As sirens close in on three fresh corpses, a blown streetlight and a cheap camera glitch give Lu Jin his one narrow way out—while Li Xing dances through her first real fight, waking something in Resource Point No. 7 that was never meant to open.
The infrared camera over the convenience store entrance flickered.
Its red indicator cut through the rain like a tiny, mocking eye.
Somewhere farther off, a police siren wailed, faint but drawing closer, echoing down the wet streets of the new era.
In this age, if a D-rank citizen killed someone in public—even in self-defense—there was only one outcome written into the system.
Forced disposal.
A notification slid into Lu Jin's vision from the corner of his retina, cold and clinical.
[Notice: Real-world risk level ↑][Remark: D-rank individual involved in violent incident → passive "cleanup" probability: 87%.]
"Eighty-seven percent…" Lu Jin muttered.
He glanced once at the three motionless bodies out in the rain.
Then at the glowing red eye above the store door.
D-rank.
He wasn't even allowed to die on his own terms; the odds had to be approved first.
He bit down on the edge of his tongue, just enough to spike his focus, then forced his unsteady legs to move. He staggered away from the convenience store entrance and slipped into a narrower side alley, one wall away from the puddles gleaming under the streetlight.
One more step and he'd be lying directly under the lamp, in full view of every dashcam and patrol drone in the district.
At least here, he still had shadow.
Rain poured off the broken eaves in a heavy curtain, sealing the mouth of the alley like a beaded door. Beyond it, the street and the sidewalk felt like another world. Sirens grew louder. Red and blue reflections rolled and twisted in the distant water, not yet breaking into this crack in the city.
Lu Jin slid down the damp wall until his hip hit the overflowing trash bin. The stench of rotting food and cheap disinfectant mixed with the rain.
His chest heaved. Every breath felt like rusty hooks dragging his lungs apart.
Another couple of lines appeared on his HUD.
[Suggestion: Evacuate immediately to a low-population-density zone.][Warning: Current physical condition does not support high-intensity sprinting.]
"Shut up…" he rasped, not even bothering to raise his voice.
They both knew that if he tried to run flat-out now, his lungs would fail before the cops ever had a chance to shoot him.
The feed from Deep Space Echo rippled.
In the upper-left corner of his vision, the city's dirty alley folded away, replaced by a different ruin entirely.
[Wasteland · Sector A-11]
Half of the old subway station had collapsed, leaving a jagged, gaping wound in the earth. The entrance yawned open, a black mouth that breathed nothing but cold.
That tunnel was the only way down.
The only way to Resource Point No. 7.
"Skree—skree—skree—"
Three mutant rats, each the size of a large dog, burst out of the shadows one after another. Their bodies were swollen, skin mottled with patches of metal sheen. Steel-hard incisors glinted in the faint light as they fanned out in a half-circle, blocking the stairs down.
Little Rock sucked in a sharp breath. "S-Sis…"
He never finished the sentence.
Because in that moment, Li Xing changed.
A minute ago, she'd still been walking a step behind him, eyes darting, shoulders hunched like a skittish fawn.
Now her spine straightened.
Her shoulders squared.
Her breathing deepened and evened out. Her gaze sharpened into something that could cut.
All hesitation evaporated.
What settled over her was a cold, empty focus—a state that had no room for fear.
"Mode switch… combat," she whispered.
The "Wasteland Wolf" exoskeleton shivered around her, reading the subtle shifts in her muscles. The powered spine along her back vibrated once in response, as if a dormant predator had just opened its eyes.
Li Xing moved.
No wasted steps. No dramatic windup.
The "Thunderstorm" nailgun came up in a blur, faster than the exoskeleton's automatic targeting prompts could ping.
"Left. Right. Center."
Her voice was soft as a sigh, but carried the weight of a command.
"Thunk— thunk— thunk—"
Metal cut the air in three sharp lines.
All three rats froze mid-pounce, bodies still hanging in the motion of attack.
Then the force of the impact hurled them backward. They smashed into the concrete wall and hit hard enough to punch three deep craters into it before slumping, twitching, to the ground.
They never even made it to the floor properly.
The entire exchange took less than a second.
"…"
Little Rock stared, mouth open, pupils dilating.
Li Xing slowly exhaled and lowered the gun.
She glanced once at the fallen mutants, then turned, stepping lightly back toward the others. When she looked up again, her expression had softened, eyes going round and obedient like before.
"Cleared," she said calmly. "No danger."
