Another Side.18 · [Gift · Gift]

Foreword:

Steel is born in the heat of fire and the quenching liquid, so it is fearless.

[--Jiang Xueming]

[Part 2: Is this the end?]

Materialism stands frozen in the shallows, motionless.

The body was damaged in various places by the [Water Man], and the damage was irreparable in a short period of time.

The right arm's combat component had completely stopped working; it had suffered a terrible mechanical injury from the Ice Man's axe strike. After dealing with the [Power Man], Yibu led his brothers back to the spinal cord. Following the arm bone's veins and steel muscles, they walked forward and saw that the body of the Fireman Surter was now covered with stamens.

The Water Elemental's minions are like clumps of oil-like slimes.

They are gentle in nature, yet their behavior is exceptionally violent.

These bizarre elements clung to metal objects, hindering gears and disrupting circuits. The mud and sand mixed in the slurry, along with the powerful bioelectricity of the water elementals, were damaging every nerve ending in Surter.

The electrical circuits were constantly emitting high-temperature fire alarms due to overload. People rushed to various fire stations to put out the fires, but the huge mech was already terminally ill and could not move at all.

It's like attribute advantage--

Heavy rain can extinguish a flame.

"Move! Surter! Move! Why aren't you moving!"

Jason continued to race through the rotor's central control center, his psionic flames burning like blazing stars in the darkness, showing no sign of extinguishing.

But after the [Giant Breaking Heaven Drill] pierced the enemy's chest, and without the umbrella made of metal fiber curtain, [Materialism] could no longer move.

"That's enough," Wendy said, reaching out to pat her employer on the shoulder. "Iason, we've come to the end. There's no road ahead. You've come further than before, you've reached places no one else in the world has ever been. That's enough."

Jason's mental state is very unstable. He shares the same feelings as Surter, while Hui Shi is immersed in the cerebrospinal fluid mud of the Immortal Lune, constantly teetering on the edge of madness.

His skin was sometimes dry and cracked, and sometimes red and wrinkled.

The entire human bioelectric system was on the verge of collapse, making it extremely difficult to control this behemoth and make it act according to the will of a Homo sapiens.

Right now, everyone's busy fighting fires and providing disaster relief throughout the machine. We need to find a way to drive the Water Elemental's minions out [materialism]. If no one taps the bioelectric contacts on its limbs, they'll start discharging naturally and act according to the will of the Immortal Lune.

Without his companions to help Jason, Jason must single-handedly deal with the more than two thousand bioelectric contacts and control the shaky, unruly limbs of [Materialism].

His brain was overclocked, and he heard Wendy whispering.

"Why don't you sit down and rest for a while?"

"No! No!" Jason's eyes were bloodshot, a symptom of the Immortal Lune invading his central nervous system. "If I sit down, I'll want to lie down! Wendy! If Materialism lies in this sea, we'll all die."

The giant's steel body emitted various strange creaking and groaning sounds, which were unnatural electrical signals jumping between the joints. These neurological disorders caused problems with the coordination between the mechanical body and the organic body, and Surter's bones and blood were not so tightly bonded to the Soviets's steel armor.

The muscles in his right leg began to twitch unnaturally, and crimson lava gushed from the arrow wound, as if it had vanished into thin air. Surter's elemental essence was rapidly diminishing, spilling from these wounds onto the border of Niflheim.

Even temperatures exceeding a thousand degrees Celsius don't cause much of a commotion in this strange ocean; only the muffled buzzing of a few bubbles bursting can be heard.

Besides the water spirit inside the body--

--There are three more enemies in the distance.

"It's not far, it's really not far. We just need to go all out and get through it." Jason was still bothered by this. "Wendy, as long as we go all out and get through it, materialism will definitely crush them!"

"You're running out of time, Iason!" Wendy Mills said sternly, explaining the situation to Jason: "[The Phoenix] has given you special treatment; it has specifically assigned you Madness Index."

A line of dark numbers lay before Jason Megan.

[Madness Index: Out of Spectrum (Visualized data approximately: 710%)]

[Note: This is approximately 27 times the acceptable limit for a normal Homo sapiens. Generally, once the Madness Index exceeds level S, the default value is 100%. At this point, your self-destructive tendencies will reach a threshold and slowly decline to a normal level as your mental state stabilizes. For you, mania itself is rationality.]

[Note II: According to historically verifiable extreme data, when a natural person's Madness Index approaches 355% (i. e., an SSS rating), the body will experience bioelectrical disturbances and organ failure, similar to being attacked by neurotoxins, and the brain will send various erroneous commands to the body.]

