The rain didn't let up.
Dirty water, full of exhaust and ash, ran off the rooftops and straight down Lu Jin's hair, into his collar. It slid along his spine like something cold and alive. He sat slumped against a trash bin that reeked of sweet, rotten food, his left hand locked on his right arm where the bone had snapped. Every breath dragged over his lungs like rusted sandpaper.
On his phone, the warning window pulsed in a frantic red rhythm, throwing bloody light over the alley walls.
[LETHAL WARNING: S-class threat entity has locked onto target!][Estimated party wipe countdown: 00:00:03]
Lu Jin didn't bother watching the countdown.
His gaze went past the cracked glass, locked on the feed from the wasteland. In the center of the frame, something peeled itself out of the dark.
Not a creature. Not a machine.
A torture device someone had forced to stand upright.
Over four meters tall. Its "muscles" had the color of spoiled meat, slabs of flesh hung across a titanium skeleton. The right arm ended in a spinning multi-barrel gun. The left arm was a chainsaw still dripping with hot, viscous oil. Worst of all was the head—a glass tank slotted onto the neck, cloudy liquid sloshing inside around a brain that still thumped and flexed. Cables burrowed into that mass of tissue like black worms.
Each breath the thing took pushed a cloud of faint blue dust from the vents along its back, radiation visible even through the screen.
"Chee—"
The Geiger counter on Li Xing's side went wild, its scream hissing out through Lu Jin's cheap phone speaker and straight into his ear.
[Target ID: Ark Prototype Bioweapon "Executioner" (S-09)][Status: Berserk / Hostile][Weakness Analysis: None (for your current level, anyway)]
Another window rolled over the image. This time there were no rainbow borders, no stupid ad effects. Just plain black text on white.
[Situation: Absolute crisis detected.][Recommended solution: Orbital kinetic strike (tungsten penetrator, single shot).][Description: There is nothing one tungsten rod cannot solve. If there is, try two.][Salvation price: ¥999,999.00][Current balance: ¥471.00]
"Ninety-nine… thousand…"
Lu Jin stared at the number. A dry laugh tore itself out of his throat. The movement tugged on the damage in his chest; he bent over and spat out a mouthful of bloody foam onto the concrete.
Deep Space Echo didn't even bother throwing the usual ten-thousand-yuan heavy weapons at him this time. It knew those toys wouldn't even scratch an S-class monster. So it skipped straight to the only cheat-code answer and put the price on the moon.
Then watched the poor bastard die.
"Sell you off…" He dragged the back of his thumb over the purchase button and hit cancel. "Still wouldn't cover the deposit."
He wiped the blood from his mouth with the same hand and stabbed a finger at the corner of the screen, dismissing the prompt.
No orbital gun. No backup.
Four hundred seventy-one yuan and one body that barely qualified as a corpse-in-progress.
That was it.
Wasteland – No. 7 Resource Point, Deep Zone
The air in the subway station carried the sharp bite of scorched ozone.
When the Executioner took its first step, the floor shivered. The oppressive force rolling off it didn't care about species, rank, or courage. Little Rock, crouched behind a broken pillar, didn't even manage a scream; his eyes rolled back and he went limp. The old man dropped like wet cloth, only his arms still clamped around the black metal box that had dragged him through so many hells.
Only Li Xing stayed upright.
That was the exoskeleton's work as much as hers.
The Wasteland Wolf's spine unit hummed low, armor plates around her throat, chest, and knees ratcheting tighter. The metal frame bristled, every joint on edge. Danger indicators flooded her visor in red, one after another.
She dismissed them. One after another.
Her heart hammered, but the rhythm held.
Pupils tight. Breath cycling the way someone had drilled into her long ago—inhale, hold, exhale longer, leave room for explosive movement. No one had needed to remind her. The pattern was burned into her nerves with electricity and drugs.
S-class.
Top of the food chain out here. The kind of target she'd been forced to watch in lab footage, frame by frame, until she could recite its kill radius in her sleep. Those files had all carried the same tag in the corner: Engagement Forbidden.
But forbidden to fight had never meant allowed to run.
Priority protocols rose from the bottom of her memory, older than that "forbidden."
Protect the subject first.
Back when she was just a number, they'd played that line on a loop while they wired her muscles and broke her bones. You stand in front. You stay in front. Until you can't stand.
