Embrace

After Liu Sui called that person away, only Luo Ruzhuo and another medical worker remained in the room.

Luo Ruzhuo lay with her eyes closed, breathing steadily, but her mental power had long since spread throughout the room like an invisible net. She could detect the other person's every move.

Unlike the flamboyant outpost members Luo Ruzhuo had seen before, this person had an utterly ordinary face, the kind one would forget after a single glance.

The door to the medical room's dressing area slid open and shut, and the sound of a nursing cart's wheels rolling across the floor gradually grew louder. The regular ticking of the instruments mingled with the faint sound of footsteps, making them hard to distinguish.

But Luo Ruzhuo knew.

Those footsteps had stopped beside her bed.

Her mental power also saw a narrow-bladed dagger, now held in a hand that had been wearing a medical glove all along.

The person tapped a few times on the optical computer at his wrist, and the medical room's surveillance indicator immediately turned gray.

The dagger descended along with his killing intent.

This was the moment Luo Ruzhuo had been waiting for!

She snapped her eyes open and rolled onto her side, dodging the strike. The dagger plunged into the treatment pod's soft padding with a muffled puff.

Her opponent reacted swiftly. The instant the thrust missed, he switched to a horizontal slash. The blade grazed Luo Ruzhuo's sleeve, cutting a clean line through it, and a faint trace of blood immediately appeared.

Luo Ruzhuo was fast, but this body's physical capabilities were nowhere near what she had possessed in the apocalypse. She had still been injured.

This assassin disguised as a medical worker was no ordinary sentinel!

Luo Ruzhuo silently compared the man before her with the sentinels she had met. His strength and speed... were comparable to Liu Sui's. He was at least S-rank.

His lethal attacks pressed her relentlessly, leaving Luo Ruzhuo no time to launch a mental attack.

Just one second.

The more dangerous the situation, the calmer Luo Ruzhuo became.

She thought that if she had just one second, she could use a mental attack to win.

The second strike came without pause.

Luo Ruzhuo avoided meeting force with force. She ducked under the second strike and drove her elbow toward a vulnerable joint, trying to counter with a skillful move.

But her opponent had a keen sense of danger and knocked her elbow aside with his palm. The tremendous force instantly numbed her entire arm, and her back struck the metal edge of the treatment pod with a dull thud.

Each strike came faster than the last.

Her opponent closed in swiftly, and the third strike was already at her throat.

This was the moment!

Luo Ruzhuo seized the dagger with her bare hand. Blood ran down her fingertips, but she seemed not to feel it. She thrust her forehead toward him.

The girl's eyes were like bared blades, piercing his reflection in her ink-black pupils.

She looked at him as though he were already dead.

How could a frail guide have eyes like that?

The assassin suddenly remembered the disdain he had felt when he saw her information after accepting the job.

"She drugged and killed the young master while working as a maid...?" He snorted. "A crude method!"

The expression on the Feite Family VIP's face had been complicated at the time. Hatred and killing intent intertwined... It was as though he wanted to cut her into a thousand pieces.

"Hmph! This woman isn't as easy to deal with as you think. You'd better keep your word."

At the time, he had not grasped the deeper meaning behind those words... Only now, facing her himself, did he realize he had underestimated her.

The assassin hurriedly tried to release his Mental Entity.

But it was already too late.

The mental power Luo Ruzhuo had spread out suddenly contracted, and mental blades rampaged through his Mental Domain like a storm.

"Ah!" He screamed. It felt as though ten thousand knives were churning inside his head, and every pulse in his temples brought a stab of agony.

The tremendous damage to his Mental Domain was worse than any contamination he had ever suffered. He could only clutch his head and flee blindly, not even knowing where the dagger had fallen.

Luo Ruzhuo searched through his memories, intending to destroy the body and erase the traces after learning the whole story.

Just then, the medical room door was violently forced open.

The entire metal door flew inward and crashed against the wall with a tremendous bang. A figure arrived almost at the same instant as the noise.

The blade in Liu Qing's hand, manifested from a black swan, struck the attacker precisely at the back of the neck. Under the force of the blow, the assassin's head flew off like a ball.

A few drops of blood splashed onto Luo Ruzhuo's face.

The headless body struck the floor with a smack. The sound of bones breaking was crisp, like a withered leaf crushed underfoot in autumn.

Luo Ruzhuo had not even had time to read his complete memories before the assassin's head was severed from his body. It bounced twice on the floor.

Luo Ruzhuo: ...

Why did this man always rush over whenever she made a move?

If Liu Qing were a member of the Firmament Squad, she would almost have suspected he was the mole.

But Luo Ruzhuo had no time to argue with Liu Qing. She still wanted to salvage what she could.

As long as the brain had not been directly attacked, a recently deceased human brain would still mistakenly believe itself alive.

Many people could even see their own heads separated from their bodies.

