Consciousness returned like a drowning man breaching water's surface. Guann's eyes focused on the familiar carved wooden beams of Teacher J's reception chamber. A cool palm pressed against his feverish cheek, slender fingers brushing matted hair from his forehead.
"Why...you?" Guann's parched lips formed the words before his vision cleared. "Where's...Shan?"
Ilyia's delicate features hardened. The silver-haired healer withdrew her hand as if scalded, jade hair ornaments clinking like wind chimes in a storm. "Dead!" she spat, rising from the medicinal couch in a swirl of azure robes. "Fed to desert scorpions! Left for vultures!"
Guann's bandaged hand trembled as he raised it palm-upward, ignoring the searing pain radiating from his shattered ribs. His silent demand hung between them, amplified by the bitter scent of dragon's blood resin burning in copper censers.
"You insufferable—!" Ilyia's porcein mask shattered. She thrust the Rejuvenation Heart into his palm with enough force to crack jade. The golden artifact pulsed like a captured star, its healing warmth immediately easing his bored breathing. "I should've let that brute stomp your fool head into paste!"
As she whirled toward the exit, Guann's hoarse whisper froze her: "Wait."
When he weakly opened his arms, time suspended. The water clock's rhythmic drips counted three full cycles before silk rustled. Ilyia perched stiffly on the couch's edge, every line of her body screaming protest even as she allowed herself to be drawn into an embrace.
Outside, autumn wind carried the first maple leaves past tticed windows. Neither acknowledged how her trembling fingers came to rest against his pulse point.
---
Eighteen kilometers northeast, Akatai Castle's shattered towers cwed at a poison-green sky. Wosuo's massive frame trembled as he ejected the smoking cartridge from his N5 anti-material rifle. The depleted uranium round had torn through three stone columns before dissipating harmlessly through Qiqis mist-like form.
"Waste of ammunition," the toxic specter sneered, her voice echoing from all directions. Emerald vapors coalesced into a feminine shape that dissolved before any retort could be aimed. "When Dick finishes with your precious student, I'll pickle your bones in neurotoxin!"
Yuhang's grip tightened on the Saint Shield generator. Sweat stung his eyes as he assessed their dire position—twelve trainees huddled behind crumbling barricades, energy reserves at 8%, comms still jammed. His twelfth attempt to contact Guann had died in static.
A grating stone-on-stone sound froze the battlefield. From the dining hall's gaping maw emerged a silhouette that might have been human. The figure staggered into fading sunlight, revealing horrors that drew gasps even from veteran fighters.
Qin Hong's right arm ended in a charred stump below the elbow. Third-degree burns mottled his body like some grotesque calico pattern, cracked flesh oozing yellowish fluid. Where his eyes should have been, milky-white orbs stared unseeing beneath lids burned away. Yet in his remaining hand glowed a mango-shaped energy core, its golden light pushing back the miasma.
"Dick..." The rasping voice contained unimaginable pain. "...is dead."
The toxic clouds convulsed. Qiqis form materialized fully for the first time—a beautiful woman with jade-green hair now streaming like Medusa's snakes. "Liar!" Her shriek sent trainees clutching bleeding ears. "My Dick would never...!"
Yuhang's survival instincts overrode shock. "River! Now!" he roared, activating the Saint Shield's emergency protocol. Novices scrambled over shattered masonry as bck tendrils descended like the devil's own vines.
Qin Hong colpsed against a fractured pilr. His blistered lips moved soundlessly—whether praying or attempting to contact Xiaoyu's communicator, none could tell. The death cloud reached for him...
A silver blur intercepted. Water erupted from the Yena River below, crystallizing into a protective dome moments before the toxins struck. Through the aqueous barrier, Qin Hong's ruined face twitched in something resembling relief as strong arms lifted him.
---
Dawn's first light found survivors vomiting bck bile along the riverbank. Yuhang watched medics seal Qin Hong into a regeneration pod, the youth's vitals flickering like a dying candle.
"Cut that close, even for you." The bck-cd agent emerged silently, X insignia gleaming dully on his chest. Water still dripped from his hydrodynamic suit. "Council's demanding a full report by—"
"Save it, Beronte." Yuhang pocketed Dick's still-warm energy core. "I need you overseeing cleanup. The entire valley's contaminated."
The agent groaned, surveying the apocalyptic ndscape. Akatai Castle's once-proud towers now resembled rotten teeth. Fist-sized holes pockmarked the terrain where Qiqis poison had eaten through bedrock.
Beronte's sigh dissolved into the metallic tang of poisoned air as his fingers closed around the leather-bound notebook. The volume's edges bore singe marks from the Battle of Fiern Pass, its pages yellowed with age yet protected by a shimmering stasis field. With practiced motion, he thumbed the activation rune engraved on the cover, watching holographic quill tips extend from his glove's fingertips.
The castle's ruins loomed before him - its eastern facade resembling rotting honeycomb, structural beams jutting like broken ribs through crumbling mortar. Beronte's form blurred into quantum dispcement, the air screaming in protest as he breached retivistic speeds. To observing recruits, he manifested simultaneously at twelve coordinates:
- **Northwest Tower (02:17:34 GMT):** Finger tracing stress fractures in load-bearing columns, hologram recording molecur-level decay patterns. - **Grand Hall (02:17:35 GMT):** Boots crunching through gssified banquet tables, sensor array mapping ceiling colpse vectors.- **East Gallery (02:17:36 GMT):** Thermal imager detecting residual psychic signatures in warped steel girders.
"Secondary exterior wall, western quadrant - carbonization depth 4.7cm... Main support pilr Gamma-12, crystalline infestation reaching..." His mutterings transted directly into glowing text, the notebook's pages filling with schematics and damage assessments faster than mortal eyes could follow.
As he materialized in the poisoned forest, chrono-dispcement afterimages lingered like mourning ghosts. Beronte's enhanced vision catalogued each dying oak's precise necrosis percentage (72.3%±0.8), every mutated squirrel's tumor distribution pattern. His gloved hand paused mid-scribble when the scanner detected familiar DNA traces beneath a shattered spruce - Dick's blood crystallized into rubellite formations among the roots.
The wind chose that moment to intensify, whipping dead leaves into frenzied spirals. Beronte's helm retracted automatically as he knelt, allowing boreal gusts to evaporate the moisture gathering at his shlines. Through the howling gale, his whispered words to the poisoned earth might have been mistaken for equipment diagnostics:
"Stupid... reckless... glorious fool..."
His thrusters fred cobalt as he rocketed toward the next coordinates, the sonic boom scattering ash like funeral offerings. The notebook's test entry blinked accusingly - *Tear salinity analysis: 98.6% match to Agent X-7 emotional stress response pattern* - before he angrily encrypted the data stream.
