Rita's giant scythe traced an arc through the air.
"Riiip—"
Space itself seemed to be unzipped along an invisible seam, dark violet Honkai energy particles hissing out from the incision, only to be swept clean by the night wind in a heartbeat.
She drew the scythe back and folded both hands before her skirt, her posture so textbook-perfect it could have been printed straight into a British etiquette manual.
Her gaze swept past Su Yu's shoulder and settled on the Honkai Emperor that loomed like a small mountain of amethyst.
"It's a Honkai Emperor, Lord Su Yu."
Her tone was steady, elegant, as if she weren't reporting a strategic-class monster but asking, "How many sugar cubes would you like in your black tea tonight?"
"Do be careful."
Su Yu didn't turn around.
His eyes were nailed to that pinkish-purple figure, the light of his golden eyes drifting slowly through his irises.
The Honkai Emperor hovered five meters up, a dozen or so ring blades spinning around its body.
The smooth, oval structure that served as its head rotated to face Su Yu.
Su Yu could feel himself being "scanned."
Like an airport scanner forcibly gauging his bone density, muscle fiber, and body fat under X-rays.
Fenghuang's voice rose in his mind.
"A Honkai Emperor is an excellent whetstone for you as you are now."
There wasn't a trace of worry in the old Squad Monitor's tone.
More like a hardcore martial arts coach standing at the edge of the ring, arms crossed, watching his own disciple finally get ranked in the placement matches.
"As the gatekeeper of the higher-tier Honkai Beasts, beating it head-on means you've now reached the threshold of an upper A-rank Valkyrie." Fenghuang paused. "It's about time we tested the results of these past two weeks of taking hits."
Su Yu's mouth twitched.
He turned his head, looking back at Rita and Kiana behind him.
"This big guy—I solo him, that alright?"
Rita planted the butt of her scythe's shaft against the ground and folded both hands over the top.
"Understood. Please be careful. This is your first time fighting a Honkai Beast, don't take it lightly."
Kiana stood beside Rita, one Skyward Destroyer hanging from her left hand, the other slung over her right shoulder.
Two enormous large-caliber energy hand cannons looked like a pair of toy water guns in her grip.
She waved the one in her right hand.
"Relax, you've got me here! If you crash and burn, I'll charge right in, smash that hunk of metal into scrap, and dig you out!"
Su Yu looked at her.
Kiana's eyes shone like two stars in the purple glow of the Honkai energy, blue on the left and gold on the right, her ahoge bobbing in the currents of Honkai energy.
Her expression was no different from when she fought over snacks back in the studio, as if the thing in front of her weren't a strategic-class monster capable of slapping an overpass into scrap metal, but a stray cat she needed to shoo away.
Su Yu smiled.
"Then I'll have to trouble Miss Kaslana to cover me."
He turned back to face the Honkai Emperor.
The light of his golden eyes drew inward.
In its place came a different change.
The surface of Su Yu's skin began to heat up.
His blood vessels bulged beneath his skin, spreading from the back of his hand up the forearm, the upper arm, the shoulder, as if something were surging through them.
Second-stage Genetic Lock.
Overload state.
Full activation.
"BOOM—!"
No sound of shattering bone, only the explosive crack of air violently heated and expanded!
The suspended purple raindrops within three meters of him vanished into steam in an instant, becoming a layer of boiling white vapor that shrouded his figure.
Twenty meters away, Siegfried leaned against the door of the Maybach, cradling Kevin, who had slipped into a half-conscious state after being injected with the recovery agent.
He saw the change come over Su Yu.
White vapor rose off the black-haired young man's body, starkly visible against the frozen curtain of rain.
Su Yu's frame hadn't changed—still that medium-built young man who didn't look particularly strong.
But the feeling of him standing there had changed.
Siegfried couldn't put his finger on what that feeling was.
If he had to describe it—a humanoid nuke with its fuse ripped out and then stuffed into a microwave to heat up.
Su Yu moved.
Siegfried didn't see how he moved.
No bending of the knees, no running start, no push off the ground.
One frame Su Yu was still standing there steaming, the next—the picture jump-cut.
