You can’t kill me.
The buzzing sound generated by those wings cleaving the air gave anyone goosebumps all over, and judging purely by the acoustic profile, the incoming pollutants numbered well beyond a single entity.
Ston dared not slacken his pace, yet lacking any sense of security, he turned his head slightly to glance backward while running.
That single glance nearly caused his long, interlaced legs to trip over each other and send him sprawling onto the dirt.
For what Ston beheld in hot pursuit behind him was a species bearing a striking resemblance to a hybrid between a housefly and a beetle.
These pollutants possessed the compound eyes and wings of a common fly, yet their torsos were armored beneath a layer of glossy, black hard shells reminiscent of beetles. Roughly equivalent in size to a small adult canine, their wings though proportionately enlarged still appeared slightly strained under the burden of carrying their massive carapaces, restricting their flight altitude to just over a meter above the ground.
What made the situation catastrophic was that these pollutants traveled in a pack of four or five. Ston didn’t even pause to tally the exact count before averting his gaze, yet their multifaceted compound eyes enlarged thousands upon thousands of times alongside their elongated, barb-strewn probosces were enough to provoke an instinctive wave of physiological nausea.
Amidst the howling rush of the wind whistling past his ears, the buzzing whir of beating wings drew ever closer. Several reactive strategies flashed through Ston’s brain in a split second. Lacking the bandwidth to carefully weigh which option carried the highest success rate, his body simply executed an agile, forward-diving lunge.
In the very next fraction of a second the exact instant Ston launched himself into his forward dive and impacted the ground that swarm of mutated flies likewise swarmed blindly toward the precise patch of earth Ston had just occupied, thrusting their barb-ridden probosces forward in a frenzy to suck and devour.
Pushing himself up from the ground with lightning speed, Ston moved like a flash of lightning as he struck with his blade, shearing the wings off the two rearmost pollutants within the span of a single heartbeat. The moment those two flies crashed onto the dirt, Ston, suppressing his intense revulsion—stomped down hard with his heel directly upon their compound eyes, one by one.
Before the two crushed pollutants could emit a whimper, Ston had already squashed their brains out beneath his boots.
Simultaneously, an intensely gag-inducing, sticky sensation seeped upward through the soles of his shoes. Even through the thick leather of his military boots, Ston’s scalp prickled with goosebumps.
Yet, affording himself zero bandwidth to dwell on the disgust, he gritted his teeth, forced his steps forward, and using his sticky, gummed-up soles resumed his frantic sprint in the opposite direction.
The remaining three flies blindly overshot by several meters before registering that their target had vanished from ahead. Pulling up short, they swiftly discovered their freshly slain comrades in the rear alongside their fleeing target food source, prompting them to swivel their fly-heads in unison and accelerate into a charging dive toward their quarry.
Human legs could never outrun wings; after all, the latter possessed the gift of flight. Consequently, Ston’s initial objective had never been outrunning them, but rather replicating his previous tactic to eliminate two more flies, leaving a solitary target he could tackle head-on.
Yet right as Ston unaware of his trajectory unconsciously sprinted all the way back to the doorstep of the townhouse he had just evacuated, a crisp shattering of window glass suddenly echoed from the structure.
Without breaking his stride, Ston caught out of the corner of his eye that Zhuang Xingyu having somehow woken up was flapping his massive white feathered wings, smashing straight through a window pane to launch a ferocious aerial dive toward them!
It was plainly evident that Zhuang Xingyu’s freshly bandaged right wing possessed restricted mobility, yet for low-altitude flight, it remained functional enough to manage.
Wielding a gleaming, razor-sharp kitchen cleaver, he cut through the air like a streak of white lightning, landing amidst the fly swarm to cleanly and ruthlessly decapitate all three remaining flies in under a minute.
Landing just outside the perimeter of the pulverized fly swarm, Zhuang Xingyu stood resting upon the turf, clutching the blood-stained cleaver as he fixed a deep, unfathomable gaze upon Ston.
