World Serpent General Base
Inside the base, Jackal, who couldn't follow Gray Serpent's operation, was anxiously waiting for Gray Serpent to return to the base.
Previously, when they watched the battlefield through the Titan's surveillance system, Kevin used An-Utu to slash out a [Judgment of Shamash] while dueling Aaron.
And the surrounding Titan mechs naturally didn't have the ability to withstand the aftershocks caused by [Might of An-Utu]'s [Judgment of Shamash] and were all incinerated by this blow.
Under these circumstances, unable to see the situation on-site, Gray Serpent and Jackal made up their minds to fly over directly.
And now...
Accompanied by a spatial distortion, Jackal saw two figures...
—And the shockwave appearing behind them.
"Holy sh*t?!"
Before she could see the figures of those two clearly, a sense of crisis erupting from the depths of her heart invaded Jackal's mind at this moment.
At this time, Jackal, as a researcher who was obviously not good at sports, lunged directly toward the vicinity of a cover.
Subsequently—this room in the World Serpent General Base was instantly blown up by the energy shockwave brought back by Gray Serpent and Kevin.
"Cough... cough cough..."
Jackal, thanks to the cover, didn't receive much serious damage.
But looking at the ruined walls around her, she still felt she was incredibly lucky right now.
If her speed had been a bit slower...
She probably would have had to ask Gray Serpent to help her get some prosthetic limbs installed on her body.
"Liege, please forgive your subordinate for being late."
At this moment, Gray Serpent, who had half his body blown away, tried to crawl up from the ground.
Only Gray Serpent, now left with only one hand and one leg, found that he couldn't perform such an action at all.
"It's fine... rather, I should thank you."
Kevin, spitting out a mouthful of blood, spoke slightly weakly.
"Thanks to your timely rescue. Otherwise... I couldn't guarantee that I would survive this battle."
"That kid... actually has such ability?!"
Looking at the charred Honkai Beast carapace falling from Kevin's chest, Gray Serpent couldn't hold back the doubt in his heart and asked Kevin.
"I remember you seized the mimicked Star of Eden from the Herrscher of Reason, Liege. With two Great Divine Keys, you still couldn't defeat that kid?"
"His recovery ability and destructive power are too strong."
After placing the mimicked Rock Herrscher Core, which had shattered into small pieces, on the table, Kevin exhaled a breath of turbid air deeply.
"After forcibly taking a Judgment of Shamash struck by An-Utu, he could actually restore his physical body to an uninjured state in an instant."
Recalling the young man whose body burned with flames yet nearly beat him down with a few moves, Kevin spoke helplessly.
"Such powerful recovery ability; even I didn't possess it when activating the Meta-Morph Factor in my prime."
When Kevin said this, Gray Serpent, left with only half a body, felt an incredible headache right now.
He never dreamed that Liege Kevin would have such a high evaluation of Aaron.
And this evaluation wasn't exaggerated praise.
Liege Kevin, having fought Aaron, wouldn't praise the opponent excessively in this regard.
And judging from the battle just now, Liege Kevin was indeed on the losing side.
If Gray Serpent hadn't prepared for the worst, having other 'selves' ready to self-destruct and completing the self-destruction as soon as they arrived, Aaron would have destroyed those Gray Serpents turned Emperor-class on the spot and swatted him, this individual, to death along the way.
At that time, Kevin, not connected to the quantum teleportation system, would have been forced to decide life and death with Aaron at The Deep in the end...
Judging by the current situation, the one dying would likely be the Liege.
Even if the Liege had weakened a lot after spending over a thousand years in the Sea of Quanta, this was too exaggerated, right?
And the Liege was still coughing blood right now!
With the Liege's recovery ability, for Aaron to hurt him to this extent, if calculated in reverse...
Although thinking this way was very rude to the Liege, if the Liege didn't recover his power, he would only lose more miserably in Aaron's hands next time.
Kevin, still in a heavily injured state, recalled the battle just now and felt he really escaped by luck this time.
