath her nails, until she even snapped two of them clean off.
"I refuse to accept this…"
She roared at Fenghuang inside her mind, the sound twisted to the extreme by rage and weakness.
"If this were before… an ant like this—this Queen would only need to snap her fingers…"
"But you are not what you were now."
Fenghuang's voice was like a basin of ice water, dousing Sirin's meaningless, impotent fury from head to toe.
"In this world, you rely on the Anchor just to maintain your very form. There is no imaginary-space energy here for you to squander. That last move already overdrew this body's limits."
Fenghuang paused for a moment, her tone turning incomparably heavy and grounded in reality.
"Wait. Su Yu is already on his way here. As long as we can stall until he intervenes on the battlefield—"
"What good will it do for him to come!" Sirin retorted shrilly from the depths of her consciousness. "That's an S-rank Valkyrie of Schicksal! Even I've been driven to this state—he's a mere mortal who only knows how to cook and tap at a keyboard. If he comes, won't he just be throwing his life away!"
"Because he is the only hope." There was not a single fluctuation in Fenghuang's voice. "In this damned, peaceful world, in this place without Honkai energy, facing a killing machine unbound by any rules—"
"—apart from that man who signed a contract with this body, no one else has both the ability and the willingness to stand up and block the path in front of this monster."
Fenghuang paused. If only there were Honkai energy she could supply to Yu Ducheng, she could at least manifest herself before Rita and stop all of this. But she could do nothing—she could only shift back and forth between the consciousnesses of Kiana and Su Yu.
A wave of helplessness welled up in Fenghuang's heart.
Sirin's pupils abruptly dilated.
The blinding sunlight outside the unfinished building filtered through the gaps in the load-bearing pillar, falling upon her face, which had gone pale as paper.
An unprecedented grievance and helplessness, like a great pair of hands, seized her heart in a death grip.
Her noble life, the Herrscher's dignity she took such pride in—
In this inexplicable dead end, they were now completely and utterly tethered to a man she had always called her "idiot human servant."
Without him, she didn't even have the qualification to stand here.
"Clack. Clack."
The sound of tactical boots grinding floor tiles into fragments interrupted the panic in Sirin's mind.
Rita had completely broken free of the gravity field's suppression.
Carrying that enormous, frigid scythe, she paced slowly through the abandoned hall.
"Hiding, are we? What a shame. A clumsy little trick like this can only be performed in a filthy, cluttered place like this."
Rita's voice was no longer that elegant maid's tone she usually carried, but bore the absolute coldness of a predator that had locked onto its prey.
Sirin held her breath, shrinking her body even further into the gap between the load-bearing pillar and a cement pipe.
The shadows covered more than half of her body.
As Rita closed in step by step, the lower armor of the Argent Knight: Artemis refracted a chill, ghostly gleam in the dim light.
"Beep— beep— beep—"
A faint but rapid radar target-search tone rang out, sounding especially piercing in this silent space.
Sirin's heart clenched violently.
On the tactical visor of the Argent Knight: Artemis, although the Honkai-energy tracking had failed—
—the infrared thermal imaging and the keen life-sign detector easily captured that faint but distinct cluster of heat within this half-finished building full of cold, cold stone.
"Found you."
Accompanying Rita's utterly unruffled declaration—
"Crack!"
That ice scythe, radiating absolute-zero frost, without any wind-up, tore straight through the thick load-bearing pillar as easily as slicing tofu.
Shattered chunks of cement, mixed with the ear-splitting shriek of snapping rebar, came crashing down all over her.
The enormous scythe blade fell so close it practically shaved Sirin's scalp.
The frigid wind of the blade instantly split the skin at her temple, and several strands of silver-white hair were sheared off at the root, drifting through the air.
Her hiding place was destroyed in an instant.
Sirin didn't even have time to let out a cry of alarm before the violent aftershock of that force blasted her away.
She rolled four or five times across the ground covered in dust and grit, until her back slammed hard against a mottled brick wall and she finally came to a stop.
