"Boom!"
Within the already-collapsed cave, the billowing smoke dispersed, revealing the three battered members of the Night Watcher.
"Cough, cough, cough!"
Robin coughed violently as she crawled out of the ruins and anxiously asked,
"Teacher Chongming, Teacher Tengshe, are you all right? Are you both all right?"
"Crash!"
Chongming clawed away the rubble burying him and sat up, his face covered in dust, while waving away the smoke in front of him.
"I'm not going to die—but Tengshe, couldn't you have used a less choking method to offset that 'explosion' just now?"
The [Singularity Bomb] thrown by Freud and obtained from the Player had not actually caused an "explosion." Instead, it had triggered a "collapse," creating an ultra-powerful gravitational singularity resembling a black hole, though not nearly as absurd, which had devoured and annihilated most of the matter inside the cave.
So...
Most of the billowing smoke here had been the "defensive measure" Tengshe had just released.
To keep the three of them from being sucked into the singularity, and to prevent the secondary disaster of a cave-in caused by damage to the cave's main structure from harming Chongming and Robin, Tengshe had naturally held nothing back.
So, although Chongming had scolded him, Tengshe was not particularly angry.
"I'm just a dirt-poor wandering bum. How many defensive measures could I have? We'll just have to make do with what I've got!"
"Good that you two are all right."
He spoke magnanimously as Chongming looked toward the main body of the cave.
"We're fine... but the mission counts as a failure."
The cave, originally located deep underground, had collapsed into an open-air sinkhole.
Fortunately, Shen Bingmiao had deliberately chosen an uninhabited wasteland as the location directly above the servers. Although a bustling university town stood nearby, there were no buildings or