Volume 2, Chapter 26 – Street Brawl（1）

At the main gate of No. 1 High, Bai Zhuqing was dragging a big backpack in one hand and carrying another on her back, shuffling forward in tiny, painful steps.

“Little Junior Sister…” She had to strain just to squeeze sound out of her throat. “You live so close… why did you stuff this much into the school…?”

Before coming, she’d figured that since Chen Jing’s family lived inside the Circuit City, somewhere on East Ring Road, not far from No. 1 High—about half an hour’s walk—the luggage wouldn’t be too much.

She’d only arranged for a van “just in case,” but it turned out to be exactly the right call.

Two more people followed behind Bai Zhuqing: a sweating Hu Hu and Chen Jing herself. The former had bags hanging front and back and was also carrying a few rolled-up flagpoles, while the latter had a pack on her back and was pushing a big suitcase, looking like she was heading off on a long trip.

“Little Senior Sister, how about you put it down first…” Chen Jing was a bit embarrassed too. “Just set it here by the wall in the passage. I’ll grab it myself right away, it’s fine…”

“It’s just this little weight…” Bai Zhuqing was sweating buckets but stubbornly kept going. She didn’t want to lose face in front of her junior sister.

But matter didn’t bend to human will. She hadn’t Entered the Dao yet, her strength was limited, and after two more steps she completely gave out, her whole body wobbling.

Seeing this, Chen Jing hurriedly set the suitcase flat, helped Bai Zhuqing sit on it, and suggested that everyone take a break first.

“?”

Loaded down with a pile of stuff, Hu Hu looked from Bai Zhuqing—sitting there in full “rest and recovery” mode—to the van parked right at the school gate, barely ten steps from the passage, and her smooth forehead filled with question marks.

Little Senior Sister is such small fry… Definitely can’t compare with Senior Sister…

Mm, I won’t expose her.

To avoid it looking like she was mocking her, she decided not to walk those extra few steps either and plopped down to rest with her.

It was a nice thought, but she clearly lacked practical experience. Every bit of it showed on her face and was caught perfectly by the seated Bai Zhuqing.

“Hu Hu, you don’t get it.” Bai Zhuqing took a breath, then raised a finger with solemn seriousness. “There’s a lot of nuance in when you take a break.”

What nuance?

Even Chen Jing pricked up her ears. She didn’t get it—wasn’t the van right there?

“Come on, Little Junior Sister.” Bai Zhuqing cleared her throat twice, primly straightening her skirt. “Tell us—what suspicions do you have, specifically, about your father’s disappearance?”

It was hot today. Bai Zhuqing wasn’t like Bai Xiang; the white stockings she usually wore under her clothes had been swapped for white thigh-highs.

Her little white dress was quite long, hanging down past her knees, so no one could see the real scenery.

Suspicions?

Chen Jing frowned, glancing around a little uneasily.

It was already six o’clock, and plenty of students were heading out—either going home or off to eat.

The three of them together drew plenty of attention. Even pressed against the wall, they caught a lot of sideways glances. So she had to lean in close and keep her voice low enough for just the three of them to hear. “I suspect Dad might have been hurt by someone.”

She just looked young, not childish. She wasn’t naive enough to still imagine that someone who’d gone missing inside the Circuit City for ten days would just walk home on his own.

Under normal circumstances, this kind of disappearance would be assumed to be someone getting caught by demons while walking at night.

Shadows under streetlights, cries for help from alleyways, strange footprints by the river, flickering stairwell lights… Tales like that were never in short supply, and every so often there really were incidents.

But Chen Jing had investigated her father’s disappearance together with her mother. The investigation wasn’t thorough, sure, but at the very least, when they went to petition Qingyun Pharmaceuticals, they noticed something: people who came with stories like theirs didn’t seem to be the only ones.

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“You come here every day, every day—didn’t I tell you already? Go to the police!”

Those were the security guard’s exact words at the gate. Chen Jing remembered them word for word.

That was their first day there. That “every day” clearly referred to others, which meant her father might not have been the only employee who’d gone missing—maybe not the only two or three, either.

From that, you could extend in two directions.

First: multiple employees disappearing from a company. In past news reports, this usually happened because something had gone wrong inside a lab.

A virus leak; an operator mishandling equipment and causing a fire or explosion—those kinds of accidents could cause mass casualties in one go.

The second leaned more toward conspiracy theory and usually only came up in neighbors’ gossip: the employee had learned something they weren’t supposed to know and was disposed of by the company.

