Total Annihilation

Russell's attention withdrew from the virtual panel, his gaze falling on the battlefield before him, soaked in smoke and blood.

Severed limbs, shattered flesh, twisted firearms, and charred cartridge cases lay scattered everywhere like the installation art of some dered madman.

He frowned.

Since I'm seeing this through to the end, I might as well clean up the battlefield.

His left hand pressed downward into empty space, and his telekinesis reached deep into the earth's crust like an invisible giant palm.

As his hand slowly opened, the ground beneath his feet began to vibrate. At first it was only a slight tremor, but it quickly escalated into the shaking of an entire region.

The earth split open a huge fissure before him, opening silently like a hungry mouth.

Dozens of corpses, along with those shattered firearms, cartridge cases, and fragments of blood-soaked combat uniforms, were lifted together by an invisible force and slowly slid into the fissure.

Loess poured down like a waterfall, burying all of this several meters deep underground.

Just as the earth was about to close, Russell's ears caught a sound, a faint scream coming from the depths of the fissure.

Someone was still alive.

He paused, his brows raising slightly without delving further into it. The fissure had already closed, and that sound had vanished as well.

He turned around, his gaze drawn to five huge, silver-white figures in the distance.

Those big fellows were a full three meters tall, gleaming with a chilling metallic luster in the sunlight and standing out as conspicuously as lighthouses in the dark night.

Sentinels?

When they walked a bit closer, Russell finally saw the details: the exterior did indeed bear some resemblance to the Sentinels in Days of Future Past, but the workmanship was much cruder.

Atop the silver-white mechanical arms were not energy cannons, but modified large-caliber machine guns, with bullet belts hanging down from the shoulders and swaying gently in the wind.

The armor plates on their chests bore obvious welding marks, and the hydraulic rods at the joints were exposed, looking like rushed prototype machines.

Beside them also followed more than thirty fully armed soldiers with camouflage uniforms, bulletproof helmets, and night-vision goggles hanging on their helmets. Their M4 rifles hugged their shoulders, and their muzzles uniformly pointed in Russell's direction.

Without even thinking, he knew they were in cahoots with the previous batch of people.

"Don't move, you're surrounded!"

A familiar line, a familiar tone, a familiar self-righteousness; Russell couldn't even be bothered to reply.

Almost simultaneously, dozens of infrared aiming beams pierced the air, converging on Russell's body—forehead, chest, limbs. The red dots were dense and numerous, like some morbid tattoo.

Major Flint walked out from the squad, his combat boots crunching against the gravel.

His gaze swept over the cracked and re-closed road surface all around, the collapsed ruins, and the shattered firearms scattered among the rubble, his frown growing tighter and tighter.

Bizarre—far too bizarre.

No corpses, no blood, nothing at all. Over a hundred elite soldiers seemed to have vanished into thin air.

"Kid," Flint's voice dropped very low, carrying a deliberate, manufactured ferocity, "call your accomplices out. I know there's more than one mutant here—there are two, right? Don't even think about trying any sneak attacks."

He paused, taking a deep breath. "Speak, was it you and those two who killed our soldiers? Where are the rest of the surviving soldiers?"

He blurted out all his questions in one breath, his voice growing louder and louder as if he were using sheer volume to mask a certain unease.

Russell glanced at him, that gaze as flat as if he were looking at a piece of garbage awaiting disposal. "You mean those people wearing the same clothes as you?"

He paused, the corners of his mouth curving slightly upward. "They're right beside you."

Flint's eyes narrowed as he stared fixedly at Russell, not even sweeping his peripheral vision to the side.

Yet the surrounding soldiers panicked, instinctively looking all around while their gun muzzles wavered back and forth, as if something might pounce out of the darkness in the next second.

Nothing was there—only the wind and the burning smell of scorched wood in the distance.

"To be specific," Russell added, his voice unhurried, "beneath your feet."

Flint's face instantly turned the color of a pig's liver.

He realized he had been played. The veins at his temples throbbed violently, and the knuckles of the hand gripping the walkie-talkie turned white.

"Kid, you fucking dare to play with me?" He squeezed these words out from between his teeth, then whirled around abruptly and roared at the soldiers behind him.

"Two of you, come forward and cuff this kid. If he dares to make a move, execute him on the spot. The rest of you, get into that room and drag the other two mutants out for me!"

