Bronya raised her hand and gave the order expressionlessly. "Heavy-duty Rabbit, fire!"
Boom!!!
The Heavy Ion Cannon, with its cool appearance and destructive power, fired repeatedly. Even as pale blue gas constantly sprayed from the rear of the barrel to offset the recoil, the several-meter-tall Heavy-duty Rabbit was still pushed backward by the force of its own shots!
So this was Bronya's personality when she had not joined St. Freya—resorting to guns and cannons at the slightest disagreement.
Fu Li gripped Crescent Moon's hilt. The rapidly spinning Shadow Blade formed a circular shield before him, blocking half the incoming artillery barrage.
The remaining half tore through the shield with enough force to rip apart ten-meter-thick alloy steel walls, but the figure who should have been standing there had long since vanished.
"What a—Instant Blade—"
A clear whisper of wind rang beside Bronya's ear.
"—delightful surprise—Immeasurable Evil!"
The slash that transcended time struck Heavy-duty Rabbit's steel arm, which had transformed into a Heavy Ion Cannon. Its essence was unmistakably identical to the lightning-fast draw slash Ling had learned from her sister!
In countless fictional works, things like the Eye of Insight, the technique "Copy," Mirror Pupils, or even Tencent QQ could completely master an unfamiliar skill with just one look. But in Fu Li's reality, at least as far as he remembered, no one could truly do that.
A skill was unlike mundane chores such as laying bricks or hammering nails. Its composition involved every conceivable aspect.
For example, the speed and direction of energy circulation within the body, the construction and activation sequence of Honkai-mutated organs, or the degree of force exerted by a particular muscle fiber at a particular moment.
One small mistake could make all the difference in the world.
Take the Anti-Titan Gymnastics Fu Li had observed from Schicksal Valkyries. In the end, he had only copied its form, never grasped its spirit.
It worked well enough against D-rank and C-rank mechs, but anything above that made it utterly useless.
There was, however, one exception: when both sides used submodules produced by the same system.
In Shenzhou terms, that meant they came from the same school.
Even if the same program had one or two characters altered, its output would not—well, fine, it would probably still be vastly different.
But at least there would be traces to follow. As long as the programmer writing the code was skilled enough, reconstructing its original logic was not impossible.
Take the gifted youth who inherited Yanqing's name among the Seven Swords of Taixu.
When he was young, he had faced swords with his grandmaster. After forcibly taking his opponent's killing move, "Ephemeral Bloom · Heavenly River Dream Leak," he had immediately altered it into the more suitable "Wind Returns, Clouds Stir · Heavenly River Dream Leak."
Fu Li had not the slightest connection to Ling, much less any shared lineage.
But he knew Sakura Bloom.
That move was one Yae Sakura had obtained from the genes of the Sakura Stigmata.
And its name in the Previous Era had been Instant Blade: Kushana, belonging to the Eighth Seat among the Fire Moths.
Using that as a foundation to trace its roots, it was not impossible for Fu Li to reverse-engineer the Instant Blade: Endless Asura he had witnessed firsthand.
Still, it was ultimately a sword technique improvised in the heat of battle. Combined with Bronya's prior precautions, the lightning-fast draw slash ultimately struck Heavy-duty Rabbit's steel wrist as it rushed back to defend.
The collision of blade and cannon body erupted with a piercing cry like a thousand birds. Fu Li stomped on a foothold condensed by Void Step in midair and swiftly widened the distance from Bronya, whose leg shot up with the aid of her Lower Limb Armor.
He took another moment to glance at Crescent Moon's gleaming blade.
There was a tiny chip in the edge.
The weapons built by Heavy-duty Rabbit were extraordinarily hard. Mikazuki Munechika was already ineffective against machinery, it had just endured an extremely intense battle with Ling last night, and tachi were inherently fragile weapons to begin with. With all three debuffs piled onto it, a chipped edge after the collision was perfectly normal.
Besides that, the footprint on his calf showed that Fu Li had not dodged quite quickly enough.
Many people thought the high heels worn by Valkyries were flashy nonsense and ridiculous things to bring onto a battlefield.
What they did not know was that their craftsmanship and raw materials were comparable to cold weapons. Sharpening the edges was merely standard procedure; some truly deranged people even carved blood grooves into the sides of their heels.
If someone suddenly kicked you during a close-quarters fight, it was no different from taking a vicious stab to a vital point.
Unfortunately, Bronya was one of those deranged people.
It was true that her legs had been paralyzed in the X-10 experiment at the beginning of 2014, but she had auxiliary Lower Limb Armor.
