BOOM—!!!

  A dull, violent roar ripped the night’s silence apart.

  Even from a good distance, with yers of pnts and old ruins in the way, the explosion’s shockwave hit the treehouse wall like a physical hammer. The crude shack shook hard. Dust rained down. The view through the periscope blurred and jumped for a second.

  But Nicole held the lens steady. The corner of her mouth even curled up. She softly mouthed a sound effect, like she was dubbing her own work:

  “Bang.”

  In her view, the bakery’s roof was shredded and blown sky-high in the very first instant by raw force. Wood, rubble, broken gss, mixed with a scalding heat wave, erupted like a volcano into the air. Then the walls caved. Support beams snapped.

  In just seconds, the bakery that had given Wilber a sliver of fake peace was turned into a pile of burning, smoking wreckage.

  But Nicole’s eyes—bright with excitement and hope behind the lens a moment ago—slowly dulled. Disappointment set in after she stared hard at the rubble for more than ten seconds.

  She saw him.

  At the edge of the ruins, where fires still licked and debris still fell, a familiar, blood-soaked figure crawled out. His clothes were rags. He struggled, staggering, and pushed himself up from the pile.

  Even from that far, even though the guy looked completely wrecked, that third-rank aura—fierce and stubborn as a hurt animal—was still clear as day.

  “Sigh…”

  Nicole let out a light, helpless breath. A feeling of ‘of course’ washed through her.

  Wilber, third rank… He really wasn’t that easy to kill.

  Especially since, to keep Wilber from sensing them early, she’d been forced to pnt her carefully made alchemy bombs in the bakery’s hidden spots—pces hard to detect. Deep in the double-yered oven. In a hidden compartment under the old counter. In the decorative cracks of the ceiling.

  That kept things secret, but it cost some of the bst’s surprise and total kill coverage. In the end, whether it was the first wave of deadly force or the colpsing building that followed, because it gave Wilber that crucial split-second to react… it hadn’t finished her enemy off for good.

  But Nicole didn’t let the disappointment hang around. She adjusted the periscope’s focus, her gaze sharpening like a hunter’s, studying every detail of that broken shape in the distance.

  Finally, under the mix of moonlight and the still-burning wreckage fire, she saw it.

  On Wilber’s skin, nearly covered in blood and grime, there was a yer of… strange, translucent substance faintly covering him. It was thin as a cicada’s wing, stuck tight to his skin. In some broken spots, the edges curled and peeled up, looking unnatural. Like he was “molting.”

  People don’t molt. Not unless they’ve drunk a specific, precious healing potion—the Sloughing Decoction. That’s when this full-body protective “shed” happened while the medicine worked.

  And judging by Wilber’s state, and how this “shed” wasn’t complete—torn and ruined in lots of pces… He was clearly right in the middle of the Sloughing Decoction’s critical healing time.

  The explosion had cut that short and messed it up badly.

  So even if her bombs hadn’t killed Wilber outright, they’d definitely left him with a… “trauma” way more annoying and hard to fix than the wounds from his st fight.

  The disappointment drained from Nicole’s eyes. A clear, pleased satisfaction finally showed on her face.

  “You didn’t die…” she murmured to herself, her voice ced with the vindictive cruelty of a woman savoring revenge. “But… this is enough to make you hurt. Just wait. This is only the start. Just the ‘interest.’ You dared to buy my info and then skip on the bill… Then pay it back slow, with your pain and your filthy blood.”

  ………………

  Outside the ruins.

  “Who?!” “WHO IS IT?!!” Wilber’s roar was a mix of pain and rage.

  He was soaked in blood. Fresh cuts crisscrossed with half-healed gashes, making him look like a broken, bloody doll. That half-finished molt clung to him in patches. Instead of protecting him, it had torn more skin during the bst and the rubble scrape, just adding to the misery.

  Even worse, the huge bang was the loudest dinner bell in the night. It pulled every wandering zombie from the nearby area out of the dark. They crawled from building shadows. Like piranhas smelling blood, they groaned and stumbled, all heading for Wilber.

  Wilber had to fight the stinging pain all over his body, swinging his mutated hands to rip apart and bash away the zombies lunging at him. Bck blood and bone chips flew. He needed to find a safer spot, fast, to deal with this mess of wounds.

  But the zombie crowd—drawn by the bst and the strong smell of blood—wouldn’t stop. Mixed in with the mostly first-rank walkers were a good number of faster, stronger second-rank variants, some with special tricks. Even as a third-ranker, surrounded and worn down by a huge pack while badly hurt and in terrible shape… it was totally possible to die here, worn to nothing.

  And the smell of fresh, hot blood on him—way stronger than before—acted like a glowing sign. It made shaking these clingy pursuers almost impossible.

  He was furious. A fire burned in his chest. The Sloughing Decoction had been halfway done, his injuries healing fast, and then this sneaky, deadly twist happened. The explosion hadn’t just ruined his precious healing time, leaving The Scalpel’s worm-bullet damage unfixed. It made those injuries worse and more complicated.

  New wounds on top of old ones, inside and outside damage all mixed together, plus bst impact, burns, and possible alchemical poison from the bombs…

  Right now, Wilber was really worried about one thing. In his current wrecked state, if he didn’t get perfect, professional treatment right away… some of these injuries… had a real shot at leaving permanent scars.

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