Her legs didn't give. The exoskeleton didn't shift back an inch.
Every fiber in her body shrieked at her to drop, to dive, to cling to the floor. She stepped forward instead, bringing Little Rock and the unconscious old man fully under the projected shield zone of the Wasteland Wolf.
Crack.
Her boot crushed a tile. The sound wasn't loud, but in that dead-still station it had the weight of a switch being flipped.
In front of the four-meter monster, she was nothing. Dust in the muzzle flash.
She still spread her arms, locking into the standard guard stance the trainers had beaten into her. Those hands, once used to kill other test subjects on command, lined up perfectly to form a wall.
Behind the glass dome on the Executioner's shoulders, the brain twitched.
The minigun arm rose, barrels whining as they spun up. The targeting feed on Li Xing's visor showed three moving lines converging—not on Little Rock. Not on the old man.
On her chest.
"Priority… scrambled," she thought, weirdly calm.
According to every rule she knew, the instant that S-class weapon tracked her, she should have triggered Evade Protocol, dropped the baggage, and used the pillars for cover. By her mental math, she had a sixty-two percent chance to slip out of the firing arc.
Something else shoved those numbers aside.
She remembered the way the black fortress had erupted from the blizzard for her. Remembered that quiet "good night" across a gulf of stars. Remembered the strawberry-flavored nutrition bar she hadn't wanted to finish in one go. The soft bed in the shelter. The shy little "welcome home," barely voiced.
None of that came from the lab.
It was his.
"I can't… live like a number when he's watching."
She said it to herself, barely a thought.
She didn't dodge. She lifted her chin a little, almost formal, like a trained bodyguard confirming her post in front of a VIP.
She stood on the "target's" side.
The Executioner's barrels spun to full speed. The muzzle threw off a red glow that lined up neatly with her heart.
Li Xing chose not to raise the nail gun. Against S-class armor, that thing was a joke. Instead, she did something that would've gotten her punished in any lab.
She opened her mouth.
A shaky sound slipped out. Thin, but steady enough to carry.
"Mm—ah—"
It barely qualified as a melody.
Not because she was terrified—though she was—but because no one had ever taught her how to sing like a person. In training files, voices served two roles: give numbers, give kill phrases.
Now she was trying to use hers for a third.
It was the tune she'd hummed in cages to herself when the lights went out. First time she'd ever sent it out to someone else.
She gambled.
That this was a trial her "god" had dropped on her. That if she didn't break, if she sang straight through the muzzle flash, the gaze on her from that other world wouldn't turn away.
Reality – The Alley
On the other side of the glass, Lu Jin watched that stupid girl sing with her eyes closed in front of a spinning minigun.
Something ugly twisted in his chest.
"Idiot…"
He cursed her under his breath, voice shaking.
Two seconds. That was all she had before those shells turned her into mist.
Two seconds.
In those two seconds, his mind ran hot. Plans flared and died too fast to count.
Buy a weapon? Too late. Too weak.Buy a shield? Pointless. Wrong scale.
His gaze skimmed the corner of the screen and snagged on a detail—on the black box behind Li Xing, the one she'd set down like a talisman.
The Ark key.
A phrase he'd shrugged off when reading the system's lore feed slammed into place.
"Ark constructs must obey Ark orders."
Hard-coded. Deep layer. Below morality, above fear.
If—and it was a big if—he could prove he outranked whatever control node the Executioner was listening to.
But he had no Ark ID. No gene tag. No right.
All he had was that key and a fragment of a classified hex string he'd glimpsed in a scrolling wall of text and copied for absolutely no good reason at the time.
His vision fuzzed. Blood ran from his nose and hit the phone screen, spreading across Li Xing's face on the feed.
He bet anyway.
Bet the key counted as a master token. Bet the old war machine still recognized the call sign.
His fingers flew. Each tap felt like someone hammering inside his skull.
[Purchasing service: Command Barrage (Rush Order · Full-Band Broadcast Edition)][Description: Convert your text into high-decibel synthetic voice and force-inject it into all audio channels in the target "instance dungeon" (wasteland line only).][Price: ¥450.00]
"Buy it!"
He rasped the words out loud.
[Payment complete! Balance: ¥21.00]
His last four hundred and fifty yuan turned into raw data. The input box blinked open.
He didn't type "Run" or "Help" or any other useless plea.
