EM CH13

Chapter 13: Encounter Battle

Yu An stood sideways facing the mirror, using his peripheral vision to gauge positions within the reflection, before casually and quietly slipping the shoulder bag off his shoulder and holding it in his hand.

Everything in Xiliu Beauty Salon felt wrong. Having experienced so many hair-raising, eerie incidents in just two short hours, that Yu An could still maintain his sanity without being driven mad was entirely thanks to the courage he had trained while playing horror games.

Yet reality differed from games. Facing a computer screen, people held a psychological premise that no matter how terrifying a monster was, it could not smash through the display to attack them. The current situation was completely different: sharing a room with a severed hand meant there was a genuine risk of being attacked by it.

Under intense pressure, Yu An remained composed. He had originally intended to swing the backpack and smash it repeatedly against the floor, but considering someone was right next door, making too much noise would surely put him in an even more disadvantageous position.

Therefore, Yu An adopted Plan B.

Taking advantage of the moment the severed hand on his backpack wasn’t paying attention, he whipped the bag violently.

Caught off guard, the right hand lost its grip and went flying with a whoosh. It slammed hard onto the floor, seeing stars from the impact, and crawled away in a daze, only to crash headfirst into the wall in its panic.

Employing the precise footwork one would use to stomp a cockroach, Yu An stepped right onto it.

The right hand struggled fiercely, flipping and writhing under his sole like a freshly caught carp.

Yu An applied pressure with his foot, causing the severed hand to emit a painful creak. Struggling with its fingertips, it dipped into the wet pink wall paint and sketched a simple stick-figure face on the floor.

Messy, spiky hair like a ruffled chicken, with upper and lower rows of serrated fangs: clearly the face of a monster, with no way to tell what it was trying to express.

Yu An squatted down while keeping his foot on the severed hand, propping his chin as he examined the portrait it had drawn.

“Looks a bit like the interviewer.”

The right hand knocked furiously against the floor, exactly like a human nodding vigorously.

Yu An picked up the severed hand from beneath his boot, holding it by the wrist to inspect it.

It was a very beautiful right hand: long fingers, fair and soft skin, with well-defined knuckles glowing with a faint blush of pink. Although the interviewer had never removed his gloves in front of him, Yu An had imagined what kind of clean, translucent hands were hidden beneath that leather.

Was this the secret beneath his gloves? Could it be that his hands were never attached to his body in the first place? Had he sent a right hand to help him?

To stand out in the talent-laden Underground Railway and hold a position among the higher-ups, the interviewer was definitely not as gentle and considerate as he appeared on the surface.

Yu An grew even more certain of his hypothesis: the interviewer was undoubtedly a Vessel capable of embedding Aberrant Cores, and the embedded core was surely of high tier, granting him the ability to detach limbs and let them move freely.

Still, to think his hand was this good-looking.

Yu An stroked the palm of this right hand, rubbed along the fingers, pinched the fingertips twice, and brought it close to his nose to take a gentle sniff. The skin was tinted with a faint scent of wood, identical to the fragrance on the interviewer.

Dizzied and disoriented, the right hand curled its five fingers, its knuckles blushing with a shy flush.

Yu An sat flat on the floor, pressing close to the wall to listen to the commotion next door. The doctor inside seemed to be assembling some sort of steel components and hadn’t come out.

For now, he could only wait patiently.

During this time, Yu An whispered to the right hand, “Interviewer, did you smuggle a gun for me?”

Although Underground Railway did not publicly permit operatives to carry guns, a company this massive couldn’t possibly lack an armory behind the scenes.

The right hand wagged its index finger.

“What about a formidable Aberrant Core? Something combat-ready like the Goat Horns from before?”

The right hand blanked out for a moment, looking confused. Perhaps a limb separated from the torso possessed limited intelligence and could not comprehend complex vocabulary.

Yu An sighed: “Then what can you do?”