Su Yu had already blinked to a spot directly in front of the Honkai Emperor.
His right fist was already buried solidly in the Honkai Emperor's chest plate.
The sound arrived late.
First a dull impact, like a great hammer striking an anvil.
Then the shrill scream of air torn apart by a shockwave.
Finally, as the Honkai Emperor's white-and-purple body flew backward out of control, the arcs its shell fragments and dark violet fluid traced through the air.
The Honkai Emperor had been sent flying.
One punch.
That strategic-class elite monster, hovering in mid-air, the one that had beaten first-stage-Genetic-Lock Kevin into critical condition, had been knocked out of the park like a baseball.
Siegfried's mouth fell open.
Kevin, in his arms, cracked his eyes open groggily, then closed them again.
Su Yu stood where the Honkai Emperor had been hovering, his right fist still held in its follow-through.
The skin over his knuckles had split in several fine cuts, beads of blood seeping out only to be flash-dried by the heat of his skin, leaving a few dark red streaks.
A knot of white mist still lingered in the air around his fist.
That was the condensed vapor produced when the fist moved at high speed, air compressed to its limit and then abruptly expanding.
"A beautiful punch."
There was a touch of satisfaction in Fenghuang's voice.
"After entering the overload state of the second-stage Genetic Lock, your physical strength has reached the level of an A-rank Valkyrie—stronger than one, even, by a fair margin."
"This state shouldn't have lasted long, but these two weeks of high-intensity training with Rita have raised your baseline. The you of now can hold it much longer."
Su Yu flexed the fingers of his right hand.
He could feel it.
The power surging through his body was completely different from that time in the abandoned building.
That time had been a desperate, last-ditch burst, like igniting the final drop of fuel in the tank—burning out the moment it was spent.
Now the output of power was steady, controllable, like a finely tuned engine, every ounce of horsepower distributed precisely to where it needed to go.
Of course, the price was being ground under Rita's heel every morning before dawn, and forcing himself not to look where he shouldn't while dodging those deadly, life-taking scissor legs.
A history written in blood and tears.
Ahead, the Honkai Emperor finally steadied itself.
The washbasin-sized dent in its chest plate was ghastly to look at, purple steam hissing wildly out of the spiderweb of cracks.
The ring blades around it accelerated.
The dozen-plus ring blades shifted from a slow orbit into a high-speed spin, then shot toward Su Yu like buckshot.
Su Yu didn't dodge.
He stretched out his left hand, palm forward.
Star of Eden.
A gravity field unfolded in front of his palm.
Those ring blades hurtling in at high speed abruptly slowed three meters from him, as if they'd slammed into an invisible wall.
Under the suppression of the gravity field, the spin of the ring blades plummeted, degrading from lethal high-speed cutting weapons into a heap of metal shards tumbling slowly through the air.
Su Yu clenched his fist.
The gravity field contracted.
"Crunch—crunch—!" The dozen-plus high-tensile alloy ring blades were forcibly kneaded into a single mass.
Amid the ear-piercing shriek of twisting metal, they became one enormous solid iron ball that punched through the asphalt of the overpass with a thud.
Su Yu's right hand reached behind his waist.
White Dwarf was drawn from his storage space in an instant.
The 81.4-kilogram high-frequency vibration dagger was yanked from the magnetic mount at his waist.
In the second-stage overload state, 81.4 kilograms felt no different in his hand from an ordinary fruit knife.
He pressed the activation switch on the dagger's hilt.
The blade of White Dwarf began to vibrate.
The high-frequency oscillation exceeded the range the human ear could catch, but the air could feel it.
The air around the dagger blurred, as if a layer of heat haze churned above the blade.
Gripping White Dwarf, Su Yu charged at the Honkai Emperor.
Meanwhile, on the other side, the "cleanup crew" work was underway at the same time.
Kiana's fighting style ran on one core principle: "Kaslana ancestral materialism."
Recoil? Didn't exist.
She treated the two hand cannons like a pair of dual-wielded submachine guns.
Every terrifying kick of recoil from firing she converted flawlessly into momentum for the next spin, jump, or slide.
Her white braid whipped up and down through the swarm of Zombies, her heterochromatic eyes locking precisely onto every freak that dared come close.