Two soldiers stepped forward in response, holding specialized alloy handcuffs—the model specifically used for suppressing mutants, equipped internally with a miniature current generator capable of continuously releasing low-frequency pulses that interfered with neural signals.

Russell did not move.

He merely stood in place and spoke in that flat, hair-raising tone. "Don't bother looking. I killed them all."

He lifted his eyelids to meet Flint's gaze. "Want to capture me? Based on you lot—that's not enough."

Flint's pupils shrank violently.

The next instant, an invisible force coiled around his body like a giant python.

Not from the outside, but from the inside—blood, the blood that had surged through his blood vessels for over forty years, suddenly felt as though someone had pressed the pause button.

It no longer flowed, no longer delivered oxygen, but merely gathered quietly and heavily within the vessels like a frozen river.

The feeling of suffocation arrived fast and fierce.

Flint's face turned from red to purple, then from purple to cyan. His eyeballs bulged, and his mouth opened like a fish thrown onto the shore, yet he could not draw in half a breath of air.

With his last remaining strength, he squeezed an almost shattered syllable from his throat:

"Fire... quick..."

Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!

The soldiers' reactions were as fast as a conditioned reflex.

Over thirty M4s opened fire simultaneously, bullets pouring forth like a rainstorm.

Russell casually waved his left hand.

Those bullets, metal projectiles powerful enough to tear an ordinary person to pieces, collided with an invisible wall, suspended in the air for less than half a second, and then neatly reversed direction, flying back at a speed even faster than when they came.

Puff-puff-puff-puff!

The sound of bullets entering flesh was as dense as rainfall.

Over thirty soldiers didn't even have time to let out screams before they collapsed in unison like harvested wheat. A bloody mist permeated the air, carrying the fishy stench of rust.

Flint's legs went soft, and he dropped to his knees.

The very instant the soldiers opened fire, that invisible force gripping his blood suddenly released.

It wasn't that Russell had shown mercy, but rather that his attention had been briefly distracted by the bullets.

Flint sprawled on the ground like a trampled bug, gasping heavily for air, his lungs filled with an atmosphere mixed with gunsmoke and the smell of blood.

He did not hesitate.

Or rather, terror left him no time to hesitate.

Flint scrambled backward behind those five Sentinel robots, his fingers frantically poking at the control panel.

Green lights flashed, and the robots' eyes instantly burst forth with a cold blue glow as the targeting system initiated.

The five Sentinels raised their mechanical arms almost simultaneously, and five modified M134 machine guns began to spin, their barrels cutting blurred circles in the air.

Bullet belts rattled and jumped, and bullets poured out like a torrent. These were not ordinary bullets, but armor-piercing rounds specially designed to deal with mutants, their tips embedded with trace oscillation crystals capable of interfering with mutant gene expression.

Thud-thud-thud!

The gunfire was no longer the crisp "tat-tat-tat," but a dull, continuous roar resembling a pile driver.

Large-caliber bullets dragged visible ballistic trails, pressing down on Russell overwhelmingly.

Useless.

Russell didn't even raise his hand.

Those bullets collided with an invisible gelatinous layer a few meters in front of him, their speed plummeting drastically before—turning around.

Clang-clang-clang!

The bullets struck the Sentinels' silver-white armor, splashing dazzling sparks everywhere.

Yet that was all. Those heavy armor plates seemed specially designed to defend against this kind of attack, leaving only shallow dents from the bullet tips without even fracturing into a proper crack.

Hiding behind a Sentinel and watching this scene, Flint finally understood what Lieutenant Tang Wei's unfinished sentence in the communicator had meant.

"You pray, just like we do."

He truly wanted to strangle that intelligence-gathering bastard.

"You call this a level-three mutant?" Flint cursed at the empty space, his voice laced with a crying tone.

Russell looked at those thick-skinned iron lumps and raised an eyebrow.

An eye for an eye? Fine, but the efficiency was far too low.

He raised his right hand.

That massive curtain of water spanning miles in mid-air began to churn.

It was not a slow flow, but a descent.

Hundreds of thousands of tons of lake water poured down from an altitude of a thousand meters, the air compressed into a deafening roar as the entire firmament seemed torn open.

That was no rain, nor a waterfall; it was an inverted river suddenly breaking free from the shackles of gravity.