The right hand stood upright on the floor using its index and middle fingers, curling its thumb and pinky upward into an angle impossible for ordinary humans, flexing its nonexistent bicep for Yu An.

“Forget it.” Yu An picked up the right hand and let it perch quietly on his shoulder. “You’d better be able to fight.”

The white door next door swung open again. The male doctor stepped out and departed down the hallway to the right.

With his back against the white door, Yu An used his eyepiece to track the male doctor’s movements. Once the figure in the white coat disappeared around the corner, he gently pushed open the white door and edged along the wall into the neighboring room.

The instant he stepped inside, a pungent stench assaulted his senses: a sickening concoction of disinfectant and stale sweat that stung his eyes, as though he had walked into a livestock shed uncleaned for half a month.

Resting flat upon the hydraulic bed in the center of the salon was a mountain of flesh. Countless tangled catheters were hooked into the crevices between cascading folds of skin, liquid medication pumping steadily beneath the dermis through transparent tubes, several puncture sites already swollen and inflamed.

The beauty salon was already preparing to film a new installment of the Skeletal Art series; little rescue time remained for Yu An.

This body was even more massive than when Yu An had first seen it in the morgue of Guxian Hospital, likely injected with drugs that stimulated rapid weight gain.

Yu An pulled out the photograph Officer Ye had provided. Comparing it to the polite, genial gentleman in the picture, Mr. Zhou on the salon bed had practically lost all human form.

According to the file Officer Ye supplied, the missing patient, Zhou Gongxing, had stepped down from frontline research teams six years ago due to illness and received treatment at a hospital in Changhui City. However, side effects from medication caused morbid obesity, and the Eagle Bureau had yet to uncover why he appeared in Hongli City alone.

When he first heard the name, Yu An had found it familiar. But seeing this photo made Yu An realize that it wasn’t a shared name; this was indeed the Mr. Zhou from his memory.

Hardly any student majoring in precision mechanics wouldn’t know him: this portrait was printed directly on the preface page of their textbooks. Mr. Zhou was an engineer of exceptional prestige in the field of precision machinery who had co-authored dozens of professional volumes, truly worthy of being called an author whose works equaled his height.

Yu An walked up and shook his arm.

The bloated face resting against the headrest struggled to half-open its eyes, seeing the young man before him with an unfathomable dark void beneath his hood.

Mr. Zhou’s eyes rolled back, and he stopped moving. The monitoring equipment attached to him indicated he had been startled.

Yu An hurriedly pulled off the Pure Black Hood, using his dagger to sever the leather restraint straps securing Mr. Zhou. The right hand perched on his shoulder leaped down as well, helping to tug at the brass buckles on the belts.

After dealing with the belts, Yu An began removing the IV lines from Mr. Zhou’s body, carefully peeling away the adhesive tape and sliding the flexible needles out along their angles of insertion, the fine tips still spraying droplets of fluid.

“Go pull the tubes from his lower body,” Yu An quietly instructed the right hand that was spacing out nearby.

The right hand proved obedient, its five fingers scuttling rapidly across Mr. Zhou’s legs. Grabbing a dozen IV lines in one fist, it yanked them out all at once with a clatter, some needles still trailing specks of blood.

“…” Yu An clicked his tongue. Sensing it had caused trouble again, the right hand sheepishly retreated to the side, rubbing its fingertips together.

Yet Yu An soon realized this approach was actually faster. Gathering a bunch of IV lines himself, he pulled them out in one swift motion, then patched things up by dabbing at the bleeding punctures with a wad of gauze. No big deal.

The stinging sensation across his skin woke Mr. Zhou once more. This time, his eyes opened to the young man’s clean, delicate face.

Mr. Zhou spotted the compact mechanical eyepiece hooked to Yu An’s backpack, the exterior bearing the engraved characters “Changhui University.” He grew instantly agitated, his morbidly swollen fingers clutching Yu An’s backpack strap.

