(Heartfelt thanks to Kaede no Chōrei, Lei Xiang, Yuezuki Tatsuha, and Kaede no Chōrei for their rewards!)
"Got you!"
As that voice rang out, the true forms of the pale arms wrapped around Xie Ming slowly emerged from the spreading shadow on the ground.
They were girls dressed in black-and-red Gothic Princess Dresses, with one long and one short ponytail, one red eye and one golden eye. Their golden eyes resembled clock faces, and their expressions were both delighted and ferocious.
These girls, who looked completely identical—even wearing the exact same expression at this moment—were naturally all Kurumi!
More precisely, they were clones recreated by Kurumi using Eighth Bullet, which could manifest her past selves from the timeline.
Seeing the identical girls with those delighted yet savage expressions tightly wrapping their arms around him and firmly restraining him, even Xie Ming was startled. His movements halted for an instant.
"Ice Puppet—!"
At the instant Xie Ming stopped moving, a white beam containing terrifyingly low temperatures suddenly descended from the sky. Like a comet falling from heaven, it trailed ice shards behind it and struck Xie Ming's position with a resounding boom.
"Crack, crack—!"
Immediately, within a ten-meter radius around Xie Ming, including the ground and the Kurumis tightly holding onto him, everything was gradually covered in hard ice amid spine-chilling cracking sounds. Before long, it became a massive iceberg.
Bone-piercing cold assailed him from all directions. Xie Ming's pupils trembled as he was trapped within the solid iceberg, while billowing black mist surged from his body like a heat wave and rampaged inside the ice.
"Rumble—!"
The solid iceberg began to shake violently. Cracking sounds rang out once more, but this time, they were the sounds of the iceberg beginning to fracture.
Judging by the spread of those cracks, the