Jianglin Fortress.
Millions of Jianglin's citizens were packed into the underground air-raid shelter. Squads of armed soldiers stood guard all around, wholly focused on keeping the civilians safe, while an emotion called panic spread through the crowd.
Huge numbers of people had taken refuge here the moment the Beast Tide struck, and they had no idea how the battle outside was going.
Li Xi and her parents stood amid the dense press of bodies, as ordinary and unremarkable as any family of three. The soldiers had already told them how the battle had gone, so they were far calmer than everyone else.
Li Xi slipped a hand into her pocket and clutched the Origin Internet Cafe badge. Its scalding heat spread from her palm through her whole body.
She was too distracted to notice that with her current strength she could bend a slab of steel with ease — and yet this tiny badge hadn't deformed in the slightest under her grip.
Snap!
The enormous projection screen suspended from the ceiling of the shelter suddenly flared to life.
Everyone looked up. A middle-aged man in military uniform had appeared at the center of the screen — square, blocky face, burly and powerful frame. He radiated an imposing menace without even trying.
Li Xi looked at him with mixed feelings. She knew this man too.
In last night's game, he'd sent his regards to her mother several times from atop the city wall.
"I am Chen Lei, Commander of the Fortress Military Department. I now have a major announcement to make to all of you!"
True to a soldier's bold and forthright nature, Chen Lei wasted no words on preamble. His very first sentence pulled everyone's nerves taut.
For many, tonight was the first time they had ever seen Chen Lei; only when he introduced himself did they realize he was the supreme commander of Jianglin Fortress. If the Commander himself was delivering a major announcement, surely it had to do with the Beast Tide that had invaded the fortress yesterday?
With countless tense, anxious eyes on him, Chen Lei spoke gravely, weighing each word. "The fortress has successfully repelled the Beast Tide. The small number of monsters that breached the interior are being wiped out and cleared as we speak. The situation is now completely stable."
"Thank god!"
The cry burst out of someone in the crowd.
The crowd exhaled long and hard, as if a weight had been lifted from them, and joyful smiles spread across their faces. A stable situation was unquestionably tremendous news to them — the home they depended on for survival had not been destroyed.
"The reason we were able to win this battle against the monsters is entirely because a goddess came to our aid. Under the goddess's leadership, every last monster was as fragile and helpless as clay chickens and dirt dogs..."
But Chen Lei's next words left everyone stunned.
The joy on their faces gradually gave way to bewilderment. They stared at one another, baffled and confused, doubting their own ears.
A goddess?
Are you kidding me? Do gods actually exist in this world?!
In this Age of Catastrophe that spoke the language of technology and genetics, hardly anyone still believed in deities. Most held that the legends of gods were nothing more than fantasies dreamed up by humanity's ancient ancestors — after all, no one had ever seen a god in reality.
While the crowd gaped, Li Xi's heart was pounding wildly. She felt terribly guilty, because she knew the so-called goddess was none other than herself...
As if sensing their doubt, Chen Lei went on, his expression unchanged. "Next, we'll play you footage of the battle captured by satellite. This is the proof that the goddess exists. Once you've all watched it, you god... you'll all understand exactly what happened."
The huge projection screen switched over, and the crowd saw last night's battle from a satellite's god's-eye view.
A female soldier was mixed in among the troops, gripping a sniper rifle and firing round after round down at the surging torrent of monsters below the fortress.
The footage was as plain and unremarkable as the female soldier herself, and at first no one paid it any attention — only Li Xi stared at her wide-eyed, not blinking even once.
This female soldier was the game avatar the system had randomly generated for her last night!
Even if she'd been stark naked, Li Xi would have recognized her!
As the video fast-forwarded, the crowd gradually realized something was off.
Every time the female soldier fired, wherever her muzzle was pointed erupted in a massive explosion. Each blast rivaled a small missile and swallowed a dozen or more monsters in a sea of flame.
"Can a sniper rifle even fire rounds like that?"
Many people muttered to themselves. And just as their doubts were mounting, an even more unbelievable scene unfolded!
The muzzle flash abruptly turned to silver flame. Every round that hit the ground sealed everything within dozens of meters in ice, and monsters were frozen into ice sculptures by the pack, as if a world of ice and snow had descended.
"This—!"
Every civilian in the fortress was struck dumb, so shocked they couldn't speak. By now, even a blind man could tell there was something abnormal about this female soldier.
So when the sniper rifle turned into a Blue-Fire Gatling and began reaping monster lives wholesale, the crowd's eyes nearly popped out of their heads!
"Holy sh*t!"
The cry of alarm came from some uneducated old man.
A sniper rifle firing ten thousand rounds a minute — that rate of fire far exceeded any model of machine gun ever made!
"My god, it really is a goddess!"
"How could a sniper rifle have that kind of power? The goddess is magnificent!"
"Is this real?! Is this real?!"
"..."
Waves of stunned exclamations rose and fell through the crowd.
Li Xi flushed crimson. All this praise embarrassed her terribly, and she bowed her head, mortified.
She badly wanted to tell them all that she wasn't a goddess — that the 【Blue-Fire Gatling】 was just an item she'd bought with gold coins in the game.
Under the sniper rifle's ceaseless sweeping fire, the Beast Tide was quickly torn to pieces. Just when the battle seemed about to end, a fresh wave of two hundred thousand monsters suddenly surged forth.
From here on the video spun completely out of control, and scenes that overturned everyone's worldview began to play out.
An enormous Rocket Missile Launcher round blasted out of a 5.56mm gun barrel and blossomed into a spectacular mushroom cloud right in the heart of the Beast Tide!
"Sniper rifle firing a shell — holy sh*t, holy sh*t, holy sh*t, hell!!!"
It had even rhymed!
"Is this something a human being could possibly do?"
"The monsters might not be human — but SHE's the real monster!"
"Is this the power of a god? It's utterly, absolutely inconceivable!"
"..."
BOOM!
Then a blue laser beam shot straight out for more than ten kilometers, like the Grim Reaper swinging his scythe. The earth split open; countless monsters were cleaved in two in an instant and fell into pools of blood. A towering peak was severed at the waist and came thundering down, flames leaping sky-high from the fresh wound.
Countless civilians stared blankly, their lips trembling, so shaken they couldn't make a sound.
At last, they watched with their own eyes as the female soldier dissolved into a stream of green data fragments and scattered across the city wall. The video froze on her utterly plain, unremarkable face.
Thud.
Suddenly someone's legs gave way, and they sank to their knees before that face.