Late in the way TV cops always are, the police nonetheless arrived fairly quickly, sparing Lu Mingxue from having to freeze in the cold for too long.
She lay shivering on the cold mud for a good long while before working up the courage to search a phone off the three teenagers’ corpses—it was password-locked, but the emergency call function could be used directly.
Pulling on the coat Officer Chen handed her, Lu Mingxue turned her face away from the three battered corpses.
“There were four dressed in black altogether; the card-player got away.
The three dead ones were Carry Out Justice on Heaven’s Behalf people—they’re the ones who kidnapped me…
I already told you, I wasn’t assaulted!”
To cover up the fact that she’d wet herself, she’d deliberately dug up some mud from the ground and smeared it over her pants.
A heavy downpour had come through just a couple of days earlier, and for this time of year the fields were still especially muddy; the feeling of dirt getting into both her pants and shoes was particularly miserable.
“Do you want to make up your story over again?
I can give you a little time.” Officer Chen handed a pair of sunglasses to Lu Mingxue, motioning for her to put them on.
‘At the critical moment, a black-clad someone who does good deeds without leaving a name suddenly charged in—couldn’t make out his face, couldn’t make out his height, couldn’t make out his build, only remember that he was very handsome.’
Who’d believe a story like that?
“Everything I said is true.
At the end of the day, I got kidnapped right under your noses—for my own safety, I’m going to have to think about whether to move to a different city.” The girl spoke without expression.
“This was our failure.” Officer Chen bowed his head, apologizing on his subordinates’ behalf.
Of course, Lu Mingxue moving to another city was just talk—that wasn’t the kind of thing she could pull off just by saying so.
“Was that card man Night Demon?” Yiwen, now changed into her assassin’s outfit, looked down at the long streak of blood on the ground.
She’d come along the moment the emergency call came in.
“No.
This car was meant to lure us away; the real one must have fled in another direction.
We’ve already sealed off all the roads.” It was Officer Chen who answered her.
At that, Yiwen lingered no longer; both feet left the ground and she flew swiftly off into the distance.
The three from Carry Out Justice on Heaven’s Behalf were dead.
The three black-suited men had taken N1202 Enhancement Drug, but had suffered severe blunt trauma—the worst of them even had a dent in the right side of his chest, clinging to life on nothing but a robust constitution.
All three had lost consciousness and couldn’t be roused.
Officer Chen turned back to Lu Mingxue.
“You knew in advance you were going to be kidnapped?
Why did you run after class?”
“Mm.
I accidentally read someone’s mind and caught that they were going to kidnap me.” Lu Mingxue glanced over at the three youths being covered with white cloth and lifted onto stretchers.
According to the information they’d dug up, the youngest of the three, George, was two months younger than Lu Mingxue.
His parents had assumed he was staying overnight at a classmate’s, and when the police called, they’d even taken it for a spam call and hung up twice in a row.
Officer Chen nodded and asked nothing further.
“We’ll strengthen your protection.”
He turned to glance at the three young corpses on the stretchers, and sighed.
“That farm on your left that looks abandoned…
right there—hold your position and guard him, don’t get close…
He’s spotted you!
Fall back, quick—” Sister Hermit’s alluring voice carried a note of urgency.
“Got him,” Mi Xiaoliu answered.
She ran fast, and it had taken almost no time at all for her long legs to catch up to the target.
“Got him?
Take a photo with your phone and send it to me.” Sister Hermit clearly didn’t believe her.
“Take a photo?” Mi Xiaoliu was puzzled.
“Yes—otherwise how am I supposed to confirm—”
“Open the screen where you normally type your chats.
There’s a plus sign on the right—tap it, then tap the first option, then tap open the flashlight-shaped icon in the top left, then point it at ‘Night Demon’ and tap the round button, and finally tap send.” Wei Shi walked Mi Xiaoliu through the exact steps over the earpiece.
Mi Xiaoliu did as instructed.
Reclining in a somewhat dated car speeding along at full tilt, Wei Shi blew a mouthful of smoke at the photo in the group chat.
The camera on the organization’s phone was quite good, and the shot was crisp—the technique and angle were both terrible, yet it still captured, plain as day, a middle-aged man sprawled on the ground, clutching an unnaturally twisted right leg and groaning in pain.
A full beard, deep-set eye sockets, somewhat dark skin, a hulking frame at one meter eighty-five (about six foot one), and a perfect inverted-triangle build of solid muscle—but the most striking thing was the blue cobra tattoo on his neck.
This was “Night Demon” Charuk, hunted by both sides of the law.
