Pops held his hands behind his back, his cloth shoes stepping onto the cold alloy floor as he slowly walked out of the elevator.
Behind him, the two elevator doors slowly slid shut amidst a flashing red light.
The inside of the elevator car was completely empty.
At the exact moment it closed completely, a faint sigh of regret seemed to echo from deep within its cold mechanical structure.
“Who goes there? Put your hands up!”
The two guards' foreheads were drenched in cold sweat. Staring at this strange old man who had appeared out of thin air, their fingers instinctively squeezed toward the triggers.
However...
Sshk!
In the empty air right before their eyes, a pitch-black spherical discontinuity emerged out of nowhere.
Immediately after, a burst of azure sword energy, carrying a tyrannical momentum that could tear anything to shreds, shot out from the black hole, sweeping through everything in its path!
The fully armed exoskeleton guards didn't even have time to let out a scream.
Along with the alloy mechas they took so much pride in, and the heavy blast door several meters thick behind them...
...everything was sliced in two without suspense under the force of this single strike, cut as cleanly as tofu!
With a loud crash, the severed alloy door slammed heavily onto the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust.
The green tassel on the hilt swayed gently as Sword-man swaggered out of the black hole with a casual, carefree stride.
Right behind him, Evans followed closely, sporting black hair and a black trench coat.
As for Ren Yi, he was still hiding inside Evans's coat.
“Let's begin.”
Pops turned around. His cloudy, old eyes swept over the guards sliced in half on the floor, and then looked toward the flashing red lights deeper down the corridor.
Without wasting any words, he simply raised his hand and gestured behind him.
Black holes emerged out of thin air one after another, and seven or eight figures stepped out silently.
They were men and women of various shapes and sizes. Some wore modern clothing, while others still wore ancient robes.
They were the “compatriots” Pops had brought out from the Deep Abyss... objects that, like Sword-man, had once belonged to the Immortal Sword Venerable and had now gained their own consciousness.
“I'll leave the perimeter guards and core nodes to you,” Pops said in a low voice.
“We don't have much power left, but it should be enough to hold off those small fry.”
A middle-aged man with a short blade hanging from his waist nodded without a word, turning to lead the others as they vanished into a fork in the corridor.
Soon, brief sounds of gunfire and screams echoed from the distance before falling back into silence.
The elevator from just now was, of course, the Anomaly B-119 that Ren Yi had seen before—the one used by the Lord of the City and his men to escape when the land ship capsized.
He hadn't expected that the People of the Abyss would also know the location of one of the elevator's eight doors.
B-119 would only begin its attacks starting from the second person to exit the elevator.
Pops had therefore used his storage bag True Form to bring a whole minivan's worth... or rather, a whole storage bag's worth of people over.
Surprisingly, the Sky Eye Organization had taken no precautions.
“He wants to ‘devour’ us too, doesn't he?”
Sword-man let out a cold snort. “To perfectly initiate the New Era, he still needs us, and...”
He looked at Evans.
“...his power.”
Pops turned to Sword-man and Evans, falling silent for a moment.
“I can't help you much with the path ahead up there.”
“Breaking the All-Heaven Stellar Array has already drained most of our resources.”
“Our old friends have shattered or scattered. What's left is only enough to clear out the small fry.”
He fiddled with a cloth bag in his hand, then looked up at Sword-man.
“So, you take him up. I'll wait for you on this floor.”
Sword-man rested his sword on his shoulder and tilted his head. “You're not coming up?”
“What would I go up for?” Pops' voice was as flat as if he were talking about the weather.
“With S-003's suppression power, I'd just be a dead cloth bag if I went up.”
He paused, his gaze landing on Evans, his cloudy old eyes filled with something indescribable.
“Besides, he doesn't need me. He has his own helper.”
Sword-man's eyes flickered slightly, but he said nothing. Evans remained expressionless.
Pops turned around, his back to them, and walked toward the other end of the corridor.
“Go on,” he said without turning back. “Whether we succeed or fail, don't leave yourselves with any regrets.”
The sound of his footsteps gradually faded into the distance.
Sword-man stared in the direction the figure had vanished for two seconds. Then, he exhaled, took the sword off his shoulder, and tapped the tip lightly against the ground.
“Let's go. We have our own work to do.”
He continued walking down the corridor, and Evans followed behind him.
Black liquid spread silently from beneath Evans's feet, leaving a thin, fleeting black stain on the metal floor.
After walking a dozen paces, Sword-man suddenly spoke, his voice kept very low.
“Where is the thing we're looking for?”
These words were not directed at Evans.
Evans's collar bulged slightly as a puff of white cloud silently drifted out from a gap in the layer of black liquid, hovering next to Evans's shoulder.
A few tentacles pointed toward the left at the end of the corridor before retracting.
They had previously agreed that, if possible, they would help Ren Yi find the Base Station first.
Sword-man stopped in his tracks.
He tilted his head, sensing in the direction Ren Yi's tentacles had pointed for a moment.
The expression on his face shifted from calm to a subtle, complex look.
“Interesting,” he said, a hint of something indefinable in his voice.
“Do you know what is in that direction?”
Evans frowned. “What?”
“The blood pact.”
Sword-man switched his sword to his left hand and tapped his fingers against his chest.
“My sense of the madman's blood pact... S-003 is right there.”
“It's in the exact same direction as the thing you're looking for.”
Ren Yi's tentacles curled in slightly, and the puff of white cloud expanded from the size of a fist to the size of a head before shrinking back down.
He was pondering what this implication meant.
Evans voiced the question in his mind for him.
“Are you saying his thing is in the same place as S-003? Or... right next to S-003?”
“Both are possible,” Sword-man said, resuming his stride. “It might even be inside S-003's stomach.”
“Anyway, that thing swallows everything. It wouldn't be surprising if it swallowed some Base Station.”
“So what do you say? Do we charge straight in?”
He raised three fingers. “To be safe, I need to outline a few possible scenarios for what comes next.”
Rate on N.U.
