Pinned between sirens and an S-class war relic, Lu Jin has ¥471, a shattered arm, and one idea left—fake being a god to something built to execute gods.
The rain didn't stop.
Dirty water—half exhaust, half acid dust—ran down Lu Jin's hair, slid under his collar, and crept along his spine like an ice-cold snake.
He leaned against the reeking metal of the dumpster, left hand clamped over his broken right arm. Every breath dragged across his lungs like two sheets of rusted sandpaper grinding together.
On his cracked screen, red warning windows flashed at a seizure-inducing rhythm, painting the alley in pulsing blood-light.
[Lethal Warning: S-class threat entity has locked onto target!][Estimated time to total party kill: 00:00:03]
Lu Jin didn't look at the countdown.
His gaze went past the spiderweb of fractures in the glass, fixed on the thing slowly peeling itself out of the shadows at the center of the wasteland feed.
It wasn't a creature. It wasn't a machine.
It was an execution frame someone had welded out of flesh and steel.
The thing was over four meters tall. Rotten-gray muscle hung off a titanium skeleton in knotted slabs, like spoiled meat slapped onto rebar. Its right arm was a spinning multi-barrel cannon; its left, a chainsaw still dripping hot lubricant.
Worst of all was its head.
Or what passed for one.
A huge glass cylinder sat where a skull should've been, filled with murky fluid. Suspended inside, a naked brain pulsed slowly, cables burrowed into the soft tissue like a nest of mechanical tapeworms.
Every breath it took vented a cloud of visible, ghost-blue dust from the exhaust ports on its back—radiation so thick you could almost see it crawling.
"Bzzzz—"
The Geiger counter's scream tore through the phone's tiny speakers, a high, shrill whine that stabbed straight into Lu Jin's eardrums.
New lines burned across his HUD.
[Target Identified: Ark Prototype Bio-Weapon "Executioner" (Model S-09)][Status: Berserk / Hostile][Weak Point Analysis: None (for your current level)]
Then Deep Space Echo threw another window right over his vision.
No fireworks. No confetti. No sales voice.
Just a simple black rectangle with white text:
[Situation: Checkmate.][Recommended Solution: Orbital Kinetic Strike (Tungsten Rod, Single Shot)][Description: There is nothing a tungsten rod from orbit can't solve. If one isn't enough, try two.][Savior's Price: ¥999,999.00][Current Balance: ¥471.00]
"Ninety-nine… nine hundred and ninety-nine…"
Lu Jin's dry chuckle came out as two harsh barks. The laugh tugged at his ribs and sent a sharp bolt of pain through his chest. Blood bubbled up in his throat and spattered the back of his hand in dark red.
The system wasn't even pretending to offer the midrange gear anymore.
It knew.
Against something like this, the usual tens-of-thousands "miracle cannons" were less than a joke. So it showed him the one thing that would work… then nailed the price somewhere in low orbit and waited for the poor bastard to die.
"Could sell you… and still not make the down payment," Lu Jin muttered.
He smeared his bloody thumb across the screen and stabbed the [X] to close the window.
No money.
No backup.
No miracle.
He had ¥471 and a body held together with spite.
[Wasteland · Resource Point No. 7 · Inner Chambers]
The air smelled like burned ozone.
When the thing called Executioner took its first step, the entire subway station shook. The oppressive weight of its presence crushed the space flat; it was a predator standing at the top of the food chain, and everything else knew it.
Little Rock didn't even manage a scream.
His eyes rolled back, and he dropped like his strings had been cut.
The old scavenger hit the floor too, arms limp—except for the way his fingers refused to loosen around the black metal box. That last scrap of will clung to the Ark key like it was his own heart.
Only Li Xing was still standing.
Strictly speaking, it was the "Wasteland Wolf" exoskeleton holding her up.
The hydraulic spine hummed under high load. Her neck guard, chest plates, knee locks all snapped tighter, armoring her in overlapping layers of metal. Warning indicators kept flashing red across her visor, and she kept manually clearing them, one by one.
Her heart pounded fast.
But not wild.
Her pupils narrowed. Her breathing shifted, on instinct, into a combat-ready rhythm—inhale, hold for a beat, exhale longer to prime the body for a burst. It was a pattern drilled into her with electricity and drugs until her muscles remembered it for her.
