Chapter Nineteen: If Escape Is Impossible, Then Fight
Yan Luo and Xu Han, each supporting one of Chu Qingfeng’s arms, carried his one-legged frame as they ran. Wang Dongwei dragged the ball-like Zhu Xiaoyong behind him, with Li Changxin and Yatogami Yari following—seven people in all, desperately fleeing for their lives.
“I can’t… I can’t run anymore…” Zhu Xiaoyong panted heavily, while Chu Qingfeng’s face was ashen with fear—afraid of being left behind.
The mansion where they’d entered, and the portal within, were now far behind. Under the crushing tension of this prismatic, distorted spacetime, physical exhaustion set in quickly. The bio-aberration, the chaotic monstrosity, was already upon them.
“Even the guide is dead—we can’t escape, none of us can! We’re all going to die…” Zhu Xiaoyong wailed in despair.
Yan Luo silently checked the reserves of the Heartless Marionette. He’d set his talent to absorb only fear, disgust, and madness. Now, the first two were at their limits; madness lagged by eight points. Sadly, in this dire situation, the emotions radiating from Zhu Xiaoyong were fear and hopelessness.
“The boss is here!” Chu Qingfeng glanced back. A brain-like mass, over three meters in diameter, its surface wrinkled and veined with blood, bristling with tendrils and a thick neural cord, surged after them. At its tip, a single enormous eyeball glared, white as bone, its pupil a vivid red—barely thirty meters away.
“If we can’t escape, then we fight!” declared Li Changxin, her gentle image shattered. She had surpassed human limits; now, there was nothing adorable about her. Her lovely face twisted into a bizarre, bloodshot-eyed snarl, eyes glinting with a predator’s light.
She tightened her grip on her hatchet.
“Human, ghost, monster, god! All must die! Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!” The girl’s slender body trembled, black mist visibly rising from her skin. Her delicate, almost translucent hand, veins standing out, brandished the black hatchet and pointed it toward the bio-aberration.
Yan Luo stopped, waiting for his emotional gauge to reach one hundred.
As he halted, Xu Han had no choice but to stop as well. Zhu Xiaoyong, long since unable to run, collapsed to the ground, dragging Wang Dongwei down with him.
Everyone came to a standstill.
“Fight the boss? Impossible! We can’t win! Even the guide is dead—we’re just rookies!” Mortician Xu Han felt despair welling up inside.
“Is she… scared?” Wang Dongwei looked at Li Changxin, unable to comprehend how such a delicate, adorable girl could be trembling with fear, yet still find the courage to face this monstrous boss.
“Scared? Not at all!” Li Changxin’s eyes bulged wide, veins throbbing on her forehead, a manic grin twisting her features. “I’m excited—so excited! Ahahahaha, I’m thrilled, hahahaha, hahahahaha…”
You sense a surge of emotion:
Madness +2
Six points to go.
The bio-aberration paused, and a searing beam of light shot from its eyeball.
“Bang!”
Li Changxin swung her hatchet up to meet the beam—an iron clang rang out, as if metal met metal. The energy blast, unbelievably, was cleaved into oblivion by her. Yet the hatchet, unearthed from the inner world, shattered to fragments.
Countless black shards fluttered like butterflies. One sharp piece spun past, grazing her cheek and leaving a thin line of blood.
Her smile froze, turning as cold as ice. She looked down at the broken handle in her right hand, lifted her left to her wounded cheek, and stared at the red threads seeping from the cut. She brought her fingers to her eyes, gazing at the crimson liquid staining them.
She extended her pink tongue and gently licked her finger.
Sweet, and salty…
You sense a surge of emotion:
Madness +2
Four points to go.
Li Changxin lifted her head again, staring at the twisted monster forty meters away.
The enormous eyeball flashed again—a beam lanced out.
“Danger!” Someone charged from the side, body-checking the dazed Li Changxin out of harm’s way.
“Boom!”
Chunks of flesh, intermixed with shattered meat, exploded through the air.
Failed to surpass the human limit: Wang Dongwei.
Dead.
Zhu Xiaoyong was stunned. He had never imagined that Brother Wang, who had cared for him these past two days, would die so abruptly.
Li Changxin, too, stared blankly at the severed limbs and flesh scattered across the ground, her thoughts lost in chaos and confusion.
“Uncle!”
The chuunibyou girl, Yatogami Yari, tears streaming down her face—if Wang Dongwei had still been alive, he would have been devastated to hear this fourteen-year-old girl call him ‘uncle’. But now, he could never hear it again.