Either way, the odds of her father being alive were low. And Chen Jing knew —from having watched it herself—that recently, Chen Zhien had been busy working overtime on some new project at the company. He’d even asked for leave at the last minute just to go thank Bai Xiang at the hospital.

When she’d asked him what project it was, he’d just played coy and said it was “top secret,” telling her and her mother not to overthink it, that life would be better in the future.

From his tone, he’d been completely confident in this new project. But considering how he’d ended up missing, it was hard for Chen Jing not to suspect that the source of it all was that “top secret information.”

These were conclusions she’d only reached after she’d calmed down and gone over everything in her head. After finishing, she’d already resolved that once they reached the dojo, she’d tell Bai Xiang all of it again.

“Then that’s it.”

Twisting a strand of hair, Bai Zhuqing’s expression grew serious too.

“If that’s what you’re suspecting… then let me ask: isn’t there a chance… that the people who hurt you—who want to hurt your father—are really just trying to stop him from sharing that ‘top secret information’?”

It was a very logical line of thought. Hu Hu and Chen Jing both nodded along.

Right. That was “silencing a witness.”

“Then might they come looking for you too?”

“Ah?” Chen Jing froze. Her first reaction was that it was impossible.

After all, she knew for a fact that even when he came home to spend time with her and her mother, her father had kept his mouth shut. He’d never said a thing.

But she quickly realized her little senior sister wasn’t just fearmongering.

Because the fact that “Chen Zhien didn’t say anything” was something she and her mother had no way to prove .

They had no way to prove that “we don’t know anything.” So if this was about silencing people, what reason would the people behind it have to spare them?

“So this break is to keep us from running ourselves to the limit… so we’re ready for a possible ambush…”

Now Hu Hu was stunned. She hadn’t expected Bai Zhuqing’s “nonsense logic” to actually be pretty sound.

But Chen Jing’s face had gone completely pale.

She wasn’t thinking about herself now—only her mother, who was home alone.

“Creak—”

“Screee—”

A dozen anti-riot vehicles pulled up at the gate and blocked the flow of traffic. In a heartbeat, dozens of Inspectorate Police armed with guns, riot shields, and bulletproof vests poured out.

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They gave the crowd no time to react, raising their shields to clear the road and sending over more than ten officers to surround the three girls.

“Target confirmed.”

Han Li lifted his visor and smiled at the three startled girls.

“Bai Xiang notified us.”

“She said you’re in danger.”

“She’s hired me to escort you back to the dojo.”

Ah! Sister Xiang’er actually…

Bai Zhuqing froze. She hadn’t expected that while she was so “strategically prepared,” Bai Xiang had not only thought of it already, she’d gone straight to putting protection in place.

She looked at the fully armed Inspectorate Police around her, even wearing ballistic helmets, and then at the little wooden practice sword stuck under her arm. The gap hit her all at once.

As expected of Sister Xiang’er.

So you didn’t tell me in advance… planning to use this to crush my confidence and make me give up?

No use!

I only like you more !

“Tch, unlucky.”

On the rooftop of an apartment building across the street, a man dressed like a vagrant hurriedly ducked his head back and pressed a finger to his earpiece. “Change of plans! You hear me? Change of plans!”

[Shhh…]

But all he got was static. The transmission was completely dead.

Deploying a wide-area jammer… just to pick up a little girl?

Eyes bulging, his scalp tingled all the way down to his toes. He didn’t even bother trying to warn his teammates, just hunched down and slipped into the stairwell.

At the same time, on the second floor above a nearby flower shop, a few people hid in the shadows, conferring in low voices.

“So many people…?”

“Did they cancel the mission?”

“No word. I checked in and got nothing back. That means we’re going to Plan B.”

“Plan B, huh… That’s going to be a big show…”

“Nothing we can do. They could’ve just killed her and left, but they had to make it a grand production.”

“Cut the crap. Let’s move.”

Talking as they worked, they dug out a pile of metal components from under the flowers and quickly assembled several large-caliber guns. One of them poked his head out the window—just in time to lock eyes with Han Li, who was scanning the surroundings.

Han Li’s reaction was fast. He immediately raised his own gun and took aim.

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But he hadn’t known what the suspects looked like beforehand, so he needed that instant to decide whether this was just a curious civilian or an actual hostile.

That instant was enough to keep him from firing first. By the time he saw clearly that the guy was wearing a black hood—the standard getup of a criminal—the man had already tossed something down.