Fortunately, the speed of Immeasurable Evil had far exceeded her expectations, so the kick meant to drive him back had been rushed. Combined with the Silver Bloom Seed's timely automatic defense, it had only left a shallow mark on Fu Li's trousers.
This undoubtedly displeased Bronya. Fu Li's slash had cut deeply into Rabbit, directly disabling the heavy cannon formed from Heavy-duty Rabbit's arm. That meant the girl could not reconstruct this highly destructive anti-ship weapon anytime soon.
Fortunately, as Cocolia's adopted daughter and the sole trump card of the Anti-Entropy Executor, Bronya lacked nothing of this sort.
The battlefield changed in a flash, with attack and defense switching places several times already.
The wildly sweeping crystal-blue sword energy resembled countless falling stars raining from the sky. Mikazuki Munechika alternated between lifting, slashing, thrusting, and sweeping, racing across the battlefield amid repeated sonic booms and closing in on the petite floating figure again and again like an arrow loosed from the bowstring.
But if Fu Li's offensive could be called gorgeous and fierce, then Bronya's counterattacks were art, like playing the piano.
Heavy-duty Rabbit 19c, a crucial part of Bronya's combat power, was an all-domain combat mech equipped with a Gravity Module and multiple combat forms.
Outside combat, it remained hidden beside its user in a Quantum State. Once battle began, it switched forms according to need to handle all kinds of environments.
It could also equip external technological weapons to unlock newer, larger, and stronger modes. It was a growth-type individual armament that would never become obsolete.
The over-three-meter-tall Heavy-duty Rabbit 19c stood before Bronya like a medieval knight, unleashing overwhelming firepower from its arms and shoulders as they transformed into all manner of guns and cannons.
The Core Fusion Cannon, which accelerated through magnetic rails to fire at twice the speed of sound, releasing a plasma sphere over ten thousand degrees Celsius across a small area upon impact;
The Stalker Cannon, a quad launcher whose explosive diameter depended on the injected Honkai Energy, with a maximum destructive range of three hundred meters;
And Frost Rain, an anti-ship pulse machine gun nearly two meters long that accelerated solid needle-like bullets in pulses, reached a maximum firing rate of seventy thousand rounds per second, and could pierce ten-meter-thick alloy steel plates in under a second.
Long guns and short cannons firing at different frequencies surveyed every direction under Bronya's precise control, forcing Fu Li and his flashing blade light back time and again toward the next prearranged ambush point of concentrated fire.
As fierce as Yi shooting down nine suns, as graceful as emperors riding dragons through the skies.
Arriving like thunder to quell its rage, departing like rivers and seas gathering their clear radiance.
Perhaps many people viewed bombardment only in terms of power and radius.
Yet at this moment, this seven-character quatrain the Poet Sage had used to praise Gongsun Daniang's sword dance felt not the slightest bit out of place on this battlefield!
"Sir, the times have changed!"
Based on Fu Li's understanding of Bronya, she was probably still holding back considerably out of caution toward her enemy's hidden methods.
The little girl had only brought out one D-rank weapon and two C-rank weapons so far.
That was right. The ultra-high-temperature plasma cannon fired at twice the speed of sound was only rated D among weapons, while Frost Rain's seventy thousand rounds per second and the quad launcher with power comparable to a miniature nuclear bomb were somehow merely C-rank.
Fu Li had once suspected that the people who created the weapon-ranking system had something wrong with their brains. In their eyes, any technological product had to be priced half a rank higher by convention, and its power at the same rank was generally absurdly high.
Later, he learned it was because such things counted as external equipment and were easily affected by outside conditions such as EMP. That doomed this entire category to low prices.
Of course, anyone who thought tossing an EMP electromagnetic pulse at Bronya would make her shut down was simply overthinking things.
If Bronya knew her own weaknesses yet did nothing to correct them, she could never have become the famed Ural Silver Wolf.
Under the girl's steady footing and precise calculations, this brief clash came to a pause when Fu Li concealed himself behind a building.
A war of attrition was far too difficult for a newbie like him, whose energy reserves were only C-rank.
Fortunately, he had already activated Breath Concealment, and the chaotic, complicated structure of the metropolis further hindered Bronya's radar senses.
The Ural Silver Wolf, raised as an assassin since childhood, had always remembered one principle:
When the prey's presence suddenly disappeared, be careful. It often signaled that hunter and prey had exchanged places.
In that case...
Cradling the bizarre yellow doll called Hutao, Bronya raised eyes slightly lighter in color than her hair.
"Heavy-duty Rabbit, conduct saturation bombardment around Bronya until no isolated target taller than a wheel remains within a three-hundred-meter radius."
She added flatly, "A wheel lying flat."