[Note III: I don't want to see your movie on Friday the 13th, Jason. Think twice. But congratulations, you've joined my historical archive, providing my Soulforce with a truly outrageous new sample.]

Even if Jason Megan stopped now, released his soul power, and used the power of the [Windmill] to retrieve all twenty-four Lapis Lazuli, he would still need to sleep for a very, very long time to repair his Brain Injury and mend his riddled mental world.

Even drinking tea won't help with this.

--When he shared a body with a mythical unit like Surter, it was a 16-watt powered brain of Homo sapiens (in the case of a passenger, there might be exceptions with boosted power), connected to a flesh-and-blood computer with synapses as thick as fingers and a brain the size of a building.

The bioelectricity emitted by this head could kill Homo sapiens; in a physical sense, [a single thought could kill a person].

Thanks to the "materialist" armor that the Soviet Union built for Surter, this incredible creature was split in two, and two avionics systems were created using semiconductor integrated circuits developed by the Immortal Lune.

One set is the rotor central control console that Jason is currently using, which is connected to twenty-five spinal mechanisms.

The other system consists of bio-neural electrical switches for each part of the limbs and the torso, controlled by 22 sub-body walking mechs as the core code, which control the precise operation of the limbs.

Wendy: "If this continues, you'll be harmed by the Immortal Lune and turn into [Outlaw]."

Jason: "That's good! Could it get any worse?"

Wendy: "Or... you'll become Surter's possession, just like those little fire-breathing creatures. You'll be forever trapped inside its body, becoming its blood, becoming its flesh."

Jason examined his right arm and saw a steel fist resembling that of [materialism]. The arm was like a skyscraper, with scorching fireballs darting in and out of the wounds inflicted by the axe blade.

These little fire figures hugged the wounded steel beam frame, hand in hand, heart to heart, until in no time they became a Band-Aid. Under the onslaught of rain and cold wind, they quickly cooled, turning into indestructible steel, devoid of any expression, becoming a rugged and ancient iron sculpture.

"Were these people the same?" Jason turned his head, following Wendy's voice, and asked, "Did they also try to awaken this iron shell? Try to pilot this giant? Did they all end up becoming Surter's slaves?"

Wendy didn't say anything.

However, given Jason's clever and cunning nature, he could probably guess it.

--The language spoken by the [Liren] when communicating with Surter was a variant of an ancient version of Runes.

When I first met the little fireman--

--These adorable, brainless guys can speak Russian, and they can say "[commander-in-chief]".

As for the soldiers of the Heaven's Ladder, these powerful and indiscriminate individuals can acquire the wisdom and knowledge of Homo sapiens by consuming their essence.

Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that among Surter's possessions were living people.

After all, human history spans thousands of years, and the history of giants is even more unverifiable.

More than books, language, music, or any other form of expression.

All of this is far from what Cliff Guderian said—

--It's better to just eat it all in one bite.

"You should rest for a while, Iason." Wendy emphasized again, "We've taken down four corrupt giants, and the deep water is just 600 meters ahead. [Materialism] can't fight underwater. It was created to clear enemies from the mud, to become a weapon made by [Red Star Hill] for the sake of [RSH], this temporary border."

Wendy pointed to the ancient projection on the iron wall of the rotor's central core.

"Further into the deep waters, our VIP couldn't see the enemy lurking beneath the surface—she was exhausted. To save [Materialism] from [Powerman's] fatal blow, she nearly gave it her all, using rockets and the power of redstone to turn our fate around."

Wendy cupped Jason's face, trying to extinguish the flames in her employer's heart.

"There's no need to fight anymore. Don't end up like Iason in mythology, my employer. You shouldn't have been crushed to death by the ship's heavy timbers."

Jason was stunned. "Did I lose?"

He looked behind him and was immediately greeted by a 360-degree panoramic projection that showed the desolate and dilapidated mountain hollow of RSH.

"It seems like there's nothing left."

"It feels like we've gone a very, very long way, and it feels like we've put in a lot of effort."

"It feels like all the work I've done these past few years, these past ten years, has been for nothing."

In the end, I still didn't get there.

Wendy immediately asked, "Where are you going?"

"When I was attacked by the [Icon's] spiritual power, my Inspiration was incredibly sharp—" Jason described the Lord of Cinder's spiritual world. "—that guy, that Lord of Cinder named Maddes Bruno, he seems to have come here for the servants, just like me. I want to go there! I want to go to the realm of the dead and see if you're waiting for me there! Jiang Xueming's other personality, another soul, could escape from Helheim, maybe you can too?!"

