Black Dragon's Wild Dance Night (I)

"Lu Mingfei, this way! Run! The explosives we planted will go off any second!"

No longer needing to worry about accuracy, Caesar viciously poured his remaining ammunition into the more distant Deadpools, covering them with everything he had.

Deadpools were undoubtedly the most bloodthirsty, most voracious predators. Their sense of smell was more than ten times stronger than a shark's.

Sharks could smell blood from a kilometer away, while Deadpools possessed an even greater sense of smell. Supernatural creatures carrying dragon blood could not be judged by common sense.

They craved Lu Mingfei and Gen Chisei's blood, especially Lu Mingfei's, so close at hand. They lunged forward one after another in their hunger.

Even when the one before them had had its claws, flesh and bone alike, sheared off by the saber, even when Lu Mingfei's delicate face had twisted into something ferocious with rage, they continued circling and attacking.

The number of Deadpools had risen from more than forty to over seventy. That was even after Lu Mingfei had slain five of them. Nearly all those that had flooded into this level earlier had emerged from the corners.

Deadpools possessed extraordinarily tenacious vitality, especially these captive Serpentine Deadpools. They were the strong or cunning survivors of perpetual killing feasts where they devoured their own kind, their life force far surpassing that of ordinary hybrids.

Even a single one that escaped could unleash a bloody, savage rampage through Tokyo's shopping streets. And under that premise, the instance had drastically strengthened every last one of them. Without the alchemical longsword in his hand, Lu Mingfei would never have been able to cut them down like vegetables.

Cutting off their reinforcements was effective. The elevator shaft ran straight through the building, and the simplest route up from the lowest floor had been temporarily blocked by the fallen elevator. The number of Deadpools reaching this level had dropped by nearly half.

Although the middle and lower levels still had a cargo elevator, the Deadpools were not yet capable of climbing the stairs to the ground floor and pressing the elevator button.

"I'd love to run... Senior Brother, you don't mind if I carry you bridal-style, right? It'll make it easier for us to get away. I'll avenge you later."

With cold, efficient swings, Lu Mingfei spun and threw his blade, severing the throats of the Deadpools blocking his way. Carrying Chu Zihang in his arms, he carved out a bloody path.

There was something the panel had not said. In other instances, even if he had ten points of attributes on paper, he might only be able to bring out seven or eight. But in this instance, his ten points could perform like thirty. He could predict every Deadpool's movements.

Inside Genji Heavy Industries, he should have been a Super S-Rank!

Under the effects of the evolution drug, he was more exhilarated than ever, yet colder than ever. Like a novice butcher charging into a slaughterhouse, he tried desperately to master the lives of every beast and become an efficient tyrant.

Even with one hand, Lu Mingfei displayed battlefield dominance bordering on brutality. He quickly reached Caesar and Gen Chisei, who were providing cover, and placed Chu Zihang at the "safe spot."

"I'd like to chat with you for a while, but this isn't the place." Caesar let out a breath, then unwillingly slapped the elevator wall. "Damn it, how much longer until the elevator from the top floor gets here? Why is it so slow?!"

An elevator operating normally could not possibly be this slow, unless someone was deliberately holding it up. But in a situation like this, no one would have the leisure to do that.

The earthquake had apparently triggered some built-in safety mode in the elevator. The only certainty was that it could still operate.

"Two minutes and nineteen seconds. That's not slow. It's the best timing. If it came earlier, we'd have to be roommates with the Deadpools in the elevator shaft. Later would be even worse." Without hesitation, Lu Mingfei tossed the guns from his back over to them. "I'll hold them off. You cover me."

"What? The explosives I planted will blow in thirty-odd seconds. Hiss... where did you get so many Chicago Typewriters? And alchemical bullets too?"

Caesar's heart sank as he took the gun and chambered a round. Being blown to death by explosives he had planted himself was not an honorable Catholic death. Those lunatics from the Equipment Department, on the other hand, might have been thrilled to die smiling.

Chicago Typewriter was one nickname for the American Thompson submachine gun. Its automatic gunfire resembled the old American typewriters of the 1940s. It had plenty of other nicknames too, such as Donkey Killer Submachine Gun and Chicago Violin.