He keyed in sixteen characters of hex he had no business knowing—Omega-level Ark override—and one short command.
Wasteland – No. 7 Resource Point
The Executioner's barrels howled at full spin.
Just as the trigger impulse hit—
"BZZT—!"
Every speaker in the station screamed in protest. Even the Executioner's internal comms flickered, sound surging straight into its control systems.
Then a voice dropped into the station like a hammer.
Metallic. Distant. Cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature. It wasn't loud, but every syllable carried the weight of a rule written into hardware.
"Command code: Ω-Alpha-990. Authority override."
The air itself seemed to wait.
"Codename: Zero. Ownership confirmed."
The Executioner's minigun arm locked in place mid-fire. The brain in its glass tank convulsed, sending ripples through the pale tissue. Whatever ran its combat routine just took a direct hit from something higher up the food chain.
Li Xing's off-key humming cut off. Her eyes snapped open.
The next word hit like a dropped verdict.
"Kneel."
Boom.
There was no resistance. No delayed reaction.
The S-class war engine that could wipe out a battalion crashed down. Its hydraulic knees slammed into the concrete so hard the entire platform split. Dust rushed up in a wave.
It lowered its heavy head. The gun arm that had been pointed at Li Xing pressed flat to the ground. The position was perfect, almost ceremonial—a textbook image of submission, pointed not at her, but at the authority that had spoken through her world.
The hostile red indicator in its optics blinked, sputtered, then went out. A dull amber glow settled in its place.
Standby. Compliance.
Silence.
The whole station went still.
Only Li Xing's breathing filled the space, coming fast and harsh into her helmet mic. She stared at the thing that had been seconds from killing her, now prostrated like a guard dog.
This…
A miracle?
"Listener…"
Her hand lifted toward the Executioner's bowed head out of pure instinct, fingers hovering for a second above the scarred plating. She stopped mid-air, curling them back and clutching instead at the empty strawberry-bar wrapper against her chest.
That sound—those words—had been his. Distant, filtered, artificial, but his.
Cold, yes. But no colder than a fortress rising out of a blizzard.
Punishment and protection, both with her name on them.
Deep Space Echo chimed, almost politely.
[Detected: Observed Target "Li Xing" chose "Last Stand Guard" behavior under S-class suppression and witnessed high-tier miracle event.][Emotion Profile: Desperate Protection A · Awe of Miracle A–]
[Holy Resonance EXP: +70]
[Observed Target: Li Xing][Holy Echo Realm: Mortal Echo · Faint Light Stage][Level: LV2][EXP: 174 / 500 → 244 / 500][Progress: Faint Light LV2 (244 / 500)][Note: Portion of this feedback has been auto-routed to maintain Host's consciousness threshold, delaying short-term mental collapse.]
Reality
"Kh—"
Lu Jin couldn't hold it anymore. Blood burst out of his mouth and splattered across the screen, mixing with the rain.
The razor-edged clarity from earlier had burned out. His nerves felt hollowed. Every twitch of thought sent flashes of white behind his eyes.
He couldn't lift his hand.
But he'd done it.
He'd conned an S-class monster for four hundred and fifty yuan.
The System didn't share his sense of humor.
[Warning! High-risk operation detected!][The "Ark" master command you just faked has produced full-spectrum ripple effects within the wasteland instance's quantum network.][Details: The forged directive has triggered abnormal activity in Ark Core Protocol "Omega." Expect "Janitor" units to activate and trace the signal origin within the resource-point dungeon.][Note: Consequences apply to game world only. Real-world coordinates: safe. Please do not panic about cross-world assassinations. This system is broke and cannot afford that kind of marketing.]
The lines swam in front of his eyes. He could barely read them, but the gist still landed.
He'd poked a god he didn't even believe in.
Good.
"Come on then…"
His lips moved soundlessly. He couldn't push enough air to make it audible.
"As long as I'm not dead… we can keep playing."
The phone slipped from his fingers. It hit the filthy water at his side and bobbed once, the glow smeared by ripples and rain. The balance number—[¥21.00]—stood out in the corner like a joke.
As the water crept into the casing, the interface shivered one last time.
A faint prompt flickered up from the bottom.
[Detected: Observed Target "Li Xing" is attempting "reverse offering"…]
Lu Jin's eyes closed. His awareness sank, pulled down into the dark. No calming hymn came to hold him up this time.
Only sirens, closer than before.