“Shiel—”

Han Li hadn’t even finished shouting when the thing exploded in midair.

A thunderclap boomed overhead, showering fragments over the crowd and causing horrific carnage on the spot.

Even so, Han Li’s experience showed. Though his ears rang with pain, he still lunged forward on instinct, raising his riot shield to cover Chen Jing completely behind him.

He’d barely done that when his wrist went numb and a massive force slammed into him, knocking him flying and sending Chen Jing tumbling too.

What the hell was that?

Feeling the delayed spike of pain in his arm, Han Li cursed up a storm in his head.

A large-caliber sniper rifle? How did they even get that in here?

“Up there! Move!”

He barked orders, watching his subordinates spring into action—scaling walls and railings like parkour athletes, making it up to the second floor in under ten seconds. That finally eased his rage a bit.

But the next moment, standing in the shadow of the passage, he felt the ground and the whole building shudder.

Wha—

He had no time left to think. In his widened pupils, the ceiling of the passage suddenly caved in.

At the last critical moment, it was Bai Zhuqing and Hu Hu at his sides who pulled him and Chen Jing out of the way—one grabbing him and one grabbing Chen Jing. If not for them, the two of them would have been crushed and buried on the spot.

“Cough, cough, cough…”

The explosion inside the building kicked up a huge cloud of dust and smoke. Han Li and the others coughed as they looked up to see that half the tunnel over the gate had collapsed.

Outside the school, people were screaming and running.

The attack had caused widespread panic. Aside from those unable to move, most people bolted blindly, diving into nearby shops or alleys to find cover wherever they could.

Han Li had originally assumed the attackers had planted explosives inside the building. But when the smoke gradually thinned, revealing the bodies on the road—and the cracks in the ground—he realized those lunatics had also planted bombs in the sewer lines.

This was the damn gate of a school!

A rush of blood went straight to his head. Han Li couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this furious.

“Shh… shh…”

Movement sounded in the lingering haze.

Every Inspectorate Police officer who could still move overlapped their riot shields, protecting the front and overhead, peering out through the gaps with tense eyes as a figure took shape in the smoke.

Slowly, the outline grew distinct. Every eye widened as they stared at the thing standing in the middle of the street.

It stood upright like a person, about two meters tall, but it had a lizard’s face and its entire body was covered in deep-black scales.

Its wrists alone were as thick as a grown man’s thigh. Its limbs and chest were massively muscled, and a thick, long tail dragged behind it. Jagged black spikes jutted from the end of the tail, up along its spine to the nape of its neck, and at its elbows and knees.

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“Bio… beast… man…?”

Han Li stared at the lizard-man in disbelief, like he was seeing a nightmare that had no business appearing in reality.

“Open fire—!”

He barked the order, and he and the others unleashed a hail of bullets at the creature.

“Clang, clang!”

The bullets struck its scales and bounced right off. Even the large-caliber sniper rounds that nailed it in the torso only sank a little into the armor, not even forcing it a half-step back.

“I told you this is on you.”

Tilting its head, the lizard-man looked down at the bodies and wounded on the ground.

“This could’ve been over quickly.”

“Seriously, you just had to turn it into a spectacle.”

“Little girl.” It fixed its blood-red eyes on Chen Jing.

“Remember—they all ended up like this because of you…”

What did he say?

Chen Jing’s pupils constricted sharply.

“Bang bang bang—”

No one needed Han Li’s orders now. The Inspectorate Police who couldn’t stomach it anymore gritted their teeth and kept pouring fire into the thing.

But this time, their enemy wasn’t just standing there to be used as a target.

Its shadow flickered. The ground detonated under its feet, and in an instant it was inside the shield wall formed by twenty officers.

Crash!

The shields blew apart. It spread its arms, razor-sharp bone spurs snapping out from its wrists.

A young Inspectorate officer, face flushed, charged its lower leg and was swatted aside. The bone spur punched straight through his shield and into his skull, impaling both in one go.

Aah!

Someone else drove an electric baton into the gaps between its scales. It twisted, tail snapping around the man and tightening. The spikes along it drilled into his flesh in a spiral, stripping him from his own skeleton alive.

Eyes bloodshot, Han Li snatched up a sniper rifle from the ground, checked it, and aimed at the creature’s eye.

But it reacted as if it could feel the crosshairs on it, jerking its head aside and dodging the shot.

“Bang!”

The next instant, his instincts screamed. He ducked, and a whole chunk of the broken wall behind him vanished.