The Operation Begins / Cunning Honkai Soldiers

However...

That's enough.

Her expression suddenly changed, a jumble of emotions swirling in her eyes, condescendingly telling "Lin" to shut up.

With that command, "Lin's" demeanor froze, and he became somewhat stiff.

Upon seeing this scene, a hint of mockery appeared in her eyes.

"... Team Member Lin, please don't think so much, okay? We've finally met again, why bring up irrelevant things?" Soon, the playfulness was replaced by her original concern, and she reached out her hand to "Lin," "From now on, you don't have to fight anymore, you can live a normal life."

"...good."

Having received Lin's affirmative answer, she smiled with relief, but then a sharp gaze made her frown. She looked around and finally stared coldly at one spot.

The Ferris Wheel, which had been stopped, was suddenly turned on again, but from a distance, no one was riding it.

Except for the one that has reached its highest point at this moment.

She squinted, and some Black Mist emanated from her body.

A hideous Honkai zombie was inside, staring at him with its foul-smelling, rotting eyes.

"Here it is..."

After settling Ling in, Sakura headed to the mission location. This was a rare mission given to her by Mei that wasn't specifically for the Poisoned Cocoon. Apparently, due to an unexpected event at headquarters, they had too few combat personnel to send out, so they temporarily reassigned her to fight against the Herrscher.

Slay the Herrscher...

Sakura had heard of this name, and every member of the Fire-Chasing Moths knew its meaning perfectly well: it was something more terrifying than a nightmare, a divine representative from mythology.

The order she received was to slay the son of the gods— the Herrscher —right in the city where she lived.

Unexpectedly, her first direct confrontation with the Honkai, the enemy of humanity, would involve facing its highest manifestation, the Herrscher. Even with Sakura's strong mental fortitude, she couldn't help but feel extremely nervous. If it weren't for the existence of records of defeating the first to Fifth Herrscher, she might have suspected that Mei intended to silence her.

Fortunately, this mission doesn't actually involve her fighting the Herrscher alone. Instead, it's about waiting for headquarters to send personnel to join the battle. This time, the Herrscher Authority might require her unique fighting style.

But what surprised her the most was that this place... was the amusement park where Suzu and Rin first met.

Their fates changed here then, and now they've returned, making one feel as if some things were preordained.

"Doctor Einstein, I have arrived at the designated location."

"Okay, I have some urgent information for you. A total of seven teams entered this amusement park before you to search for the Herrscher, but their signals disappeared at the same time. I need you to investigate the last place where the signals disappeared." Einstein's calm voice came through Sakura's earpiece.

Vanished in an instant...

Even Sakura couldn't guarantee that she could kill seven people in an instant, let alone seven squads.

And this is probably only a negligible part of the Herrscher's power.

Sakura's palms were sweating, but the thought of Rin calmed her wildly beating heart. After taking three deep breaths with her eyes closed, she replied to Einstein, "Understood, please send the coordinates."

Following the coordinates, Sakura avoided the crowd and arrived at the spot where the soldiers had last disappeared.

"Is this... a haunted house?"

Sakura looked at the rotting human figure on the display board with some disbelief.

Chapter 82 Operation Begins

Lin's right eye is a blind spot. Accustomed to binocular vision, he tries his best to adapt to the narrow field of vision of only his left eye. However, this can be considered a blessing in disguise. Losing half of the available information has greatly reduced the pressure of Lin's instinctive information processing. In the current situation, continuing to maintain the previous high-intensity thinking mode may not be a good thing.

Standing at the highest point of the amusement park, with an unobstructed view of everything below the Ferris Wheel, Lin quickly found his target after the sparse crowd gradually dispersed.

Standing in the feeding area of the no-man's-land, his deep red eyes, like sedimented impurities, stared intently at him from a distance of over 600 meters.

Just standing there gives people a deep sense of unease. The survival instinct of living beings warns them to stay away from her. Perhaps that is why ordinary people subconsciously avoid her, making the area within a hundred meters of her a strange no-man's-land.

However, being in a no-man's-land doesn't mean she was without "people" around her.

Honkai zombie.

More than fifty individuals, all special types of Honkai zombie, were gathered together, while monsters swarmed behind her.

The sheer number of these special Honkai zombie was enough to give any squad a headache, and this was probably far from the limit of the Sixth Herrscher. The moment Lin saw this army of Honkai zombie composed of special individuals, he realized that the power of the Sixth Herrscher was not just as simple as withering away.

She can also create.

The two spotted their target at the same time. Instead of immediately attacking Lin, she spoke to the Honkai zombie beside her as if talking to herself.