It looked like she was playing full-screen AOE whack-a-mole at an arcade.
By comparison, Rita's style was like conducting an elegant art exhibition.
Her dark maid's dress fluttered in the rainy night, and every silver-gray arc her giant scythe carved cut precisely through a Zombie's vitals.
Not a wasted motion—it was the art of slaughter performed to its very peak.
The whole thing took less than three minutes.
Rita withdrew her scythe and wiped the dark violet fluid from the blade with a white handkerchief.
Kiana blew away the heat rising from her gun barrels.
"Done, wrapping up!"
The two walked back to the side of the Maybach.
With the recovery agent taking effect, Kevin's color looked much better, and he was gasping laboriously in Siegfried's arms.
Kiana leaned over and crouched down, the ahoge on her head giving a wobble. "Hey mister, is he okay?"
Siegfried didn't answer.
The old agent's eyes were fixed hard on this white-haired girl in front of him.
Just three minutes ago, she'd been holding a heavy cannon one-handed and blasting a swarm of monsters into dust.
Siegfried's throat bobbed. That paternity test report was still in his pocket—he'd assumed it was just an excuse Theresa had cooked up to throw people off.
But now it seemed.
It was all real.
She was a Kaslana.
She was his daughter.
Siegfried opened his mouth, wanting to say something.
But he didn't know what to say.
Kiana didn't wait for him to speak.
She fished a crumpled pack of bandages straight out of her pocket and slapped it onto Siegfried's leg.
"Mister, your shoulder's still bleeding. Slap these on to patch it for now, deal with it properly when we get back."
With that she turned and ran off toward the direction of Su Yu's fight.
Printed on the bandage packaging was a pink HOMU.
Siegfried lowered his head and looked at that pack of bandages for a long time.
The old man stared at that HOMU, and his eyes suddenly stung.
Meanwhile, ahead, Su Yu's solo show was reaching its finale too.
Total time: seven minutes.
The first three minutes were the test cuts.
He tested, in order, the Gravity Control of the Star of Eden, the spatial-cutting Authority of the Herrscher of the Void, and the destructive power of White Dwarf in the second-stage overload state.
Each ability left a different degree of scarring on the Honkai Emperor's shell.
Gravity Control could suppress its movement but couldn't directly break the shell.
Spatial cutting could slice open gashes in the shell, but the cut depth was limited and couldn't reach the core.
White Dwarf's high-frequency vibration could pierce through the gashes in the shell, but it required getting close, and the Honkai Emperor, having lost its ring blades, began using high-temperature gas and limb attacks for close-range defense.
The last four minutes were the harvest.
Su Yu found the combination.
He used the gravity field of the Star of Eden to pin down the Honkai Emperor's movement, then used the cutting Authority of the Herrscher of the Void to slice a deep enough gash into its chest plate.
Finally, he attached the spatial-cutting Authority to White Dwarf's blade, gripped the 81.4-kilogram dagger, and thrust it in through the gash.
White Dwarf's high-frequency vibration plus the double effect of spatial cutting was like a red-hot knife slicing into butter.
The dagger sank into the Honkai Emperor's body cavity, the blade tip touching the core.
The core shattered.
The Honkai Emperor's massive body seized violently, and then its pinkish-purple shell peeled away wildly like cracking porcelain.
Accompanied by a deafening roar, the strategic-class monster dissolved into a sky full of purple rain, crashing down heavily onto the overpass, routed at last.
Su Yu leapt down from the Honkai Emperor's wreckage and landed on the road.
He released the overload state.
The heat dissipated rapidly from his skin, white vapor lingering around him for a few seconds before the wind scattered it.
His breathing was a bit heavier than usual, and there was sweat on his forehead, but that was all.
Compared to last time in the abandoned building, when he'd passed out cold, this was worlds better.
A line of System notification popped up across his retina.
[Honkai Emperor slain. The Spatial Rift remains active. A Honkai energy central core detected deep within the rift; the core must be destroyed to close the rift.]
Su Yu rubbed his aching wrist and turned to look at Kiana, who had run over.
"Have Rita watch the mister and Kevin outside. We're going into the dungeon."
