EM CH14

Chapter 14: Two Against Two

“Team Leader, should we dispatch backup?”

Zhao Ran switched off the audio system, sobered up substantially, and pressed his hands against his lips in thought. “The big boss made it clear: Yu An must complete the internship mission independently. No one is permitted to help.”

He pondered for a moment, then leaned back into the chair. “Lipu isn’t incapable in a fight either. Really, it shouldn’t be much of a problem.”

His subordinate Xiao Qi remained expressionless. “Will Yu An find out?”

“He shouldn’t…” Zhao Ran rolled his fingertips together, calculating silently. Before the word “shouldn’t” could fully leave his mouth, he suddenly clutched his right hand and let out a stifled groan.

It hurt. It felt as though it had been stepped on by something. He never should have sent that clumsy thing over; it bumped into doorframes even when walking across flat ground, let alone carrying out covert assignments.

Xiao Qi gazed placidly at Team Leader Zhao. He watched the team leader grumble and curse in his chair for a moment before abruptly going quiet. Zhao Ran leaned forward uncomfortably against the desk, clutching his right hand while messy hair veiled his cheeks, a faint blush abruptly rising along the two inches of neck between his hairline and collar.

“It got caught. Useless thing. Run away already! If you get caught by that brat, you’ll…” Before Zhao Ran could finish his sentence, his body stiffened suddenly. He slumped slowly against the desk, resting his forehead on his forearm. His right hand drooped below the tabletop, five fingers curling into the palm, the leather of his glove rubbing together with faint squeaks.

The left hand that had been pouring wine set down the bottle, crawled out of the drawer, pulled a tissue, and handed it to Zhao Ran.

Xiao Qi silently stepped back half a pace. The team leader was dead drunk in the office, his eyes and neck flushed red enough to bleed; if the boss caught him, he would surely get an earful.

Xiao Qi shook his head and drew the curtains shut. The team leader always maintained a careless facade, his working manner frequently leading others to doubt whether he took the job seriously at all. Yet the performance reports and combat settlements submitted every month proved to everyone that Underground Railway could not function without him.

He drank heavily often, but unlike men with no self-control, he never went into drunken hysterics. Most of the time, he would simply find an unlit corner to sit quietly with his eyes vacant, as if alcohol were the only choice he had to numb his emotions. More than once, when Xiao Qi arrived at work early in the morning and pushed open the office door, the frigid air that had settled overnight blasted him in the face. Then, he would see the team leader dead drunk by the glass window: white shirt, pale face, and faint, washed-out hair, frost patterns creeping onto his skin with cold frost clinging to his eyelashes, like a dying moth.

However, the arrival of the intern had overturned this routine. The team leader had specifically picked out a vivid burgundy shirt to hang in his wardrobe and lingered in front of the full-length mirror for several seconds every time he left. He had never paid so much attention to maintaining the company image before. To describe his transformation in the words of other subordinates: a decadent drunk had gone to a pet shop one day and brought home a little kitten.

The phone on the desk vibrated. Zhao Ran lifted his head from his arms, his lip bitten through by a sharp tooth, leaking a trickle of deep crimson.

Emergency Order Internship Squad 1, Yu An: “Where are you?”

No way. What was with this helpless, kitten-crying-for-mama distress call?

That aloof and proud brat wouldn’t easily ask others for help. Could he truly have run into a dead end?

Yu An’s situation was indeed critical.

Contorting his uncoordinated limbs, the male doctor advanced on Yu An step by step. Raising his foot above Yu An’s head, he brought it stomping down with fierce power.

Yu An’s vision blackened and his ears buzzed. Clawing his fingers against the wall, he hoisted his upper body and rolled forward on instinct, narrowly evading the fatal stomp and sparing himself from becoming a flattened soda can.

Retreating three meters back, Yu An reset into a defensive posture, the Satan core in his left eye still grinning maliciously.

