Declaration of War
Youchen coughed lightly a few times, and the warmth on his back, which could not be blocked by the clothes, reached his central nervous system. Only then did he realize that he was being embraced in someone's arms.
Ying Yungui took the water that had been prepared on the side.
The clear liquid flowed through his throat, and Shi Youchen swallowed the dryness and itchiness in his throat. He still felt a little dizzy when he stood up.
"What's going on now?" In front of them was a light ink-colored car window, and there were only the two of them in the spacious space.
Ying Yungui rubbed the tip of his nose with his index finger. "Simply put, the domain covering this place was shattered by an external force, which is why we woke up." "Domain?" Shi Youchen was stunned. "There was no warning when I came here."
"The domain we deployed has been covered, and the opponent's domain cannot detect the energy entity." Ying Yungui glanced at the air outside the window and said in a dull tone, "There." Shi Youchen followed his gaze and looked over.
Thirteen screens of light hung in the dark blue night sky, each displaying a different scene. The leftmost screen in the third row, from top to bottom, displayed the ruins of the Sector 9 branch base. Its edges were blood-red. Several others shared the same blood-red edges and displayed similarly devastated scenes.
"They were there when I woke up. It seems that the branch bases in all thirteen districts have been attacked, and we can't contact anyone in any area." Ying Yungui knocked on the car window with his knuckles, pointing to a place slightly below the light curtain and said, "That person is the fugitive who trapped us in this nightmare."
There was a blurry figure there, too far away to be clearly seen. I could only vaguely see that it was of considerable size, suspended in mid-air without moving.
"Nightmare?" Shi Youchen recalled the silver-white marks on the foreheads of the task force members in the cliff cave, and he began to understand their meaning. "I was awakened. After waking, I felt like I had been in a deep sleep for a long time, and my energy was almost gone. The dream I had while I was asleep..." Ying Yungui paused, "I don't remember it clearly."
Shi Youchen: "Who woke you up?"
There were two knocks on the car window, and someone standing outside the door asked softly, "Are you awake?" It was Yan Zhiyuan. Ying Yungui withdrew his burning hand and opened the car door a crack, "Yeah."
Yan Zhiyuan looked at Shi Youchen for a long while, and the breath he exhaled took several seconds to dissipate in the cold air. "Fortunately, we made it in time and nothing serious happened to you, otherwise we would feel guilty for the rest of our lives." Neither of them noticed the brief pause in his words.
He got in the car and sat opposite the two of them and said, "Except for Nightmare, all the other fugitives in the domain have been executed." Ying Yungui "hmm" and said, "The outcome of the battle is decided. With him here, we have nothing to worry about." He laughed at himself and said, "This mission of ours was quite pathetic." For Ying Yungui, who has always been arrogant, he was knocked down as soon as he arrived here. When he woke up, he found that almost all the energy in his body was drained. He couldn't even heal Shi Youchen who was in a deep coma. He could only watch over him in the car after others cleared the poison and healed his injuries.
This is indeed the first time this has happened. How pathetic.
No one knew that upon discovering Shi Youchen unconscious on the second floor of the empty house, Ying Yungui's heart skipped a beat. Even though the hypnotic fog had almost dissipated, his knees went numb, forcing him to hold onto the wall and finally collapse before Shi Youchen. Only when he felt the faint but steady beat of his carotid artery did his heart seem to come alive again.
As the team's healers treated Shi Youchen's injuries, Ying Yungui's intense gaze on them stirred doubt. "Alright, the toxins and the drug have been cleared from your body." "The leg wound is healed, too." "It's probably an overdose in a short period of time. It's too much strain on your body. You need to rest and recuperate for a while."
"Team leader? Then we're leaving first?"
At that time, Ying Yungui was immersed in his own dream, and he subconsciously murmured. They assumed he knew and left together, walking more than twenty meters before daring to speak. "Who is that? I haven't seen him before, he's really good-looking." "I don't know him either, but he looks like he's related to the team leader." "The team leader's brother? Not like." "Who knows, he's watching so closely, maybe he's his boyfriend~" Of course, Ying Yungui, who was immersed in the dream, didn't hear these words or anything else.
After that, Ying Yungui was alone in the car waiting for Shi Youchen to wake up.
Yan Zhiyuan fiddled with the bracelet for a while, then suddenly said, "Connected!" He quickly opened the association's forum and chat room, which were already filled with explosive news -
"District branch bases were suddenly attacked, resulting in heavy losses."
"The invaders are powerful but their identities are unknown."
"High-level psychics have been dispatched to provide reinforcements, and the situation has stabilized."
...
"There's news that the president has arrived in District 9."
"People from District 9 are sharing their own experiences. I was on a mission when I was automatically connected to the internal conference line and watched the live broadcast from the base. It was atrocious..."
"Same as those from Area 9. The base was completely destroyed, with heavy casualties and many missing."
"People from Area 3, the same base was destroyed... but there were very few casualties. It seems they destroyed the base and left..."
...
"Fuck, this isn't going to start a big war."
A single stone stirred up a thousand waves, and the discussion below all turned in this direction. Some firmly believed that the Association's superpowered people would definitely defeat the invaders; some were pessimistic, believing that the base could be easily invaded; some were seriously investigating the origins of the invaders; and some were worried about the ordinary people.
"In Area 8, our base was attacked by a powerful enemy, but from what we've observed, there were zero casualties among the civilian population in the entire area."
"District 10, same as above."
"District 5, same."