Suddenly the whole world fell silent.

Only the distant echo of [materialism] seemed to resonate like the empty space between buildings.

"Give me a hand! Ming Ge! I can carry this thing!"

"There's still some mud here. Bring the water pump's guide pipe over! If the power isn't enough, connect it to the R495 switch!"

"Where the hell is this R495?! The dashboards here are all in Russian, only the department's control panel has Chinese!"

"It should be in the lower right rib area of the S17 mechanism; there's a universal interface there, and the output is definitely sufficient."

"Where the hell is S17 again?"

"Feel your liver, count down two segments. That's roughly it."

"The elevators are broken! Am I supposed to carry this 200-plus-pound tube down more than 40 floors?"

"That's how it is in theory."

Are you speaking human language?

"Actually, fixing the elevator is quite simple. I just need to resolve the 114514 fault signal in both the electrical and mechanical engineering buildings. The basic safety and maintenance power should still be working, but if the fire alarm signal can't be removed, the elevator will stop. That's how the safety system works."

"How do we start the elevator?"

"First, you need to go to S1 headquarters, to the central nervous system, find the main power room of our fuel and ammunition reserve department, switch to cold start mode, and then..."

"I'll climb down, stop talking, stop chanting 'Master'."

[Part 1: No, no, no! Absolutely not!]

That's roughly how it is--

After greeting Xue Ming, people followed the Little Fire People and traveled around.

Only the area below the knees was relatively lively. Xia Xia led 3301 to the knees and calves, where the water was most severe.

The subordinates of [Laguz] are very active here.

They clustered into indistinct human-shaped groups in the submerged area near the Dead Sea.

Amidst the complex steel rooms and electrical conduit corridors, one could see lumps of clay of varying sizes, without facial features, rising up and slowly transforming into human shapes.

The feeling was very strange, like a humanoid creature crawling out of a lifeless, bizarre mass of mud.

These humanoids were intertwined, their limbs fused together with those of their fellow humans. Within them, one could see star-like neural nodes, with faint electrical currents flashing, like comets.

3301, draw your gun and fire!

--The experienced VIP immediately stopped the half-wolf girl.

"Don't waste bullets, let me handle this."

After saying that, Xia Xia took out two sticks from two large iron boxes.

That was a sword-shaped staff that was very similar in design to the Magic Wand Xue Ming had chosen initially.

--[Mingde's Inferior Work: Magic Wand]

Xia Xia effortlessly lifted the heavy weapon, and a dazzling light burst forth from the blade. She moved forward through the narrow corridor, gently sweeping the swords like a brush dipped in paint remover. One by one, the little [Water Elemental] babies turned into black mist under the scorching heat.

Teacher San San immediately took out her own chewing stick and examined it closely—feeling a bit of regret. She stared at the chewing stick, drooling, but couldn't bear to ask the BOSS for another one, so she reluctantly stuffed it back into her bag.

After cleaning up the little water sprite on the right leg, Teacher Xia Xia wiped the mud off her face and then grabbed the half-wolf girl's hand to climb up to the left leg. Without the elevator, these two Lapis Lazuli Guards could still rely on their blood-bearing bodies to climb mountains and cross valleys with their steel teeth and iron claws in complex environments.

The other end--

--A Ling- sensei has entered her super-long standby mode again.

When she returned to the oil and ammunition reserve department from the shoulder of materialism, she greeted a flustered Katusha.

The little sister couldn't be of much help. On their journey through the unknown territory, she was clearly no match for Xue Ming and Liuxing, much less for her good husband. All she could think about was that if she had the chance, she could fight enemies hand-to-hand and with weapons like Senior 9527 —perhaps she wouldn't have any regrets even if she died.

She had been waiting at the supply station for the VIP to return. All she knew was that Teacher A Ling was injured, her entire right arm was broken, almost shattered. She had prepared the Universal Elixir early in the morning and was about to give it to the esteemed VIP.

Before Katusha could treat A Ling's injuries--

--A Ling grabbed her hand holding the needle, and she couldn't move it.

"Teacher A Ling! Aren't you going to treat her? The Universal Elixir works really well!"

Su Ling had no expression, because she simply couldn't make one.

She rubbed her left arm together, gave a flirtatious wink, grabbed the waterproof plastic bag beside her, and tossed it to Katusha.

"Connect it for me."

Katusha looked closely and almost rolled her eyes back in fright.

The plastic bag was full of blood, and there was a severed arm cut into three pieces, with fingers blown into about ten joints.

