Rooftop Showdown (1)

Pei Shao looked up and even saw many apartments whose windows had completely vanished, leaving them like black holes in the night—like the gaping, blood-filled maws of ancient beasts lurking in the darkness, ready to devour anyone who came near. The sight sent chills down his spine.

"No one should be living here anymore, right?" Pei Shao suddenly felt cold all over.

"Target confirmed. It is hiding on the rooftop of this building!"

"Damn! Seriously? What are we supposed to do now?" With the moment at hand, Pei Shao began to get nervous again. It was understandable. The other party might not have been some freakish monster with three heads and six arms, but it had jumped from a building over twenty stories high without suffering so much as a scratch. If Pei Shao faced it one-on-one, the result would be no different from a mantis trying to stop a chariot.

"Go up!" Castle issued the command without hesitation.

"Uh..." Pei Shao really wanted to say, "Why don't you go up by yourself? I'll just stay behind and watch!" But when he thought of how Castle would surely look down on him if he said that, he held his tongue. Besides, he really wanted to see whether the other party actually looked like a toilet. After reassuring himself that "as long as Castle is here, my life shouldn't be in danger," Pei Shao took a deep breath and strode into the darkness.

The building had seven floors in total. When he reached the halfway point of the fifth floor, a red glare burst from inside Pei Shao's pocket, bathing the surroundings in crimson. It was somewhat like candlelight, making Pei Shao involuntarily think of the opening scenes of certain horror movies.

"Mr. Castle, can you turn off the alarm light? It's creepy as hell!"

Castle did not answer that question. "The other party has probably already detected me and is now on full alert. The battlefield is the rooftop!"

"Fuck!" Pei Shao's plan to sneak up behind it and smack it with a brick instantly went up in smoke.

"If it hides in the shadows on the rooftop, won't we be at a huge disadvantage?"

"No, it won't. It is standing in the center of the rooftop, waiting for us. Its light-energy signal is growing stronger and stronger. Clearly, it has already fully recovered from the shock caused by its jump from the building!" Colors Pei Shao had never seen before flickered within Castle's electronic eyes. Was it excitement at seeing one of its own kind, helplessness, or perhaps both?

Pei Shao gripped Castle's heavy metal casing tightly and soon spotted the stairs and skylight leading to the rooftop. Then Castle spoke again. "Stop!"

"What is it?"

"According to my analysis, the other party has not yet detected your presence. Stay here and wait for me, so that we do not accidentally injure you during the battle!"

"What a good Castle! It actually knows how to think of me!" In that instant, Pei Shao felt a tiny bit moved.

Who would have thought Castle's next sentence would nearly knock him unconscious? "Your muscle fibers are too fragile, and your mobility is less than 33% of mine. If you are present, you may become an impediment!" Castle was always so blunt, always speaking the truth.

Pei Shao was extremely displeased. "What do you mean I'll become an impediment? Damn it, I'll show you whether I'm really dead weight!" Having secretly made up his mind, Pei Shao nodded and said something straight out of a bandit tale. "Go on, Mr. Castle. I'll hold the line for you here!" Yet inwardly, he was calculating how to suddenly charge out like a heavenly surprise attack once they were locked in fierce combat and too distracted to spare him a thought.

Castle wasted no words and quickly darted through the large hole in the ceiling. Pei Shao noticed that the hole was about the same size as the one in the window shown on the live television broadcast. Its width was roughly that of an LCD screen. A gust of cold wind swept in at that moment. Pei Shao shrank his neck and reached up, only to find that the rooftop was more than two feet above his head.

That height was child's play for Castle. For Pei Shao, though, it was a rather troublesome obstacle. Knowing that his jumping ability had not reached the absurd level of Air Jordan, Pei Shao quickly headed for the nearest security door.

Pei Shao found that the door opened inward. After kicking it hard a few times, the security door actually flew open. It seemed that a building awaiting demolition truly was unreliable everywhere.

A moldy, damp stench hit him in the face, and the remaining items in the room were scattered in complete disarray. Covering his nose, Pei Shao walked inside and looked around. His luck was not bad—he found a wooden computer desk so rotten that it creaked wildly the moment he picked it up.

Pei Shao summoned all his strength to carry the computer desk beneath the skylight. He shook the tabletop with his hand and decided it should hold his weight. Only then did he flip himself up onto it with extreme caution.

Slowly straightening up, Pei Shao poked his head through the skylight. He had barely taken one look when he nearly fell off the computer desk in fright. Almost the very instant his head emerged, a tiny flame rapidly swelled in size and shot straight at his face at incredible speed, screeching exaggeratedly as it rubbed against the air.

Fortunately, Pei Shao's reactions were quick enough. If he had been even a beat slower, his face might have instantly turned into that of a charcoal seller. Even so, although Pei Shao had narrowly dodged the attack, the right side of his face still burned with searing pain.

"Damn it, are they burning rattan-armored soldiers?" Pei Shao waited a full five seconds before daring to stick his head out again. His gaze swept around briefly, then froze in an instant.

"Oh my god! What is that?" Pei Shao saw something like a square, massive chunk of iron planted in the darkness at the center of the rooftop. The iron block itself only reached his calves, but with its two mechanical legs, it stood nearly as tall as half a grown man. Its two ghostly, gleaming electronic eyes were exactly like Castle's. What truly horrified Pei Shao, however, were the several mechanical arms extending from both sides of the iron block. Each was about a foot long. Pei Shao counted them in secret—there were around six. Every mechanical arm waved and writhed through the air like the tentacles of a deep-sea octopus.

"What on earth had this thing 'evolved' from?" Clearly, it was not the toilet robot Pei Shao had imagined earlier, but a square object about the size of a monitor.

Even after transforming into a robot, some traces of the original form could still be found. For instance, 40% of Castle's appearance resembled a cellphone. So this thing before him...

Could it be—

A giant iron pot? An iron-pot Transformer?