Separated by less than five meters, even amidst the dim illumination, Ston could clearly discern that Zhuang Xingyu’s torso and arms bore several fresh lacerations inflicted by the biting jaws of those sharp probosces.
Because Zhuang Xingyu’s skin was blanketed by a dense layer of fine white feathers, Ston couldn’t inspect the full extent of his injuries, though the previously observed overlapping wounds appeared to exhibit a noticeable receding trend.
Furthermore, Zhuang Xingyu’s fractured right wing, following several hours of bandaging, appeared to be recovering at an astonishingly rapid pace.
Yet Ston lacked concrete confirmation for any of these observations.
The two locked eyes across the short distance in silence for a stretch, until Zhuang Xingyu abruptly hurled the bloodied kitchen cleaver far off into the distance and strode over toward Ston.
Though discarding his blade served as a silent, subtle concession of non-aggression, Zhuang Xingyu having just massacred three pollutants bare-moments prior still radiated an uncontainable aura of lingering bloodlust. Instinctively, Ston retreated a step to widen the physical gap between them.
“Justice,” Zhuang Xingyu rasped in a low, husky voice, “you know full well you can’t run away. Why not head back inside and get some sleep?”
Purse-lipped, Ston suppressed his urge to step back, standing tall and rigid in place while tightening his grip around the fruit knife concealed in his hand.
Zhuang Xingyu’s nocturnal vision, enhanced through mutation, operated at several multiples of normal human optics, allowing him to perceive with absolute clarity the gleaming, razor-sharp fruit knife gripped tightly within Ston’s downward-slung hand.
“You can’t kill me,” Zhuang Xingyu stated with blunt directness.
“I have no intention of killing you,” Ston replied with solemn gravity. “I am going to drag you back to the Federation to stand trial.”
Zhuang Xingyu let out a scornful scoff, his expression dripping with disdain. Marching right up to Ston, he came to a halt, extended his left wing, and executed a mock-polite, sweeping gesture of invitation.
“Back inside to sleep, Justice. We still have a long march ahead of us tomorrow morning. You didn’t ingest a scrap of nourishment this evening, and you’ve burned through massive amounts of physical energy tonight what’ll you do if your legs give out tomorrow? Were you hoping I’d carry you the whole way?”
Rolling his eyes in speechlessness, Ston shoved Zhuang Xingyu roughly aside, strode past him, and marched straight back into the townhouse.
Crossing the threshold, the howling wailing of the wind died down noticeably. Wrapping himself inside his blanket, Ston seated himself upon the sofa, though any lingering desire to sleep had entirely evaporated.
Zhuang Xingyu entered the townhouse a few minutes behind Ston, tossing several dried timber strips into the fireplace to reignite the flames.
Indoor temperatures crept steadily upward once more. Though Ston maintained an expression of cold indifference, his body betrayed him: pulling the blanket snugly around his shoulders, he shoved the sofa closer to the hearth.
Zhuang Xingyu had initially been sitting cross-legged on the floor tending the fire; hearing the shifting furniture, he twisted around to discover that Ston had actually dragged the sofa right up beside the fireplace. Sitting atop the sofa with his side angled toward the warmth, Ston was swaddled entirely head-to-toe inside his thick blanket, leaving exposed only his slightly upturned phoenix-like eyes and the bridge of his straight nose. With his gaze alert and clear, it remained entirely ambiguous whether he was battling insomnia or simply freezing.
Unable to suppress a chuckle, Zhuang Xingyu shifted his weight and scooted slightly to the side, ceding a greater share of the radiant hearth heat to Ston while teasing: “Justice, with your aversion to cold and dirt, and your refusal to eat this or touch that, you really shouldn’t be wandering around the surface world. You belong safely tucked away inside the subterranean city where the sun doesn’t scorch, the wind doesn’t blow, and your meals are perpetually secured that environment suits your pedigree far better.”
“…” Ignoring the jab entirely, Ston toasted himself by the fire within his protective cocoon of blankets. As his core temperature gradually recovered, his mood thawed correspondingly.
