Hysteria, Turing

When Yulia knocked Leif down, Jingbao Kui paused.

It was truly only for an instant. He had already started his tracks and was preparing to flee, but when he saw Leif's predicament, he could not help pausing for a moment.

Then Xiang Shan saw a mass of strange color blocks suddenly appear amid the previously normal scenery.

Xiang Shan had not noticed Jingbao Kui before. But by then, Jingbao Kui's drive was nearly scrapped as well, and he could no longer spare the computational power needed to maintain his optical camouflage.

Jingbao Kui had not been far from Leif to begin with.

So Xiang Shan leaped over.

A kick descended from the sky.

With a heavy clang, Jingbao Kui's outer armor actually let out a muffled sound.

Jingbao Kui was also considered a martial artist, but his Outer-School Martial Arts were atrocious, utterly incapable of matching his Inner Power cultivation. He had always partnered with Leif or another martial artist and rarely engaged in close-range combat. Thus, aside from its optical camouflage, his outer armor was nowhere near as strong as Leif's.

Xiang Shan's heel smashed into Jingbao Kui's back. The optical camouflage took the impact, and colors immediately rippled outward like water. A strange figure appeared in Xiang Shan's field of vision. The thing's outline resembled a turtle—the enemy was actually lying prone on the ground. Its overall shell was rounded, and it had discarded arms and legs altogether. In roughly the positions where its limbs should have been were four relatively independent tracks, all completely covered by optical camouflage. There also seemed to be vacuum cleaners inside the tracks, sucking away the dust they kicked up and minimizing the traces of movement.

Xiang Shan used that stomp to change direction, then landed. In an instant, armor on Jingbao Kui's right flank opened, ejecting a row of gun barrels. To remain concealed, all these weapons had been stored inside the optical camouflage.

The moment the optical-camouflage armor opened, Xiang Shan twisted his legs to shift his center of gravity and slammed his back against the ground. A burst of bullets grazed past his skull and missed. Xiang Shan did not rise. Instead, he braced his back against the ground and fiercely kicked both legs upward.

It was only one kick, one movement, but millions of artificial muscle fibers and tens of thousands of discharge devices worked in sync. Countless electrons raced through excellent conductors at the speed of light, carrying energy. Then, tens of thousands of discharge devices and millions of artificial muscle fibers moved.

From one component to another. Power traveled through the prosthetic body, colliding and accumulating through countless parts.

True-Force Discharge.

The gun barrels were even slightly stronger than the outer armor of a martial artist's prosthetic body. But the problem was that not every component connected to those barrels possessed that level of strength.

Amid a roar, Jingbao Kui's exposed firearms were destroyed in a single blow. No parts scattered, because the force of Xiang Shan's kick directly drove every piece of scrap metal into that opening in the armor.

Warnings and error messages instantly flooded Jingbao Kui's vision.

Jingbao Kui roared like a wounded beast. His wind-up mechanism spun as he tried to turn around and fight Xiang Shan with the weapons on his front. But while he was turning, Xiang Shan had already rushed back to Leif's side.

The two battlefields were only twenty or thirty meters apart. For a martial artist, that distance took less than a second to cross.

Only then had Leif just managed to climb back up. Seeing Xiang Shan already charging before him, Leif assumed his final fighting stance.

He knew he had no hope of survival. So, with his natural face, he forced out the last expression of his life.

A savage grin.

The boss will avenge me...

His fists crossed as they thrust forward, but they failed to stop Xiang Shan. Xiang Shan swiftly circled beneath Leif's crotch, used Leif's incoming kick to spring upward, cleared Leif's shoulder, then heavily kicked Leif in the forehead. Spinning in midair, he drove a foot through that head.

Only then did Jingbao Kui realize that what he should have done was not fight for his life, but flee for it.

The tracks kicked up a vast cloud of dust. But Xiang Shan had already landed atop Jingbao Kui, then stomped at the gap left by the ruined firearms.

In the distant past, on Africa's grasslands, a carnivoran animal called the hyena hunted African buffalo. Spotted hyenas generally weighed around fifty kilograms, while wild buffalo commonly weighed over half a ton. Yet even so, hyenas could still successfully hunt buffalo.

Hyenas knew how to pull their prey's organs out through its excretory opening.

Xiang Shan dealt with Jingbao Kui just as a hyena hunted a buffalo.

One leg drove straight through the section where the armor had failed, bypassing the difficult-to-penetrate main structure and attacking the weakest electronic components.

Jingbao Kui did not even make it a hundred meters before completely losing power.

Inertia carried him crashing into a building nearby.