The searing pain sent waves of darkness across her vision, and a thick, rusty taste of iron rose in her throat.
She wanted to stand up.
But when she strained to prop up her upper body and tried to move her legs—
A layer of solid ice radiating bone-piercing cold had, at some unknown moment, spread across the ground toward her.
Under Sirin's despairing gaze, that thick layer of ice crystals rapidly climbed up her calves, firmly freezing her knees and thighs, nailing her fast to the ground.
The extreme cold instantly numbed the nerves in her lower body.
"No…"
Sirin's lips trembled, letting out a faint, sob-choked whimper.
Rita stepped over the frozen rubble, dragging that scythe reeking of death, and like an emotionless executioner, walked step by step until she stood before Sirin.
A huge shadow fell over Sirin's pale little face.
The scythe was raised high once more.
The ghostly blue blade edge flickered with a dazzling, cold light in the shaft of sunlight pouring down from the top of the unfinished building.
Sirin watched that slaughtering blade about to fall.
She struggled no longer.
Because struggling had lost all meaning.
The lightless, sunless terror and helplessness she had once endured in the Babylon Laboratory, at the hands of those beasts in white lab coats—in this moment, they came flooding back into her mind like a rising tide.
At the corners of her eyes, two tears, slipping free from the extremity of her indignation and despair, instantly froze into two tiny ice crystals in the frigid air, falling onto the iced-over ground with a soft "tink."
She closed her eyes.
In this final moment of her life, the flickering slideshow of her memories held no wild fantasies of destroying the world, and no venomous curses against humanity.
The image froze on a narrow kitchen filled with the smell of cooking oil and smoke.
That man, wearing that ridiculous little yellow duckling apron, spatula in hand, was placing a slab of pork chop—fried golden and crisp—into her bowl.
He turned his head and, in that tone always tinged with a bit of exasperation and indulgence, said: "Stop being a picky eater. Finish this bowl and I'll let you have another bottle of iced tea."
I really can't accept this.
The corner of Sirin's mouth tugged into an ugly, even faintly wretched, bitter smile.
Her greatest regret, unexpectedly, was not that she'd failed to slaughter every last one of those ants who had bullied her.
It was that…
from now on, she would never again get to see that idiot human, conquered by the culinary skills of her, the great Herrscher of the Void, kneeling on the ground and weeping his heart out.
That meal—she still hadn't cooked it for him yet.
"It's over."
This was the last thought to flash through Sirin's mind.
"Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang——!!!!"
At the very hair's-breadth instant when that ice scythe—powerful enough to cleave steel—was about to fall!—
A dense string of gunshots, so close together they nearly merged into a single unbroken line, tore through this dead-silent space in an instant, like a chain of high-explosive charges suddenly detonating!
The smell of burning gunpowder and the ear-splitting clang of metal on metal exploded thunderously at the entrance of the unfinished building!
This was suppressive fire that had utterly abandoned accuracy, pouring out every ounce of kinetic energy within a single second in the most unreasonable manner possible!
On Rita's face, which had maintained its coldness all along, a trace of astonishment appeared for the first time.
Though those densely fired bullets could not pierce the armor of the Argent Knight: Artemis, that immense physical kinetic energy hammered wildly against the body of the ice scythe like an invisible iron mallet.
Every bullet's impact forced the scythe, on the verge of falling, to deviate ever so slightly, again and again, beyond her control.
"Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang!"
Sparks scattered wildly across the ghostly blue armor surface and the scythe's edge, even lighting up the dim corners of the unfinished building.
This sudden metal storm forced this S-rank Valkyrie to immediately halt the execution.
Instinctively she pulled both hands back, bringing that enormous Skadi Ondurgud across her chest to defend.
Sirin's despair-dimmed golden eyes snapped open.
Through that acrid smoke and the swirling cement dust—
She looked in that direction.
At the entrance of the unfinished building, that figure once shrouded in backlight was charging in with great, sweeping strides.
Su Yu held level in both hands two Uzi submachine guns radiating heat.