Kiana's mouth curled up. "Let's go!"
The two headed deep into the rift.
Inside the rift was an entirely different scene.
No overpass—only a narrow passage covered in purple blood vessels, pulsing slowly like a creature's intestines.
"How'd the fight go just now?" Su Yu asked offhandedly.
Kiana pursed her lips and craned her head to one side. "Barely passable, I guess. Pretty average."
Su Yu shot her a sidelong glance.
Those heterochromatic eyes were practically screaming, "I was totally awesome just now, hurry up and praise me," yet the corner of her mouth was more stubborn than a dead duck's beak.
The two pressed two hundred meters deep along the passage.
At the end was a spherical cavity ten meters across.
Dead center, a purple crystal hovered, throbbing rhythmically like a heart.
The Honkai energy central core.
Su Yu drew White Dwarf from behind his waist and walked toward the core.
The moment his hand rose—
A chill of pure bodily instinct made his body go rigid.
"Su Yu, Kiana, watch out!!"
Fenghuang's voice detonated in both their minds at once.
Even before Fenghuang's voice reached him, Su Yu's body had already shoved his left hand forward, throwing the gravity field of the Star of Eden wide open in an instant!
Overhead, hidden weapons poured down like a rainstorm.
Pure black wafers, edges sharp enough to cut even the purple light of Honkai energy, like the black feathers of a raven.
The instant the gravity field spread, Su Yu had assumed those hidden weapons would be suppressed by his gravity and lose all their momentum.
However.
They all slammed on the brakes five meters short of him.
The black wafers, as if touching an invisible barrier, instantly lost their kinetic energy, degrading from "lethal weapons" into "heavy iron scraps."
They began tumbling and falling in slow motion.
"Clink, clink, clang—"
After a crisp, pleasant chorus of clashing metal, over a hundred hidden weapons spread across the floor of the spherical space into a heap of scrap.
It really did look like the Star of Eden had blocked the hidden weapons.
But Su Yu could feel it clearly.
Those hidden weapons hadn't touched the gravity field at all.
The perception amplification of the Tai Xu Sword Qi switched on in that moment, and he stared fixedly at the edge of the spherical space.
There was a patch of shadow there that didn't belong at all, thick as an unspreadable blot of ink.
"Oh?"
A low, faintly mocking hum drifted out of the shadow.
A woman's voice.
Pitched low, extremely steady.
"Star of Eden?"
The ink-like shadow moved.
A figure peeled itself out of the darkness like a sticker being torn free.
A black tactical cloak hung from her shoulders all the way to her ankles, the hem churning in the purple light like a mass of living night.
An enormous hood was pulled down very low, hiding most of her face, revealing only a delicate chin and a pair of lips edged with cold.
Her right hand held a gun.
Not a Colt, and not an AK.
The thing was sized somewhere between a heavy sniper rifle and an anti-materiel cannon.
The body of the gun was engraved with patterns, coiled about with lightning.
Pale blue arcs, fine as hairs, raced along the barrel all the way to the stock, tearing teeth-grinding "cracks" from the air.
With every leap of the arcs, Su Yu could feel the hair on his arms dancing madly.
"Don't tell me you're that one from Anti-Entropy—"
The woman's words weren't finished before Su Yu cut her off without mercy.
"World Serpent's officer. Raven."
The figure in the shadow visibly stiffened.
Under the hood, those eyes finally lit up out of the darkness.
She was frantically scanning Su Yu.
Su Yu was sizing her up just as brazenly.
Natasha Cioara, codename "Raven."
World Serpent officer, moonlighting as a gold-medal mercenary.
In the Honkai storyline, this woman was a maddening piece of gristle—chillingly calm, but with her own bottom line.
And that sniper rifle in her hand…
Su Yu's gaze lingered on the gun for two extra seconds.
"That's the Third Divine Key, Seven Thunders of Judgment."
Fenghuang's voice sounded right on cue in his head.
"Careful. With your current flesh-and-blood bodies, taking a direct hit from that thing—"
Fenghuang didn't finish, but Su Yu knew—the power of this thing was no joke.
