1:03 a.m.
The back hill of the special training base.
The moon had ducked behind the clouds, and the whole clearing held nothing but a faint spill of light leaking from the distant barracks, sketching the treetops into blurred silhouettes.
Su Yu knelt on one knee in the grass, left hand braced against the ground, his right fist still frozen in the posture of the strike he'd just thrown.
He was gasping.
His chest heaved violently, sweat sliding down from his forehead, running along the bridge of his nose to drip onto the blades of grass.
Almost half a month now.
From the first day, when Rita had locked him in a triangle choke until his eyes rolled back, to now, when he could last a full fifteen rounds before being put down.
The neural reflexes of his second-stage Genetic Lock had been torn open, rebuilt, torn open again, and rebuilt again through half a month of hellish tempering.
Like a billet of steel folded and hammered over and over by a blacksmith, the impurities forced out with each strike.
His Reaction Speed had quickened.
Half a month ago he couldn't even make out the direction Rita struck from; now he could at least catch her opening movement, though catching it didn't mean he could dodge it.
No sensory amplification from Tai Xu Sword Qi, no skills or armaments of any kind, not even the Bullet Time effect that the Genetic Lock itself could provide.
As it stood now, his five senses could already rival the perception he'd once had with a first-stage Genetic Lock open and the amplification of Tai Xu Sword Qi.
This terrifying rate of progress startled even Fenghuang, though it stood to reason.
After all, compared to the ordinary man he'd once been, Su Yu having stepped into the second-stage Genetic Lock could no longer be understood within the category of "human."
At the first stage, the sensory amplification of Tai Xu Sword Qi had let him clearly track Rita's lines of movement; after reaching the second stage his mental strength climbed further, until he'd even brushed, faintly, against the threshold of the third stage.
The first two stages of the Genetic Lock were both about wringing the body to its limit, but at the third-stage Genetic Lock came a qualitative leap, for what it unlocked was the human "Brain Domain."
And its most central ability was Mind Simulation.
This was the most iconic, and the most terrifying, ability of the third-stage Genetic Lock.
Through a deeply developed brain, one could perfectly simulate the thought patterns, combat style, even the killing aura of a powerful opponent one had crossed hands with, or understood to an extreme degree.
If Su Yu opened a third-stage simulation on Rita, his gaze and micro-expressions would in an instant shift into that "perfect scheming assassin" state of hers.
He could think like Rita, anticipate Rita's next move, even deploy Rita's signature strangulation techniques.
Of course, the state was not without its price. The more times and the longer he ran a Mind Simulation, the more his own mind would drift uncontrollably toward the target he was simulating.
For Su Yu, who had not yet crossed the third-stage threshold, this ability manifested as an astonishing "capacity to learn."
"Shff—"
Tonight Rita's first ambushing strike was successfully deflected by Su Yu, but the "assassination" was far from over.
Su Yu forced his head up.
And then his breath skipped half a beat.
Rita stood five meters away at the edge of the moonlit shadow.
She had changed clothes.
That signature European-style long-skirted maid outfit was gone.
In its place was a form-fitting short-skirt version.
The hem had been cruelly sliced from the ankle straight up to mid-thigh in a single stroke. The black-and-white fabric clung tight to the perfect curve of her waist and hips.
The hem of the short skirt cut off abruptly at mid-thigh.
A pair of black garter stockings sheathed her long legs snugly.
The stockings' material was thinner, more sheer than the previous style, thin enough to let the snow-white skin beneath faintly show through.
Two slim black elastic garter straps extended out of the dim depths below the hem, climbing straight up along the outer thigh, until at the fullest, softest point of the thigh they were clamped fast by silver metal buckles.
The upper edge of the stockings pressed an eye-catching, tantalizing seam into the flesh of her thigh.
That biting-into-flesh look was, frankly, lethal.
Su Yu's eyes narrowed dangerously.
Before the assassination training, he might genuinely have taken a moment to appreciate it.
But unfortunately, right now there was no room in his head for that kind of worldly desire.
He was running a frenzied tactical analysis.
The short skirt.
The garter stockings.
This was absolutely not some late-night fan service!
This was a despicable, deranged psychological weapon of war!
The long maid skirt, elegant as it looked, would severely restrict the range of motion of the leg joints in high-speed unrestricted combat, especially the angle of high side kicks and life-taking scissor legs.
Switched to this short skirt, Rita's meat-grinder leg strikes had, at the physical level alone, expanded their reach by at least thirty percent!
And that pale sliver of skin exposed between the garter strap and the hem…
In high-speed movement, it would generate a horrifying visual-interference effect!
The human male eyeball, driven by genes honed over millions of years of evolution, would instinctively and uncontrollably track a "bright, sensitive zone" that suddenly appeared and vanished in motion.