The muzzle flashes cast flickering light and shadow across his cheeks.
He did not stop firing; instead, while maintaining that violent suppressive fire, he strode over the rubble strewn across the ground.
And then.
He came to a stop in front of Sirin.
Like an indestructible wall, he blocked all those scattering sparks, that bone-piercing cold, and the killing intent of that terrifying S-rank Valkyrie entirely on the outside.
The submachine guns' spent casings fell like raindrops into the dust at his feet, ringing with a crisp "tink, tink."
Sirin stared blankly at this back—not particularly tall, its shoulders even somewhat thin and slight.
What he wore today was still that casual jacket bought from the supermarket's discount rack, washed until it had faded somewhat.
Yet it was precisely a back like this that, in this instant, gave her a sense of absolute safety—as if even the whole world collapsing wouldn't cause her the slightest harm.
Sirin heard, deep within her heart, that hard-as-iron black shell of ice, frozen for over a decade.
Give off a faint "crack" of splitting.
Those fissures spread wildly.
And with them came a scorching warmth she had never experienced before—the warmth of being desperately shielded behind someone—surging madly along her blood into every part of her body.
Making even those frozen nerves begin to twitch greedily.
So this was it.
That bond called "love" and "protection" that the little brat Bronie was always going on about.
Was this the weight of it—the kind that made you want to burst into tears on the spot, yet feel unbelievably at ease?
"Click. Click."
The magazines of both submachine guns were emptied at almost the same time.
The firing pins gave off the crisp click of empty chambers.
From opening fire to running out of ammunition had taken no more than a few short seconds.
But those few seconds had already been enough to change the entire tide of battle.
Su Yu felt no attachment whatsoever. With a flick of both hands outward, he flung the two still-smoking submachine guns straight into the ruins on either side.
In the very instant Rita lowered the ice scythe held across her chest, preparing to launch a counterattack—
Su Yu's right hand had already darted toward his back like lightning.
A dark-green launch tube brimming with the aesthetics of violence was ripped out by him without the slightest hesitation.
His thumb flicked off the safety, and he hoisted it straight onto his right shoulder.
That RPG muzzle, loaded with a high-explosive warhead, steadily leveled at the ice-cold reaper before him.
Su Yu stood there, his left arm hanging naturally at his side.
His breathing had grown somewhat heavy from the frantic sprint and violent exertion just now, but in his eyes as he watched Rita, there was not the slightest fear of facing an S-rank Valkyrie.
The smell of gunsmoke from the dense volley had not yet dispersed.
Su Yu stood atop the rubble, his right shoulder steadily bearing the RPG launch tube.
The pitch-black high-explosive warhead's sights were fixed unwaveringly upon Rita.
His chest rose and fell slightly as he evened out the ragged breathing brought on by his sprint.
Su Yu didn't want to fight.
He knew very well that this heavy weapon of terrifying caliber in his hands was absolutely apocalyptic against street gangs or ordinary armored vehicles.
But used against a Schicksal S-rank Valkyrie clad in the highest-spec Argent Knight: Artemis armor—one who had cut her way through untold numbers of Emperor-class Honkai Beasts in the Honkai world—
this thing was, at best, a slightly louder firework.
Its greatest use was to form a deterrent at this distance.
To make his opponent wary of the collapse or secondary damage the explosion might cause, thereby buying a few sentences' worth of time to exchange information.
Perhaps, so long as he could explain this absurd misunderstanding clearly, this fight wouldn't need to happen at all.
Su Yu had just parted his lips slightly, the tip of his tongue already pressed against his teeth, about to speak the first word.
At that very moment.
"Left blind spot! Three o'clock direction!"
Fenghuang's voice leapt up an octave in the depths of Su Yu's mind.
"It's a Genome Reaper!"
Su Yu's pupils abruptly contracted to pinpoints.
The Tai Xu perception granted by the first-level Genetic Lock, like an invisible neural net, instantly extended toward that pile of abandoned building materials on the left, completely enveloped in shadow.
The faint shift in the flow of air, the subtle friction of mechanical joints.