The disorientation effect of Satan’s Guidance had not yet worn off, so the male doctor’s movements remained sluggish. Yu An took the initiative on offense, throwing a left hook, but the male doctor raised an arm to block it. Yu An immediately whipped his torso in the opposite direction, driving a brutal elbow strike into the male doctor’s ribs.

An elbow strike was a lethal weapon in unarmed combat. Flesh collided, and the crisp, gruesome sound of snapping bone echoed clearly.

Clutching his ribs, the male doctor leaned against the wall, nearly tumbling over.

Yu An stared at his left hand, reminiscing on that blank void in his mind. His right hand was his dominant hand, used without exception for writing and eating, yet when it came to fighting, he habitually favored the left side of his body for punches and kicks.

This indicated that the coach who taught him to fight was very likely left-handed. Yet Yu An couldn’t recall where he had ever learned boxing or sanda; every stretch and rhythm of his body was pure muscle memory responding on reflex.

As his exchanges of offense and evasion piled up, instinct formed sequences in his mind. Yu An no longer relied on the raw impact of fist-to-flesh to find the direction of his next strike.

He kicked off the wall. The Pure Black Hood suit granted him a jump boost, and the retractable claws on the boot tips greatly enhanced friction.

Leaping into the air, Yu An spun mid-flight to unleash a flying kick. The double kick landed squarely on the male doctor’s face, the blade at the boot tip slicing across his features. The fierce draft Yu An carried carved two deep gouges across the male doctor’s face, slicing through the bridge of his nose straight into the cranium.

Taking advantage of the male doctor staggering backward and collapsing, Yu An pounced over him once more, driving the dagger reverse-grip into spots he hadn’t yet searched, looking for the doctor’s Aberrant Core.

The blade sank into the upper arm and cleanly cleaved through muscle tissue, yet could not find the core inside him.

Cold sweat trickled from Yu An’s forehead, strands of black hair sticking to his cheeks.

Wait, there was movement next door.

In a flash, Yu An recalled the Skeletal Art video Officer Ye had screened. The ones performing the fat removal surgery on the obese patient on the salon bed had clearly been two doctors.

Before Yu An could even turn his head, a woman’s shriek erupted from the wall behind him. Without giving Yu An a second to react, spiderweb fractures burst across the wall surface. A hole blew open in the center, and a powerful yet slender hand burst through, clamping around Yu An’s left arm and hauling backward with ferocity.

“Fuck, there’s another one…!” Yu An’s reflexes were swift enough. Letting go of the male doctor, he whipped around and drove his dagger straight into the woman’s hand protruding from the hole in the wall.

The woman’s piercing shriek reverberated through the entire building. Yu An lunged forward, and the right hand leaped up from the floor, catching Yu An by wedging its thumb and forefinger beneath his armpit. But having only one hand, it couldn’t maintain balance and tumbled across the floor right along with him.

Reinforced concrete crumbled from the breached hole as a woman in a white lab coat pushed through the broken bricks, stepping through with long legs.

Scarlet lips, dark red eyeshadow; an unnerving smile was plastered across the female doctor’s glamorous face, blood-red gums completely exposed, brandishing a scalpel in her hand.

Guarding Xiliu Beauty Salon was a pair of doctor Aberrants.

At this point, the only tactic Yu An could think of was “time to pull out.” Even if the rescue target was a precision machinery engineer who had made outstanding contributions to the country and the world, it wasn’t worth throwing his own life away to be buried here with him.

If Mr. Zhou died, it would only prove that Underground Railway lacked judgment in staffing, daring to take on a commission from the Peeping Eagle Bureau with a mere intern.

Yu An knew his own limits. Facing an unwinnable situation, he could only choose to run.

“Get… out of my way!” Dragging along the trembling right hand, Yu An sprinted at full speed toward the exit. Purple light flared in his left eye, the Satan demon patterns grinning evilly at the female doctor.