Even a mere zero-point-one-second shift of the gaze!
In a fight at this level, where a single lapse of focus meant a shattered rib, that zero-point-one second was more than enough for Rita to kick his skull open!
Gritting his teeth, Su Yu stood, and gave his still faintly aching wrist a hard shake.
"Rita, I've pretty much guessed what you're after, changing into that getup in the dead of night."
Rita stood in the shadow and tilted her head slightly.
She shifted the tactical folder in her hand to her left, and elegantly pressed the tip of her right index finger to that streak of vivid red on her lips.
"Oh? And what has Lord Su Yu guessed?"
"The short skirt frees up the physical range of your legs, and the garter's job is to create visual seduction and interference." Su Yu drew a deep breath and settled into a defensive stance. "You're force-training my dynamic vision's resistance to interference."
The perfect corner of Rita's mouth ticked minutely upward.
"It seems half a month of midnight tutoring hasn't gone to waste. Since you've already seen through my hand, then—"
She vanished.
This was no exaggerated literary flourish.
It was that her burst of movement had grown so fast that Su Yu's retina simply couldn't catch the afterimage!
The hairs on the back of Su Yu's neck stood up.
Half a month of grueling training hadn't been for nothing; the instant his eyes lost their target, his sense of touch surged to the fore.
Left side.
His body reacted before his brain, right arm rising to block.
"Crack!"
A dull, teeth-grinding impact!
Rita's shin, sheathed in black stocking, swept like a battle-axe hard against the bone of Su Yu's forearm!
Terrifying force ran the length of the arm bone and shot through his whole body in an instant, rattling every tooth in his mouth.
But he held—by sheer force! He wasn't sent flying!
Half a month ago, a kick like that would have left him three meters off in the mud, questioning his life choices.
This time, both feet only slid back half a step across the grass.
In the gap while Rita withdrew her leg, Su Yu's left fist drove straight for her waist.
It hit empty.
Rita's waist twisted at an impossible angle in midair; Su Yu's fist grazed past her side, his knuckles brushing the fabric of her hem.
A flash of white streaked across the edge of his vision.
That strip of skin between the garter strap and the hem swept past the periphery of his sight in the instant she spun.
Su Yu's gaze wavered for zero-point-one second.
Just that zero-point-one second.
Rita's right leg was already cleaving down from above, the rounded calf wrapped in black stocking, the instep aimed square at his temple, carving a black arc of death through the night wind that could only be called a work of art!
Su Yu tilted his neck thirty degrees to the right; Rita's instep skimmed past the shell of his ear, dragging a gust of wind with it.
Close.
Too close.
Rita's flawless face was now less than twenty centimeters from the tip of Su Yu's nose.
Even after completing such a violent, high-speed combination, her breath came out soft as orchid-scent, steady to a frightening degree, not a trace of quickened rhythm to it.
"Lord Su Yu."
Her voice, gentle enough to drip water, drifted into Su Yu's ear from that razor-thin distance.
"In a real fight to the death, greedily ogling a girl's legs… that's something you pay for with your life, immediately."
Su Yu retreated a step and shook out his right arm, still numb from the kick.
"I'm begging you here—can't you wear a proper pair of tactical trousers to next time's tutoring?"
"That won't do." Rita lifted her hem with one hand. "Trousers do not conform to the professional dress code of a perfect maid."
"Does your Schicksal maid dress code actually have a clause that says you must strangle the Boss with your thighs?!"
"That is a special supplementary provision aimed specifically at you."
Su Yu drew a deep breath and reset his fighting stance.
"Again! This time I swear, even if you fight bare-legged I will absolutely not glance at them once more!"
Rita set the tactical folder gently on a nearby stone and gracefully lifted both sides of her short skirt with both hands.
In the moonlight she performed a textbook-perfect European curtsy.
"Then, tonight's sixteenth round, officially begins."
—
Three hundred meters north of the back-hill clearing, in the crown of an old elm.
Siegfried Kaslana lay flat along a branch as thick as a bowl's mouth, left arm hooked around the trunk, right hand steadying a military-grade micro night-vision scope.
He had been lying on this branch for twenty minutes.
The original plan had been to loop around the back hill, avoid the surveillance blind spots, and drive straight for the archive room on the base's north side.
He'd scouted the route by daylight, every camera's scan angle and frequency committed to memory.
But for all his careful planning, he'd never dreamed of this.
In this pitch-black dead of night, there were actually people out in the back-hill clearing!
And they were absolutely not ordinary "people."
Siegfried had forcibly cranked the scope's night-vision magnification to maximum.
At three hundred meters, through the ghostly green field of the military night-vision device, he could barely make out the outlines of their faces, but not the fine details of their expressions.
He could clearly see two figures crossing, colliding, splitting apart, and then slamming into each other again in the clearing with a ferocious kind of motion.
