"Old Li? Is that you?" Liu Yu asked in a low voice.
He took another step back, but something in the mud seemed to catch on the feet of his powered armor, causing him to lose his balance and fall flat on his back.
"Damn!"
Liu Yu cursed under his breath and reached out, trying to brace himself against the ground and get back up. But neither his own arms nor the mechanical arms attached to the powered armor's backpack could find any point of leverage in the slick mud. After several attempts, he still failed to push himself up.
The powered armor bearing the names Li Yimin and Peng Wei slowly walked up to Liu Yu and looked down at him.
"Old Li? Peng Wei?" Liu Yu still clung to his last shred of hope—but he knew perfectly well that if the person inside that powered armor really was Li Yimin, he would have reached out and pulled him up already, rather than simply watching him struggle in the mud.
The fear in Liu Yu's heart swelled to its limit. Faintly, he seemed to see a pair of pale eyes behind the other party's visor, staring straight at him.
No, not just one pair of eyes!
Liu Yu did not know whether he was hallucinating, but when the other party closed to within less than half a meter, he finally saw the face hidden behind the visor's shadow.
That face looked as though it had been corroded by strong acid. Its surface was covered in dense pits, and at the bottom of those pits were things that looked like eyeballs, rolling around incessantly.
And now, the hundreds of eyeballs of all sizes on "Li Yimin's" face had all focused on Liu Yu's own face.
Liu Yu's mind went blank.