“Everyone, calm down! I’m still alive!” Yueye thought she had a good plan. Since everyone already believed she was dead, wouldn’t her showing up now make the illusion fall apart on its own…?
But things didn’t go as smoothly as Yueye had hoped. Everyone turned to look at her… Almost all of them wore expressions of terror, and they raised their weapons toward her…
“What the hell?” Yueye was stunned… She couldn’t for the life of her figure out what kind of illusion her teammates were seeing to make them act like this toward her…
“Um, it’s me, Yueye… Whatever’s going on, can’t we calm down and talk it through?” She instinctively took a step back, trying to shield Liu Huiying completely behind her in case something unexpected happened…
Zhu Yue stared at her as if she’d seen a ghost… “Yue…ye?” Her voice trembled as if a hand were squeezing her throat…
“D-Don’t come any closer… Monster!” Wang Qian took one step back after another… as if her psychological limits were being pushed to the breaking point.
Yueye’s expression darkened… The question she’d asked herself last night surfaced in her mind again, sharp as a steel needle…
The word “monster” exploded in her mind like a bomb…
Under the effects of the hallucinogen, the entire team had fallen into a strange illusion… From their perspective, Yueye had come back from the dead—and become something like a monster…
【From the team’s perspective】
“Hey, everyone, I’m still alive…” Amid their argument, a voice that absolutely shouldn’t have been part of the conversation abruptly cut in.
Everyone immediately turned toward the direction the voice had come from.
“That’s impossible…” Wang Qian’s mental defenses crumbled completely… Her face was filled with unwillingness. The person she hated most stood before her like a demon returned from hell, looking at her as if she were nothing more than a toy…
“Yueye… you?” Wang Tong stared at Yueye’s monstrous appearance… Her feelings were a tangled mess.
“What about me?” Yueye stood there smiling in the vision everyone else saw… as if mocking every person present…
The huge black wings on her back swayed slowly. Two black horns atop her head looked sharp enough to attack. Black-and-gold scales covered her pale, bloodless skin, with a few scales scattered across her delicate face… Her golden vertical pupils fixed on everyone. A long black tail swished back and forth above her hips, graceful but eerie… She looked like a specter from hell, come to exact revenge. That was how Yueye appeared from the team’s perspective…
“That really hurt… Wang Qian, I have to thank you for that…” The Yueye in the illusion deliberately revealed the spot where Wang Qian had hit her in everyone’s earlier vision… Scales covered it, leaving only a large patch of Scarlet…
“So, how are you going to make it up to me…?” Yueye licked the corner of her mouth. A few sharp little fangs showed between her lips. They looked cute, but were every bit as dangerous as they seemed…
“D-Don’t come any closer!” Yueye’s movements completely shattered Wang Qian’s composure… She screamed and fired at Yueye without holding back…
“Bang, bang, bang…” Seven gunshots echoed far through the woods…
As if announcing Wang Qian’s defeat, the dry “click, click, click” of an empty magazine—and a shadow that suddenly appeared behind her—brought their first clash to an end…
Wang Qian felt a heavy blow to the back of her neck… Then she passed out…
“Oh, dear. I’m not about to fall for the same weapon twice…” Somehow, Yueye was already standing in the middle of the group… At her feet, Wang Qian lay in a pool of blood…
Yueye put her index finger in her mouth and gently bit down… No, that could no longer be called a hand. It was a dragon’s claw, one that looked capable of immense destruction… A faint, cold glint shone at the tip of each claw. Huge black-and-gold scales spread from her fingers all the way up her forearm…
“Ara, would you rather hurry up and die on your own… or should I give you that pleasure?” Yueye wore a strange smile… She looked like a little girl who’d found a new toy, excitement filling her eyes… But on her pale, bloodless face, that excitement seemed especially terrifying…
Her claw curled into a fist, and a thunderous metallic clanging rang out… Shaking every team member to the core…
“Hehe, got you…” The black shadow vanished from sight in an instant… When it appeared again, its claw was buried deep in empty air.
In an instant, the black scales slowly receded from Yueye, revealing the delicate girl beneath them. Her blue skirt fluttered in the wind… The green sword in her hand was buried deep in the transparent air before her… At that moment, the creator of the illusion had been badly wounded, and everyone broke free of it.
“Zhee, zhee, zhee…” The insects’ piercing cries grated on everyone’s eardrums…
“…So… your tricks are pretty mediocre…” Golden light shone from Yueye’s pale blue eyes… From her perspective, the insect that appeared invisible to everyone else had nowhere left to hide… Green fluid splattered across the ground…
“Yueye, you bastard! You monster!” Su Lin suddenly roared from behind her, his voice full of hatred. Yueye tensed… and hurriedly engaged every muscle in her body to dodge the bullets flying toward her from behind… The insect seized the opportunity and darted to the other side of the team…
“Yueye… Zhu Yue was so good to you. How could you do this to her?!” The illusion had faded for only an instant… Now Yueye had become that black demon again in everyone’s eyes… Su Lin assumed that brief glimpse of her normal self had been his imagination. The scene before him looked like hell…
Yueye’s black claws had pierced straight through Zhu Yue’s chest from behind. Her delicate body hung from Yueye’s talons, blood spraying across the ground… Something—an organ, perhaps—slid down to the ground in a bloody, mangled mass…
“…Having fun?” Yueye didn’t move after dodging the bullets. She stared fixedly toward the team… as if she were watching her prey…
“Go to hell!” Su Lin didn’t know why, but he couldn’t stop his eyes from aching. Tears flooded his vision in an instant… The Zhu Yue he remembered, so full of energy and always encouraging him, stood in stark contrast to the bloodied, mangled Zhu Yue he saw now.
“Aah!…” He roared and opened fire on Yueye without a second thought… as if he were trying to unleash every ounce of his resentment… He barely even took aim…
“Rat-a-tat! Rat-a-tat! Rat-a-tat!” Almost everyone joined Su Lin in attacking Yueye.
“Tch…” Yueye’s black silhouette wavered through the air… Then she suddenly stiffened, reappearing before everyone’s eyes… She knelt on the grass, eyes full of unwillingness. Her scales seemed as flimsy as paper… Black blood ran from the corner of her mouth, and more slowly squeezed through the gaps between her scales. A bullet had pierced her delicate lower abdomen, passing right through her armor…
“Dodging bullets… is hard…” From Yueye’s perspective, her eyes and physical abilities were good enough to let her evade bullets. But faced with such a dense barrage, she still felt overwhelmed. Pain flared in her lower abdomen, and blood slowly seeped out, staining her skirt red… As numbness began to spread through her legs, she sank to her knees on the grass…
“You’re going to die…” Su Lin saw Yueye get hit and didn’t stop to think. A grenade he’d somehow exchanged for appeared in his hand, and he charged at Yueye as if he meant to die with her. “Su Lin!… That’s an illusion! Don’t let it fool you!” Yueye endured the agony in her abdomen and spat out a mouthful of blood… Then she shouted desperately at him.
