Chapter 10: The Fight

Sang Ling scarcely dared blink, standing utterly still, locked in a standoff with the two Zerg across from her.

Setting aside sheer mass, insects were the apex predators. Their compound eyes outperformed the eyes of lions and tigers; their reaction speed and leaping power far exceeded any great cat.

Have you ever observed an insect’s true face under a magnifying glass?

Magnify one, and you’ll find that these bugs you could kill with a single finger are, in truth, horrifying to behold—everything about them built for war.

What Sang Ling faced now were insects magnified thousands of times over. She felt as though she were locking eyes with two mobile killing machines.

Su Qingyue, watching from the side, held her breath. Static seemed to crawl beneath her skin, adrenaline erupting, flooding her brain until it could not stay calm.

She wanted instinctively to move closer to Sang Ling, yet feared disturbing her, and could only sweep her gaze back and forth, again and again, between the Alpha and the Zerg.

She was beginning to find herself a little pathetic. On the road to becoming the President Su everyone in Capital Star feared, her hands had hardly been clean, and she had always been ruthless with people—yet before this most primal of life crises, she was still, like any ordinary person, helplessly growing dependent on the Alpha protecting her.

The suspension-bridge effect: a phenomenon in which, under dangerous conditions, people misattribute physiological reactions—a racing heart, quickened blood—to emotions like liking, like attraction. In psychology, the process by which people draw false conclusions about their own feelings is called misattribution of arousal……

Su Qingyue recited the principle of the suspension-bridge effect in her mind, trying to stay calm.

But her eyes remained fixed, without the slightest deviation, on Sang Ling’s straight, upright back. That white uniform hung crisp, fitting her perfectly.

Her ears filtered out every other sound, waiting only for Sang Ling’s command.

Sang Ling finally moved. In her standoff with the two giant predators, she chose to strike first.

Her body swayed slightly, and the giant Millipede’s tail lashed out at once—only now did Sang Ling truly act. She leapt, landing on the Millipede’s tail, and using it as a springboard, took aim in midair at the Mantis.

It all happened between lightning and sparks. Su Qingyue seemed to lag two seconds before hearing the roar Sang Ling tore out: “RUN!”

Run!

She had to run!

Su Qingyue came back to herself. While Sang Ling could still barely tie down both Zerg, she would circle around them and keep going for the air-raid shelter.

She ran like a madwoman, not daring to look back even once.

The wind roared past her ears—and suddenly, the briefing the military had presented at that last meeting, when they came to her for aid, surfaced in her mind.

Seventy-three percent of Alphas, without an Exoskeleton Mecha, would be killed within forty-five seconds in a one-on-one encounter with a Zerg. Facing two Zerg, survival time would plummet to thirty-three seconds.

Thirty-three seconds was far too short—so short that Su Qingyue absolutely refused to look back. She was afraid that if she did, she would see Sang Ling impaled on that Mantis’s forelimb, blood soaking her white uniform, dead.

Her foot hurt so much. She tried to divert her thoughts, cursing inwardly—high heels, how hateful a thing, uncomfortable enough as it was, and they slashed your running speed besides.

‘Thirty-three seconds.’

The foot pain couldn’t stop her thoughts from circling back to that number, around and around.

Is it thirty-three seconds yet?

Is she still alive?

She’s the one who told me not to look back. So I shouldn’t look back.

What could I even do if I did? If that Alpha is dead, what could a Beta like me accomplish by turning around? Nothing but die together with her.

Su Qingyue had never once erred in the treacherous business world, and she wouldn’t now. Machine-calm, she thought: One must never look back.

But just one glance.

Just one.

Running, Su Qingyue couldn’t help turning her head to look back.

She didn’t see Sang Ling. Didn’t see that tall white silhouette, that silver-white hair.

Her entire field of vision was filled by a forelimb studded with sharp protrusions, dark blood slowly dripping from it.

She could already smell the blood’s fishy reek.

That Mantis was bearing down on her, unstoppable!

Truthfully, Sang Ling didn’t know how she was going to win.

Insects reacted too fast, and her Light Energy Gun had only two rounds left—far too few to waste.

So from the start of the fight she had chosen a tying-down strategy: better to dance with two Zerg than to fire the first shot without certainty.

It was difficult—especially since she had to hold the attention of both Zerg at once, never letting the Mantis break away to hunt Su Qingyue.

She had to buy Su Qingyue at least thirty seconds to make good her escape.

Her gaze quickly locked onto the tables and chairs of the street-side cafés. With an Alpha’s strength, she could hurl them easily.

So she chose to spar with the relatively ponderous, less lethal Millipede while intermittently flinging tables and chairs at the Mantis trying to chase Su Qingyue, drawing its aggression.

The strategy was working. Using the water pipes and iron spikes studding the wall, Sang Ling free-climbed the three-meter-plus wall, took aim above the Millipede’s head, and leapt.

A chair was clutched in her hand. If nothing went wrong, the moment she smashed into the Millipede, the impact would stun it for at least two seconds.

At that point she would hurl the chair at the Mantis already closing on Su Qingyue, yanking it back—under the double pull of a wounded companion and an incoming attack, the Mantis was certain to return.