Little Rock swallowed audibly. "S-Sis… just now, you… you…"
Li Xing blinked, then suddenly let the steel in her posture melt away. Her lips pressed together in a shy little line.
"T-That was…" She stole a glance toward the invisible eye of the camera floating above them. "Listener-sama taught me."
Her gaze shone.
Pride. A desperate, secret need to be praised.
"I… did well, right?"
[Reality · Alley]
A patrol car screamed past the alley mouth, tires hissing on the wet road. Red and blue light rolled over the narrowed entrance like a tide.
The glow slid across the trash bin, crept toward the patch of shadow where Lu Jin lay—
And stopped short.
He heard his own breath rasping in his ears, wild and uneven.
For one blinding moment, his consciousness was about to drop, tugged down by exhaustion, pain, and blood loss.
The white glow of a streetlamp washed over his face—
Then burst with a sharp pop.
Sparks spat out in the rain.
Not divine light.
Just a cheaply built lamp finally giving out under too much water and too little maintenance.
The bulb had been flickering for minutes already, voltage swinging up and down. Now, under the double punishment of a storm and the lower city's rotten wiring, it simply surrendered.
Up on the convenience store's wall, the infrared camera's red dot flashed once, stubbornly.
Then there was a faint, dirty little zzt.
Rain seeped through the cracked plastic of its weather cover and into the exposed wiring.
Short circuit.
The red dot blinked out.
That entire stretch of street fell into a deeper darkness.
Another neat overlay slid into Lu Jin's view.
[Remark: Detected real-world signal disruption caused by non-system environmental failure.][Suggestion: In real-world operations, please independently minimize high-exposure behaviors to avoid triggering cleanup protocols.]
No miracles.
No hidden hand.
Just infrastructure shoddy enough to die on its own.
But for Lu Jin, it was enough.
Rain drowned out the sirens.
Darkness swallowed the outlines of bodies, diluted blood, blurred muddy footprints.
The alley closed itself like a curtain, shielding him.
"…That girl," Lu Jin rasped, every word an effort.
His voice was hoarse, but there was the faintest hint of a broken laugh in it.
"She really knows how to pick her timing."
He forced his body to move again, one muscle at a time. The screen's glow stuttered in the rain as his trembling hand lifted it closer.
On the other side, at the subway entrance, Li Xing was facing the camera.
She tried to smile—too wide, too crooked, like she'd practiced it in her head but never on her face. It nearly fell apart at the edges, but she held it there anyway.
Enough to make a dying man hang on another second.
"Heh…"
Lu Jin let himself flop back into the filthy puddle, eyes on the black sky, rain washing the blood from his face.
"This kid… saved my life again."
He groped until he found his phone again, fingers closing over its slick edges.
As long as he was alive, the game wasn't over.
He was just bracing himself to push up and stagger away from this crime scene when the feed flickered once more.
The viewpoint dove deeper into the darkness of Resource Point No. 7.
Far below the broken subway platform, in the guts of the ruin, the old scavenger—Ark's stray—was staring at the thing in his arms.
The black metal box he'd been hugging like his own heart.
The Ark key.
It had been dormant this whole time.
But the second they crossed into the resource point's radiation field, the box lit up.
Blood-red.
"Beep— beep— beep—"
A shrill alarm ricocheted off the subway walls, knocking dust loose from the cracked ceiling.
The double-helix etched onto the box began to spin wildly, emitting a pulse that slammed downward, straight into the depths of the earth.
New alerts stacked one after another across Lu Jin's field of vision, all in red.
[WARNING! WARNING!][Detected: S-class energy signature!][Data Correction: Resource Point No. 7 is NOT an abandoned storage depot.][Classification updated: "Ark" Organization Live Containment Facility.][Status: Seal compromised. Guardian awakening in progress.]
The floor blurred on the feed as the entire underground structure shuddered.
From the black pit at the end of the tunnel, two pale blue lights snapped on like lanterns in the dark.
Something scraped against metal, long and heavy.
A huge shadow was unfolding, joints grinding, like a mechanical giant dragging itself out of chains.
Lu Jin stared at the deepening red on the warning panel. Whatever color he'd gotten back in his face drained out again.
"…You've gotta be kidding me," he croaked at his phone, voice raw. "C-class resource point, huh?"
He let out a harsh, breathless laugh, somewhere between humor and hysteria.
"Scammer, this is what you call C-class?!"
And in the acid rain above and the dead station below, the two halves of the same disaster took their first synchronized step.