Chapter 297: Bonus Chapter

The blade energy swept the entire friends and family section off its feet. Bing-1 and An Xuefeng had turned and struck with such blinding speed that no one could react in time. Only Dreamchaser, directly in the path of their attack, suddenly turned translucent, shimmering and luminous, like a dream bubble taking shape, and that dream bubble wrapped itself neatly around the headstone and the Sun charm.

In that same instant the Puppet Master, cleaved open, dissolved into a phantom, as though trying to scatter and flee. But the dream bubble blocked her way, and with three of them trapping her from all sides, the Agency’s rules inside the virtual hall had already been thrown into chaos by the Latitude 30 Degrees tokens.

At the same moment everyone else on the platform was directly transported down to the audience seats below, so that no one who might have been contaminated by the Puppet Master could interfere with the battle. Below the platform things had already descended into chaos, and the moment An Xuefeng struck, thick fog surged up and blocked everyone’s view.

“What is happening?? What is Captain An doing??”

“Can’t you see? He’s trying to kill Bing-1! The fog came up and Bing-1 disappeared from sight!”

“Nonsense, Bing-1 is in Captain An’s arms, I saw it clearly! They struck together!”

“But what about, it was Dreamchaser before them, oh heavens, they’re not going after Dreamchaser, are they? I refuse to believe it!”

The crowd below erupted in noise. On the platform itself, only An Xuefeng, Dreamchaser, Wei Xun, and the Puppet Master remained. In the space of a breath, unable to flee, unable to return to her Agency residence, the phantom solidified once more, the Puppet Master’s form reconstituting. She still wore Silverfish’s appearance, her expression contorted and ashen, as though about to speak.

But before she could open her mouth, the Return Journey Saber and the Madman’s Blade fell again.

The silver-purple cloak offered her not a shred of defense against the Return Journey Saber. An Xuefeng’s blade drove toward the Puppet Master’s abdomen. The phantom Dreamchaser raised a hand curled like a dragon’s claw and raked at the Puppet Master’s face. And Wei Xun’s Madman’s Blade, which had initially fallen alongside the Return Journey Saber, grazed the Puppet Master’s abdomen and immediately changed course, without warning swinging upward to drive into her left shoulder.

With An Xuefeng and Dreamchaser as his flanking guardians, Wei Xun could freely target wherever he chose. Dreamchaser’s claw crushing the Puppet Master’s skull was aimed at severing her mind and breaking her control over Silverfish. An Xuefeng’s slash toward her abdomen was an instinctive judgment that the abdomen was the critical weak point of this body she occupied. Wei Xun kept An Xuefeng’s earlier words fixed in mind — strike the same place he strikes — because the Puppet Master’s unusual constitution made it nearly impossible to kill her in a single blow; to be counted as having killed her, something on her body had to be destroyed. With the Return Journey Saber opening the wound, she would certainly be critically injured, and as long as the Madman’s Blade followed and grazed that opening, it too would count as having drawn blood from an A-class Tour Guide.

Wei Xun had been about to strike in sync with An Xuefeng when, in that fraction of a second, the kitten in his arms seemed to stir.

A thought surfaced abruptly in his mind.

‘Left shoulder. Butterfly.’

The cat spoke.

Left shoulder. Butterfly?!

Wei Xun’s gaze sharpened in an instant. Without a moment’s hesitation, his Madman’s Blade grazed through the Puppet Master’s abdomen and immediately flicked upward.

After fusing with the Killing Blade, the Madman’s Blade had transformed completely. A long narrow body, pure black, with a blood groove carved deep, serrated teeth running along the spine, a keen blood-red edge. More terrifying still, a layer of red, green, and gold light drifted across the blade, all of it a mental pollution compressed and fused and twisted together. At times the red and gold merged into orange, at times the red and green merged into brown; even Qi Le’chen, who had witnessed the forging process, would not have recognized this blade for what it once was.

And when the blade edge reached the Puppet Master’s shoulder, her expression finally shifted.

She had come alone to the platform because she had her own foundations to stand on. In this moment her body was like a set of nested dolls, An Xuefeng and Bing-1 struck down the first layer together, Dreamchaser and An Xuefeng crushed the second layer, but the third layer had the Puppet Master whole again in an instant. Without eliminating her all at once, she could layer by layer find her opening and break free the moment it appeared.

That opening lay in the Latitude 30 Degrees tokens’ lockdown. Strong as it was, it also had limits. When the four tokens appeared, even Black Widow, who was only present as a projection, immediately winked out. But her disappearance also caused violent spatial turbulence; to keep the lockdown intact, An Xuefeng could not draw on the Latitude 30 Degrees tokens, which meant he could not go all-out and kill her outright in a single blow.

And even at their current level of force, this lockdown could hold for a minute at most.

After one minute, the Agency’s rules would descend and the commotion here would inevitably draw attention from multiple parties. By then, her chance to escape would come.

But no matter how many layers nested, there was always a true and absolute weak point. The Puppet Master’s full attention was on An Xuefeng and Dreamchaser, her two most dangerous adversaries, with a portion still on the Puppeteer’s headstone and the Sun charm. For Bing-1, held in An Xuefeng’s arms, she had nothing left over for him. Even if his blade grazed her in the abdomen, it was nothing more than a tickle to the Puppet Master; he could hack away as he pleased. An Xuefeng and Dreamchaser were the real threat.

Until Bing-1’s blade drove into her left shoulder.

Her expression flickered slightly, but in the next second she steadied. The blade was still too weak, it simply could not pierce her body. Like lions on the savannah hunting a buffalo: the great lion had to tear open the thick hide first before the smaller one could reach the tender meat underneath.

Without the Return Journey Saber prying things open, Bing-1’s small blade could not break through the Puppet Master’s skin.