Water from the great river comes from the skies, crushing everything.

Soft water, empowered by high speed and gravity, was deadlier than any artillery shell.

A single drop of water was enough to pierce a steel plate, and what poured down at this moment was... an entire lake.

The three closest Sentinels were hit head-on by the torrent. Their silver-white armor dented, tore, and shattered in a fraction of a second.

Hydraulic oil and coolant spewed from the broken joints, mixing with the muddy lake water before being crushed into fine foam by the even greater water pressure.

Steel roared, and the earth trembled.

By the time Russell gathered the stray water currents back together and sent them back into mid-air, a huge abyss-like crater had appeared on the ground.

[Fear Emotion +1]

[Shock Emotion +1]

[Shock Emotion +1]

The other two Sentinels were not caught in the torrent, but their reaction speeds were astonishingly fast.

Their eye-lights flashed wildly, and their systems completed target re-locking in 0.3 seconds.

The armor plates on their chests flipped outward, revealing the gun muzzles hidden beneath. This time it wasn't machine guns, but true energy weapons.

Deep within the muzzles, white light began to gather.

Not ordinary white, but that scorching, nearly liquid white that made one's eyeballs feel burned just by looking at them.

The hairs all over Russell's body stood on end at that exact moment.

Laser weapons.

And of a caliber sufficient to threaten him.

He did not hesitate.

His left hand pressed downward, and his telekinesis slammed like an invisible hammer onto the ground beneath those two Sentinels. The earth split open in 0.1 seconds, and the two three-meter-tall iron beasts suddenly had empty space beneath their feet, their centers of gravity instantly losing control.

The very moment they tilted, their gun muzzles deflected by less than a degree, and those two beams brimming with energy tore through the air, grazing the top of Russell's head as they shot into the sky.

Where the beams passed, the air was ionized into plasma, leaving a visible vacuum channel with blue electric arcs still crackling along the edges.

Russell did not give them a second chance to charge. His left hand closed, and the split ground snapped shut like a giant mouth, swallowing the two Sentinels along with their laser cannons underground.

Dirt and rock became denser than concrete under the pressure of telekinesis, sealing those two silver-white wrecks permanently several meters deep underground.

Flint stood in place like a dead tree struck by lightning.

He looked at the soldiers lying in pools of blood, at the five Sentinels he had pinned his hopes on turning into a pile of scrap metal, and at the young man before him crushing all his trump cards as easily as pinching an ant.

Finished.

Everything was finished.

Even if he could return alive, the military court wouldn't let him go.

Prison, dishonorable discharge, stripping of all honors—that was if he was lucky.

If he was unlucky, a bullet, a trench, and a name no one would ever mention.

His gaze fell upon the figure with his back to him not far away.

The one who had ruined everything for him.

Flint's hand groped toward his waist.

Hanging there was a new type of grenade, an experimental piece personally approved by General Darian, with an effective kill radius of fifteen meters.

His finger hooked the Ra, the expression on his face shifting from despair to madness, and then to a sort of near-pious resolve.

"Let's die together—!"

He pulled the Ra and rushed toward Russell, gripping the grenade.

Three steps.

He only ran three steps.

That feeling came again.

Fiercer and more vicious than the first time, his blood surged backward in his vessels as if being dragged upward from the soles of his feet by an invisible hand.

His heart beat wildly yet could pump no blood; his brain screamed piercingly in oxygen deprivation; his eyeballs bulged, his eardrums bloated, and warm liquid poured from his nasal passages.

Beep-beep-beep-beep—

The grenade's fuse was still burning.

Three seconds, two seconds.

Flint's body exploded during the final second.

It wasn't the grenade; when the blood reflux reached its limit, his blood vessels, heart, and brain burst simultaneously.

Flesh flew and bone shards scattered. The grenade, failing to detonate in time, was blasted away, landing in the ruins a dozen meters away and producing a dull, non-threatening pop.

Russell stood in place without even lifting an eyelid.

The debris and flying stones generated by the explosion were blocked by an invisible force field a meter in front of him, dropping rustlingly to the ground.

[Psychic Telekinesis Control Experience +1]

"Finally quiet."

He yawned, lifted his right hand, and waved it toward the curtain of water in mid-air.