Behind him, Kiana had clearly noticed the Seven Thunders of Judgment too.
From the period when she'd crossed over from Arc City, she didn't yet know any Raven.
But the Kaslana family instinct made her feel a bone-deep chill on reflex.
And the power of lightning on that gun made a name suddenly ring out in her mind.
Raiden Mei.
She didn't know what connection this gun had to Mei, but she could be certain that the "Raven" before her was absolutely not from Su Yu's world.
She was from her own—that world overrun by the Honkai.
"Click."
Kiana's right hand silently tightened around the grip of the [Skyward Destroyer], her index finger settling steadily against the trigger guard.
She wasn't rushing to pull it, but the moment the other side dared raise that gun, she could absolutely turn her into a sieve within one second.
Raven's line of sight moved off Su Yu and landed on Kiana behind him. That signature white hair.
Heterochromatic eyes woven of azure and gold.
Even that ahoge stubbornly swaying in the air current.
Raven's pupils quaked violently.
The amplitude was tiny—if not for Su Yu's perception being fully open, he'd never have caught it.
"Herrscher of the Void?"
There was a rare note of bewilderment in Raven's voice; clearly, calm as this gold-medal mercenary was, she too had been stunned by the scene before her.
"How is this possible?"
Su Yu didn't respond.
He was playing psychological warfare.
Raven's right hand still held the [Seven Thunders of Judgment], muzzle pointed down, not raised.
Her left hand hung naturally at her side, but her fingertips were rubbing rapidly at something inside her cloak.
She didn't fire right away.
Su Yu drew up a table in his mind.
[Raven's Known Intel]: the Star of Eden is Anti-Entropy's property; that white-haired girl with the heterochromatic eyes is the Herrscher of the Void.
[Raven's Blind Spots]: Who is this nobody standing in front of the Herrscher? Why has the Herrscher of the Void come back from the dead? And what the hell is this broken rift?
[Su Yu's Known Intel]: Raven's entire ancestral backstory, her three sizes (redacted), her personality weaknesses, and the terrifying power of that [Seven Thunders of Judgment]—graze you and it wounds, touch you and you die.
[Su Yu's Blind Spot]: How the heck did this lady even get here?
The air in the spherical space was thick as paste.
Dead center, that suspended Honkai energy central core still throbbed with purple light, "thump, thump," like a heart.
Raven's gaze pulled back from Kiana and refocused on Su Yu's face.
Under the shadow of the hood, her eyes narrowed dangerously.
That was the micro-expression of a professional intelligence dealer frantically searching an internal database.
She was searching: apart from that Herrscher of Reason from Anti-Entropy, which known faction had a man who could wander around toting the Star of Eden?
Search result: no such person found.
Raven's brow furrowed almost imperceptibly.
The thing she hated most was the "unknown."
And now, standing before her were two gigantic super mystery boxes: a man who could use the Star of Eden and had no record whatsoever, and a Herrscher of the Void who should already have vanished.
Her left hand slipped out from inside the cloak, a coin-sized metal chip pinched between her fingers—most likely some kind of emergency communicator or a call-for-backup button.
But she didn't press it.
In this godforsaken spatial rift, the signal from that thing was probably no better than a brick's.
Without a flicker of expression, Raven tucked the communicator back and made a small adjustment to her grip on the gun.
She didn't raise it, just gripped it tighter.
The events of the day replayed in Raven's mind like a film.
To track leads on Raiden Mei and the remnants of the Immortal Blades, she'd come to the bomb-ravaged industrial district to search for traces.
Yet the already-collapsed underground laboratory had shown abnormal energy readings.
Holding to the principle that, at the critical juncture of executing Project STIGMA, no failure could be permitted—
Raven dug open a passage and entered the underground laboratory.
At the place Rita Rossweisse had left from, the space seemed twisted by something. Before Raven could get a good look, a terrifying suction force swept her into it.
When she opened her eyes again, she was already inside this bizarre space.
And then.
A Herrscher of the Void who should have disappeared, and a man who could manipulate the Star of Eden and had never appeared in any file, showed up.
At the same time Raven was thinking, Su Yu was analyzing the situation too.
