After that strange mental attack, Gussy felt sick. Its head was spinning, and everything it looked at had a double image.
It searched for the phone on its body, only to find that it had been smashed to pieces in the fight.
“Forget it.”
Gussy raced through the woods with its head down, charging ahead until it had knocked down five or six trees. Only then did it feel a little better. By now, it had reached the area near the agreed meeting point and was waiting for someone from Huaguo to come pick it up.
Feeling the emptiness inside it, Gussy casually set a few trees alight and buried itself in the flames. It carefully controlled the fire, keeping it close by so it wouldn’t spread anywhere else.
As it replenished its energy, Gussy noticed something strange about its energy pool. The trees weighed at least three tons altogether. Even with a moisture content of 40%, each kilogram should have provided more than 5 MJ of heat. But after burning five massive trees, each with a trunk 40 centimeters across, Gussy found that its energy had recovered by a measly 1%.
What was going on? Had its ability to absorb energy gotten worse?
But Gussy’s control over energy hadn’t weakened. It hadn’t wasted a single bit while the trees burned—it had absorbed it all.
Could it be that its energy pool had grown larger?
‘Have I gotten stronger?’ Gussy thought excitedly. Then it suddenly noticed a drone flying in from the sky.
The drone spotted Gussy too. A red light flashed across its camera, and then it turned back the way it had come.
Whose drone was that? Huaguo’s?
Gussy decided to follow it and take a look—but right then, a shrill whistle tore through the air from the horizon!
Ten flaming shells came one after another, tracing arcs of death as they slammed into the ground around Gussy. The nearest landed less than ten meters away. With an explosive force of more than ten tons of TNT, it blasted the entire layer of soil into the air. The shock wave swept across the area, making everything within a one-kilometer radius feel like it had been hit by a massive earthquake. Gussy and the surrounding trees were thrown skyward in an instant.
Compared with the shells that had hit the compound before, these were far more accurate and powerful. An ordinary person would probably have had their internal organs shattered on the spot, never mind the damage from the shrapnel.
The energy shield around Gussy flickered. The energy it had just replenished was already almost gone.
The sudden attack left Gussy stunned for a moment. Once it realized the enemy meant to harm it, a violent rage surged inside. It flung out a hand, blasting the drone that had been watching from a distance into fragments. Then it kicked off the tree trunk beneath it and plunged down like a cheetah, racing toward the direction the shells had come from. The rugged terrain couldn’t slow Gussy down. It covered a kilometer in just one minute, but still couldn’t find any sign of the attackers.
Five drones in the distance were closing in on Gussy’s position. Gussy didn’t give them a chance to spot it. It blasted them out of the sky with energy beams from afar.
Another shrill whistle rang out overhead. Having lost track of Gussy, the enemy fired a volley of shells blindly. They exploded three hundred meters behind it.
Gussy ran another two kilometers forward. It didn’t find the enemy, but it spotted even more drones in the sky. It didn’t have enough energy left to shoot them all down.
Ten seconds had passed between the drone first spotting Gussy and the first volley of shells arriving. Based on how fast the second volley had traveled, Gussy calculated that the enemy was at least eight kilometers away. If it ignored the drones and kept charging forward, it would probably come under fire several more times.
Gussy could take at most one more attack of that scale. If a shell hit it directly, it would probably die instantly.
Should it just fly over there and kill them all?
No, that wouldn’t work. It had too little energy left. Going over there would be a gamble with its life. Better to play it safe.
With that thought, it glared bitterly at the drones in the distance, then ran to the side and plunged into a densely wooded area. It needed to replenish its energy again.
Who were the enemies? Huaguo, or the local warlords? It didn’t matter. Once it killed enough of them to make them give up resisting, it would find out who they were. They’d pay for what they’d done!
……
“Team One reporting! We’ve lost sight of the target. According to the drone’s observations, it seems to have taken cover in the dense forest to the west.” The commander’s voice came over the radio.
Inside a mobile armored vehicle, Tower Owl smoked a cigar as he watched the footage sent back by the drone. His face darkened, and his brows knitted together. “This monster is even stronger than when we first encountered it. Not only is its intelligence growing, its strength is increasing too. Even if we can’t capture it, we have to kill it. Otherwise, if it holds a grudge against us, Organization K will be in trouble.”
With real-time corrections from the drones, Tower Owl’s special forces could keep the shelling error within ten meters, even from ten kilometers away. Organization K had calculated that ten 155-millimeter high-explosive shells, each weighing 50 kilograms, would be enough to leave the demon unable to fight back. They hadn’t expected it to take a full volley head-on and still keep moving.
“The target is heading west. Drones, keep it contained. We’ve got it surrounded now.”
“Artillery Team Two, load up and wait for orders. Teams Six and Seven, prepare the armor-piercing guns.”