Yet there he was like some pitiful wretch, face contorted, writhing on the broken glass—and though the struggling only kept adding to the wounds on his body, it still couldn’t outweigh the pain of his broken bones.
“Come back.
Never mind him.” Wei Shi tossed the phone aside in mild irritation, and with the roughness of the motion the charging cable snapped off right inside the port.
He turned the car around to head back the way he’d come.
“This one’s a fake.”
“So that’s how it is?
Well, nothing I can do about it—I drew him based on appearance, after all.” Sister Hermit deflected the blame at once.
Mi Xiaoliu: “?”
“Don’t get it?
That one’s a disguise.” Wei Shi’s voice was thoroughly impatient.
“N1202 Disguise Type—black-market price of twenty million a bottle, lasts only about twenty-four hours.
Deep pockets, that one.”
Mi Xiaoliu: “A million?”
“Gone.
Go back to sleep.”
With that, Wei Shi hung up.
“…”
Mi Xiaoliu bent her slender fingers one by one, trying to work out how many baozi she’d just lost.
While she lingered there, someone else arrived at the spot.
“I see the sedan—the license plate matches the one you gave me, and I hear screaming too,” Yiwen said softly.
“Careful—I’m not as fast as you, wait there for now and don’t act rashly…
I can hear your breathing speeding up.” Again a voice through the earpiece.
“You were seriously over the speed limit just now; you circled the same spot three times and we still couldn’t keep up with you.”
“I know…
there’s no such thing as a speed limit in the air, is there.” Yiwen took a deep breath and lifted her gaze to the second floor of the house in the middle of the farm.
“There are signs the second-floor window’s been broken.
I see someone tied up in there—the screaming’s coming from him.”
“A hostage?”
“It’s Night Demon.”
“…Could be a trap.”
But by the time those words came through the earpiece, Yiwen had already leapt straight from the ground floor to the second-floor window.
The man before her had a right leg bent forward at a spot that wasn’t a joint; the other leg was rigid and seemingly immobile too.
From his throat came nothing but hoarse groans.
Had he already lost the ability to move on his own?
Yiwen took out handcuffs and clapped them on him.
“This is Beluga.
Target apprehen—”
—but then she noticed his eyes kept darting toward the pile of junk further back, as if trying to signal her about something.
Frowning, Yiwen twisted the watch-style light on her arm and shone it over there.
She could make out a figure in a black trench coat crouching there, trying to use the surrounding darkness to hide.
Once Yiwen had spotted her, Mi Xiaoliu simply dropped the pretense and exploded forward off the mark, giving Yiwen a fright.
Caught completely off guard, at that speed anyone else would have had no chance of reacting in time—their mind short-circuiting like getting a sudden jumpscare to the face while idly scrolling through short videos.
The stairs on the second floor were blocked by clutter, so the fastest way out was through the window—but Yiwen was blocking the window.
As Mi Xiaoliu barreled toward her, Yiwen made no move to dodge; she had absolute confidence in her ability.
All the Special Esper Police in Fanzui City combined had four Level 4 espers—not “only” four, but “as many as” four; it was precisely because Fanzui City’s crime rate was so high that it could support that many.
For a city of considerable size, having only four was already a lot—which just went to show the sheer worth of a Level 4.
Well…
but Yiwen was not one of those four.
Still, apart from the single category of “ability range,” every one of her stats touched the Level 4 grade for her power.
Level 3 rank.
Ability: Force.
As the name suggested, she could alter the intensity and direction of “force” within a five-meter radius (about sixteen feet).
The side effect was a catastrophically bad sense of direction.
Because her development wasn’t all that high, her range was small—but even an armor-piercing sniper round fired at high speed, upon entering her zone of control, could be turned by her from an “attack” into a limp, powerless “touch.” With a three-hundred-sixty-degree protective field up, she didn’t even need to consciously track the speed or position of a bullet.
By the same logic, this opponent’s feeble little punch would come out truly feeble.
In an instant, her rapidly whirring mind judged from the opponent’s build that she wasn’t a Physical Enhancement type, and Yiwen very casually reduced the “force” Mi Xiaoliu was generating toward her to one-tenth, then reached out to catch her fist.
And so the next second, the back of Yiwen’s hand slammed hard into her own chest, dragging her entire body through the wooden wall and flying off toward the distant cowshed, crashing through two more wooden walls before she finally came to a stop.
“Master, you should’ve held back a little—you didn’t beat him to death, did you…” That person probably wasn’t a bad guy—his clothes were white, and he was even carrying handcuffs.
Sasha really didn’t want the Master going and assaulting an officer…