Too fast.
Siegfried's brow furrowed.
He'd spent more than twenty years as ace agent codename K-0017, and in his lifetime he'd seen enough top-tier fighting masters to fill an Encyclopedia.
He'd sat in on internal sparring between Schicksal's S-rank agents.
He'd witnessed death-duels between mercenary bosses who'd clawed their way out of the corpse-piles of the Middle Eastern deserts.
He'd even used his clearance to unlock and view top-secret footage of certain great powers' first-generation "super soldiers" trained in underground labs.
But.
Right here, right now, the speed at which these two exchanged blows utterly exceeded every scrap of common sense Siegfried had accumulated over the better part of a lifetime!
That woman in the short skirt was the devil instructor who'd been twirling a lace parasol out on the training ground by day.
Siegfried recognized her build at a glance.
Even with a change into more combat-friendly clothes, that death-god-perfect stance and flawless way of moving could never fool the eyes of an old agent.
When she rotated her body in the air, the axis of her spin completely violated human ergonomics.
A normal person's lumbar range of motion is forty-five degrees each way; she turned at least one hundred and twenty, and she did it while airborne!
Every time a whip kick lashed out, Siegfried's ears caught a short, sharp "snap"—that was the miniature sonic boom produced when the limb's speed of movement broke past the threshold of air resistance.
Siegfried's fingers tightened on the branch.
He swung the scope onto the other person.
Black hair.
About one meter eighty tall.
Lean build, but the muscle lines were clearly defined.
The fighting stance wasn't quite orthodox; the footwork looked to have some Shenzhou martial-arts grounding, though not from very long of practice.
Every clumsy punch this guy threw carried an absurd amount of force!
Wherever the punch's wind swept, the loose grass and pebbles on the ground were shoved brutally aside by the terrifying air pressure!
Siegfried adjusted the scope's angle, trying to make out the man's face.
A little moonlight leaked down through a gap in the clouds, lighting up the man's profile.
Siegfried's hand froze.
Su Yu.
The very young man he'd grabbed by the collar a few days ago at the café on the shopping street and demanded to his face, "Are you my son's boyfriend?"
The direct superior of his own perpetually iceberg-faced son, Kevin.
That ordinary-looking, seemingly can't-truss-a-chicken game producer boss whose smile was even a little kindly!
Siegfried's eyeballs nearly popped from their sockets.
Through the scope he watched, wide-eyed, as Su Yu took, head-on, a side kick from that maid instructor powerful enough to smash stone tablets and split boulders.
His whole arm was flung backward in an exaggerated whip, like a noodle.
The terrifying kinetic energy packed into that one kick, Siegfried could gauge precisely with his naked eye alone.
Absolutely enough to bend a solid load-bearing steel rebar five centimeters in diameter on the spot!
And by the look of it, that maid was still operating with total ease—this wasn't anywhere near her full strength!
But Su Yu just shook out his arm.
And then, like nothing had happened at all.
He went charging back in, howling like a lunatic!
Siegfried lowered the scope.
He felt like his breathing had gone a little difficult.
He needed to quietly digest the picture he'd just seen.
Was this even a normally developed carbon-based organism from planet Earth?!
In his mind, Siegfried rapidly pulled up the combat data from the physical peak of his own youth.
Twenty-five years old.
Every physiological metric at its zenith.
Forged through Schicksal's most brutal agent death-duel training, with an elimination rate as high as ninety percent.
Plus the boost of combat experience earned crawling and scrapping along the edge of life and death countless times.
The self of back then had, in overall combat ability, ranked steadily in the top five across Schicksal's vast agent System.
So then—if it were the twenty-five-year-old peak version of himself against that devil maid instructor down below?
In his heart, Siegfried delivered the most honest, most desolate assessment of his combat power: three moves.
Three moves at most.
And that neck he'd always been so proud of would be twisted clean off, right there.
And that fellow down there named Su Yu—the game-company boss who looked twenty years younger than him.
Not only had he gone toe-to-toe with that humanoid monster for a full fifteen rounds! Even beaten this savagely, he could still stand steady on the ground and catch his breath!
No—not just catch his breath; he looked, on the whole, like he'd barely been hurt at all. Never mind broken ribs, Siegfried judged.
At most he had some bruises on him, and merely looked a bit battered on the surface.
Siegfried slumped hopelessly against the rough trunk, tipped his head back, and stared at the black night sky sliced into countless little fragments by the leaves.
The wind in the tree crown was stronger than on the ground.
It poured in through the collar of Siegfried's work coveralls, cold and clammy.
He tugged the collar higher and forced himself to keep observing the battle below through the scope.
His brain was working past its limit.
The professional instinct of an S-rank agent was automatically analyzing all available information.