Each new message that appeared below automatically switched languages, expressing the same thing - the association was attacked, but the other party did not seem to attack ordinary people.
Shi Youchen was trying hard to recall what happened before he fell asleep, but unfortunately he was still more or less affected by the drug, and his memory was not complete. He stopped at the stage when he found this empty house with a car full of people.
At this moment, he felt a sharp pain in his solar plexus and a layer of cold sweat suddenly appeared on his back.
There was a new post in the forum - "Have there been any masked invaders in other areas?" The attached picture on the first floor was a not very clear photo. The person in the photo was lying on the ground with his head tilted towards the camera, and he was wearing a mask with strange patterns on his face.
The post received over a thousand hits right after it was published, and within less than a minute the number of replies also exceeded a thousand. Many people replied saying that it had appeared in their own areas, and some even attached photos.
Yan Zhiyuan extracted every photo of a person wearing a mask and arranged them on the left side of the screen. "Look, the overall style of the patterns on these masks is similar." Shi Youchen heard the word "mask" and looked over. Suddenly, the "clang" sound of masks falling to the ground in the dark land rang in his mind.
"This one looks like a scorpion, and this one should be a snake or a dragon, right? This..." Yan Zhiyuan and Ying Yungui were discussing as they watched, while Shi Youchen's memory was suddenly opened up, and the pattern on the mask that Jiang Da took off appeared clearly in front of him.
That's a fox.
"Cough! Cough cough!" He suddenly started coughing, which startled Ying Yungui. He quickly turned around, patted his back and handed him some water. "What's wrong? Are you okay?" There was an indescribable sticky feeling in the air, which made him feel short of breath since he woke up. Coupled with the dull pain in his head, he really couldn't say the word "okay" frankly.
Shi Youchen coughed and waved his hand gently. Just as Ying Yungui was about to rush out to find a medic, a man with most of his face and neck red grabbed the corner of his clothes and said in a hoarse voice, "You just said that all the fugitives in the domain have been executed?"
"Yeah." Yan Zhiyuan continued to scroll through the forum interface without looking up. "The guy whose superpower is Nightmare came later. Except for him, everyone else has been executed." "Who did it?" Judging from the current state of Yan and Ying, they did not look like they had just fought. What's more, Ying Yungui just said that after he woke up, he found that his energy was almost drained.
This question seemed difficult to answer. Not only did Ying Yungui look hesitant, but even Yan Zhiyuan turned away from the heated discussion and looked at him. He opened his mouth but felt he hadn't organized his words properly. Finally, the two exchanged glances before he said, "President."
"?" Shi Youchen, who had originally thought it was a high-level psychic providing support, was stunned. "The Association President?" He truly didn't dare to consider someone of such status. The two nodded, and Ying Yungui said, "He rushed here as soon as he finished handling the connection matters with headquarters. If he had been a step later, you probably wouldn't have seen us."
Yan Zhiyuan pressed "Send" and agreed. "Indeed, when I opened my eyes, the boy's needle was just this close to my head." He pinched his thumb and index finger together, then slowly pulled them apart a knuckle. Shi Youchen's detached memories finally began to reconnect.
"! There are two people, a mute child, and an older man with a slightly long beard. They..." His hurried tone slowed down after seeing the strange expressions of the two, "Are they still there?"
"Dead."
"The kid you mentioned tried to kill us, but the president arrived and executed him on the spot. When they caught that old man, they wanted to interrogate him, but he taunted the president like crazy... and then activated some kind of neural device and committed suicide."
As if realizing that the existence of these two people held some significance for Shi Youchen, Yan Zhiyuan tried to keep his tone as light as possible when speaking these words, "What's wrong? Is there something wrong with these two people?"
Jiang Da's words, "You must clear his name for me," echoed in Shi Youchen's ears, and he had indeed promised to do his best. Promises to the deceased must be fulfilled, otherwise, there's no need to respond to expectations. This was what his grandmother had taught him since he was a child. This way, he had an IOU on his shoulders.
"Since there are still fugitives who have not been dealt with, their bodies should still be there, right?" Shi Youchen asked.
Yan Zhiyuan looked at Ying Yungui silently, but he didn't meet his gaze. "In that house." Captain Ying, who had just stood with Yan Zhiyuan on the matter of the president, now decisively abandoned him. "You want to go? I'll go with you." He said attentively.
Shi Youchen nodded: "Yeah."
On the second floor, against the wall where Shi Youchen had leaned, several bodies lay, Wu Yan and Jiang Da among them. "After the child died, we discovered he was a mutant who had logged into District 9. He showed no signs of being controlled or anything else, which only suggests he betrayed himself of his own accord," Ying Yungui said.
"Except for him, the others are all unregistered fugitives."
Shi Youchen rummaged through the pockets under Wuyan's collar and found a shrunken lilac. He asked, "There was a female researcher from Area 9 who was with you guys before. Where is she?"
"She rushed back to base with the rest of the group."
"Like this." He squatted beside Jiang Da for a long time, but in the end he didn't reach out to touch her. "There's something I want to tell you."
Shi Youchen closed his eyes and said, "He's not an unregistered fugitive."
"He was one of the six people who disappeared after the S-rank mission in 169." He looked at Ying Yungui, "He was also Lu Shen's best friend."
"I believe that the masked invaders appearing in various districts are all former registered psychics of the association, just like him."
"Somehow they escaped the association's supervision and joined some opposing... organization."
"And this time, it is very likely that this organization officially declared war."
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