Glancing casually toward Zhuang Xingyu’s fractured right wing, he intended to check whether the recovery rate matched the abnormal healing speed witnessed outside. Instead, his attention was hijacked by several fresh puncture wounds marring the wing’s surface.
They resembled the sharp, needle-like teeth embedded inside the probosces of those giant flies from earlier—having sunk so savagely during the assault that they had driven deep into Zhuang Xingyu’s flesh like rigid iron needles.
Upon closer inspection, those small-finger-wide lacerations were still sluggishly weeping trickles of blood.
Furrowing his brows, Ston offered a pointed reminder: “You… those things on your wing. You’d best pull them out.”
Setting aside whether they carried toxic properties, embedding foreign objects of that nature into living tissue was universally problematic.
Because Ston’s mouth remained muffled beneath his blanket, his voice emerged muffled and slightly muted a timbre radically distinct from his usual crisp, authoritative delivery. Finding that muffled cadence rather endearing, Zhuang Xingyu felt an impulse to draw out the conversation, prompting him to feign ignorance: “Oh? What things?”
“…” Ston paused briefly before replying in that same muted, oddly endearing tone, “They look like the sharp teeth from those pollutants… jammed right into your… wing. Didn’t you even feel the pain?”
In truth, Zhuang Xingyu genuinely felt zero localized pain. Perhaps because his right wing remained fractured, the agonizing throbbing of broken bone overlapped with the piercing sting of the embedded teeth, numbing his nervous system to the point where discrimination became impossible.
“Let me take a look.”
Uttering those words, Zhuang Xingyu stretched out his right wing in an attempt to peer behind his back; however, executing the extension too abruptly strained the fractured bone, triggering a sharp jolt of agony that forced a low hiss from his lips as cold sweat beaded across his brow.
“…”
Frowning at Zhuang Xingyu’s helpless, flailing struggle unable to see, unable to reach, and sweating profusely from pain Ston hesitated for a beat before abandoning the sofa. Keeping himself cocooned securely inside his blanket, he padded over to sit cross-legged directly behind Zhuang Xingyu.
“Don’t move,” Ston instructed, extending a hand out from the warmth of his bedding. Seated directly behind Zhuang Xingyu, he utilized the flickering firelight to commence the meticulous extraction of the embedded fangs.
The teeth were deeply anchored, requiring sustained finger pressure to wrench free. Ston initiated the process by extracting a single fang to gauge whether hemorrhaging would pose a severe issue; contrary to his expectations, the small-finger-wide cavity did not erupt into heavy arterial bleeding upon extraction, instead oozing a minimal, steady trickle of blood.
Though puzzled as to why a wound of that depth and scale bled so sparsely, Ston recognized it as an objectively favorable outcome, prompting him to systematically pluck out four of the five embedded fangs in a single uninterrupted sequence.
Seated comfortably cross-legged before the hearth, soaking up Ston’s “attentive” service, Zhuang Xingyu squinted his eyes and playfully poked the bear: “For the Grand Justice to willingly slide his arm out from the cozy cotton quilt and render personal service this gesture is genuinely touching.”
Ston raised an eyebrow. Immune to the transparent framing of Zhuang Xingyu’s faux-praise masking petty grievances, he refrained from verbal retaliation. Instead, while gripping the fifth and final embedded fang, his wrist executed a swift, clever twist rotating the tooth a full circle inside the flesh before extracting it from the wing.
A piercing shriek ripped from Zhuang Xingyu’s throat.
“Agh! You—!” Zhuang Xingyu winced in agony, “Why are you so petty?! Always plotting intentional retaliation…”
Ignoring him entirely, Ston tossed the extracted fifth fang aside, yanked his hand back into the safety of his blanket, and instructed Zhuang Xingyu: “Go upstairs and find some breathable fabric. You need to bandage that wound.”
With his wing throbbing and his heart nursing lingering grievances, the hard-earned gratitude and warmth he had felt moments prior evaporated into thin air: ……