This was S-class.
Top of the wasteland food chain. The subject of hours and hours of mandatory combat footage review back in the lab—the one file whose notes had carried four bold red characters:
[Engagement Prohibited]
But "engagement prohibited" was never the same as "you may retreat."
[Priority: Protect the objective.]
Another, older line of code lit up at the base of her skull.
The command that had been poured into her ears when she was still just a designation, not a name:
Stand in front.
Until you lose the ability to stand.
Her legs didn't shake.
The exoskeleton didn't take a single step back.
Her muscles burned under the mounting pressure, but her movements were cleaner than they had ever been during training. She stepped forward instead, aligning her body so that she and the unconscious pair behind her were perfectly overlapped within the "Wasteland Wolf" projected shield angle.
Crack.
Her armored boot drove a tile into powder. The sound was small and sharp, like someone pressing the "Start" button on a firearm.
In front of the four-meter-tall mass of steel and flesh, she was nothing.
A speck of dust in the path of a war machine.
But she spread her arms, locking them into the exact geometry of a defensive stance. The hands that had once been trained to choke out her own batchmates now formed a wall.
Executioner's brain pulsed inside its tank, gray folds twitching.
The cannon arm whirred as it rose. The barrels glowed dull red with preheat, buzz building into the teeth-grinding whine of spinning metal.
Its targeting line locked.
Not on the limp scavenger.
Not on the fainted boy.
On her chest.
"Priority… mismatch," Li Xing noted silently.
By training, the instant she saw that cannon rise, she should've triggered evasive protocol. Drop the burdens. Use the terrain. Escape the kill zone.
Given the map and its firing arc, she estimated a 62% chance of breaking line of fire if she ran now.
Another thing rose stronger than the numbers.
She remembered the fortress that had fallen out of the blizzard for her.
The soft "good night" that had crossed a dead sky.
The strawberry-flavored nutrition bar she'd still been too reluctant to eat.
The bed.
The whisper, barely audible, that had said, Welcome home.
The lab never gave her those.
He did.
I can't… live like a number when he's watching, the girl told herself.
She didn't back away.
She lifted her chin a fraction instead—just enough to mark the line.
A loyal guard, confirming her stance in front of her charge.
She was standing on this side.
The cannon reached full spin. Heat shimmered at the muzzle, murder condensed into metal and velocity.
Li Xing didn't raise the "Thunderstorm" nailgun. Against S-class armor, it was closer to an insult than a weapon.
Instead, she did something else.
She opened her mouth.
And forced out a thread of sound from the bottom of her throat.
"Mm—ah—"
It wasn't in any key. It wasn't even really a melody.
Not because she was scared.
Because no one had ever taught her how to sing.
In her whole life, her voice had only ever been used for two things—reciting numbers, and issuing kill orders.
Now she was trying to give it a third.
A tune she'd hummed to herself in cages and dark rooms, barely audible over the buzzing lights… sung for the first time to someone else.
To another world.
She gambled.
That this was a trial sent down by her god.
That as long as she didn't run, as long as she sang the way her heart told her to, the gaze fixed on her from beyond the sky wouldn't turn away.
[Reality · Back Alley]
On the other side of the screen, Lu Jin felt something in his chest twist.
"This idiot…"
The insult came out shaking.
Executioner's cannon was already at full spin. Flames licked at the muzzle. Two seconds—maybe less—and those high-caliber depleted uranium rounds would turn her into a fine red mist.
Two seconds.
In those two seconds, Lu Jin's mind overclocked so hard it bordered on tearing itself apart.
Buy a gun? No money.
Buy a shield? Wouldn't matter.
His eyes skimmed the screen edge, caught on the black box behind Li Xing. The one she'd carefully set down like a talisman.
The Ark key.
A memory shard snapped into place.
A line buried in the flood of info Deep Space Echo had dumped into his head about Ark.
Ark constructs must obey Ark commands.
Hard-coded into the brains of their gene-soldiers and mechanical guardians.
If—and only if—you could prove you were "Ark high command."
How?
He had no ID card. No bio-signature.
His vision blurred. Hot blood trickled from his nose and dripped off his upper lip onto the glass. He gambled.
Gambled that the key was a master-token, something even a relic like that would recognize.