It seemed that fuel inside Jingbao Kui's body had leaked and caught fire. With a bang, flames a meter high suddenly erupted. Xiang Shan instinctively recoiled at first, but quickly realized that his body surface no longer had pain receptors, and such flames would not cause any serious harm to his mechanical body.

But Xiang Shan still jumped away. His prosthetic body already had heat-dissipation issues, and standing in a high-temperature environment would still affect his combat ability.

There was one final martial artist on the field—the one holding the blade.

Watching Xiang Shan charge toward him, Longkoni froze. He was still dazed. His biological brain could not yet process so many things. Why was that giant man so strong? Why had Paulus joined the rioters? Why had that giant man suddenly wanted Paulus to join the attack? Why had that invincible giant man died? Why had Paulus died too? And who exactly was that enemy who had appeared at the end?

"Hahahahahaha... I don't understand any of this at all!" Longkoni screamed. "This isn't real! It's an illusion! I must have entered an immersive experience... Hahahahahaha! This experience is too realistic! Hahaha! This new game!"

The three remaining blades crossed as they slashed at Xiang Shan, blooming like a silver flower.

"Flashy but useless."

That thought flashed through Xiang Shan's mind as his legs were already striking in rapid succession, repeatedly kicking at his opponent's head, chest, and hands.

Then came three consecutive kicks of Power-Force Discharge, blasting into Longkoni's chest.

The first shook two screws loose. The second shook another two loose. The third struck the center of the armor plate with tremendous force. The force passed through the armor plate's vibrations and ejected the screws.

An armor plate flew straight into the air.

What the hell? This experience is way too unrealistic. How could any martial artist do something like this? Hahahahahaha...

Then came the blow that destroyed the internal structure.

Longkoni's hands drooped limply, with only the blade on his back still stubbornly resisting the enemy.

The next kick knocked aside the one-handed blade, then slammed into Longkoni's neck.

He repeated this several times. Several screws sprang free.

The mayor suddenly held his breath. He realized what Xiang Shan was about to do. The old man let out a tremendous scream. "No! Don't kill—"

But Xiang Shan had already kicked apart that unprotected head.

Fear.

A kind of fear born from the depths of the heart flooded the mayor. Not just him, but the other townspeople as well.

Xiang Shan looked around at the surreal scene in confusion, completely unable to understand what had happened. He had merely killed an enemy, but for some reason, every resident seemed to have suffered a PTSD episode and fallen into a bizarre state.

"Why did you do that... You killed him! You killed him! You shouldn't have..."

The mayor rushed over, seeming to want to say something. But halfway there, he fainted outright. The balance system built into his drive kept his body steady, and he swayed without falling to the ground.

But...

He still had no idea what exactly had happened.

Xiang Shan looked around in confusion, utterly unable to understand why. In his imagination, after a knight-errant killed an enemy, the ordinary people around him might cheer, or they might fearfully demand that the knight-errant leave quickly so as not to implicate them—both situations were common in novels, and he himself should have encountered them before.

But this behavior, like a case of collective hysteria... what was going on?

Jingbao Kui had reached the final moments of his life. His drive chip had already been on the verge of scrapping from overheating. Now that he was trapped in a sea of flames, there was even less chance of survival.

He could no longer control his body.

At the moment of death, he instead forgot his fear, leaving only calmness in his heart.

It was far too normal for him to die here. After all, his utterly ordinary Inner Power was nothing compared to humanity's collective wisdom and the divine techniques held in the hands of masters.

From lowest to highest, Inner Power could roughly be divided into the Command Realm, Language Realm, Compilation Realm, Assembly Realm, Mechanical Realm, and the legendary Mathematical Realm.

But beyond legend, there was another legend.

True hackers knew how to erase their traces from the internet. Aside from what they wanted others to know, people knew nothing about them. Thus, the more elite an Inner Power master was, the more concealed he became. And even those who knew their names did not dare casually speak their codenames aloud, for fear of triggering keyword surveillance.

Among that tiny handful of top programmers, only tales like myths and strange legends circulated.

Legend said that above the Mathematical Realm, there was another realm... perhaps it could not even be called a "realm"? Perhaps it was merely a title?

Those supreme figures who showed their heads but never their tails were called "Turing."

Some said Turing was the codename of a top Inner Power master. Others believed Turing was a nickname only a very small number of people could possess. Still others swore that it was a group.

Of course, some believed that it was a realm.

He did not understand at all how the enemy had countered his Inner Power. But he could be certain that this method had far surpassed the Language Realm he occupied; even the Compilation Realm could not possibly accomplish such a thing.

For some reason, he had a feeling.

This was intelligence pointing toward "Turing."

There was no reason for it, only intuition.

But at the end of his life, he smiled.

"To behold Turing, this disciple can die without regrets..."