The instant his perception touched them, that patch of shadow was torn open.
A mechanical hound—its entire body an interweaving of deep green and ink-black, its shell covered in barbs like a beetle's—slid soundlessly out from the gap in the ruins.
Its four limbs were extremely developed, and the sharp claws at its feet gouged deep white scratches into the cement floor.
On that hideous head, composed of all manner of sensors and a high-voltage electric-shock maw, two crimson electronic eyes flickered.
That was Rita Rossweisse's hound.
An efficient killing machine designed specifically to track and rip apart high-energy targets.
This Genome Reaper paid no mind at all to Su Yu and Rita locked in their standoff.
Its System had long since been fed a single command.
Those two crimson points of light locked, unwavering, onto Sirin—sitting on the ground, both legs frozen fast in solid ice, so weak she couldn't even lift a single finger.
The distance to Sirin was less than seven meters.
For a Genome Reaper launching at full speed, this distance wouldn't take even half a second to cross.
Its gaping mechanical maw had already begun to give off the ear-splitting "crackle" of high-voltage current.
One bite was all it would take.
Sirin's utterly defenseless, fragile neck would be snapped clean through like a withered twig.
Su Yu's back was instantly soaked with cold sweat.
Time seemed to slow infinitely in his perception.
This was a lethal dead end with no room for maneuver.
The RPG hoisted in his hands held only a single charge.
Which meant he had only one chance to fire.
If he kept aiming at Rita as a threat, then Sirin would absolutely be torn to shreds by that mechanical hound.
If he swung the muzzle around to save Sirin… then the only bargaining chip he had for suppressing Rita would vanish in that instant.
Exposing himself completely beneath that S-rank Valkyrie's terrifying ice scythe.
Even a gravely wounded S-rank was still a primordial behemoth that could crush an ordinary person to death with a casual flick of its claws.
All the calculations of gain and loss, all the tactical analysis in his mind, lasted only a thousandth of a second.
Su Yu's body had already made its choice ahead of his reason.
He showed not the slightest hesitation—didn't even blink an eye.
His waist snapped into force, the muscles of his legs biting down hard against the ground.
The right shoulder bearing the RPG whipped violently to the right.
The heavy launch tube carved a semicircular afterimage through the air.
The muzzle, once firmly locked onto Rita, swung ninety degrees in that flash of lightning.
The sights didn't even bother to search for that high-speed green-black afterimage.
Relying entirely on a beast-like instinct, Su Yu predicted the leaping, biting trajectory of that Genome Reaper.
His index finger clamped down hard on the trigger.
"BOOM——!"
The deafening firing blast reverberated thunderously through the abandoned unfinished building.
The propellant charge burned fiercely, spewing a long tail of scorching flame from the rear.
That dark-green high-explosive warhead, with an air-tearing shriek, slammed with pinpoint accuracy into the mechanical hound that had just leapt into midair.
"KA-BOOM!!!"
A dazzling orange-red fireball erupted violently on the open ground to the side.
The violent blast shockwave swept up the rubble and dust across the whole floor, whirling outward in every direction like a miniature sandstorm.
That indestructibly hard Genome Reaper, beneath this point-blank high-explosive detonation, had not even half a chance to struggle. It was blown outright into a heap of twisted, charred scrap-iron parts, scattering across the ground with a clattering "tink-tink-clang."
Sirin's pale little face was lit up by the fireball's glare.
She stared blankly at that fireball bursting open before her, even feeling the scorching wave of heat that surged against her face.
Su Yu didn't even have time to check whether that hound was thoroughly dead.
Because in the very instant he squeezed the trigger and the muzzle flash bloomed—
The air ahead of him collapsed.
That was a Outclassed by None in the truest sense.
This was a fatal opening created after casting aside nearly all defense and all deterrence.
To Rita—battle-hardened, her combat instincts long since forged to the utmost extreme—
Su Yu's motion of swinging his muzzle around was as conspicuous as a searchlight suddenly blazing to life in a dead, silent night.