Don't you dare die now... Luo Ruzhuo repeated inwardly. She held the head on the floor with both hands, pressing her fingers to either side of its temples as her mental power rapidly read the collapsing memories.

The memories rewound like film, returning to the scene where the assassin accepted the job.

It was a familiar face everyone had seen in court. The Feier Family... She sneered. It was them after all.

At the head was the man from the courtroom that day, Phil Rice's father-Phil White. He had just received intelligence from the outpost war zone. When he read that the male guide from North Star had dropped in rank after a failed purification, he could not help raising an eyebrow.

"Is Xianzhu's contamination severe?" Phil White asked the assistant beside him. The assistant looked smug and held his fingers a very short distance apart. "He's just this close to complete aberration."

"Excellent." Phil White smiled. "Go contact Fang Yingbai."

"Tell him Luo Ruzhuo can purify Xianzhu's contamination. The Black Tower won't pass up a chance to successfully purify a double-S sentinel."

The topic at the desk shifted, and Phil White's gaze suddenly turned toward Luo Ruzhuo, meeting hers directly.

"You've been undercover in the Firmament Squad for so long. It's time you made yourself useful." Phil White waved a hand. "Don't wait for her to suffer a backlash from purifying Xianzhu. Just in case, intercept and kill her aboard the starship beforehand."

"Yes." Luo Ruzhuo heard the body in the memory answer.

Phil White, the assistant, Fang Yingbai... Luo Ruzhuo looked over their faces, imprinting them deeply in her mind.

She had already arranged how these people would die.

Further back... Luo Ruzhuo gave a silent exclamation. She had actually found that mysterious box in the assassin's memories too.

The box was codenamed TK30085, and the thing inside that could become the mother of contaminants... was a chip.

"Think carefully." In the memory, a researcher bearing Ankang Pharmaceuticals' identification took the chip out of the box and said to him as he lay on the operating table, "After the chip transplant, we cannot guarantee with absolute certainty that your Mental Domain rank will increase."

Despite his words, his expression was smug, as though success were all but assured. And so it was. In the memory of the sentinel rank test results, Luo Ruzhuo saw the assassin's delighted face. "Congratulations, your sentinel rank has risen to S-rank!"

But that joy soon turned into another kind of suffering... The sentinel in the memory later discovered that his Mental Entity seemed to be merging with him.

Literally merging with him.

As with aberration, part of his body began to display his Mental Entity's characteristics. But unlike aberration, the corresponding part was missing from his manifested Mental Entity.

Gradually, he began to show his Mental Entity in front of others less and less. When people asked about the animal features he occasionally displayed, he brushed them off by saying his aberration rate had risen again lately.

The sentinel went to settle accounts with Ankang Pharmaceuticals, but the agreement was there in black and white, leaving him empty-handed time and again. In the end, he accepted Ankang Pharmaceuticals' proposal to work as an assassin for the Feier Family, earning star coins and a chance at another operation.

The job to kill Luo Ruzhuo paid the most.

Luo Ruzhuo saw clearly in the memory the price Phil White had offered: seventy million star coins.

Well, she was worth quite a bit.

He was not the only one who had accepted the job. The other was the very person Liu Sui had called away.

Thinking about it now, Liu Sui had probably also noticed something was wrong, and the two of them were probably fighting.

Both moles had been found, and both were in the medical department, the easiest place to plant people. The discovery made Luo Ruzhuo breathe a small sigh of relief.

She did not want to have to guard against a stab in the back from within the Firmament Squad while treating Captain Xianzhu.

Ironically, Luo Ruzhuo had acted so well that the two moles had truly believed she had been unconscious ever since the contamination carried her away. They had intended to lure the tiger away from the mountain and take the chance to kill her... Neither had expected Luo Ruzhuo to be the tiger.

Liu Qing stood beside Luo Ruzhuo and looked down at the girl kneeling amid the mess, her eyes closed and a head cradled in her hands. Fine beads of sweat glistened at her temples, and her brows were slightly furrowed, as though she were trapped in a nightmare.

Blood was seeping from both her hands, and her sleeve was torn, exposing the scar on her wrist again.

This time, it did not seem to be an act.

Liu Qing thought she was hurt, and her expression looked pained too.

She must have been frightened.

If she was frightened, she needed comforting.

The next second, he swept the girl's entire body into his arms.

Liu Qing could encircle her entire waist with one hand. He went straight to the treatment pod, crouched down, and gave the girl's wounds a quick cleaning and dressing with gauze. His movements were swift and practiced; it was clear he had done this many times before.

By rights, she would heal faster if he put her in the treatment pod.

But with her warm, soft body in his arms, it was as though the missing half of his own body had fitted into place, giving Liu Qing an inexplicable sense of satisfaction.

It was that satisfaction that made him selfishly wish the moment could last a little longer.

When Liu Sui, who had just dealt with the mole and rushed impatiently into the medical room, saw this scene, it looked quite different to him.