The World's Fastest Bird

"Right, right, right, Brother Li, you're right. We should hurry up and run." Boss Gao echoed repeatedly, casually beckoning the young maid beside him.

"Xiao Kui! Let's go!"

Weighing over two hundred pounds, he hurriedly threw himself onto the back of a girl barely five feet three. The girl in the black-and-white maid uniform remained expressionless, her body not even trembling, as if she were carrying a feather.

Behind a large tree in the distance, Li You watched in complete confusion.

"Brother Ye, what are they doing? Why did a feather suddenly fall from the sky, and now they're leaving? That superhuman looks pretty strong, and that fat guy is way too shameless. He actually made that little girl carry him?"

The string of questions gave Bai Ye a headache. Too lazy to respond to Li You, he stared at the feather on the ground, feeling that it looked strangely familiar.

The feather was grayish-black all over, marked with black spots and horizontal stripes, with a dirty white tip. Together, they formed a distinctive pattern.

He felt as though he had seen such a distinctive feather in Animal World before. What was it again?

"Holy shit! His head exploded!" Li You suddenly cried out in a low voice. He was so shocked that his body involuntarily shuddered.

Bai Ye's pupils abruptly contracted as he looked toward the group of more than ten people. One of them had suddenly had his head explode without warning!

"That beast is back! Mr. Li, act now!"

Cries erupted from the crowd. They began firing into the air again, while the shadow behind Li Xiao squirmed and rose to its feet once more.

He struck repeatedly, and more than a dozen eerie black shadow darts wove together into a net in midair, spinning at high speed.

Clang, clang, clang...

The metallic clashes rang out without pause. The shadow darts seemed to be continuously colliding with some creature, scattering tiny sparks.

At that moment, Bai Ye finally saw what they were fighting.

They were not shooting at thin air, but at... a peregrine falcon!

He had not seen it before because it was too far away, and the peregrine falcon was simply too fast for the naked eye to catch. It was nothing but a streak of black lightning, gone in an instant.

Now, forced back by Li Xiao's shadow darts, the peregrine falcon slowed down enough for its full form to be seen.

"It's actually a peregrine falcon," Bai Ye murmured.

Li You caught a fleeting glimpse of part of the peregrine falcon's shadow and hurriedly asked, "What's a peregrine falcon?"

Bai Ye recalled the introduction from Animal World. "The peregrine falcon is the second-fastest bird in the world in flight. Because it's incredibly fast, it's known as the stealth bomber among birds. If it doesn't like the look of something, it swoops over and claws it. The creatures it targets are often disemboweled before they even see its shadow."

Li You was dumbfounded. He had never studied much, so naturally he did not know there was such a creature as a peregrine falcon.

"Speed that ridiculous only ranks second!? Then what bird ranks first?"

Bai Ye glanced at him and said flatly, "Naturally, it's you, my friend, because you only last three seconds."

"Huh? Me?" Li You pointed at himself with his mouth hanging open. It took him three seconds to understand the implication, and he flared up in anger.

"This is an mutated peregrine falcon. It's clearly even faster, nearly beyond the limit of what the naked eye can track. Those people are in danger."

Bai Ye watched the panicked crowd. Just moments ago, another person had been pierced through the head.

The mutated peregrine falcon was too fast, faster than bullets. When it flew past ordinary people, it could not even leave an image on their retinas.

After observing for a while, he made up his mind and decided to step in and save them.

This group was not weak. That superhuman could control shadows, and the petite maid was no ordinary person either. To protect the fat man just now, she had actually taken a claw strike from the peregrine falcon head-on. Aside from swaying slightly, she had not suffered any real injury.

The middle-aged man with dual pistols was an excellent shot and knew gun-fu. There were also several gene-modified humans in the group, clearly a level stronger than Tan Jie, the wild boar.

Only the fat man seemed to be an ordinary person, requiring protection the entire time.

This was an undeniably powerful team. If they had faced the hyenas, gray sparrows, and the like from earlier, they could have crushed them easily. Unfortunately, they had encountered a mutated peregrine falcon.

The peregrine falcon itself was not particularly strong, but its speed was absolutely unmatched. No matter how strong they were, it was useless if they could not hit it.

But to Bai Ye, the peregrine falcon's extreme speed was nothing. Could it possibly be faster than stopped time?

After thinking for a moment, he said to Li You beside him, "Li Zuo, it's time for you to show off."

"Huh? Me?" Li You gaped and pointed at himself, utterly bewildered.

Bai Ye gave a mysterious smile, leaned close to his ear, and whispered a few words.

"Li Xiao, can you even handle this? I paid a fortune to hire you to protect me!"

Boss Gao shouted, his face drenched in cold sweat. He had nearly died just now. If Xiao Kui had not blocked that attack for him, he would have been dead already.

Seeing that Li Xiao still could not deal with the peregrine falcon, he no longer cared about being polite.

Li Xiao's expression was extremely ugly. His eyeballs darted rapidly in their sockets, but even so, he could only catch a trace of the peregrine falcon's afterimage. How could someone as proud as him admit that knocking off a feather earlier had merely been a lucky fluke?

"Shut up! Stop making noise! I'm thinking of a way!" Cold sweat ran down Li Xiao's face. He was even considering whether he should abandon these people and run away alone. He was a man destined to become one of the Ten Kings—how could he die so miserably at the claws of a bird?

Just then, the grass in the distance suddenly rustled, and the sound of shoes brushing against weeds came abruptly through the air.

Someone was coming?

Li Xiao and the others noticed the newcomer, and their hearts immediately lifted. Anyone daring to appear on Black Mountain at this time could not be ordinary. Yet when the newcomers emerged from the grass, everyone's hearts sank.

Two ragged wastelanders slowly walked out, looking rather strange. One had a mechanical thigh slung over his shoulder, while the other had filthy bandages wrapped around his right hand and carried a large sack in his left. It was bulging, seemingly containing a square box along with quite a few miscellaneous items.

"Two wastelanders?"

"Why would there be wastelanders here? Were they captured and brought here to scout the way?"

They had seen quite a few people capture wastelanders and bring them to Black Mountain as pathfinders.

With disaster looming over him, Boss Gao could not worry about much else. He hurriedly shouted past Bai Ye and the other's backs, "Friends behind them, I'm Gao Bancheng, son of Gao Shanhe, chairman of the Fortune Commerce Association! If you help me through this crisis today, I will repay you handsomely in the future!"

Everyone waited eagerly for a response, but only the two wastelanders stood there. The people behind them did not appear.

"Damn it!" Gao Bancheng cursed under his breath.

Just then, the wastelander with bandages around his right hand spoke coldly. "How much?"

Gao Bancheng froze. Could these two be more than mere wastelanders? It was not that he judged by appearances, but no matter how little a powerful person cared about appearance, they could not possibly dress as shabbily as Bai Ye and the other. They were practically naked.

At first, their clothes had been old and torn but at least covered their bodies. Yet after encountering three waves of mutated beasts along the way, as well as an attack by the Man-eating Flower Tree, their already cheap burlap rags had naturally become even more tattered.