She didn't need to ponder why Su Yu had done it.
She only knew that the threat pointed at her had disappeared.
The thruster nozzles on the back of the Argent Knight: Artemis erupted with a dark-red flame even more blinding than before.
"Bang!"
The spot where Rita had originally stood—the hard concrete floor was stamped into a pit half a meter deep, spiderweb-like cracks radiating all around it.
The terrifying explosive power of an S-rank Valkyrie was displayed without the slightest reservation in this moment.
Her whole body hugging the ground, she transformed into a bolt of blue lightning utterly impossible to catch with the naked eye.
The ten-plus-meter distance was, to her, as thin as a sheet of paper.
Su Yu's brain, in the overclocked state of the first-level Genetic Lock, clearly captured every detail of Rita's charging motion.
He saw Rita's slightly lowered shoulders, saw the taut knuckles of the hand gripping the long-shafted scythe, saw that ghostly blue ice scythe carve through the air in a lethal arc chilling enough to freeze blood itself.
His consciousness was frantically issuing commands to dodge.
Fall back! Roll to the left! Whatever it takes, get out of the path of that blade!
But it was useless.
A mortal's flesh, that shell built of carbon-based cells and ordinary bone, simply could not keep up with those overclocked neural reactions in the face of this sound-barrier-breaking speed.
Su Yu was like a machine fitted with the latest sports-car CPU, yet dragging along the chassis of a decrepit old tractor.
His hands and feet had only just received the faint electrical signals relayed from his brain.
And that scythe, radiating absolute-zero frost, had already arrived.
"Shrrrk——!"
Rita did not cut Su Yu in half at the waist directly.
A flicker of cold calculation flashed through her dark-red eyes.
Her wrist twisted slightly, and Skadi Ondurgud's massive blade edge, at the last millimeter before it would have sliced open Su Yu's waist and abdomen—
—shifted precisely to strike with the heavy, broad flat of the blade, carrying earth-shattering kinetic force, slamming brutally into Su Yu's chest.
The power of this single blow.
It was like being struck head-on, without any cushioning, by a fully-loaded heavy cargo truck barreling down a highway at full speed.
"Crack-crack-crack…"
A string of hair-raising bone-snapping sounds burst densely from within Su Yu's chest cavity.
That faded-from-washing casual jacket on his body was torn into countless fluttering strips the instant it made contact with that terrifying, extreme-cold blade wind.
The enormous impact sent Su Yu's feet clean off the ground.
His whole body, like a burlap sack whose string had snapped, flew backward through the air.
Midair, a great mouthful of fresh blood mixed with fragments of shattered organs uncontrollably erupted from his mouth, carving a searing red arc through the dim light.
"BANG——!!!"
Su Yu slammed heavily into a thick load-bearing brick wall over ten meters away.
The enormous impact sent a violent tremor through the entire brick wall.
The wall's surface peeled away in great sheets, and several deep cracks, centered on the point where his back had struck, spread rapidly in all directions like hideous centipedes.
Su Yu's body slid slowly down the wall to the ground.
"Cough… cough cough cough…"
He curled up amid the pile of bricks, coughing violently in agony.
Every cough brought up great gouts of dark-red bloody foam.
Blood ran down along his chin, dripping onto his already tattered clothes.
He tried to prop himself up off the ground and sit, but at the elbow of his right arm, a length of pale bone splinter had already pierced through the skin and lay exposed to the air, the blood quickly staining that patch of ground red.
His internal organs felt as though they had been completely dislodged from their places; every breath was like a rusty saw being dragged back and forth inside his chest cavity.
Even though the first-level Genetic Lock had blocked out part of the pain, the weakness of having his bodily structure suffer such devastating damage still made it feel unbearably difficult just to lift his eyelids.
This was what was real.
Undiluted by anything—the utterly unbridgeable chasm in strength that lay between a human and an S-rank Valkyrie.
Merely a single flat-of-the-blade strike, carrying no killing intent, had nearly destroyed this body of his, enhanced though it was by the System's serums.
