Chapter 114

“Ains!” Horne shouted. He grabbed her hand, but it was too slippery. Horne unhesitatingly scooped her up.

Blood. It was blood.

Ains trembled all over. She touched her chest, feeling a gush of scalding liquid. Fresh red blood flowed out from her chest, washed away by the raindrops. The moment she realized what it was, she burst into painful sobs.

The screams behind them never stopped. Horne did not look back and could not stop fleeing.

The recon drone’s attacks pressed closer step by step, grazing his upper arm as it shot toward the road surface.

Horne’s heart skipped a beat from the pain, then he gripped Ains even tighter.

They turned a street corner. In that instant of turning, a recon drone flew in from the opposite direction, nearly colliding head-on!

There was absolutely no time to dodge that recon drone!

The red light had already taken shape.

It was over.

Too late.

In the instant the red light fired, a black shadow flashed out and lunged straight at Horne.

A fierce penetration.

Shouts of alarm came from farther away: “Mazora!!”

Thud. The man who called Mazora’s name fell down.

Horne froze for half a second. The man on the ground used his last bit of strength to roar, “Mr. Horne, run!”

It was a stranger, with a fist-sized hole in his abdomen.

“Run!”

There was no time for any words. Horne scooped up Ains and turned to run.

The man who had blocked the attack for him collapsed into a puddle. The rain pressed down on him as his gaze grew scattered, watching Horne’s figure flee into the distance.

Horne dashed through an empty street, the recon drone behind him following relentlessly.

“Brother, it hurts so much, it hurts so much.” Ains cried, her sobs quickly swallowed by the roaring rain, almost inaudible.

“Hold on just a bit longer, hold on.” Horne panted heavily, completely soaked.

A scorching tongue of flame grazed past him. The smell of burnt char drilled into his lungs, and Horne coughed several times.

The pursuit spread from Central Avenue into the alleys, nearly reaching the slum in the north. The recon drone shadowed them like a ghost, indiscriminately bombing for nearly three kilometers, showing no signs of stopping.

The recon drone resumed detection, and since Ains had no mask, they would inevitably be chased all the way. The places they could go now…

The recon drone dove down. Just a second before the laser in its mouth fired, a voice rang out.

“Horne!”

A familiar voice.

They rushed around a corner, and a hand pulled Horne along.

It was Hels!

“Follow me!”

Boom! Another thunderclap, and the glass of the shop beside them shattered.

They trampled over the rubble and clambered up a low wall. Red light swept over them. Horne held Ains tight and leaped down without hesitation. The laser explosion instantly engulfed the spot where they had just been.

The slum.

“Go left up ahead!” Hels shielded Horne from the front, blocking the lasers that shot out for him.

Hels frowned but did not make a sound.

Horne could no longer tell if the wetness on his body was rain or Ains’s blood. He could no longer hear Ains’s cries either—nothing but the thunderstorm filled his ears.

They madly dashed across the now-empty plaza, around side paths, around ruins. Hels kicked open the door of one of the abandoned houses.

Bam, the door slammed shut, the heavy metal emitting a massive clang.

All sounds suddenly dulled.

Hels rushed inside first. When he came back out, he directly fastened a mask onto Ains’s face.

Whirr—the sound of something speeding by flashed past in an instant.

Horne gasped for breath and half-kneeled in place. Rainwater seeped down his body, leaving long trails of water wherever he moved. He did not dare stop for a moment and immediately set Ains down.

Her clothes were completely soaked, a pale red mix of rain and blood. Her lips were ashen, her brows tightly furrowed, silent.

“Ains, Ains.” Horne anxiously called her name twice and brushed the hair plastered to her face aside.

He opened the medical kit. Hels pulled open her clothes, revealing a mangled mess of flesh and blood that had pierced through her organs. He said urgently, “Lift her legs up.”

Horne did so immediately.

Blood still seeped out nonstop. He pressed hemostatic cotton to the wound, but it quickly turned red. Hels immediately swapped it for another, which turned red just as fast.

Ains let out a faint whimper, in so much pain she could barely breathe. Her eyes remained tightly shut. Horne called her several times, but got no response.

“Ains, can you hear me?”

She could hear. That voice echoed in her ears, as if separated by layers of ripples, and she was the one drowning in this violent rain today.

Ains opened her mouth, wanting to speak. She wanted to say she had done it, that she could do even better. It shouldn’t have been like this. Her lips moved twice, so slightly it was almost imperceptible, but she could not give any response.

“The wound is too deep.” Hels said softly. He continued stabilizing the bleeding around the wound, but could not fully control it. The pulse he could feel was growing fainter and fainter.

It was too late to go to the hospital now. With this weather and the rampaging recon drones outside, an ambulance might not even make it. They could only handle it emergently.

“Ains, open your eyes.”

She could not.

