“Never heard of the Corrosion Zone? So this really is somewhere else?” Feng Xue frowned, but the man had clearly run out of patience. With a wave of his hand, the two underlings immediately pulled their triggers!
“Bang! Bang!”
After all, Feng Xue had undergone a period of special training. The moment the burly man waved, he had already moved. The powerful neural reflexes granted by the Phantom Dragon Soul Type III even allowed him to catch the instant the bullets left the barrels. Roughly judging their trajectories, Feng Xue pushed off with his feet and shot toward the evacuation point without a second thought.
It was only three hundred meters. With his current weight and strength, thirty seconds at most—
“You still dare run?!”
There was a trace of mockery in the bald man’s angry shout. His figure abruptly lowered, the crude fabric splitting slightly to reveal a pair of mechanical legs brimming with explosive power.
In an instant, he left the two gun-wielding underlings behind, making them give up on shooting at once.
Listening to the whistling wind behind him, Feng Xue’s expression grew uglier and uglier. He knew his own strengths and weaknesses very well, and this almost completely flat terrain clearly offered him no room to bring his advantages into play.
The howling behind his ears drew closer and closer. Feng Xue’s brain, enhanced by the Phantom Dragon Soul, completed the distance calculation in an instant.
“No, I have to dodge!”
Realizing that if he kept charging forward he would inevitably be caught, Feng Xue suddenly exerted force with the tips of his toes. His overly light body came to a stop almost without burden, then twisted through the air along the burst of force from underfoot. And in the very next instant after he completed that change of direction, a figure smashed down onto the spot where he had just been.
“Pretty quick reactions!” Seeing that his strike had missed, the bald man turned his wrist, and the electric dagger instantly shifted from an ice-pick grip to a hammer grip. The flickering arcs of electricity lit up that vicious face, making it look especially ferocious.
His massive body was like a wall, blocking Feng Xue’s path, forcing him to tighten his grip on the metal bat in his hand.
“Tch.”
Understanding that a fight was unavoidable, Feng Xue sighed. Recalling the contents of Blacksteel International’s armed combat course, he raised the bat and assumed a counter stance meant for facing short weapons.
Seeing that Feng Xue seemed intent on resisting, the bald man split his mouth in a grin, and his entire body shot forward.
The leg prosthetics granted him explosive power like a cannonball fired from the barrel. His mechanical arm stretched forward, the electric dagger thrusting straight for Feng Xue’s throat!
This advance was so simple and direct that, the moment the bald man tensed his body, Feng Xue had already finished predicting his move. He did not attempt to block with this overly light body—instead, just like before, he kicked hard off the ground, trying to evade.
The buzzing dagger swept past in front of him. But before Feng Xue could feel any joy, that rather crude-looking mechanical prosthetic suddenly completed a reverse-joint change of direction.
Feng Xue had, at any rate, studied with the old man for some time. Looking at the elbow joint of the prosthetic, he knew it possessed such a function. The instant he realized the other party’s intention, Feng Xue, filled with helplessness, raised the bat in his hand.
“Clang!”
Though he did not want to clash head-on, if he did not block now, this blow would probably knock him flat. Along with that dull metallic impact, Feng Xue only felt as if his whole body were floating.
Fortunately, his strength was not exactly small. While his body was being pushed back by the force, the bald man’s attack was also knocked aside.
This exchange was only an appetizer. Just as Feng Xue intended to borrow the force and retreat, a huge foot had already slammed viciously into his knee.
His upper body, which had originally been leaning back, pitched forward like a lever, and his entire body lost balance in that instant. The gap in actual combat experience was simply too great. Even though Feng Xue’s neural reflexes far surpassed the bald man’s, he had no way to further expand that advantage.
At this moment, Feng Xue was like Sasuke when he first met Lee. His eyes could clearly keep up, but the gap in their bodies left him with no room to make use of it.
Bang!
The mechanical prosthetic that had tossed aside the dagger seized Feng Xue’s hand together with the bat in one grip. Along with the sharp pain of his hand bones shattering, Feng Xue was violently yanked back, and immediately afterward, a large hand clamped around his throat.
“Dodge, then. Why aren’t you dodging anymore?”
The bald man lifted Feng Xue up like a rag doll, seeming to want to savor the sight of his desperate struggle. But unexpectedly, in the eyes of this fellow who was already on the verge of death, there was not the slightest fear. Instead, there was a trace of incomprehensible surprise.
That expression made the bald man’s scalp prickle. He could not help adding a bit more force. But Feng Xue, who was nearly being crushed to death, had his attention entirely elsewhere at this moment, because—
[Unrecorded entry detected. Record it? Note: Recording an entry will cause irreversible damage to the entry’s carrier. You may also obtain this entry by installing the prosthetic.]
“Record it!”
Feng Xue, whose consciousness had already mostly shifted back to his main body, issued the command. In the next instant, the metal prosthetic gripping Feng Xue’s hand suddenly began to twist and disintegrate. Just like the lightweight prosthetic arm before, it turned into fragments smaller than a thumb.
“AAAAAAAH! Bastard!”
Although he did not know how his prosthetic had been destroyed, the feedback from his pontine processor and the simulated pain left him no time to care about the fact that a living person was worth more. As his left hand suddenly exerted force, the screen of Feng Xue’s golden finger abruptly went dark, and that final bit of consciousness also returned to his main body.
When his throat had been seized, Feng Xue had already transferred most of his consciousness back to his main body, so he did not have much of a real sense of death. Just as he was about to check the entry he had recorded earlier, lines of text had already popped up first on the golden finger panel—
[Character dead. Synchronization lost.]
[Side objectives completed: None]
[Evacuation failed. Supplies lost.]
[Achievement unlocked: First Death]
“...”
Feng Xue looked at the few lines of text, his gaze stopping on the word “Achievement,” which looked like a hyperlink and had been specially highlighted in a different color. As his attention focused on it, a pop-up window unfolded:
Achievement: First Death
Unlock Condition: Character’s first death in action
Reward: [Battle Continuation]
Remarks: The first time always leaves a deeper impression, but once it happens more often, you get used to it.
……
“So achievements give entry rewards too? But if dying once gets an achievement, why didn’t I get an achievement when I made prosthetics before? Don’t tell me only combat gives achievements?”
Feng Xue muttered inwardly, but he still could not help opening the entry library. At a glance, he saw the newly obtained entry—
Entry: Battle Continuation
Type: Trait
Quality: White Common
Effect: Grants an item the Battle Continuation trait. The wielder of this item can still fight at full strength for 15 seconds after death. The death state is irreversible. This trait can only trigger once for the same character.
Remarks: Dead but not yet out of breath, though dead all the same.
……
“How should I put it... better than nothing, I suppose? But if I really can use Source Energy to create prosthetic avatars, it might be somewhat useful.”
After Feng Xue finished looking at its attributes, he stopped paying attention to it and instead focused on the entry he had stripped from the bald man’s hand earlier—
Entry: Great Strength
Type: Skill
Quality: White Common
Effect: An item with this entry gains a skill. After activation, output increases by 200% for 10 seconds. Cooldown: 10 minutes. Identical skills do not share cooldowns.
Remarks: Great strength works miracles.