Gray Serpent, this cyborg who had been operating since the Previous Era, really did him a big favor this time.
Without Gray Serpent's timely rescue, Kevin would probably be injured even more severely.
And even with Gray Serpent's rescue, the current Kevin had sustained heavier injuries.
Besides that Whale-Slaying Tyrant Fist from Aaron, the injuries on his body included two other rather awkward damages.
The first damage was when Aaron pierced through those five or six Emperor-class Honkai Beasts with the Whale-Slaying Cannon and hit Kevin's chest with the shockwave.
If Kevin hadn't used the Meta-Morph Factor in time to create a sufficiently thick Honkai Beast carapace, that energy cannon would have been enough to blast a big hole in his body.
And the second damage was even more awkward.
Before teleporting back to the World Serpent General Base, he was blasted on the spot by the energy of the surrounding self-destructing Emperor-class Honkai Beasts.
Originally, even if these degraded Emperor-class beasts self-destructed with all their energy, they couldn't have hurt Kevin in the slightest.
But the problem was that the current Kevin was worlds apart from his prime in the Previous Era.
Leaving aside Honkai energy intensity and total amount, Kevin's body had been heavily injured twice by Aaron using the Whale-Slaying Tyrant Fist and Whale-Slaying Cannon in the battle just now.
That the heavily injured Kevin could survive this explosion was truly due to his extremely high physical constitution.
Otherwise, without this explosion, those two previous strikes would have been enough to kill the vast majority of existences in this world.
Moreover, Kevin, having disengaged from the battlefield, discovered some incongruities in the details.
The holder of the Key of the Void was Su, and before Kevin and Su had their disagreement, he had teleported multiple times relying on the authority of Su's Key of the Void.
First, cyborgs like Gray Serpent didn't meet the usage conditions of the Key of the Void.
Second, the instant movement of the Key of the Void was obviously faster and more stable than the instant movement Gray Serpent used to take Kevin away from the scene.
At least Kevin could guarantee that if Su used the Key of the Void to complete instant movement, the Key of the Void wouldn't drag the explosive energy in during the process of teleporting others.
"Gray Serpent."
Realizing something was wrong, Kevin looked at Gray Serpent and asked indifferently.
"Are Su and the Key of the Void still near the River Thames right now?"
......!
Gray Serpent and Jackal, hearing Kevin's question, felt their hearts skip a beat simultaneously.
Previously, because there was a chance for the Liege to return, the two had been racking their brains tensely about how to successfully invite the Liege out of the Sea of Quanta.
And at this critical time point, the two naturally ignored some things that were actually quite important to them.
For example...
—How to explain World Serpent's current predicament.
"What's wrong? Could it be that something happened to Su and the Key of the Void???"
Sensing this awkward atmosphere, Kevin immediately frowned and said.
"What exactly happened. Speak boldly, I won't blame you."
"Liege, I'm sorry... actually, the Key of the Void has already been seized."
Helpless, Gray Serpent could only voluntarily speak of the events from half a month ago.
"At that time, Aaron and his companions suddenly arrived near the River Thames, and we don't know where they got the intelligence, but they found the location of the Key of the Void precisely."
"We tried hard to stop him. But... you also know his strength."
"With the little combat power we had in hand, we couldn't stop him at all."
Listening to Gray Serpent's explanation, Kevin recalled the scene when he met Aaron.
Aaron entering the Sea of Quanta was obviously not an accident.
Judging from how actively he acted after finding the girl named Seele, he had clearly charged into the Sea of Quanta to take Seele away from that ghost place while being prepared.
And the time point when Aaron entered the Sea of Quanta matched the time point Gray Serpent mentioned.
"And Mr. Su... Liege, you should know that matter better than I do."
Although Gray Serpent maintained that tone, Jackal actually heard a trace of... sadness in Gray Serpent's words?
"As the user of the Key of the Void, Mr. Su wouldn't easily hand the Key of the Void over to others."