Hard. Unyielding.

In the span of a few seconds, An Xuefeng had cleaved open the Puppet Master’s abdomen countless times, and Dreamchaser had crushed her skull more than a dozen times. Wei Xun kept his blade working at her left shoulder without pause, but had managed only a thin, shallow wound. He was like hacking at a sheet of rubber-tough spider silk; no matter what he did, he could not pierce through.

But Wei Xun was like a cunning and venomous snake; with every thrust he pumped contamination into the wound. The Fire God’s, the Perished Ming’s, his own, and the Sun’s pollution all together. A Tour Guide’s power was rooted in the Abyss, and their mutations were themselves a form of contamination, the clash of different pollutions would cause them to instinctively devour and attack each other, weakening whatever defenses guarded that spot.

At the same time Wei Xun was reaching out with everything he had, trying to sense her. If the Puppet Master’s body truly held a butterfly fragment, there was no reason his brother could sense it and he could feel nothing at all.

When Wei Xun poured out every last bit of his effort, the pure Abyss aura from the suit suddenly stopped radiating outward and surged entirely into Wei Xun’s body instead. His vision went black for an instant, then blazed startlingly bright, and he saw it.

Total darkness before his eyes. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] Even the Puppet Master had become a shadow. Only the butterfly fragment was luminous, and it was not at her left shoulder. It was at her right shoulder. At the left shoulder was only a dim, faint halo, like residual energy. She had transferred the butterfly fragment away from the left shoulder.

It was at the right shoulder.

Wei Xun gave no sign of it. He had already formed a plan and kept driving at her left shoulder. He was waiting, waiting for the critical moment. An Xuefeng had already noticed that Wei Xun had been consistently targeting the Puppet Master’s left shoulder.

Wei Xun gathered everything at once and braced his whole body, every muscle taut; even the hand holding the cat tightened without thinking.

The cat was squashed into a ball, its small furry face scrunching up. In his arms, the kitten that had seemed to be sleeping had fur along its spine blazing red and bright now, yet growing colder and colder, cold as ice, without any trace of living breath.

And yet in this state, the cat quietly opened its eyes. A human quality shone through those cold pupils. The cat’s gaze slipped through the gaps between Wei Xun’s fingers and landed on the Puppet Master’s right shoulder, but before it could look a moment longer, Wei Xun’s hand closed around its paw. Suddenly losing the hand supporting its body, it instinctively scrabbled at Wei Xun’s suit with its other three paws, trying to find purchase and was flung away by force.

In that same instant, almost as if by prior agreement, An Xuefeng and Dreamchaser held nothing back and struck their killing blow simultaneously.

One minute was nearly up. The Puppet Master had to be destroyed before it arrived. The Puppet Master knew this was the most critical moment too; after her long passive defense, something on her body suddenly surged and expanded violently.

Massive lumps grew across every inch of her like tumors, and more horrifying still, some of those writhing purple-black tumors had begun to grow hair, some had begun to sprout teeth like twisted things that had never properly developed.

One touch and they would explode. Bursting flesh and fluid would contaminate the body; spreading mental pollution would ravage the mind. This was her most terrifying mental pollution attack.

And An Xuefeng cut through it with a single stroke.

“Return Journey Saber…”

An orange-gold blade light fell like a bolt of golden-orange lightning. In that instant An Xuefeng’s eyes blazed the same gold-orange, radiant as a deity’s. He said nothing aloud, but his voice rang through the minds of everyone on the platform.

“Sever the Return Journey.”

The same technique, and yet completely different in its weight from when Bai Xiaosheng had mimicked An Xuefeng in the fifth layer of the underground palace, using a replica of the Return Journey Saber. When An Xuefeng’s Return Journey Saber severed the return journey, his command over it was terrifying in its precision; in an instant he locked onto exactly which return journey he wanted to cut.

The return journeys of the tumors spreading their corruption through her body: severed. The return journey of the tumors healed and stripped away: chosen.

The blade light fell. The tumors covering the Puppet Master’s body shriveled and dropped away. The Return Journey Saber, meeting no resistance, landed on her abdomen — and this time did not split it open again.

Because the abdomen was not where the tumors were.

The blade angled sharply upward. From her waist to her left shoulder, everything above the abdomen was split cleanly in two.

Above the abdomen, all of it was tumors.

And this time the cleaved flesh did not heal. Instead, it began to grey and crumble away. The Puppet Master felt her power draining, peeling off, being extinguished in steady increments.

The Return Journey Saber truly lived up to its name.

The Puppet Master thought; but the smile spreading across her graying face grew wider and wider. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] Death energy permeated everything. She had taken grievous wounds this time; the tumor pollution technique could never be used again. Her head was splitting, her mind shredded by Dreamchaser’s assault. Even the “Jia-2” title on the rankings flickered grey for a moment. But she had not died.

Not only had she not died but the Puppeteer’s headstone was clutched firmly in the Puppet Master’s hand. She had seized the headstone after all.

The four Latitude 30 Degrees tokens had been grounded; the Agency could no longer be screened out. The Puppet Master had already opened her Abyss node passage. As long as she could retreat into the Abyss to recover this time, as long as she could leave, nothing would have been lost. So, what if An Xuefeng had split open her left shoulder? That thing there…

But in the very next moment, the Puppet Master felt something sharp and delicate graze her right shoulder. Like the tentative claw of a newborn kitten, something that should have had no harmful power whatsoever yet her shoulder split open instantly. At the same moment a blade followed without a sound, quiet as a snake hidden among bright colors, and drove straight into her right shoulder, twisting, gouging.

Caught completely off guard, a piece of blue-violet butterfly fragment was flicked out into the open.