Invasion

Inside the manor's vast, lavish structure.

The squad guarding the entrance formed a human wall, preparing to fire at anyone who appeared afterward.

Qin Xa stepped out from behind them and unleashed psychic lightning beneath their stunned gazes, instantly wiping them all out.

In one room, numerous guards stationed there had heard the alarm and set up defenses. Just as they were about to rush out, grenades thrown through the shattered ceiling blew them to pieces.

Along the only route guarded by the elite sentries, the men were loudly asking about the intruder. Then their questions abruptly stopped as their heads burst at the same instant.

An invasion of the manor was underway.

Every sign of the invasion suggested that an entire professional assassination squad had entered the manor, but in truth, there was only one person behind it all.

"Tell me where your master is." Qin Xa extended a hand toward the guard before him, but he did not actually ask. Instead, he used psychic power to read the man's mind.

By planting the specific thing he wanted to find into someone's mind, Qin Xa could then read the relevant memories.

Just as he had read Oeno's mind to learn the Nuceria language.

But this guard had never seen the person he was supposed to protect. His rank was too low.

Many of the manor's guards had never seen their master either.

Still, they belonged to the manor. Qin Xa could glean a few clues from their minds and use them to deduce the location of the person he wanted to kill.

"Underground." Qin Xa lowered his head and looked at the floor beneath his feet.

At that moment, an uncontrollable Psychic Premonition suddenly struck.

Qin Xa raised his head and suddenly heard something being pierced beside his ear. He instinctively dodged, and a beam punched through the spot where he had just been standing.

Looking through the hole bored by the beam, Qin Xa saw that several hundred meters away within the massive building, ten people wearing the same visors as the Slave Catchers' captain held energy pistols, their gazes piercing through walls to see his location.

Then beams began raining down without pause.

Those people were hundreds of meters away from Qin Xa, separated by countless walls, yet they could still see where he was and fire at his position.

They advanced while firing. The Energy Coating on their armor melted directly through the walls, allowing them to move straight toward Qin Xa.

As the beams forced Qin Xa farther and farther back, the other guards being mobilized throughout the manor would arrive in time, and eventually they would try to capture him alive.

That was everything Qin Xa had seen in the Psychic Premonition.

He already knew their decisions and tactics, so naturally, he would not sit still and allow himself to be driven back.

Qin Xa chose to strike first.

In the premonition just now, Qin Xa had seen a large-caliber heavy machine gun spitting fire. It would seal off his route together with the beams, so Qin Xa headed straight for its location.

The dense beams continued to streak toward him, so numerous that Qin Xa could only evade them.

If he had been wearing Grey Knights equipment when he first came to Nuceria, even without Psychic Premonition or similar assistance, this fight would not have been so troublesome.

The heavy machine gun from the premonition was moving toward Qin Xa's position.

It was mounted on a quadrupedal combat machine. The damned thing was only about the size of a small car, not particularly huge, and could race freely through the manor's tall, spacious corridors.

The guard standing atop the quadrupedal combat machine and operating the heavy machine gun wore a visor as he scanned his surroundings. Whether walls or other obstacles, everything in his eyes was merely transparent matter made of red lines. If someone approached, he would see them.

"He's coming toward me." The guard spotted a blurry humanoid outline charging toward his position. The bastard was sprinting wildly and smashing through every wall in his path, coming straight at him.

Affected by psychic power, the guard saw Qin Xa as an old man. He was curious: what kind of person could smash through wall after wall without wearing any equipment at all?

The question vanished in an instant. The guard pressed both hands onto the heavy machine gun and fired at the charging humanoid outline.

The nineteen-millimeter heavy machine gun spat a two-meter tongue of flame, spraying hundreds of rounds in less than two seconds. The bullets easily penetrated the steel layers inside every wall and flew toward Qin Xa.

The guard kept his finger on the trigger. The heavy machine gun quickly overheated, but the weapon ejected an almost-molten metal plate. Once a second plate automatically slid into place like a fresh round being chambered, the overheating problem was resolved without even a moment's pause.

The guard kept firing until Qin Xa rushed before him. Only then did he discover that a white-glowing barrier stood in front of the intruder, deflecting every bullet.

Seeing that marked the end of the guard's life.

Qin Xa instantly leaped onto the quadrupedal machine, casually picked up a spent heavy machine gun casing from the ground littered with them, and viciously drove it into the guard's skull.

At that moment, the people capable of firing beams from hundreds of meters away were somewhat far from Qin Xa. They could still see him, but their beams could no longer completely penetrate the walls between them.

"Finally, a suitable weapon." Qin Xa gripped the heavy machine gun's handles and violently tore the entire weapon free.

After quickly checking the magazine, Qin Xa saw that fifteen rounds remained.

The ammunition box on the quadrupedal machine was full of heavy machine gun rounds, but Qin Xa did not take any. He needed to quickly turn back and fight.

Besides, he felt those fifteen rounds were more than enough.

After leaping down from the quadrupedal machine, Qin Xa took a deep breath and charged toward the enemies who continued firing beams.

The distance between both sides rapidly closed. Then, as a beam grazed past Qin Xa, he fired through the hole it had bored.

The heavy machine gun round passed through the hole left by the beam and tore the entire upper body of the person who had fired it away from his lower half.

Another beam came at him and was stopped by the Psychic Barrier.

Qin Xa swiftly turned and repeated the same tactic, firing through the hole.

The heavy machine gun boomed. The shockwave from the bullet leaving the barrel swept up all the dust in the room, but Qin Xa remained perfectly still, as if an ordinary man were using a small-caliber rifle. He silently watched as another person beyond the hole had half his body torn away by the heavy machine gun's large-caliber round.

After taking out three more people the same way, the other side clearly realized that firing beams wildly would no longer work as it had before, so they temporarily ceased fire to consider their options.

Qin Xa carried the heavy machine gun and sprinted a hundred meters in a straight line.

Whenever he encountered a wall, he put his shoulder in front of him, then jumped and slammed through it with force, repeating the process over and over.

Until Qin Xa arrived beside a corpse.

He crouched down, picked up the visor, and put it over his eyes. He discovered that the damned thing really could see people and objects through walls, but its principle was to scan heat energy across a large circular area, then use a chip to process the wearer's vision and display the scanned heat through three-dimensional imaging on the lenses.

Just like wallhacks in an FPS game.

Thus, a living person appeared in the visor as a blurry mass.