“Good… child… where did you come from…” His throat had been invaded by adipose tissue as well; words were forced through his constricted airway with immense difficulty, fragmented and broken. “Run quickly…”

“Professor, how much longer can you hold on?” Yu An attempted to push the salon bed. Although wheels were installed underneath, Mr. Zhou’s immense weight made the bed feel rooted to the ground; even with the right hand pitching in, Yu An couldn’t budge it an inch.

The blunt question left Mr. Zhou caught between laughter and tears. With great difficulty, he placed his massive, deformed hand over the young man’s, pulling his face into a strained smile: “As expected of… a Changhui student… My… death won’t be in vain…”

With his hands empty, Yu An exchanged glances with the severed right hand pinned beneath Mr. Zhou’s palm, the right hand forced to comfort the dying Mr. Zhou.

Yu An had never learned how to comfort others. What he excelled at was taking quiet action rather than making empty promises.

Continuing like this was no solution. The salon room was far too distant from the exit; wheeling Mr. Zhou out of the office building was an almost impossible task.

If only that Goat Horns core with its miraculous strength hadn’t been confiscated by the Eagle Bureau. However, Yu An had anticipated this scenario long ago: if he couldn’t move Mr. Zhou out, he would have to lure the danger away from him and stall until Officer Ye and her team obtained cross-regional arrest clearance.

Yet up until now, the Aberrant residing within the salon hadn’t shown its face, leaving Yu An with no certainty.

He felt no overwhelming sense of moral responsibility toward saving lives; he mostly just wanted to complete this assignment, and then say “nothing special” to the interviewer with total nonchalance, just to see what kind of interesting reaction would cross that face.

Yu An’s eyes scanned across the cluttered machinery and equipment in the room. When his gaze landed on one device, his pupils shrank instantly.

Directly facing the salon bed stood a video camera, powered on and actively recording.

The very first lesson a fledgling investigator learned in the field was to inspect the surrounding environment upon entering any room.

Run.

Yu An darted toward the doorway, attempting to push the door open and flee, but the white door only cracked open slightly before meeting resistance from outside.

A chill raced up his spine.

Without him noticing when it began, the male doctor with black-rimmed glasses had been standing outside, peering at Yu An through the peephole the entire time.

Throwing caution to the wind, Yu An repeated the trick he used against the smiling consultants, kicking outward against the door with all his might.

With a resounding crash, the hinges sheared off and the door split down the middle, collapsing inward. Yet the doctor with glasses didn’t fall; his head smashed through the door panel, his body unmoving, remaining slightly hunched over in the posture of peering through the peephole.

The moment their eyes met, the male doctor broke into a smile, his hand darting rapidly toward Yu An’s heart.

Buzz, buzz, buzz!

An irritating mosquito whine arose within the salon room. The patterns on the core in Yu An’s left eye lit up, and a pair of translucent gray wings unfurled from his back, fluttering so rapidly they blurred into afterimages.

Ha! Can’t hit me!

The screen on the Core Storage Analyzer at his waist lit up, displaying “Monstrosity Core: Night Mosquito” on the left with a mosquito icon beneath, while the right showed “Remaining Uses: 0.”

Yu An flapped his wings and slipped straight through the narrow gap between the doorframe and the male doctor’s arm.

The ability of Night Mosquito was to evade a single lethal attack. The doctor had merely thrown a punch toward Yu An’s chest, yet Night Mosquito judged it as a fatal strike; he was definitely not human.

Most likely, he was the Aberrant guarding this beauty salon.

Still comforting Mr. Zhou on the bed, the right hand was spooked by the loud explosion of the shattered door. It tumbled off the bed in panic, crawled around in two circles before finding its bearings, and scrambled out between the male doctor’s legs. Pattering its five fingers furiously, it sprinted after Yu An, only catching its breath once it latched onto his shoulder.

Drawn by Yu An, the male doctor turned around and began stalking after his escape route step by step.