It had also appeared in Resident Evil 4, where it was a special weapon with unlimited ammunition for killing monsters. Its appearance here felt strangely fitting. Fighting Deadpools in an enclosed space—wasn't this basically a survival horror game?

"The distant blast won't kill us. The chain explosions two and a half minutes from now will. As for this pile of guns, it's a long story. You can just think of them as a gift for playing StarCraft."

Making it up as he went, Lu Mingfei gripped his blade and charged toward the Deadpool horde again.

When he ran, he stirred up a gust of wind. It came howling, then turned warm and hazy as he stepped into the sea of fire.

Now, he seemed to have become a desperado. When had that begun...? It seemed like only recently, yet it also felt as though he had always been one.

Every year during the campus Spring Festival gala, he sat in a corner and watched Liu Miaomiao, that pretty girl with Grade Ten piano certification, play onstage. He watched the talented boys dance gracefully in black formalwear.

He imagined a helicopter descending from the sky, its rotors tearing through the night. Sunglasses-wearing agents stepped out, their faces cold and stern, discussing a mission with him as if no one else existed. Flowers and butterflies at the gala all dimmed at once, turning to watch.

Cool as hell. In his imagination, he was as dashing as the desperados boys talked big about when they hung out together. But that was not the true desperado in his heart—it was only a youthful fantasy wearing a desperado's skin.

What was the true desperado in his heart?

Someone who never grew tired of love. In other words, a bandit of love.

During the last vacation of his ninth-grade year, he had fallen for a television drama called Tokyo Love Story. Rika Akana left him tossing and turning, unable to let go. He truly loved Rika Akana as a character—jumping up to reach shoes in a tree, confiding in still objects when she was lonely. Who wouldn't love a girl like that?

So at midnight, he kept scrolling through posts on a Tokyo Love Story forum until he came across someone who had written, "Perhaps one day, you will grow tired of Tokyo, and you will grow tired of living." Netizens below replied with their own cities: Luoyang, London, Cuba, Reshulan. Lu Mingfei thought of his own little coastal city, but after typing it out and thinking it over, he deleted it.

The city was still there, its high-rises standing tall and whole. You could grow tired of a city's prices, a certain attraction, a particular alleyway, but you would not grow tired of leaving it behind. What you truly grew tired of leaving behind was a certain period of time that represented a relationship.

Everyone longed to love and be loved. It was only when they grew tired of the people they loved there that they grew tired of the city, tired of living.

People could not grow tired of love.

That was what Lu Mingfei thought.

If a person did not carefully store away their own love, how could they answer the love of the partners and friends who loved them in the future?

As long as one never grew tired of love, one need not fear loneliness. You could close the door, hug the little wooden box where you had stored it, and wait quietly. Just don't fall asleep. When the person you were waiting for finally came, you could place an equally valued wooden box in their hands, puff out your cheeks, and loudly tell the world, "I'm not lonely anymore!"

When he decided to leave the path his life had originally been set on, he had known what price he would have to pay. When he got stubborn, he was the sort of person who would use his head to punch a hole through a southern wall. Stubborn people never knew how to grow tired.

Today, he had come with a blade to save someone, and his heart naturally carried an unwillingness as vast as mountains and seas.

At this very moment, he was certainly a bandit—one genuine through and through.

"Will there still be a chance to talk later?"

Halfway there, Lu Mingfei suddenly seemed to remember something. He turned his head slightly and looked up sideways at his teammates, familiar to him yet not quite as familiar with him. The flames dyed his collar a deep crimson.

"Do you know what my high school life was like?"

No one could respond to a topic like that immediately, so he continued on his own.

"I didn't even finish high school, but it might as well be over."

"Before my final year, I was a pretty pathetic kid. I wasn't good at adapting to the world, and I couldn't go out and conquer new territory. My territory was tiny, tiny... so tiny that whenever I was a little dissatisfied, there were only a few people who truly cared about me, only a few friends who thought highly of me. I've lost them hundreds of times already."