"What happened? What happened?! Oh my god!"

A Ling spat out a mouthful of blood, her alluring eyes swirling into a horrifying smile.

"Two QN-202 man-portable missiles."

Katusha: "Huh?"

A Ling explained, "They're even smaller than BUR, but incredibly powerful! They're just expensive! These two expensive bombs are the best heavy weaponry I have on this trip. To ensure my materialistic mind has enough responsiveness, this arm is definitely not going to survive. I have to keep an eye on it constantly and prepare for point-blank explosions."

Katusha: "That's not what I'm asking! I'm asking if you're not in pain?"

A Ling: "Ouch!"

Katusha: "How come I can't see it?"

A Ling rolled her eyes naturally. "I'm in so much pain I'm about to faint! There's not enough space in my bag to hold painkillers. You ask why I can't tell? My face won't cooperate! Don't just stand there, put your hand back on!"

Katusha removed the gauze from A Ling's right arm and saw a large amount of silicified filler attached to the open wound, which could effectively stop the bleeding.

While cleaning the packing, Katusha asked cautiously.

"Why doesn't Teacher A Ling use Universal Elixir?"

Su Ling answered without hesitation, "Adapting to a new limb takes time. Palm prints, fingerprints, and muscle exertion will all change. The cerebellum and the body's central nervous system need to be re-matched to the new arm induced by the Universal Elixir. Taking shortcuts is actually taking a longer route. Think about why scavengers lose their Inspiration —it's because they've lost far too much of their physical essence."

Katusha suddenly realized, then her eyes welled up with tears. "Teacher A Ling, you've worked so hard. To preserve vital fighting strength, you endured such intense pain. It's truly admirable."

Su Ling: "No, no, no, I still need to sign autographs for fans with my right hand. It's hard to train muscle memory, and I find it troublesome. Don't overthink it."

You could see pieces of broken muscle joints and charred chunks of flesh pieced together, simply treated and fixed with medical gauze and disinfectant alcohol, the broken bone fragments were removed, and finally the arm and hand were reassembled in their original shape.

Su Ling took a bottle of cola out of her pocket and handed it to Katusha.

"Hold on."

Katusha took the Coke, and not knowing what was going on, she automatically unscrewed the tab.

Su Ling took out a cup of White Lady's milk tea and saw a small, scalding flame rolling across the pipes in the side room. She casually borrowed a light, and the medical alcohol on her right arm immediately began to burn, raising the temperature of her entire arm.

The heat of the flames scorched the iron cup.

--To fully activate the activity of White Lady's freeze-dried powder.

Su Ling raised her iron cup and clinked it with Katusha's.

"This is a gift from the abyss, we must perform this ritual! Little Katusha, remember that!"

Katusha didn't understand, didn't comprehend, and wasn't clear about it.

It seems very mysterious, with a story behind it, and quite extraordinary.

"For your wine! For my sword! May the sun shine forever!" Su Ling said, then drank the divine medicine in one gulp.

The soda flowed from his throat to his stomach, and everything seemed less terrifying and bizarre; even the unusual spiritual pressure in Niflheim subsided.

"I'll take half of the heavenly dew." Su Ling used the remaining White Lady's products as a topical treatment to extinguish the flames on her arm. "The other half will be used to wash away the blood and wine of the endless struggle, let it fall into the soil, and return to Mother's body."

The intense and uplifting prayers sounded like incantations, like songs.

Katusha didn't understand the meaning of this sentence structure, but she saw a fair and powerful limb emerge from the flames, crushing the cold blue flower in her palm.

So the little sister asked the older sister.

"What is this? What did Ms. A Ling just say?"

Without hesitation, A Ling replied, "It's the Su Ling Bible. I'll send you a copy when I have time. Anyway, with that mystical style of phrasing, it sounds pretty intimidating, right?"

"Uh, it really is quite intimidating," Katusha suddenly felt powerless.

A Ling grabbed the blood-stained plastic sheet, tore it into strips, and wrapped it around her arm as a new sleeve. Then she returned to work, sparing with words.

"Walk."

Katusha immediately followed, hurriedly asking, "Teacher A Ling! Can we continue fighting? Materialism is no longer effective!"

Su Ling was just about to borrow some famous quotes to express her artistic sentiments, but Feng Aotian's pretentiousness was always on point.

"Don't underestimate materialism, girl! The book 'How the Steel Was Tempered' also mentions—"

Xue Ming's voice came from the broadcasting station.

"--Steel is born in the heat of fire and the quenching liquid, so it is fearless."