Fenghuang's voice sounded again in the minds of Su Yu and Kiana: "After coming in, she seems to have been looking for an exit the whole time. She's probably been swept in here by accident."
Su Yu's eyes flickered.
He followed Raven's stance and looked past her.
On the passage wall behind her was an irregular breach, its edges marked with charred scorch marks.
Raven's throat moved.
That swallowing motion was mostly hidden by the high collar of her cloak, but Su Yu caught the tiny rise and fall of her chin.
She was suppressing something.
Su Yu knew what it was.
Because he knew Raven's life story.
Raven had a small island.
Or rather—she once had a small island.
Not some safehouse issued by the World Serpent, not a mission outpost, not any strategic resource.
Just an ordinary little island, in some nameless stretch of the South Pacific.
On the island was a villa she'd designed herself, with a south-facing terrace, and on that terrace an old rattan chair she'd dug up at a flea market.
That island she'd bought with her own money.
Money she'd saved up bit by bit.
Every bounty, every assassination, every savings passbook clawed out of a pile of corpses.
That villa island far from the fires of war, with its pristine white beach, planted full of coconut palms she'd trimmed with her own hands.
That was the one and only retreat she'd left for herself, a professional killer's one and only gentle dream for the rest of her life.
And the result?
The Herrscher of the Void came.
The Honkai energy tsunami it triggered was like a merciless giant hand, sweeping her remaining years, her dream, along with that row of tender young saplings just sprouting, all into the cold seawater.
After the seawater receded, all that was left of that stretch of ocean was a murky expanse strewn with floating driftwood and dead fish.
That day, she'd watched the drowned island from a helicopter, the compressed biscuit in her hand crumbling to powder all over the floor.
Su Yu knew it all too well.
In the reflection of this spherical space, he'd seen that flicker of shattering pass through the depths of Raven's eyes.
It was the sound of waves scouring the reef, the ashes left behind after a dream had completely collapsed.
Raven would absolutely make her move.
Even if her reason was telling her right now that these two people before her were enormous variables, that she shouldn't open fire rashly before she'd read their bottom line.
But that private grudge buried deep in her soul, that flesh-cutting pain of watching her retirement paradise destroyed before her eyes, couldn't be weighed with data.
She was waiting.
Waiting for even a microsecond of frequency fluctuation in Su Yu's gravity field.
Waiting for that ahoge swaying in the purple current to reveal an opening.
The moment that "timing" appeared, the thunder of the Seven Thunders of Judgment—enough to vaporize all matter—would turn this space into nothingness in an instant.
Kiana sensed this targeted killing intent.
The white heat venting from the gun's exhaust ports coiled around her ankles.
Though she didn't recognize the woman in black across from her, that look—like she was looking at the "man who killed her father"—no, like she was looking at the "thief who destroyed her home"—made her deeply uncomfortable.
"Su Yu."
Kiana bit her teeth lightly, her voice pitched extremely low, without turning her head.
"The look in her eyes—it's like she wants to eat me alive."
Su Yu didn't respond, only gripped the White Dwarf in his right hand tighter.
The dagger's oscillating hum sounded especially clear in this deathly still space, the high-frequency vibration faintly producing some eerie resonance with the flickering of the Honkai core.
Raven still stood in that sunken patch of shadow, like a black statue.
Three parties.
Two living people, one "god."
One high-frequency dagger, one thunder Divine Key, two Skyward Destroyers.
And that Honkai core, wrapped in countless bands of purple light, about to reach its critical breaking point.
The air grew heavy as lead.
Su Yu could even hear the pulse of the artery at the side of his neck.
That sound, together with the rhythm of Raven's fingertips rubbing at the gunstock and Kiana's heavy breathing, wove within those few short seconds into a suffocating net of death.
The smell of gunpowder, the smell of ozone, and the rusty-iron smell peculiar to Honkai energy, all interwoven together.
Not one of them blinked first.
At this moment, the scene was like something sealed into thick, scratch-covered Amber.
The lingering warmth of Su Yu's golden eyes went utterly cold in this instant.
The frozen air was broken by a single drop of blood.
On the blade tip of the [White Dwarf] in Su Yu's hand, a drop of dark violet Honkai Beast bodily fluid finally slid off, unable to bear its own weight.
