“Fool.”

“The Murder Hornets and the Ice Bees are both artificial-intelligence police from ancient Huaxia.”

“All these combat records are stored on our hard drives.”

“The lab used your memories as a template to create so many things.”

“They’re the same. The lab created them using your memories, too.”

“You’re the one who forgot. All these AIs have keys.”

As aside spoke, the scattered pieces of its body seemed to answer some kind of call. They trembled faintly, then flew back to rejoin it.

aside’s body fragments returned to it like petals dancing through the air, reassembling its body.

As he controlled the Murder Hornet’s advance and repaired his body, he spoke to Lilith.

The Murder Hornet strode along the tunnel’s tracks, each step stamping a deep footprint into the ground.

The tunnel’s hard floor was as soft as cement beneath his feet.

The flail trailing the massive mace in his hand was dragged along the ground by a terrifying gravitational force, carving a long trench in the floor.

“A key...?”

“But I didn’t see you activate any kind of key.”

Lilith acted as if she didn’t even see the Murder Hornet drawing closer.

Her expression didn’t change. She smiled, calm and unruffled.

“Idiot. We’re robots. Do you think we have to dance around like humans to activate one?”

“I don’t want to waste any more words on you...”

“Murder Hornet, grind her to dust!”

At aside’s command, the Murder Hornet raised the massive mace in its hands, ready to bring it down on Lilith.

Countless flails rose straight up from the ground, like mugwort swaying in the wind. They pressed down on Lilith with endless force.

Pink bubbles filled the spaces between the flails. The cold tunnel suddenly seemed like a fairyland, making anyone inside feel as if they were floating.

A force of restraint surged from the massive mace.

With a harsh, booming clang, the Murder Hornet swung the solid mace down, cleaving Lilith in half diagonally from top to bottom.

But that wasn’t the end of it. For an angel, being cut in half at the waist was hardly any worse than getting a small cut on a finger.

The Murder Hornet’s true strength lay in its ability to seal.

The instant the Murder Hornet struck Lilith, the pink bubbles around them seemed to find an outlet. They surged into Lilith’s body all at once.

At the same time, all the flails at the end of the massive mace flew out.

Like dragons leaping across a river’s surface, they circled Lilith again and again, shrinking the space in which she could move and binding her tighter and tighter.

Faced with all of this, Lilith only smiled, so faintly it was almost imperceptible.

“Ouroboros, turn the heavens upside down.”

Lilith bit her tongue and softly chanted the words.

A viper’s tongue flicked out from the mouth of Lilith’s severed upper body.

In an instant, boundless magic erupted from Lilith out of nowhere.

The magic flowed in endless cycles, surging without pause and breaking through every restraint.

Everything came to a stop.

It was as if some omnipotent presence outside the frame had pressed pause.

“A reversal spell...?”

“That’s an unfinished technology from the time when two prehistoric civilizations raced to study the field of four-dimensional space. Their research ultimately led to the destruction of both!”

“Of all the things you could’ve remembered, you had to remember this!”

“If you use something like that improperly, all of Acadia—or even the entire Earth—will collapse into a black hole the size of a grain of sand!”

“Then every living thing will cease to exist!”

“How dare you... How dare you...!”

In the paused scene, aside was the only one who hadn’t been completely frozen.

It stared at Lilith’s body as it gradually recovered, unable to believe its eyes.

The way her body restored itself defied physics, intuition, and reason. It was like watching a video rewind.

Every fleck of flesh that had flown from Lilith followed its path back and returned to her body.

At last, a rare hint of panic crept into aside’s voice.