Jiang Xia stood in the stairwell, watching Hagiwara Kenji sprint toward him. Calmly, he raised a hand and snapped his fingers.
Boom—!!
The countdown hit zero. The blast shook the heavens, and the entire floor trembled. Flames surged forward, the scorching shockwave swallowing Hagiwara Kenji before shoving the corpse onward. It tumbled to the ground at Jiang Xia's feet with a thud.
Bracing himself against the railing in the fierce wind, Jiang Xia looked down at the corpse by his feet, then at his own hand. He froze slightly.
His three-second delayed explosion skill hadn't taken effect.
...Damn. It had been too long since he'd wandered through dreams. He'd nearly forgotten that skills worked differently in dreams than they did in reality.
That snap could only have delayed a bomb that was about to explode in his real bedroom—if there was one.
"What a violent explosion." Noah was flung into the wall by the blast's fierce wind, and splat! He flattened into a round pancake. Now, he was busy shaking himself back into shape.
He looked at Hagiwara Kenji on the ground and sighed regretfully. "If it had exploded a few seconds later, he could've rushed into the stairwell and rolled down the steps. He might've survived."
Then he bounced over to the window, clung to the sill, and looked down at the colleagues below, reporting to his Spirit Medium Master in real time:
"Matsuda's trying to rush into the building!"
"The police are stopping him."
"They couldn't stop him—he ran inside!"
Jiang Xia sighed. He crouched down and arranged the disheveled officer on the floor into a slightly more dashing pose of death in the line of duty, then picked Noah up. "Let's go."
Noah rested his short, round little hands on Jiang Xia's arm and watched him take