“Uuuu…”
The girl tore off her eyepatch. She was no longer playing at delusions; her face was set with seriousness and resolve.
Beneath the eyepatch, a golden eye shone—crystalline as a jewel, radiant as purest gold.
“Fantasy Projection!”
The golden gaze seemed to illuminate the dim space around them. Where her right eye focused, a sword of pure golden light began to take shape in the void.
Fate Talent: Eye of Fantasy.
A chuunibyou girl, wishing on the power of hope to have a ‘Demon King’s Eye,’ had birthed this power.
She could project weapons and equipment from her imagination.
The cost: mental energy.
“Uuuu… I’ll avenge you, Uncle!”
Gripping her projected sword of light, Yatogami Yari faced the boss with fury. A beam erupted from the boss’s eyeball, slicing through the air toward her. Flustered, she raised the sword to block it. Unlike the hatchet, the sword of light did not explode.
But the impact of the energy forced the little girl back several steps, and she fell to the ground.
“Out of my way—leave it to me!” Li Changxin, eyes bloodshot, rushed forward and seized the sword of light, charging again at the twisted monster. The black mist swirling about her body seeped into the sword, dyeing it a deep, soul-consuming black.
“Bang!”
An oncoming beam was cleaved into nothingness by Li Changxin’s black sword.
You sense a surge of emotion:
Madness +2
Two points to go.
“In the darkness, open your eyes.”
“Who is it that turns tears into drops of blood, trickling down the cheek…”
“One by one, they are taken away, disappearing…”
Li Changxin swung her black sword, her entire figure wreathed in shadow. In the shifting, prismatic realm, amidst the ever-changing radiance, she seemed to charge through gunfire, slicing apart each beam shot from the bloodshot, pallid eyeball.
The space flickered with light. Each white beam, cleaved by the black sword, vanished into oblivion.
“There’s no turning back now…”
“Come, let it all go…”
The gap between the girl and the twisted monster closed—forty meters, thirty, twenty, ten…
A harsh, scraping sound erupted. The aberration’s thick tendrils swept sideways, and from the dark, blood-red flesh at each joint, eyes traced in thin lines cracked open. More than a dozen fine beams shot out in rapid succession.
“Hiss.”
Amid the smoke of burning flesh, a dozen tiny holes appeared in Li Changxin’s body.
Yet her stride never faltered. She charged to the monster’s side, leapt high, and with both hands drove the black sword downward—a tableau frozen in time: the ashen brain mass, the corpse-white eyeball, the blood-red pupil; the girl, sword in hand, hair streaming, features twisted in mania.
“I grant you a blood-soaked oblivion!”
The black sword pierced the eyeball, a crystalline shatter echoing as if glass had been split by steel. The aberration’s surface erupted in a web of cracks; blood fountained from the wound, gushing forth from the crimson pupil, drenching Li Changxin in a torrent of scarlet.
You sense a surge of emotion.
Madness +2
One hundred emotional points—maxed out.
With each fresh geyser of blood, the eyeball shriveled rapidly: from basin-sized, to football, to apple, until at last it shrank to a lump barely the size of a ping-pong ball, color fading to ashen grey.
Another part of the twisted monstrosity had been destroyed.
But one, the strongest, remained:
Bio-Aberration: The Lost Brain
A hum resounded.
The blood-soaked girl’s black sword, the projected sword of light, exhausted its energy and vanished.
“Ahahahaha, ahahaha…”
Soaked in blood, the madly laughing girl was lifted by an invisible force. The protein-rich brain matter writhed, swelled, and contracted. With an intangible psychic force, the monster hurled her across the space—she crashed into a wall over ten meters away, bones shattering audibly.
“Black Coffin Seal!”
Xu Han again invoked his talent. The bio-aberration, at its core, was still a corpse. A massive coffin materialized from the void, engulfing the three-meter-wide brain mass.
But this was only an ordinary wooden coffin—one that couldn’t even contain Dr. Smith earlier, let alone a chaos-corrupted, twisted aberration spawned by the miniature world.
Within moments, cracks webbed the coffin’s surface.
Gray brain matter oozed from the fissures.
“Two portions of madness, two of disgust, six of fear—one hundred emotional points. Persona Mask, fusion.”
The Heartless Marionette’s fate talent activated. In Yan Luo’s mind, three beams of light converged, and the outline of a mask began to form.
“Fusion successful.”
Yan Luo raised his right hand. A mask of black, red, and grey hovered above his palm. Expressionless, he stared at the bio-aberration as it burst from the broken coffin, then extended his index and middle fingers, pressing the mask to his face, veiling his features.