"Please."

Lin saw that she was lip-syncing to this sentence.

A blue-purple Honkai zombie wielding a bow and arrow stepped out from behind her. The bow was drawn taut like a crescent moon. Without much aiming, he released his finger as the cold light of his single eye flashed, and the arrow shot out like lightning straight into the forest.

The arrow traversed the seemingly vast distance in less than a second. The glass shattered, and Lin dodged the arrow by tilting his head slightly. Lightning then burned away the bandages on his face, leaving a charred mark that smelled of meat.

Seeing that Lin had dodged the attack, she seemed somewhat surprised. Then she said something to the Honkai zombie, causing it to draw its bow again and aim it at Lin.

This time, however, he wasn't aiming at Lin himself. He only needed to calculate, based on the shooting angle of the previous arrow, that this arrow was aimed at the connecting shaft of the Ferris Wheel carriage where Lin was located.

They retain a considerable degree of intelligence and can still command their Honkai zombie in battle.

Lin saw the shadow of the Fourth Herrscher in her. The Wind Herrscher was also quite intelligent, but this was the first time that she had directly controlled Honkai zombie Herrscher through conversation.

"Gah—"

Lin opened the communication and reported to the Fifth Branch's command center, "I have discovered the Sixth Herrscher. Please evacuate the personnel in this area immediately. I will delay the Sixth Herrscher's advance until headquarters support arrives."

"Lin? Hey, you—"

"Bang!"

The bearing above his head snapped, the feeling of weightlessness appeared, and Spasi's voice disappeared at the same moment.

Inside the stalled car, Lin closed his eyes, letting gravity pull his body down to the ground.

"We succeeded."

She smiled smugly.

She was genuinely surprised that the somewhat unusual Honkai zombie had dodged the attack; it was likely a speed-specialized Honkai zombie. However, she quickly devised a solution. Even if Honkai zombie fell from a height of hundreds of meters to the ground, it would still be smashed into pieces like a lump of fat. So, she would simply shoot off the bearings of its self-inflicted trap.

So how did those Honkai zombie get up there?

Never mind, it doesn't matter anyway, it's already resolved.

She told herself this, yet she couldn't stop her right hand from trembling. She looked down at her unconsciously trembling arm, a feeling that was like...

"Bang!"

Before she could think of a word to describe it, a loud gunshot rang out, and the person next to her fell to the ground. Blood splattered in front of her, causing her pupils to contract.

She stared in disbelief at the corpse beside her, a complex mix of emotions welling up inside her.

It was taken away again...

"No..." She covered her head, her breathing quick and labored, the crimson blood stinging her optic nerves.

"The Honkai zombie... it must be that Honkai zombie!"

But soon, another emotion called anger crept onto her face, making her grit her teeth and stare menacingly in the direction from which the gunshots came. There was nothing there, but she knew that the Honkai zombie must be watching her from the shadows.

Honkai zombie with intelligence!

"Let me handle this," the former captain of the Squad Seven said, stepping forward without even glancing at the corpse of his comrade on the ground, as if it were a complete stranger.

"No! I can't let you go! It's cunning! I can't let you take the risk!"

She glared at him fiercely, making him back away.

"If it were Lin, he would definitely do the same! He wouldn't let his comrades take on dangerous tasks; he would take the lead and complete the most dangerous parts himself. He would definitely..."

Halfway through her sentence, she suddenly remembered that Lin was right beside her, so she looked hopefully at the silent "Lin": "Team Member Lin, if it were you, you would do the same, right!"

"..." There was no reply; "Lin" simply nodded silently.

Having received Lin's affirmation, she immediately began searching for the Honkai zombie's whereabouts with great joy.

She was protecting... Honkai zombie.

Lin Cong a distance, observing her shift from resentment, which was remarkably similar to that of a human, to joy. Only the extreme changes in her emotions were befitting of a being beyond human comprehension; at other times, she was exactly like a soul.

Another point is that she seems to be treating herself as a human being.

This was not an illusion. After Herrscherification, one can use some basic abilities, such as anti-gravity flight and Honkai Energy shields, but none of these were manifested in the Sixth Herrscher. She walked on the road just like an ordinary human, using the reconnaissance methods from her memories to find his location, and still holding that giant scythe in her hand.

This was not much different from Lin's guess, and even more so than he had imagined...

Fear.

With her physical condition rapidly deteriorating, a direct confrontation with the Herrscher was clearly not advisable. Lin decided to use the fact that the Herrscher treated her as a human to stall her while waiting for headquarters' support to annihilate the Sixth Herrscher in one fell swoop.

