Night Frost’s Array Pattern smashed into the smooth iron mass gathered on Chu Qing’s hand, and pain ripped from her five fingers up her forearm like torn silk.
The earlier clash had hurt Night Frost’s left fist, but it stalled Chu Qing. Seeing the blocker wasn’t Lin but Night Frost, Chu Qing blinked, her fine brows folding like ink strokes.
She couldn’t waste time on Night Frost. If Lin arrived, her chance to seize Yin Chen Yue would sift away like sand.
She raised a hand. Metal streamed to her, forging wide iron wings on her back. With Mana, those cold feathers could glide like a hawk on rising air.
Chu Qing drove power through her legs. The wings folded; air boomed before her like a bursting drum. Night Frost moved too, swallowing the burn and the sting, bracing like flint against steel.
Night Frost didn’t look back. She shouted to Yin Chen Yue behind her, voice sharp as a whip. Run! She’s after you! Head for the elevator!
Yin Chen Yue trusted her. She spun and bolted for the elevator like a startled deer.
Array Patterns crawled over Night Frost’s forearm. Her ten fingers clamped the slicing iron wing Chu Qing swept forward. But Chu Qing was Cantata Two. With Mana, her strength and speed flooded like a river, and Night Frost’s Patterns were reeds against a current.
From the shadows, Lin sensed her line. His arms swelled with black muscle, sprouting matte spikes like midnight thistles.
The iron wing split Night Frost’s palm and grazed her arm. In that heartbeat, Lin burst from her flank and heaved Chu Qing away like a gale flipping a kite.
The wing stabbed the ground, carving two long scars. Chu Qing bled speed, steadied, and faced Night Frost and Lin head-on.
Yin Chen Yue was almost inside the elevator. Chu Qing wouldn’t allow it. Two metal slivers spun from her forearm, stooping for Yin Chen Yue’s back like hawks.
Lin wouldn’t let her be hurt. He flashed behind Yin Chen Yue and slapped the slivers away. They arced into the air. Chu Qing split her focus and seized them. One curved back for Yin Chen Yue. The other knifed at Night Frost.
Naturally, that wasn’t all. Under Chu Qing’s control, both slivers shattered into hair-fine needles, a glittering rain.
Night Frost wanted to burn them to slag. But she couldn’t meet them head-on. She rolled. Silver needles stitched the floor, piercing stone like sleet.
She was fast, yet not flawless. Two found her. The instant they bit her arm, each needle kept lengthening, threading inward along her veins like icy wire.
But too little metal sat inside Night Frost. Chu Qing couldn’t command trace iron in a body. If she could, Night Frost would already be dead. She could, however, clog vessels and choke off Mana like silt in a river.
Everyone knew Night Frost’s Mana was sealed by a bracelet. No one knew why she could use any at all. Even so, it was a trickle, bound to a few narrow paths.
A prickle of wrongness crawled under Night Frost’s skin. She breathed through it. It didn’t slow her yet.
Lin sheltered Yin Chen Yue and pushed her into the elevator at a sprint. The needles couldn’t pierce him; Chu Qing’s tricks slid off him like rain off armor.
“Finally, you slipped.” Lin called to Chu Qing hanging in the air. Chu Qing didn’t answer. She heard the stall and read the stakes. If Lin himself shielded Yin Chen Yue, the girl wasn’t simple. Catch her, and the gate to the Earth Dragon Heart would open.
Yin Chen Yue slipped inside. The car began to rise, slow as a lantern lifting. In seconds it would reach Level Two and more hands. Chu Qing’s plan frayed, and Lin’s wrath loomed like thunderheads.
She couldn’t command metal at range. The elevator’s alloy held Obsidian Stone powder, dull to her pull. Unless she drew close, she couldn’t budge its rise or fall.
So Chu Qing dove for the shaft. Lin shadowed her, a storm at her back. He couldn’t let her touch that lift.
Lin was faster. Iron wings meant nothing against power carved in bone.
Directly below, Lin gathered Abyssal Aura on his fist and drove it up. It thudded into her lower belly. She didn’t break, but the iron plate before her warped like heated wax.
Terrifying power. A half-blood of man and beast, born with fangs, stronger than any spliced knockoff.
Chu Qing shed the wings. She dragged every scrap of metal nearby and forged a colossal puppet, taller than two stories, a steel giant under stormlight.
The puppet moved sluggish, but it wasn’t made to brawl. It swung an arm for the undercity’s power nodes and load-bearing pillars, a scythe for a field.