Rita held that enormous ghostly blue ice scythe in one hand, frost radiating an icy white mist from the blade.
She halted her steps.
In those dark-red eyes—usually carrying a faint, maid-like, gentle false smile, but now holding only cool composure—a rare flicker of astonishment and surprise passed through.
She glanced down at the flat side of her own scythe.
There, a single drop of Su Yu's blood clung.
Under that near-sonic ambush just now.
The impact point she had originally calculated was to snap that man's spine directly, robbing him completely of any ability to resist.
But in the final instant of contact, that ordinary man, without a single fluctuation of Honkai energy, had actually—in a manner that completely defied the physiological limits of the human body—forcibly retracted his chest cavity backward by an infinitesimally small arc.
It was precisely this seemingly insignificant evasive motion that had shed a small portion of the lethal kinetic energy, letting him barely keep his internal organs from rupturing on the spot.
This kind of keen—one might even say monstrous—instinctive prediction of danger.
Rita had only ever seen it in Valkyries with vast experience.
This man—what exactly was his background?
A World Serpent modified human? Or the product of some unknown technology?
But why couldn't even the faintest trace of Honkai-energy radiation be detected on his body?
However, as a Valkyrie carrying out a purge mission, Rita quickly forced these doubts back down.
No matter who he was, since he had stood on the Herrscher's side, then he was an obstacle that had to be uprooted.
[Current situation win-rate calculation: less than 1% (Warning! An absolute Outclassed by None gap exists between the two parties in both physical and energy dimensions).]
[Warning! Host's bodily damage level has reached 73%. Please immediately seek cover… damn it, seek what cover! Just run!]
Su Yu slightly narrowed that left eye plastered over with blood, staring at that line of red text reading "less than 1%."
The corner of his mouth tugged with difficulty, and because it pulled at the wounds in his chest, he once again coughed up a mouthful of blood in a muffled hack.
"Run? Run where…"
He responded hoarsely to the System in his heart.
In Sirin's current state, if he did nothing, this body would be sliced into blocks of ice within a few seconds.
And Kiana would be dragged down with her.
Rita did not look at that man collapsed in the corner like a heap of mud.
After confirming her opponent had completely lost the ability to pose a threat, she turned around and once again locked onto Sirin, frozen fast to the ground and unable to move.
Dragging that heavy ice scythe, she stepped across the cement floor covered in ice shards, her footsteps ringing out "clack, clack."
"Do not attempt to challenge Schicksal's bottom line, and do not fancy that you can block us with this ludicrous little alliance."
Rita's voice recovered that elegant coldness.
It was as if she were delivering a final verdict.
"This is your last warning. If there is any further rash move, I will not mind taking the wreckage here back with me to study at my leisure."
She walked to within less than two meters of Sirin, and stopped.
Toward this Herrscher of the Void, who had once nearly pushed human civilization into the Abyss, Rita held an absolute wariness in her heart.
Even though her opponent now looked so weak she couldn't even stand, a Herrscher's authority was forever something that defied all reason.
To thoroughly eliminate this hidden threat.
Rita decided to use this Skadi Ondurgud to completely strip Sirin's body of its capacity to move.
To sever the tendons in her hands and feet, and then freeze her over and carry her away.
The enormous scythe carved a chilling crescent arc through the air.
The blade tip aimed at Sirin's slender wrist.
Sirin leaned against the cold wall.
In those golden eyes, there was no fear of the impending torture.
Her gaze passed over Rita's shoulder, fixed unwaveringly upon that man collapsed in a pool of blood, whose very breathing had grown faint.
That idiot.
So obviously weak and small.
Even though, every time she mocked him, all he could ever do was threaten her with cooking or cutting off the internet.
Even though… even if he had turned and fled just now, no one would have blamed him.
"Don't die…"
Sirin's lips trembled, the sound she made faint as a mosquito's whine, carrying a pleading note she herself hadn't even noticed.
At the very moment Rita's wrist was about to press down.
"Cough… cough cough…"
From a corner of the ruins.