"Drip."
The sound of it striking the standing water was amplified countless times in this deathly still spherical space.
Like the starting pistol of a hundred-meter dash.
All three moved at once.
Raven's right hand snapped up.
The pitch-black muzzle of the [Seven Thunders of Judgment] locked onto the spot between Su Yu's brows in an instant.
Without the slightest hesitation, her index finger jerked the trigger hard.
"BOOM—!!!"
Violent blue thunder tore apart the darkness of the space.
It was a devastating column of high-energy plasma capable of instantly vaporizing an entire building!
"Don't even think about it!"
Kiana let out a food-guarding roar.
Her blue-left, gold-right heterochromatic eyes blazed with a dazzling, savage light.
She didn't care in the slightest whether the other side was holding some kind of weapon—she brutally shoved the output of both [Skyward Destroyers] past the overload redline!
The ghostly-blue destruction beams roared out to meet the thunder head-on like two dragons surging out to sea!
Su Yu didn't retreat at all, his left hand slamming forward.
The gravity field of the Star of Eden tried to crush that thunder, along with Raven herself, flat into a two-dimensional photograph!
The thunder of a Divine Key.
The full-power carpet-fire of an Anti-Entropy heavy cannon.
The mimic black hole of the Star of Eden.
Three terrifying forces, each enough to blast this spherical space directly into nothingness, collided head-on without any flourish, right above that purple crystal at the dead center of the space.
Su Yu had even clenched his teeth, bracing to have a few ribs snapped by the blast's shockwave.
However.
There was no deafening explosion.
No blinding glare.
The violent thunder Raven had blasted out was like a bull ramming into an impregnable wall of air.
The violent arcs flattened in mid-air in an instant into a perfect cross-section, then, like a splash of water hitting bulletproof glass, dispersed without a sound.
Kiana's two heavy cannon beams met an equally absurd fate.
The beams were cut off out of thin air, their light drained away like water sucked into a sponge, leaving not a single ripple.
As for Su Yu's gravity field…
He felt the left hand he'd pressed out was like pressing against an immovable Wall of Sighs.
The gravity waves couldn't even stir up a single mote of dust on the far side of the wall.
Su Yu froze.
A glaring red warning box popped up across his retina.
[System Warning: Cross-server PK request has been rejected by the server!]
[Anomaly detected! Target unit (Natasha) is currently within an independent "World Barrier."]
[Current status ruling: Although you occupy the same spatial coordinates, you are on different world layers.]
[Conclusion: No physical strike, energy discharge, or Authority ruling can penetrate the World Barrier. In plain terms—you're all in your own safe zones right now, and none of you can touch anyone else.]
Su Yu looked at the System panel before him, then at the air ahead that hadn't so much as rippled.
"…"
Across from him, Raven still held her one-handed sniping stance.
But the wisp of smoke rising from her muzzle drifted awkwardly up along that invisible wall, as if mocking the killing intent she'd just shown.
This top-tier World Serpent assassin, forever cold, forever precise in her calculations—her eyes were now slowly, uncontrollably widening.
Written across her pupils were four big words: questioning her whole existence.
She stiffly lowered her head and glanced at the [Seven Thunders of Judgment] in her hand.
The Divine Key… was broken?
"Huh?"
Behind Su Yu, Kiana was dumbfounded too.
She lowered the two [Skyward Destroyers], still trailing white smoke, and looked in disbelief at the muzzles, then at Raven across from her—unharmed, not even a corner of her cloak torn.
"What's going on?"
Kiana thumped the gun barrel hard, like some old geezer fixing a TV set, the ahoge on her head standing bolt upright from shock.
"This piece-of-junk gun choking at the critical moment?"
One second earlier, it had been a killing ground on a razor's edge, everyone poised to fight to the death.
The next second.
Three people, separated by a "dimensional wall" none of them could see or touch, were like seals staring at each other through the glass at an aquarium.
The air was more frozen than before.
Only this time it wasn't because of killing intent.
It was because of awkwardness.
The kind of awkwardness you could curl your toes and scrape a three-bedroom apartment out of.
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