Organization K’s special forces had surrounded the mountain where the demon was. From the east, south, west, and north, no matter which way it fled, it would enter the firing range of the 155-millimeter howitzers. And even if the demon somehow made it to the artillery positions, tungsten-alloy-core anti-tank guns and machine-gun emplacements would be waiting for it. Of course, Organization K knew the demon could fly, too. The air force was ready.
Tower Owl was confident they could take down the demon. His men were hardened elites who didn’t fear death, nothing like the group of mercenaries at the compound.
But confidence didn’t mean arrogance. Tower Owl had considered the worst-case scenario, too. “All units, listen up. Keep the self-destruct system activated. Don’t give anyone a chance to capture our equipment.”
After twenty-eight hours adrift in space, the blue planet before Xu Fang grew larger and larger until it filled almost his entire field of view.
At that moment, Xu Fang was a little surprised—not because he was about to return to Earth, but because of Moulin’s eyeball. The image it saw had become clearer, and he could just make out the outline of a human figure.
Did that mean he could communicate with Luo Xiaoming again?
Xu Fang divided his attention, watching the changes in the image through his “True View” while operating the rocket beneath him.
Xu Fang’s rocket had entered the exosphere. The surface was only 100 kilometers away, and he could feel the frame beneath him shaking violently.
He’d taken the shortest route and hadn’t slowed down much. Now he was plunging into Earth’s atmosphere at nearly 2.6 km/s. The air in front of the rocket’s nose compressed violently. Xu Fang tried to control the heat, but much of it built up before it could disperse. The temperature rose sharply, and the titanium-aluminum alloy at the nose was close to giving way under the heat and breaking apart.
Xu Fang had one last chance to adjust his course. Once the rocket broke apart, he’d have to land in free fall.
Xu Fang had originally wanted to land near the compound or in Huaguo, but the Eye of Destruction showed the direction of the compound as severely distorted.
Xu Fang divided the degree of disorder the Eye of Destruction saw in things into five levels. Level 1 was relatively safe, while Level 5 was extremely dangerous—death could come at any moment.
The degree of disorder varied from place to place on Earth. The compound’s direction was at Level 3 right now. Huaguo was at Level 2. As for anywhere at Level 1… only the moon qualified.
Just as Xu Fang was about to adjust his course, he suddenly noticed that the disorder level in Huaguo’s direction had risen to Level 3.
Puzzled, Xu Fang immediately abandoned the idea of going to Huaguo and decided to land near the southern islands instead. But then Huaguo’s disorder level dropped back to Level 2.
That tiny inconsistency suddenly set off alarm bells in Xu Fang’s mind.
He could sense that someone was plotting against him—the feeling was like having a gun pointed at him while someone figured out how to kill him.
The brightness of a rocket falling and scraping against the atmosphere was visible to humans. His return to Earth wasn’t hidden at all. There was a chance he was in danger.
No matter how he tried to hide now, he was probably already within the other party’s predictions.
Xu Fang immediately opened Horror Novel Web and went to the consultation center. “Roll me a few places where I can land safely. Keep the cost under 30 points.”
【Karachi, Delhi, Kyiv, Belgrade, Turin.】
Just as the consultation center gave its answer, Xu Fang “saw” another voice coming through his “True View.”
“Xu Fang! Can you hear me?”
“Luo Xiaoming?”
“Ah, you scared me! You’re finally responding. Why does this thing keep losing its signal?”
The figure of a short-haired girl gradually came into focus. Luo Xiaoming’s pretty, worried face appeared in the “True View,” but as soon as she heard Xu Fang answer, her worry turned to delight.
“Luo Xiaoming, you’re just in time. I need you to do me a favor.”
“Huh? Uh, okay. Why all of a sudden…?” Luo Xiaoming froze for a moment, still not understanding Xu Fang’s situation.
“Karachi, Delhi, Kyiv, Belgrade, Turin. Pick any one of these five cities as the place where I’ll land.”
“Just pick one?” Luo Xiaoming didn’t know much about foreign cities. Hearing Xu Fang list those five places out of the blue, she realized she didn’t know a single one of them.
“Don’t think about it. Just name a place that feels right.” Xu Fang spoke quickly.
Luo Xiaoming could tell Xu Fang was in a bit of a hurry, so she replied, “Then let’s go with Delhi.”
“All right.”
Xu Fang adjusted the rocket’s angle and headed toward the place Luo Xiaoming had chosen.
At an altitude of 80 kilometers, the rocket’s steel frame finally gave way under the heat and tore apart into several flaming fragments. Xu Fang grabbed the largest piece and kept falling. Before long, the piece in his hands had burned to bits too, so he spread himself out, gliding as he slowed down.
……
Hundreds of kilometers away, several intercontinental missiles streaked through the mesosphere, searching for something. Their trajectories seemed to have been calculated with such precision that they were almost predicting the future.
But in the end, they still failed to intercept the target that might have appeared.