The female doctor stiffened momentarily, dazed by the Satan’s Guidance core, her movements visibly turning sluggish. Caught off guard, she took a punch from Yu An.

Yet the female doctor’s combat technique was significantly superior to the male doctor’s. Even while disoriented, her reflexes were sufficient to block Yu An’s volley of flying kicks, and she still had strength left to counter with punches.

The two fell into a deadlock during the brawl. If not for the debuff from the Satan’s Guidance core, Yu An likely wouldn’t have survived even three rounds against her.

With a heavy punch, the female doctor shattered the guard of Yu An’s crossed arms. Her long leg clad in torn stockings stirred up a gust of wind, kicking hard against Yu An’s chest.

Yu An seemed to hear the creak of his sternum shifting.

Supporting himself against the wall, he could barely remain upright. A dull ache throbbed in his chest, and a warm, coppery wave welled up to clog his throat, intensely painful.

What else at hand could be used…

Holding his injured ribs, he leaped and ducked through the room, using the dark to obscure his silhouette. At the same time, his hands fumbled across his waist, popping out the white Blind Core from the Core Storage Analyzer.

“Only you left… Even the lowest-grade Goat Horns will do…” Desperate, Yu An muttered silently. He kissed the white Blind Core through his fingers, then swapped it into his socket.

Once the white Blind Core entered his socket, it rapidly established a link with Yu An. The data on the Core Storage Analyzer screen turned into a scramble of garbled code.

The passage of time seemed to slow. At this moment, the lever of a slot machine was pulled down, dice rolled onto the felt, the corner of a Texas Hold’em hole card was peeled back, the roulette wheel spun at breakneck speed, and the cylinder of a revolver pressed to the temple clicked into place.

Yu An had staked his entire life on this single blind core.

The Core Storage Analyzer broadcast aloud: “Link successful, Blind Core White!” The screen slowly scrolled through the loaded data.

Name: Equipment Core: Arrogant Bat

Origin: Randomly activated from Blind Core White

Category: Common Species

Rank Assessment: Tier 1 Purple (Violet)

Base Abilities: A heavy wooden bat that never breaks.

Usage Restriction: After a single use, exists permanently in physical form.

Description: A legendary bat passed down through the hands of twenty-nine baseball players. Miraculously, in every single match, it slipped from their grasp and struck the umpire in the head.

Resonance Condition: Unknown

The Aberrant Core turned pale violet first, then lost its luster, dulling into gray before dropping out of Yu An’s socket. The fine purple filaments leaking from inside the core intertwined with one another, generating an entanglement of energy within the confined space.

A wooden baseball bat dropped right into Yu An’s hands.

Surprised, Yu An weighed it in his grip.

“It can even materialize… While it isn’t a gun, it’s still…” Yu An’s expression shifted slightly, his gaze transforming from a startled prey to an assured hunter.

“…Usable.” Halting his retreat, Yu An swung with both hands.

The pursuing female doctor stretched her hands forward to seize Yu An’s neck, not expecting a long, dark shadow to sweep head-on. With a thunderous crack, the bat scored a bullseye right across the female doctor’s head.

A baseball bat possessed a far greater strike zone than a dagger, and momentum multiplied the heavy bat’s impact several times over. The female doctor was sent flying three meters back on the spot.

“Home run.” Yu An shaded his eyes with a hand, gazing at the female doctor who had crashed headfirst into the pile of scrap lead aprons. Sliding the bat into his backpack, he drew his dagger, leaped over to the pile, and drove a vicious stab into her flank, rummaging for the Aberrant Core.

Perhaps infected by the salon’s smiling employees, he smiled, gradually discovering the fun in this line of work.

Blood splattered across Yu An’s face, making him so elated he practically forgot himself.