"Aaron and his companions have now seized the usage rights of the Key of the Void and moved the Key of the Void to another location. That can only mean..."
"Mr. Su might have already been killed by them. Otherwise, there's no way to explain how this group can use the Key of the Void freely."
"Ah, is that so."
Hearing Gray Serpent's analysis, Kevin's tone suddenly became incredibly cold.
"Su..."
*Are you really dead?*
Even though the two diverged due to [Project Stigma], Kevin still regarded Su as his best friend.
The Kevin back then fell into the Sea of Quanta because of Su's plan precisely because he was softhearted toward his best friend for a moment.
In these fifteen hundred years, Kevin hadn't blamed his best friend once.
After all, in Kevin's view, Project Stigma was indeed a pile of sh*t.
As a doctor, and having joined the Fire Moth to fight the Honkai and save others, Su choosing to negate Project Stigma wasn't something wrong in Kevin's view.
And now, knowing there was a huge probability his best friend had died, how could Kevin continue to remain calm!
In an instant, Jackal, who was still a living human, felt the surrounding air temperature drop drastically.
The Liege was truly angry.
*It seems he still regarded that Mr. 'Su' as an important person.*
"And Liege, this isn't over."
Gray Serpent, now smashing the broken pot, told everything about the subsequent raid on Anti-Entropy resulting in a counter-kill, and the loss of the Key of Thunder.
"Liege, your subordinate is incompetent. We lost two Divine Keys and let Raven get captured by the opponent."
"...It's fine, you've done your best."
Kevin said coldly after listening to Gray Serpent's report.
"Anti-Entropy, huh... Can the quantum teleportation system you mentioned still be used normally now?"
"To be honest, it's not very stable."
Feeling that this body was about to stop functioning, Gray Serpent immediately sped up his speech to Kevin.
"This happened a few days ago. Because it happened too suddenly, the two doctors at Anti-Entropy couldn't fix the loopholes in the quantum teleportation system in time."
"At the same time, because of our intelligence manipulation, they realized The Deep might be attacked by Schicksal, so they were forced to dispatch Titans to The Deep without having time to check them one by one."
"Precisely because of this, we could rely on the hacked Titan mechs to see your return to this world."
"But this isn't because the two doctors at Anti-Entropy are too incompetent, but because they had too many things to do, so they couldn't complete these tasks comprehensively."
"As long as they are given enough time, their threat to us... is actually really not small."
"I see. Then..."
"Please wait, this 'I' is about to crash."
After using the quantum teleportation system to bring another 'Gray Serpent' before Kevin, this Gray Serpent with only half a body completely crashed.
Then, this intact Gray Serpent bowed deeply to Kevin and asked.
"Liege, what is our next plan?"
"Rescue Raven. Then confirm whether she has betrayed us."
Kevin felt that his injuries would take some time to heal.
With his current power, although he could safely enter Anti-Entropy to save people, if he had to fight Aaron again, forget it.
Aaron's group had the coordinates of Anti-Entropy HQ, and with the Key of the Void, they could enter Anti-Entropy HQ at any time.
Under these circumstances, Kevin's action had to be fast, accurate, and ruthless.
Although it was shameful, if the current Kevin faced Aaron again, Kevin was certain that heavily injured, he would definitely not be Aaron's opponent.
And if Aaron contacted the people at Anti-Entropy, or even successfully learned the coordinates of the World Serpent main base from Raven's mouth, then the trouble World Serpent would face would be even greater.
Kevin didn't come out to fight this time; he came to work on Project Stigma.
If the base coordinates were known, how the hell could he work on Project Stigma?
With less than four years until Finality descended, at this critical juncture, he didn't wish for more complications.
"Teleport me to Anti-Entropy now. After rescuing Raven at maximum speed, we will execute the next part of the plan."
"Also, help me pay attention to the movements in Shenzhou."
"If a Honkai Beast surpassing Emperor-class appears in Shenzhou, remember to notify me immediately."
......................