“Lunene? Where are you?!”
After discovering that her companion had disappeared, Xia Li immediately grew tense—after understanding the true terrifying aspect of the “Secluded Forest Girls’ Academy” Game, in her eyes the interior of this school that had originally already been “cleaned clean” had now become a demon’s den where crisis was everywhere.
And that one-track-minded, completely unable to turn a corner stupid loli wandering alone in this kind of place was simply equivalent to a little fat sheep entering a wild wolf’s den!
This was already not something that “dangerous” could describe!
“Lunene! Lunene!”
“Miss Xia Li, I’m over here!” Worth rejoicing was that after successively shouting several times while risking being discovered by more dangerous elements, Xia Li actually heard Lunene’s voice coming from a distant pile of miscellaneous objects.
“You, are you okay? Nothing wrong?”
“Just now I wanted to eat candy, but my hand trembled once, and the sugar candy rolled away…” Lunene’s answer was still so… full of personal characteristics. After all, at a time like this, the only one who could still be thinking of eating candy was this fellow whose IQ was touching, “I… I only chased after the sugar candy and then got lost inside here…”
“Oh, no wonder she previously thought that person had gotten lost in the warehouse because of playing hide-and-seek,” Weeping of the Shadow muttered, “So it turns out she herself would get lost like this.”
“Putting oneself in another’s place is originally the normal state of human thinking.” Xia Li shrugged her shoulders, then immediately began walking toward the direction from which Lunene’s voice was coming.
However, because of the various jars and pots piled along the way, especially the discarded sports equipment, plus the need to constantly pay attention to possible dangers, the path that did not seem very far actually took her half a minute to walk.
And just as Xia Li was preparing to cross an entire row of stacked sandbags and walk in front of Lunene, the latter suddenly erupted in a hysterical scream.
“Wuu-meow! Miss Xia Li—save me ahhhhh—let me go meow—”
“This is bad!” Realizing that the situation was unfavorable, Xia Li directly knocked over the topmost sandbag and charged over.
Then… she was precisely tripped by a pre-set tripwire.
“Fuck—what kind of joke is this? The majestic Federal Empire Marshal who has experienced a hundred battles was actually tripped up by this kind of simple trap?!” Seeing this, Weeping of the Shadow immediately grew so angry that it began shouting in Xia Li’s mind.
“…” Xia Li did not refute; after all, she had just now actually failed to consider that such a simple trap might exist ahead, which was indeed a very shameful miscalculation.
And the sole reason leading to this low-level mistake was her concern for Lunene…
That’s right, although they had known each other for less than a day, perhaps because Lunene’s not-bright brain and dazed, stupid, cute appearance had stimulated Xia Li’s instinctive protective desire, only until now did Xia Li discover that the degree of her concern for Lunene was far stronger than she had imagined.
Even after being tripped, what she first thought of was still Lunene’s safety rather than her own.
After all, the same level of threat constituted completely different dangers for the two of them.
“Seize her!”
At the same time that Xia Li was tripped, two human silhouettes leaped out from empty boxes not far away and pounced toward Xia Li, then… there was no then.
“Tch.”
If these two people had been carrying firearms and had immediately opened fire upon meeting, for the Xia Li who temporarily could not stand up it would indeed have been a great trouble.
However, since they still persisted in attempting to capture Xia Li, the problem became easy to resolve: after discovering the actions of these two people, Xia Li fundamentally did not stand up, but instead directly pressed her back to the ground, exerted force from the waist, and kicked one foot into the face of the first person.
After kicking this person away, Xia Li rolled to the side, rendering the other opponent’s attempt to seize her neck futile, then raised her hand and delivered one uppercut.
Although this fox-girl loli had spoken with her less than one hour ago, after knowing the entire truth, Xia Li when doing this would not have the slightest psychological burden.
After receiving one punch, the ball-shaped object full of tentacles that the fox-girl loli was gripping in her hand flew out and smashed into a pile of mud against the wall.
Only at this time did she struggle to pull out the “single-shot” pistol inserted at her waist, preparing to open fire toward Xia Li.
However, the latter had already fired one shot first, severing the slender tentacle connected behind this person and causing her to collapse onto the floor.
However, this small success did not allow Xia Li to breathe a sigh of relief, because her tactical intuition told her that Lunene’s current situation was probably already rather unfavorable!