Lin couldn’t allow it. He charged the puppet. Bronze skin darkened in a breath, striations rising like corded rope. With a chest-deep snarl, he tore the metal arm clean off.
When he turned to chase Chu Qing, the giant’s smooth skin sprouted a thousand silver-white hands, a pale forest clawing for him as he tried to break away.
Lin closed his fingers and chopped. He pruned the puppet like a gardener, shearing it back to a polished shell.
He wouldn’t touch the arms still hanging in the air, wary of birthing stranger things. As his feet hit ground, rebar wove up from below, knitting a cage around him.
Lin cursed. He snapped the writhing bars and hurled them aside, then coiled his legs and sprinted down the street like a loosed arrow.
By then, Chu Qing’s palms pressed to the shaft wall. Yin Chen Yue needed only seconds to reach Level Two—but those seconds were enough, a door closing on fingertips.
Metal in the walls, alloy in the lift—both fell under her sway. At this range, she could yank the car down like a hooked fish.
The car, rising like a thrown stone, shuddered, then slid down the shaft, as if a giant magnet tugged from below.
Chu Qing tore a wide hole at the mouth of the shaft with Mana. Soon the car would stop before her. A flick of her hand, and Yin Chen Yue would drop into her palm.
She pried the doors apart. Yin Chen Yue curled weakly in the corner, whispering for Night Frost and for her father, voice trembling like a plucked string.
Night Frost sprinted for the opening, breath burning. Lin was a step faster, yet a step late. Chu Qing moved first and yanked Yin Chen Yue into her arms.
“Don’t move… or I’ll kill her.”
Night Frost and Lin halted and faced Chu Qing. For a beat, both stood with hands tied if they wanted the girl alive.
“I advise you to put her down.” The voice hit her the moment she scored the grab. She’d never heard it before. It rolled with crushing pressure, cloaking her body like a mountain’s shadow and seeding nameless fear.
The stone-still Chapter Three who served the Boss roused. Like a ghost, she appeared at Chu Qing’s back, cold as a draft.
Lin and Night Frost turned. Their eyes landed on the girl in pink Magic Armor, floating in midair—a Magic Maiden. Night Frost felt a thread of familiarity from her like a scent on wind.
Chu Qing had lived here for years. She knew Rouge Rabbit’s structure and roster like the lines on her palm. No one understood Rouge Rabbit better than she did.
This voice wasn’t ordinary. In her memory, no one this strong. But Rouge Rabbit had an unknown Chapter Three who always guarded the Boss. Given this deep-sea pressure, there was no need to guess. This was that unnamed Chapter Three.
“So you’re that Chapter Three, huh? Heh. If you’re moving, this girl’s probably the Boss’s daughter.”
Chu Qing glanced at Yin Chen Yue, still limp in her arms. She didn’t know the child’s status, but if she drew out the Boss’s Chapter Three, the truth spoke for itself.
Her plan to approach the Boss and seize the Earth Dragon Heart was halfway done. Fate had handed her a crooked win. But this wasn’t what she wanted. She didn’t want to face this Chapter Three now.
Even as Cantata Two, even favored by a god, she couldn’t beat an unbound Chapter Three, a mountain against an ant.
She needed a way out. Yin Chen Yue was her key, a locked secret in warm flesh. As a hostage, the girl could buy her escape.
“Heh. Chapter Three or not, one step closer and I cut her throat. We can shatter together if that’s how you want it.”
Metal gathered in Chu Qing’s palm, shaping a dagger. She traced two ghost-cuts at Yin Chen Yue’s throat and edged back. No matter how strong the foe, a hostage tied their hands…
The next second, something snagged her heel. Her balance vanished and she pitched straight down. Mana slammed Mana. Chu Qing’s signature stream was crushed by a denser tide.
The distant metal puppet she’d summoned compacted into chunks at once. Heavy Mana pinned the scraps like a mountain on pebbles, deaf to Chu Qing’s call.
Such dense Mana. This Chapter Three wasn’t weak; among the twenty-two Chapter Threes, she could claim a fearsome name. She could stand above ten thousand—so why hole up here as the Boss’s doorkeeper, a tiger guarding a gate?
She didn’t have time to grasp it. The attack came on cue. Pain blossomed across her back. Her arms were clamped. Yin Chen Yue vanished from her hold. A hard knee pressed her spine; one easy push and her backbone would snap like dry bamboo.
“I still advise you. Don’t move.” The words carried Mana. They rattled her skull, bled her seven orifices, and yanked her spirit half out of her body, leaving her limp and hollow.