Yu An mapped out the salon’s layout in his mind. Retracing his steps was a dead end because the smiling janitor was stationed at the covered skybridge, and beyond that skybridge stood a horde of manic smiling consultants. He had to take another route.

On the way here, there had been a larger storage area for equipment, the door bearing an ionizing radiation warning sign. With no other choice, Yu An ducked inside.

The lights were off in the room, with only the illumination from the corridor revealing the furnishings inside. Yu An took out his flashlight.

The energy of Night Mosquito was completely depleted. The core had turned a dull gray, feeling increasingly dry and scratchy in his socket, like a ball of wadded-up scrap tissue shoved inside.

Yu An pried out the spent Night Mosquito and slotted it back into the analyzer. Only three Aberrant Cores remained in the slots.

One was the Tier 3 Blue Eagle Wings, but in a room this cramped, flight ability offered zero tactical advantage.

Yu An retrieved Functional Core: Satan’s Guidance and pressed it into his socket, a faint purple light swirling as the link established.

Frequently swapping cores brought a dull, stinging ache to the interior of his left eye socket.

Scattered across the floor were two lead aprons used for radiation shielding. Yu An carefully edged along the wall sideways, trying to locate another exit, but he couldn’t run too far; he had to ensure the male doctor kept following him rather than doubling back to dissect Mr. Zhou midway.

An antique X-ray machine was housed in the room, an old model resembling a vintage fitting room: an imaging panel stood in front, while the generator sat behind, requiring a person to stand between them for fluoroscopy.

The machine was active, humming loudly as it ran, severely disrupting Yu An’s hearing and preventing him from tracking the doctor’s footsteps.

Just then, the right hand perched on his shoulder began tugging frantically at Yu An’s hair, gesturing for him to look toward the doorway.

The male doctor had already followed inside. Stepping over the lead aprons strewn across the floor, he bent down to search beneath desks and chairs for Yu An.

Yu An crouched beneath a recessed compartment near the X-ray machine, watching the doctor approach step by step.

Wearing an uncanny smile, the male doctor walked stiffly toward the compartment where Yu An hid, slowly bending over until their eyes met.

The moment their gazes locked, purple light flared in Yu An’s left eye, the goat skull demon on the core’s surface grinning wickedly.

The base ability of Functional Core: Satan’s Guidance was to make the target lose all sense of direction.

Stricken by the effect, the doctor’s eyes grew hazy as he stood up, swaying in a stupor.

Yu An drew his dagger and lunged.

Gripping the forged-steel dagger in reverse with his right hand and raising his left fist in defense, he launched a flying kick straight at the doctor’s cheek.

Confused by Satan’s Guidance, the doctor’s reaction time was severely sluggish. He barely raised an arm to block Yu An’s left leg, but Yu An abruptly twisted his torso to whip his right leg around, the ferocious impact kicking the doctor flat onto the ground.

Yu An kept the interviewer’s teaching firmly in mind: an Aberrant’s movement relied on the Aberrant Core within its body; unless that core was gouged out, it would always get back up.

Decisive and ruthless, Yu An pounced forward to pin the doctor down with his body weight, plunging the dagger into his torso, using the blade tip to dig through flesh and blood for the core’s location.

Not here. Not in the left flank, not in the chest… not in the thighs…

Where on earth was it located?!

The doctor drove his leg upward, his knee slamming violently into Yu An’s abdomen and flipping him off his body onto the floor.

Yu An rolled over to escape, but the doctor’s powerful hand caught him by the back of the neck, hoisting him high into the air before hurling him violently against the wall.

“Ah! Ngh…” Yu An slammed into the wall and tumbled to the floor, scraping his cheek raw as his bones groaned under the impact. The fall left him dizzy, his internal organs churning, unable to scramble back up for a long moment.

Like a rusted automaton, the male doctor straightened his frame inch by inch with jerky motions, the puncture wounds carved by the dagger weeping blood, slowly dying his white coat crimson.