A faint choke escaped her throat. She just felt so much pain, as if her five viscera and six bowels had been pierced. Her breathing grew more rapid, yet shallower.

She still wanted to say something.

But she did not know what.

Besides the pain, there was fear, and a trace of bewilderment.

Was she about to die?

“Ains, Ains.” Horne kept anxiously calling her name, assisting Hels with the rescue.

She could not respond to anything. In this instant, she suddenly knew what she wanted.

“Ains! Don’t sleep!”

Why did the voices sound farther and farther away?

She just suddenly thought of that man. He said he was her father, so he would love her innately, but she could not feel it.

All she could feel was pain. Perhaps he thought that was his way of loving his daughter, but it hurt too much. She did not want that kind of love. She wanted unconditional reliance, unreasoned support. But her father loved her only with a condition upfront: if you excel.

“Wake up, don’t sleep! Ains!”

Why did she have to prove herself? She felt some regret now.

“Ains! Open your eyes, open your eyes, look at me, Ains!”

She just wanted a straightforward, unwavering sentence that did not pretend to be silent sacrifice: I love you.

Blood mixed with tears flowed down.

“Ains!”

But why could she not even have that?

Horne called her, and Hels called out a few times too, but received no response.

The noisy whooshes of objects breaking through the air tore at the temperature. Cold and heat twisted into lines of light and dark. Day and night bordered here, tangled into a mess.

The sound of recon drones circling outside—one flew across the black sky, another returned. Sirens approached then receded.

Lightning split the air, thunder stitched the wounds. In the pitch-black downpour, the humans living in Loch City were like turtles in a jar.

The abandoned concrete building had no extra decorations, like a cold corner from the last century. Blood flowed along the filthy grooves, spreading, trickling, darkening.

Buzz buzz. Ear ringing.

The windows were shut, the entrance hall empty and dim. Some dim dust had splashed in, hot with a rusty smell.

They were in one of the abandoned buildings near the slum. From outside, it looked like a pile of ruins—every one of them did.

The living room was as desolate as it appeared from outside, but the inner room held shelves of high-security goods. It was a small warehouse, unlit and dim, with another entrance door inside.

Horne remembered this place. It was where they had come when Hels first saved him—the warehouse where he made and stored masks.

The same place, the same scene. Still leaning against the cold. That chill pierced through his skin into his bones. Horne gasped in pain.

Hels immediately stopped what he was doing and looked up softly. “Does it hurt? I’ll be gentler.”

Horne took a deep breath and exhaled. “No, just bandage it. Are you sure your wound is okay?”

“Yeah.”

He had just been grazed through by a laser while protecting Horne, but Hels had not told him about the penetrating wound. He had simply treated it briefly, bandaged it tightly with a tourniquet, and put his bloody clothes back on.

His heartbeat steadied, but his breathing remained rapid. Horne leaned against the wall sitting on the ground, head slightly bowed. His clothes had been removed and set aside, now nearly dry. Horne watched Hels seriously bandaging him, throat tight, saying nothing.

Emotions surged in his chest one wave after another.

Gale winds pierced through the broken window, gnawing at the uneven floor. The medical kit was packed away. Hels walked to the window, lifted the curtain, revealing half his face in the shadows.

Nothing but rain was visible. The window had just cracked open a slit, chaos surging in. The instant Horne looked up, Hels closed it again, returning to calm.

He turned his back to Horne, frowning slightly, hand on the windowsill before quickly releasing it. The wound hurt badly; new injuries collided with old ones inside his body.

Hels walked back and sat beside Horne. Both were silent, the bloody stench in the air piercing and numbing.

After a long while, Horne’s fingers twitched, then clenched tightly. He let out a long sigh, tilted his head back, stared at the ceiling, and murmured, “I don’t want to wait anymore.”

“Hm?” Hels turned his head.

His palm pressed hard. It had been a very, very long time since he felt this way, so hard his fingertips nearly pierced his palm.

The words squeezed out through Horne’s gritted teeth. He said, “I want all the aliens dead! Every single one!”

Hels had been about to say something, but after those words came a longer silence, thicker dead stillness. Hels just looked at the man before him without responding. Until another wave of rotting burn on his skin made him cough twice. He had to rely on deep breaths to stay clear-headed and quickly suppress the pain.

Only then did Horne lean close to touch Hels’s forehead.

Sure enough, he was feverish again.

He immediately checked the situation outside.

The recon drones were still circling widely. Whether due to some vulnerability from tampering with the motherbrain system, after the afternoon riot, the recon drones had not stopped. Losing the target without a mask, they began indiscriminately sweeping every resident outside, especially those still at the Central Avenue intersection—as if still searching for that target.

Fortunately, the riot there and this downpour had driven almost everyone back indoors. Recon drones circled low like the aliens themselves, speeding, alarming.

They still could not go out, unsure when it would end.

Horne stood straight, gazing at the pitch-black expanse. He asked, “Why is the rain black?”