Fact one: Anti-Entropy and the Shenzhou authorities had secretly joined hands and sunk a fortune into building this special training base on the outskirts of Arc City, mustering five hundred elites of every stripe.
Fact two: the training methods were extremely radical—one could even call it treating lives like weeds. In essence it wasn't really training soldiers at all, but using violent means to reshape the body's fundamental cellular structure.
Fact three: the base's head instructor was a maid monster whose bodily function and combat power completely overrode the human limit.
Fact four: his own son's game-company boss, Su Yu. On the surface a code-tapping man, but in reality equally possessed of a resistance to blows and physical constitution that far surpassed all reason.
Fact five: six months from now something big would happen—big enough to require preparation on this scale.
Fact six: the current supreme head of Anti-Entropy Entertainment was Welt Yang. The old buddy who'd once slept in the bunk above his own.
Siegfried tucked the scope into his pocket.
All at once he remembered something long past, something so old it had nearly rotted away in alcohol.
Many years ago.
He couldn't recall which year exactly.
On a winter night with snow whirling down thick.
He and Welt had holed up drinking in a run-down little tavern on the streets of Berlin.
That night, the ever-restrained Welt had, against all habit, downed two big mugs of extremely strong dark ale.
Welt was a clam-mouthed man at the best of times, and drink made him even quieter.
The two of them just sat across the table, silent and facing each other most of the time.
Now and then they'd trade a dry sentence or two about their respective dull recent affairs, then sink back into a long silence.
Just as the tavern was about to close and clear out.
Welt suddenly raised his head and, quite abruptly, spoke.
"Siegfried."
"Hm? What's up, brother? Didn't bring cash to settle the tab?"
"If one day, you knew the end of the world was coming."
"Huh?"
"But no one believed you. Everyone thought you'd gone mad. What would you do?"
Siegfried had been gnawing on a pork knuckle at the time, mouth stuffed full.
He chewed twice, swallowed, then hoisted his beer stein—bigger than his own face—and clunked it hard against the glass in front of Welt.
"You been watching too many sci-fi flicks, kid?"
Welt didn't laugh. His gaze settled on the gray, murky sky outside the window.
"Just take it as a hypothetical."
"That even needs thinking about?"
He reached out across the table and clapped Welt on the shoulder.
"Call me, that's what."
"…What?"
"The end of the world comes, you call me. I believe you. You say the end is coming, then it's coming, and worst case the two of us shoulder it together!"
Welt looked at him and said nothing for a good long while.
He lifted the dark ale he'd never touched and took a sip.
"You really are…"
"What?"
"Never mind. It's nothing."
At the time Siegfried had assumed he was just under too much stress, drunk and rambling.
But now.
Up in this tree on the outskirts of Arc City, on this dark and windy night.
Siegfried no longer thought so.
He lowered his head, his gaze complicated as it pierced through layer upon layer of leaves down to those two inhuman figures still grappling in the clearing below.
The maid instructor's speed and strength far surpassed the human limit.
Su Yu's physical constitution likewise far surpassed the ordinary man's.
The training methods at the base were performing a fundamental remaking of the human body.
Siegfried strung these facts together.
The answer surfaced completely.
That quiet old scamp Welt, doing great things in silence, really was preparing to fight the apocalypse.
Those two down there, with physiques monstrous to the point of being outrageous, were absolutely super soldiers that Anti-Entropy had poured the strength of its entire organization into secretly developing!
Siegfried leaned weakly against the trunk and shut his eyes in pain.
And then felt a surge of fury.
Welt, you shameless son of a bitch!
The apocalypse is coming! And you're off cooking up biochemical mutants! You actually didn't call me?!
Did you ever, once, treat me, Siegfried, as a brother?!
But soon.
He remembered that infuriating bespectacled fellow, the way he'd looked at him through those thick lenses that day.
Why didn't Welt call him…
Siegfried's throat bobbed.
He thought of Cecilia.
He thought of the family portrait hanging on the living-room wall at home.
He thought of the jar of homemade jam Cecilia tucked into his luggage every time before he left on a mission.
Welt knew he had a family.
Welt didn't want to drag him into it.
Just as he himself had never told Welt that he was an S-rank agent of Schicksal.
That was the unspoken understanding between grown men.
You don't tell, I don't ask.
You shoulder yours, I shoulder mine.
Siegfried scrubbed a hand hard across his face.
When his palm came away from his eyes, there seemed to be a little wetness between his fingers.
Probably sweat.
He slid soundlessly down from the crown, his toes touching down on the soft layer of fallen leaves without making a sound.
The fight in the clearing was still going on; Siegfried didn't look back again.
He tugged at the collar of his coveralls, dropped low, and slipped like a shadow into the depths of the pine forest.
Objective: the base's main building, underground level one, the core archive room.
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