Upon receiving the command, Heavy-duty Rabbit 19c's left arm swiftly transformed into a futuristic launcher, while electromagnetically driven coils unfolded flat around the muzzle.
Boom!!!
The Zero Type Round howled from the barrel, creating a nearly hundred-meter wasteland before Bronya's eyes in an instant.
And that was not all. The Stalker Cannon had a firing rate of fifteen rounds per minute.
Heavy-duty Rabbit, carrying its master, shifted directions and continuously poured artillery fire outward in every direction from its own position.
Against an assassin-type enemy like Fu Li, a ranged fighter's first priority should be to destroy the opponent's environmental advantage.
It could force the opponent into the open while creating a wide stretch of empty ground that made observation and return fire easier. Truly, three birds with one stone.
Of course, this also had a disadvantage: it made one vulnerable to a frontal assault from enemies with extreme speed and overwhelming penetration.
The youth version of 2.5 Gojo in Jujutsu Kaisen had faced the same problem against the Heavenly Tyrant. He had clearly created a battlefield favorable to himself, yet had not expected the other side to be hiding more Special Grade Cursed Tools than he could count on one hand.
Bronya did not need to worry about that, because she was armed to the teeth.
Starstone, a rare mineral from World Bubble No. 0958, was one of the hardest materials in the world.
Its special molecular structure in relative stasis made it nearly indestructible. Furthermore, because it contained the mysterious property jokingly called Crescent Moon Slash, it could absorb, release, and store heat, energy, and kinetic energy to the greatest extent possible.
This energy-amplifier-like effect made it especially favored by release-type armaments. For example, if it were mixed in a certain proportion into the pig iron used to forge a blade, the result would become a C-rank weapon close to Mikazuki Munechika.
If Starstone were crafted into a shield through a special configuration and then infused with Honkai Energy, the Crystal Wall Field it generated would be enough to block an A-rank combatant's full-force slash.
Hair ornament, earrings, neck ring, chest;
Right wrist, lower abdomen, thigh ring, left boot.
Bronya had a total of eight field-generating devices like these equipped across her body.
This was the luxury afforded to her as Cocolia's finest adopted daughter, as the Leader of Anti-Entropy Reformists' finest adopted daughter.
Those shields could also amplify one another's protection through resonance. In the past, she had sparred with many A-rank combatants within the organization, and even when they gave their all, they could only barely tear through two or three overlapping defensive fields.
Bronya refused to believe Fu Li truly had a way to break through her defenses. According to calculations by Anti-Entropy's most advanced artificial intelligence, Phyllis, an enemy who could achieve that would need offensive power comparable to a standard Silver Bullet level.
But if Fu Li possessed that level of power, why would he be playing hide-and-seek with her here?
Could it be that he was a lolicon who did not want to strike her ruthlessly? No way, right? No way?
Of course not.
Fu Li had neither reached the destructive power of a Honkai fission bomb nor become a perverted lolicon who would lay hands on Bronya.
If she really wanted to stir his XP, she would have to wait until Bronya grew into an MMD King with curves in all the right places, a Secondary Silverwing capable of competing with Post-Honkai Mei in WallpaperEngine.
The girl's simple and brutal large-scale reverse urbanization had indeed caused Fu Li trouble, but she was merely sweeping the area rather than targeting him specifically.
Having spent only half the Silver Bloom Seed's energy, Fu Li had blocked this indiscriminate attack.
The only minor issue was that he had been blasted underground, but that was no big deal.
Susanna really was a good girl...
As he marveled at the Angel Investor's generosity and selflessness, he handed a backup phone playing a recording and an Escape Dagger to the crystal-blue humanoid before him.
This was an energy phantom he had created using Shadow Blade. It was controlled purely by thought, possessed no self-awareness, and existed only to draw Bronya's attention long enough for him to rush up to her.
Smack!
After solemnly high-fiving the phantom, the two crossed paths and charged toward Bronya from opposite directions.
There they were!
Streams of data raced through the girl's eyes, followed by a trace of amusement and mockery.
As expected of a chuunibyou who still used cold weapons in modern society. That recording-looping, entirely crystal-blue Looks Not Like a Ruler charging over here was obviously bait to anyone who wasn't blind.
Bronya had plenty of room to spare. Firing on multiple fronts was ridiculously easy for her.
Icy cannon barrels formed simultaneously before and behind her. Her gaze settled on the cold-weapon users still running toward her, and a faint smile appeared on the girl's delicate face.
"Sir, the times have changed."
As her words fell, the Cluster Beam fired with a roar!
A torrent of light surged forth, swallowing both figures attacking from different directions!
"Divine Punishment: Fu Li"
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