And in the gap before it arrived, Sang Ling could blast the Millipede with the Light Energy Gun, then slowly spar with the Mantis.

Her plan was razor-thin, but it was the only one. She had even factored in Su Qingyue’s running speed: as long as the woman ran forward with everything she had and didn’t look back, the Mantis would never catch her.

But she just had to look back.

Sang Ling had noticed it the moment she leapt from three meters up.

There was no other way. Still in midair, she raised her gun and shot the Millipede, roaring toward Su Qingyue: “GET DOWN!”

Su Qingyue obeyed almost on pure instinct. She had no time to wonder why she was listening to this woman so readily before the next command came: “Roll right!”

The Mantis’s forelimbs fell like a greatsword from the heavens, striking at Su Qingyue again and again, while Su Qingyue rolled across the ground without pause. At the closest call, the blade of a forelimb came down along the side of her cheek, slicing through several strands of her hair.

BANG—!

Muffled by the suppressor, a light gunshot. The Mantis’s attack froze mid-motion. The primal, blood-soaked monster raised its keen forelimb and turned to face Sang Ling—the puny enemy who had dared fire on it.

Behind it, Su Qingyue scrambled up, shaken to her core.

Before it, Sang Ling still held that black-and-white, exorbitantly expensive Light Energy Gun.

Her face showed no emotion, her features relaxed but smileless. Seeing it turn, she simply let go.

The expensive Light Energy Gun dropped to the ground without a sound.

Out of ammo. The gun was useless to her now. As expected, she couldn’t kill the Mantis in one shot—the thing had dodged as if it had eyes in the back of its head, and the immensely powerful round had done no more than graze it.

Sang Ling rolled her neck and kneaded her knuckles with one hand.

The giant Mantis simply watched, still as stone.

At almost the same instant, both sides moved like lightning!

Su Qingyue could barely track what was happening—she caught only occasional glimpses of the silver-white tips of Sang Ling’s hair streaking past like meteors, and the Mantis’s black forelimbs cleaving the air like falling stars.

Bare-handed, Sang Ling ultimately could not truly match this killing machine.

She slipped sideways past one strike, stepped up the Mantis’s swinging left forelimb, and used the leverage to try leaping for its vulnerable neck.

But the Mantis’s right forelimb came down like an iron hammer, smashing into her.

Sang Ling crashed to the ground. A dull pain bloomed in her chest, blood surging upward, and the taste of iron flooded her mouth at once.

Her vision went black at the edges—but she had no time to worry about injuries. The Mantis’s two forelimbs had come together into the shape of scissors, bearing down on her with terrible weight!

Sang Ling threw up both hands to block, but the instant she caught the forelimbs, her arms went numb to the root. The thing’s strength was simply too great.

The sharp protrusions along the forelimbs had already sliced open her palms; blood ran down Sang Ling’s wrists in warm rivulets.

In that moment, Sang Ling knew she would not survive three more seconds.

Her strength was failing; the battered chest seemed to have several cracked bones, screaming with pain.

She was a ruined bellows, and all her effort produced was a wheezing, whistling rasp.

How could human strength match the Zerg? Sang Ling struggled on in her death throes, but the forelimbs drew closer and closer—close enough that every drop of darkened blood on them was distinct.

All of it was people this Mantis had killed before. And she, Sang Ling, would become one more.

Sang Ling lifted her head. She couldn’t see the sky. Before her eyes there was only the giant Mantis’s cold, grotesque head, its mouthparts an abyss, exhaling the stench of rot.

Within the enormous shadow the Mantis cast, within its thousands upon thousands of compound eyes, Sang Ling saw thousands upon thousands of selves about to die.

Then, suddenly, a thread of light came through the Mantis’s body from behind, as if sunlight through storm clouds.

Sang Ling’s pupils contracted sharply. The Mantis’s crushing weight vanished; her hands went slack. She looked again at this colossal, pitiless machine of slaughter.

It seemed no different. Its bulk just as immense.

But two seconds later, the Mantis split in two. One half of its body slid slowly from the other, like a mountainside collapsing, raising an enormous cloud of dust when it struck the ground.

In that swirling dust, someone in high black military boots stepped over the Zerg’s corpse and stood before Sang Ling, looking down.

In her hand she still held the Tang Dao that had cleaved the Mantis in two. The ancient weapon, wreathed in light energy, was too keen—even the Mantis hadn’t realized how it had died.

The newcomer wore a black-gold Exoskeleton. Liquid Metal coiled and wove from her fingertips, climbing along both arms, meeting at the nape of her neck, flowing down across her whole body, then rising around the front to form an uncanny Mask.

The Mask, intricate with patterns and steeped in mystery, opened—revealing a face Sang Ling knew well. A creditor’s face.

“Jiang Yunzhao.” Sang Ling forced out through the pain, murmuring.

“Mm. That’s me.”

The creditor’s expression was imperious, her red hair blazing. She scoffed.

The Alpha Eldest Miss, whose combat power was terrifying to behold, said with overbearing arrogance:

“Two Zerg did this to you? How useless can you get. Forget being an Alpha—come be my Omega instead.”