That man who by all rights shouldn't have had the strength left to so much as twitch a finger—
Slowly.
Pressed that blood-soaked right hand, its bone splinter jutting out, hard against the rubble-strewn ground.
His five fingers dug deep into the gaps between the dirt and the stones.
His fingernails cracked and curled back, dripping with blood.
"Not… over… yet…"
Su Yu's voice was extremely hoarse, like two rusty iron plates grinding against each other.
But within that voice there was a scalp-numbing madness—one that had utterly cast aside every shred of reason.
He swayed.
Bit by bit, he propped up that ruined, broken body.
He lifted his head.
His originally clear black pupils, always carrying a hint of laid-back ease, had now completely dilated.
The whites of his eyes were crawling with the red bloodshot lines of fury.
His gaze pierced through that gray, dim air and nailed itself unwaveringly onto Rita.
Like a lone wolf cornered into a dead end, resolved to drag the hunter down to hell alongside it.
Since ordinary means couldn't even breach her defenses.
Since the win-rate the System gave him didn't even reach one percent.
Su Yu trembled as he extended his left hand, and the syringe of the second Body Enhancement Serum appeared in his grasp.
It was also a key capable of pushing open the door to the "second level of the Genetic Lock"—one that demanded a horrific price from its user.
He did not hesitate.
He gripped it tightly in his palm.
"Hmmm!"
The System's light-screen bounced frantically before his eyes.
That warning red glow even stung the retinas of his eyes.
[EXTREME DANGER WARNING!!!]
[Detected that the Host is attempting to forcibly inject a high-tier enhancement serum while in a state of extreme vital-sign disorder, multiple fractures throughout the body, and severe hemorrhaging!]
[This behavior will trigger an uncontrolled violent recombination of cells! Your damaged muscles and nerves will be forcibly sutured, torn apart, and re-sutured in an extremely short span of time!]
[The agony this brings will be immeasurable! And there is an 85% probability of directly causing sudden death from heart failure!]
[Do you wish to proceed?]
Su Yu's teeth ground together, grating, as blood streamed unceasingly from the corner of his mouth.
He looked ahead.
Looked at that girl, both legs frozen in ice, her eye sockets gone red, staring at him with a look of utter disbelief.
"Proceed."
In his mind, he issued the command, like the low growl of a beast.
The System's light-screen flickered faster and faster, the red glow almost dripping with blood.
[WARNING!!!]
[The second level of the Genetic Lock · Initial Stage (Overload State) will forcibly sever your pain-protection mechanism!]
[But this does not mean the pain won't exist. In the instant of activation, your pain threshold will instantly break through 200% of the physiological limit—your brain will feel the illusion of being flayed alive and having its tendons ripped out.]
[Do you wish to proceed?!]
Su Yu abruptly opened his mouth and let out a hysterical, tearing howl.
That sound reverberated through the empty unfinished building, carrying a resolute, death-defying madness.
He abruptly raised his left arm.
Without any hesitation, without any deceleration.
Gripping that tube of deep-purple serum, in a posture that used nearly every last ounce of strength in his body.
[FINAL WARNING!!]
"Proceed! Proceed—proceed—! Proceed, damn you!"
He drove that thick, long syringe viciously, mercilessly, into his own left chest!
That is—the location of his heart!
"Sptch!"
The muffled sound of the syringe piercing through skin and muscle rang out.
Su Yu's thumb pressed down hard on the plunger.
Forcing that tube of purple liquid, scalding as magma, into his own faintly beating heart—not a single drop left behind.
In the instant the serum entered his body.
Time seemed to fall into absolute stillness within this unfinished building.
And then.
"AAAAAAAHHHHH——!!!"
A shrill, blood-curdling scream that in no way resembled a human's—like a vengeful ghost being roasted alive by karmic flames in the eighteenth level of hell, enduring the torture of being cut apart by a thousand blades—tore violently out of Su Yu's throat!
The agony and despair contained in that scream made the very air throughout the unfinished building seem to shudder on a physical level.