Shrieking, the woman threw Yu An off her body. Pushing off the ground with both hands, she crawled up, a chunk of her frontal skull caved in, eyes bulging out. Raising a hand, she shrieked an indistinct string of garbled words toward the blood-soaked male doctor beside her: “Miss… Bo… said… kill… him…”

Who?

Yu An was startled that an Aberrant could actually speak, even if her vocal cords didn’t seem fully developed.

Hearing the command, the male doctor pulled his lips into a bizarre smile. Raising his hand, he removed his cracked glasses, revealing a pair of narrow, crafty eyes.

Under Yu An’s puzzled gaze, he walked over to the X-ray machine, positioning himself between the imaging panel and the generator.

The machine whirred, projecting a skeletal frame onto the imaging panel.

The male doctor reached his hand toward the panel, miraculously grasping the femur reflected in the image, and yanked hard.

The skeleton in the projection was instantly missing an entire right leg.

And that missing skeleton piece was now held aloft in the male doctor’s hand: the femur served as a handle, the tibia connected at the front end, while the foot bones formed a right angle with the calf, turning the pale skeleton into a long-handled battleaxe.

Yu An’s eyes went wide, finding it hard to believe what was unfolding before him.

Had he pulled his own bone straight out of a life-sized projection? An X-ray version of Ma Liang and his magic brush.

Gripping his femur, the male doctor charged forward. His right leg hadn’t vanished; rather, it dragged limply along the floor. Lacking bone support in his right leg, he could only limp along on one foot, so his pace wasn’t fast.

As the battleaxe swung down, Yu An held the bat horizontally to block the handle. In terms of leverage length, the male doctor held the advantage; the overhead strike delivered a jarring impact to Yu An’s arms.

Still, with the male doctor afflicted by the disorientation of Satan’s Guidance, Yu An could comfortably handle this speed of movement.

Yet the female doctor clearly had no intention of watching from the sidelines. Clicking her high heels, she darted toward the X-ray machine. The imaging panel instantly projected a woman’s skeleton; reaching her hand inside the panel, the female doctor yanked out her own left arm bone, gripping it in hand.

The pale arm bone formed a straight line, fingers drawn together into a sharp tip, held in her right hand like a fencing rapier.

With her boneless left arm dangling limp, she brandished the bone rapier in her right hand and thrust it toward Yu An.

Yu An found it difficult to parry their combined assault.

There was something wrong with that X-ray machine.

“Cut the power! Shut off the X-ray machine!” Yu An yelled to the right hand.

Scrambling frantically, the right hand scurried over to the X-ray machine to find cords and outlets. Yet after circling it multiple times, it couldn’t locate any, growing frantic with anxiety.

“…Tsk, I’ll shut the power off.” Yu An swung his bat forward. Taking advantage of the moment the two Aberrants were driven back by his momentum, he leaped back beside the X-ray machine. “Cover me.”

Looking dumbfounded, before the right hand could figure out what was happening, Yu An scooped it up in one grasp and hurled it straight at the two doctor Aberrants.

“Get in there!”

The right hand traced a panicked arc through the air, five fingers pedaling furiously in empty space trying to crawl back along its trajectory. But it was too late; it slapped squarely across the male doctor’s face with pinpoint accuracy.

His offensive pace disrupted, the male doctor shrieked, raising a hand to tear the right hand off his face.

Yet the right hand wasn’t so easily dislodged.

The little thing sprang dexterously, hovering in midair. Forming its fingers into a chop, it slashed toward the male doctor’s carotid artery. Forced to retreat, the male doctor swung his massive battleaxe at the hand.

Instead, the right hand curled from palm into fist, driving an uppercut into the male doctor’s chin. It followed up with a combo of lethal strikes slamming into his chest, finishing with a palm strike to his jaw. A flurry of consecutive hits sent the male doctor flying backward with saliva spraying, stumbling back over a dozen paces.

The right hand landed steadily on the floor, standing on its index and middle fingers, thumb and pinky curling into Bruce Lee’s classic stance: “Wataaa!”