His fingers flew, each tap sending a spike of pain up his arm.
A new option flashed open in the interface.
[Service: Command Barrage (Priority · Full-Band Broadcast)][Description: Convert your text into a high-decibel synthetic voice and forcibly override ALL audio channels in the selected "instance dungeon" (wasteland only).][Price: ¥450.00]
"Buy it!"
Lu Jin shouted out loud.
[Payment Successful! Remaining Balance: ¥21.00]
His last ¥450 melted into a string of data.
He didn't type "Run" or "Help" or anything that sounded human.
He keyed in a string of sixteen-digit code he'd seen once in the system's info-dump—a top-secret Ark command string—and added one simple sentence.
[Wasteland · Resource Point No. 7]
Executioner's cannon screamed.
Just as the barrels started to fire—
"ZZZKKHH—!!"
Every speaker in the station shrieked at once.
Old subway announcements. Emergency intercoms. Even the internal comms running inside Executioner's own chassis all spat static in the same instant.
Then a voice dropped into the world.
Cold.
Mechanical.
Carrying the weight of an absolute order that didn't need to be loud to be heard.
"Command code: Ω-Alpha-990. Authority override."
The sound bounced off every wall of the underground space.
"Designation: Zero. Ownership confirmed."
Executioner's cannon arm seized mid-burst.
The brain inside its glass coffin convulsed, folds twitching violently as if someone had hit it with a hammer made of pure logic.
Li Xing cut her song off, eyes flying open.
She stared, breath sharp, at the killing machine in front of her… frozen like a puppet with its strings yanked tight.
The voice spoke again.
Just one word.
"Kneel."
BOOM.
There wasn't even a pause.
The S-class war relic that could wipe an army, the monster built to execute god-level targets, crashed down like its spine had been ripped out.
Both hydraulic knees slammed into the concrete. The floor cracked, dust geysered.
Executioner lowered its head.
The cannon arm pressed to the ground.
It bowed.
Standard posture for a subordinate acknowledging its master.
The red glare in its visual sensors flickered hard once, twice—
Then died.
Amber standby lights replaced them, dull and obedient.
Silence flooded the station.
Only Li Xing's ragged breathing made any sound at all.
She stared at the thing that had been unstoppable seconds ago, now crouched like a dog at her feet.
Is this… a miracle?
"Listener-sama…"
Her hand lifted, almost on its own, fingers stretching toward the bowed machine. At the last instant she stopped, curling them into a fist over the crumpled strawberry nutrition wrapper at her chest instead.
That voice—cold as it was—had protected her.
Just like the black fortress that had risen in the storm. Just like the warm light and the "welcome home."
Punishment and shelter.
Both his.
[Reality]
"Pft—"
Lu Jin couldn't hold the blood in anymore.
It sprayed across the phone screen in a wet cough.
The brain-burn from running at absolute rational output, layered over honest physical trauma, left him with barely enough strength to keep his eyes half-open.
But he'd done it.
He had conned an S-class weapon.
For ¥450.
New warnings crawled up in front of him, lines warping at the edges of his vision.
[WARNING: High-risk operation detected!][You have just forged a "highest priority Ark command" and broadcast it through the wasteland instance's local quantum network.][Detailed Warning: The forged signal has triggered an abnormal response in Ark core protocol "Omega." Expect "Cleaner" units to be activated to trace and purge the source within the resource point instance.][Note: Above consequences apply only within the game world. Real-world coordinates: stable. Please do not over-imagine cross-world assassinations. This system is broke and cannot afford that kind of marketing.]
Lu Jin stared at the text.
The edges of everything were going dark. His lips twitched up into something that might have been a smile on a better day.
"Come on then…"
His mouth moved soundlessly toward the empty air.
"As long as I don't die… we've got all the time in the world to play."
The phone slipped from his fingers and plopped into the filthy water.
On the way down, the balance number flashed one last, mocking time:
[¥21.00]
The screen dimmed as water seeped in—then flickered, just once.
A faint, almost shy line glowed at the bottom of the interface.
[Detected: Observation Target "Li Xing" attempting "reverse offering"…]
Lu Jin's eyes finally shut.
This time there was no calming song, no soft golden buff.
Only sirens, growing louder somewhere beyond the curtain of rain, as consciousness dropped out from under him.