One-time use...

Lin's grip on the pistol remained unwavering.

"Danger!"

Just as Lin was preparing to look for an opportunity to attack the group of Honkai zombie again, a beautiful pink figure flashed out from behind him and grabbed his arm.

Just then, the scythe, imbued with the aura of death, slashed down in front of him, stopping precisely where he had been dragged away...

Chapter 83 The Cunning Honkai zombie

After pulling away the immobile Lin, Pink Shadow drew her sword and lunged forward. A chilling aura emanated from her blade, and with a speed exceeding the limits of human vision, the sword struck the Sixth Herrscher before she could react. A strange power prevented the blade from directly hitting her flesh, but it still forced the Sixth Herrscher to take a few steps back.

She gave the person who saved Lin a cold, murderous look, pressed the Phase Transfer Device on her hand, and disappeared.

"Are you alright... Lin?"

Seeing that the main target didn't intend to fight to the bitter end, Sakura breathed a sigh of relief, turned around to look at the person she had saved, and then, upon seeing that piercing, cold single eye and feeling the familiar, sharp aura and razor-like vision, she subconsciously uttered Lin's name.

But she wasn't sure if this person was Lin. She had never seen Lin's real appearance, and the person in front of her was a disabled person who had lost an eye and a leg. This was quite different from Lin's appearance, so it was unlikely to be Lin.

However, Lin's temperament was so unique that once you met her, you would never forget her.

"..." Lin didn't answer her, but simply glanced at her weapons and equipment. The Powered Armor and the ice blade were still there, indicating that she was there to carry out a mission, rather than accidentally stumbling in.

Lin nodded in response.

"Really, is it Lin?" Sakura was a little flustered.

Since Lin defeated her and imprisoned her in the Deepest Place last time, they have never seen each other again. Rin also said that Lin had not visited her, so Sakura's impression of Lin was still that of the cold-faced but warm-hearted boy who gave her a chance.

It was during that time that Lin chose to give her a chance, but she still chose to kill him, and even used the knife left to her by Lin's friend to seriously injure Lin, which made Ying's guilt towards Lin increase day by day during this period.

Even though the two of them weren't particularly familiar with each other, Sakura knew what kind of person Rin was, and she was undoubtedly the kind of person he hated the most.

Lin hadn't considered these things, nor did he care whether it was Ying or someone else who came to help. After resting his body for a while, he asked, "Are you alone?"

"Um... yes, I am currently the sole member of the Special Operations Unit, Poisoned Cocoon, and have been ordered to assist in the subjugation of the Sixth Herrscher." Sakura realized that this was not the time for sentimentality, and immediately adopted a cold, official tone.

"Our mission is to delay until support from headquarters arrives, and to protect the evacuation of civilians. From now on, we will operate in pairs, and I am the temporary team leader."

Sakura was taken aback. She had always acted alone, and she hadn't expected Lin to be so... serious and quick to take on the role of team leader. However, she was also quite adaptable. After hearing Lin's words, she immediately began to survey the surrounding environment and find a safe place to discuss countermeasures.

"Don't stay in one place for too long." Lin led her around the group of Honkai zombie, moving back and forth within a 100-meter radius of them, otherwise their position would easily be exposed, leading to the situation just now.

During the transfer, Lin reported the known situation to Ying, who was astonished.

A group of rational Herrscher who consider themselves human, all of whom are unique Honkai zombie, possessing Herrscher Authority that can cause cells to wither and decompose...

In the short time since the Sixth Herrscher appeared, humanity has already figured out the Sixth Herrscher's abilities through various means, and what they need to do is to use the existing information to defeat the Sixth Herrscher.

It sounds simple, but in reality, even if you know all the information about Herrscher, she is still the most difficult enemy to deal with.

Because the Herrscher are the rules themselves, all they do is accomplish the most impossible tasks under the most difficult conditions within the rules of the other party.

"So what we need to do now is attack that group of Honkai zombie?" Sakura quickly got into the zone, coldly surveying the group of Honkai zombie in the distance. Although she hadn't actually fought Honkai zombie yet, she didn't think she would lose to a group of monsters who didn't even have normal intelligence.

"Yes, but don't kill them all at once." Lin recalled the scene of the Sixth Herrscher's conversation with the Honkai zombie and said, "Killing them all at once might cause the Sixth Herrscher to have an emotional breakdown and realize that she is Herrscher in advance. If she uses her powers, the people who have not yet evacuated will be affected."

Sakura's curiosity was piqued by Lin's confident tone. "Why are you so sure that those Honkai zombie are so important to her?"

"Because she is someone who values her companions."