Hundreds of thousands of tons of lake water surged down noisily. This time it was gentle, flowing along the slope of the street and the direction of the drainage ditch like a tamed river, quietly flowing back into the lake whose entire morning had been borrowed.

Then, he resumed his helpful burial work.

A second fissure opened and closed.

There were no screams this time.

Patting the dust from his hands, Russell turned and walked toward the dilapidated house.

He walked a few steps, then stopped and tilted his head.

It seems... there is still one thing left undone.

He turned around and walked with short, quick steps along the road through the ruins toward the entrance of the slums.

Along the way, the chunks of concrete overturned by the explosion, the large stones detached from the building structures, and the steel bars lying crisscross in the middle of the road were all casually cleared to the sides by him.

He did another good deed.

Russell felt that he truly was a living Lei Feng.

There might genuinely not have been many people living in the slums; after the fire burned through, even if there were any, they had all run away.

It might also have been because the battle just now had scared everyone away. Anyway, as he walked all the way forward, he did not even see a single shadow of a person.

Not long after, he saw those camouflage military vehicles still parked in their original spots.

The three people inside the vehicles, however, could not sit still.

Victor Marshall stared intently through the vehicle window toward the direction of the slums, his fingers tapping endlessly on his knees.

He had seen that sky-blocking water curtain disappear, heard the explosions and gunfire coming from inside, and then—nothing could be heard anymore.

Silence, dead silence.

The string in his heart tightened further and further.

"They should have caught them." He muttered to himself, his voice so soft it was as if he were trying to convince himself, "Flint brought so many people, and there's the Sentry... Just three mutants, they definitely caught them."

He poked his head out of the vehicle window and shouted at the stern-looking Sentry standing beside the vehicle, "Officer, sorry to trouble you to ask Major Flint if they've already caught the fugitives."

The Sentry glanced at him, but still picked up the communicator and asked.

Bzz—bzz—

No response.

Once, twice, three times, there was only the static noise of the electric current.

Victor's heart sank to the bottom. He reached out to open the vehicle door—

Bang!

A rifle butt slammed against the vehicle door, shoving him back inside. Two Sentries held their rifles, their expressions as cold as two statues.

"F*ck!" Victor cursed in his heart, yet dared not show the slightest bit of dissatisfaction on his face, "If only I hadn't forgotten to bring my gun today..."

His gaze swept inadvertently across the direction of the slums, and his voice stuck in his throat.

A blurry figure was walking out from the smoke-filled ruins.

Unhurried, with a calm pace.

Who was it? An escaped resident? Or... someone from the military?

Victor's breathing grew increasingly rapid, and the air was filled with a certain aura that instinctively made him feel terror.

That figure grew closer and closer, its silhouette clearer and clearer—the lean figure, the posture of lowering the head slightly while walking.

Familiar.

Far too familiar.

When he was two hundred meters away, Russell spotted those military vehicles at a glance, along with the two Sentries beside them and that acquaintance in the vehicle whom he had crossed paths with once before.

"Stop right there, fugitive, you're under arrest!"

The two Sentries reacted very quickly.

They recognized that the young man walking out from the ruins was precisely the target of the operation.

Although a voice in their brains was asking, "Why is he walking out of his own accord instead of being escorted out?", the desire to render meritorious service controlled their fingers faster than their doubts.

Tat-tat-tat—!

The gunfire was short and dense.

Then, like countless times before, it came to an abrupt halt.

The two Sentries fell in a pool of blood, their eyes still open as if they had finally figured out that question in the very last second before death.

Victor Marshall's expression completed a switch from panic to calmness to flattery in a fraction of a second.

He abruptly pushed open the vehicle door, took two steps in three to welcome him, his face piled with the relief of having survived a disaster and just the right amount of grievance:

"Mr. Russell, it's truly wonderful to see you. You have no idea..."

The extremely adaptable Victor Marshall hadn't even had time to let out a sigh of relief.

Bang.

A gunshot rang out.

It wasn't a shot fired by Russell.

It was the M4 left behind by the Sentry on the ground, whose trigger was pulled by psychokinesis.

Victor widened his eyes, looking down at the hole in his chest that was bubbling with blood.

He wanted to say something, his lips twitching a few times, but he only spat out a mouthful of bloody froth.

Then his knees went soft, and he collapsed onto the ground, pitching forward with his face buried in the mud, never to get up again.