"Crack, crackle-crackle-crackle…"
A dense series of scalp-crawling sounds spread out from within Su Yu's body.
That was the sound of his muscle fibers, beneath an unimaginably savage drug force, being ripped clean apart, stretched out, and then forcibly knotted and recombined again in a brutal manner.
That length of bone splinter on his right arm, once jutting out through the skin—
Beneath this violent repair, it was actually dragged forcibly back inside.
The granulation flesh at the wound writhed and closed at a terrifying, visible speed, and the blood flowing out turned a deep, dark red.
"Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud!"
A muffled, enormous sound, like a heavy pile-driver frantically hammering the ground, began to reverberate throughout this space.
This was Su Yu's heart, forcibly overclocked by the serum, pumping blood like a high-pressure water cannon toward his limbs at the terrifying rate of over three hundred beats per minute.
"Hisssss——!!!"
In the cold, damp air of the unfinished building, a piercing sound of vaporizing gas suddenly erupted.
Su Yu's body temperature, in less than three seconds, soared to an unbelievably high point.
The torn clothing on his body, originally soaked through with cold sweat and blood, the instant it touched that terrifying body heat—
Those droplets of moisture were vaporized outright.
Thick white steam carrying a rich reek of blood, like a pot of boiling water, surged and burst forth in every direction with Su Yu at the center.
Forming a pillar of white vapor several meters high.
Rita, who had already raised her scythe to cripple Sirin's limbs.
Her motion abruptly froze.
The instinct of Schicksal's strongest Valkyrie—that sense of danger honed on countless edges between life and death—
In this moment, sent the highest-level, frenzied alarm it had ever issued straight to her brain.
A chill that climbed all the way up her spine made the fine hairs on the back of her neck stand on end, one by one.
Rita abruptly turned her head, staring fixedly at that billowing white steam.
The steam gradually dispersed.
That man who moments ago had lain in a pool of blood like an ant, barely able even to breathe.
Slowly straightened his body.
He lowered his head.
The clothes on his body had already been utterly shredded, exposing an upper body so solid it defied belief—every line of muscle looking as though it had been cast from steel.
His skin, from the terrifying high temperature, took on an eerie dark red.
Countless thick veins, like agitated blue-green serpents, twined and knotted across his neck, arms, and chest.
White heat still rose continuously from the surface of his skin.
"Drip."
A single drop of thick, evaporated-down blood fell from his chin.
Su Yu slowly raised his head.
In those eyes, the reason belonging to a human had already been replaced by an extreme savagery that had shut out all pain and all distraction.
Like a demon-god crawling up from the lowest depths of the Abyss.
The next second.
Without the aid of any thruster.
Without any prelude.
Su Yu bent his legs slightly, then abruptly snapped them straight.
"BOOM——!!!"
The steel-reinforced concrete floor beneath his feet, already riddled with holes, thunderously caved in under the tread of this pure physical kinetic force that surpassed the limits of human endurance.
A gigantic meteor crater, over two meters in diameter and seemingly bottomless, appeared where he had stood.
The air was brutally torn apart, giving off a muffled sonic boom cloud like a fighter jet breaking the sound barrier.
Su Yu's body, carrying a ring of white breakthrough shockwave.
His speed and strength, under the forcible tearing-open of the second-level Genetic Lock, surged instantly several times over!
He crossed the ten-plus-meter distance in one leap, appearing before Rita as if by teleportation.
Facing this madman drenched head to toe in blood, all pain completely shut out, hurling himself at her with utter disregard for his own life—
The once-lofty S-rank Valkyrie Rita Rossweisse, who had held everything in the palm of her hand.
At last completely put away every trace of contempt and composure at the bottom of her eyes.
Her lips pressed tightly into a thin line, both hands gripping that enormous Skadi Ondurgud scythe in a death grip, the armor engines all over her body letting out a piercing roar.
In these cold, dank ruins.
She was forced to bring out the full twelve-tenths of her strength—the combat stance of one facing a true, formidable enemy.
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