The Lunene who had just been shouting loudly had now completely quieted down—not because she did not want to make a sound, but because a rabbit-eared young girl whose figure was one head taller than hers had already restrained her, and was currently striving with all her might to stuff a continuously writhing tentacle sphere into her mouth!
As long as she opened her mouth, the consequences afterward would probably be unimaginable.
“Let her go!”
Xia Li decisively kicked one foot into the rabbit-eared loli’s body, causing the latter to roll and crash into the wall of the warehouse.
But just at this moment, she heard a bout of unsettling abnormal movement: two other controlled players suddenly from behind her pushed over a large pile of boxes, directly treating these heavy wooden boxes filled with basketballs, tennis rackets, sandbags, and cleaning supplies as weapons and smashing them toward her!
“Bastards—” Because she could not hard-tank from the front, Xia Li could only grab the still-shaken Lunene and drag the latter to narrowly avoid the terrible ending of being pressed underneath several hundred kilograms of heavy objects by a hair’s breadth.
However, this was merely the first wave of attack from those two people.
After the boxes fell, several disgusting, tentacle-covered spheres were immediately thrown over by the other party.
Xia Li used the revolver to explode two of them, but the third firmly used those short tentacles to stick onto the weapon in her hand and could not be removed no matter what, forcing Xia Li to have no choice but to discard the pistol.
And what was even more fatal was that those two people seemed to still be carrying more similar spherical objects.
“All of you quiet down for me!”
Because she no longer had the pistol, Xia Li made the wisest decision under this kind of situation: actively charging forward before the other party continued throwing tentacle spheres, while simultaneously drawing Weeping of the Shadow from behind her.
The black blade that seemed able to swallow all light crisscrossed and danced; before the other party had time to make any movement, it had already severed the slender transparent tentacles behind them.
As the two people collapsed, those eerie little balls covered in tentacles immediately fell all over the ground.
But even so, they still continuously crawled and writhed on the floor, attempting to climb onto Xia Li’s feet.
Facing these things that made her skin crawl all over with goosebumps, Xia Li’s reaction was to directly raise the black sword above her head.
“Life and Death Bound!”
Since the assassination of Emperor Guangjing, this was the first time Xia Li had used this move that came with the black sword in actual combat.
As for the effect, although it was far from as powerful as that time in the imperial palace grand hall, it was already sufficient: the black sphere rapidly turned into a mass of dissipating mist that swallowed those struggling and writhing spherical objects on the ground.
And when the black mist dispersed, all the spheres had turned into shriveled semi-transparent gelatinous objects, exactly like jellyfish dried to death on a beach.
But the only problem was…
“Meow… meow-eeeeeeee—”
When Xia Li retracted the black blade of Weeping of the Shadow into the scabbard, she heard Lunene emit a panicked scream—this little cat girl who ordinarily committed muddled mistakes, at this moment instead revealed an extremely shocked expression, as if she had personally witnessed the scenery of the eighteen layers of hell.
This is bad; I let Lunene see my great precious sword!
This is finished ahhhhhhhhhhhh—
Ever since being banished, Xia Li had continuously carefully wrapped Weeping of the Shadow with dirty tattered cloth, disguising it as an ordinary tattered sword; the main purpose was precisely to prevent people from recognizing it—after all, her great virtuous act of motherly kindness and daughterly filial piety had already spread to every corner of the planet Elysia.
Although the majority of people did not know her original appearance, especially after Xia Li had been publicly humiliated and transplanted with dog ears and a dog tail, it was even more almost impossible for her to be recognized by the people of the earth.
However, Weeping of the Shadow was different.
This longsword that possessed a blade with nearly absolute blackbody coloration had already, along with the spread of countless folk stories, been passed on more and more fantastically, even to a degree that Xia Li herself could not understand.
In many legends, those folk storytellers who only feared that the stories were not sufficiently horrifying even claimed that Weeping of the Shadow was the form transformed from a “demon that swallows souls,” and that Xia Li had offered her own soul in sacrifice to hell before obtaining this extraordinary demonic weapon.
Nonsensical talk such as Xia Li hugging the evil sword and bathing in the blood of virgins every day, or using the hearts of infants to temper the evil power of Weeping of the Shadow, was even more continuously carrying out viral transmission in the streets and alleys.
Of course, even so, if it was only the blade that was seen, Xia Li could still quibble that she merely happened to possess a black longsword.
But the problem was that the move she had just used was currently the signature skill that had already been passed on until every household knew of it!
Even Lunene who committed muddled mistakes every day completely knew what this was!