# 113
Chapter 113
Life-and-Death Speed
A fireball blossomed mid-air, the shock-wave nearly flipping the coach outright. Shattered missile shrapnel, flung by the blast, rained down in a metallic storm.
Inside the bus the recruits clamped their hands over their ears; the detonation hammered their eardrums, and as the vehicle lurched the roof-racks spilled their luggage, turning the aisle into chaos.
Lin Qiye’s eyes snapped open.
The next instant a perfect darkness erupted from him, flooding the coach in a heartbeat, then ballooning outward to form a hemispheric shell around it.
Whsh-whsh-whsh—!!
Countless shards, as fast as bullets, punched into that night. The moment they entered the pitch-black God’s Ruins they froze in mid-air.
A few slipped through, but Lin Qiye shaved their speed to almost nothing; they bit into the roof’s metal skin like blunt knives, none piercing the cabin.
Only when every splinter was stopped did he release the Ruins. He dropped to one knee, gasping, sweat soaking his back.
No one knew what those few seconds had cost him.
Missile fragments can top 200 m/s; from burst to body, two seconds max.
In that two-second window his mind raced: first, the certainty of shrapnel; then, a frantic unfurling of the darkness; finally, less than one second left.
The first time he’d opened the darkness it had taken five seconds to cover ten metres. Had he not broken into the “Pool” realm thirty seconds earlier, he would have been too late.
Even so, the shards were lightning-quick—0.1 second from crossing the Ruins’ boundary to skewering flesh—and there were hundreds. To snare them all should have been impossible.
But in the Pool realm his mental perception stretched a hundred metres. The instant the shrapnel touched that boundary he predicted every trajectory with freakish reflexes and locked them inside the darkness.
Explosion. Darkness unfurled. Trajectories calculated. Every shard captured.
That was Lin Qiye’s two-second eternity—one that saved nearly fifty lives.
To the others it was the blink of an eye; to him, a century.
“What happened? Did you see—?”
“Everything just went black and then—”
“The fragments! They all dropped!”
“We should’ve been shredded!”
“We just danced past the gates of hell!”
Only three knew the truth: Baili Pangpang beside him, Cao Yuan, and Instructor Hong at the front.
As the bus erupted in frightened questions, Lin Qiye—his mind pushed past its limit—went white as paper, stars exploding across his vision…
“Qiye—Lin Qiye!”
Instructor Hong rushed forward, but the boy’s consciousness sank and he crumpled.
……
Training camp.
A pale-gold film had covered half the compound, shielding staff and buildings; the other half was an inferno.
Yuan Gang, in military fatigues, stood before the flames, the last gold fading from his skin, fury mirrored in his eyes.
His fists clenched tighter.
“Chief!” An instructor sprinted over, binoculars in hand. “The other two missiles hit the departure road!”
“What? The recruits—?”
“A member of Team 136 speared one missile mid-air; something black flashed—anyway, every coach is intact, no casualties.”
Yuan Gang exhaled—then his rage burned hotter.
“The moment the rookies roll out, missiles roll in…
We have a traitor among us!”
He stamped into the blaze; golden light erupted and half the camp’s flames died instantly.
Straightening his cap amid the smoking ruins, he stared at the sky.
“But how the hell did they get their hands on live missiles…?”
……
Hundreds of kilometres away.
Missile Base No. 39.
Klaxons howled and crimson beacons flashed. The hidden launch complex had fallen.
“Base Thirty-Nine, respond immediately!”
“Headquarters calling Thirty-Nine, report status!”
“Thirty-Nine, do you copy—?”
Only broken replies echoed through the control room. Flickering lights revealed pools of blood and shattered stone statues writhing in silent screams.
At the main console a sultry woman lounged, toying with a blood-slick blade that had no hilt—flip, catch, flip, catch…
She glanced at the satellite feed, lips curling.
“They scattered the pups from camp—smarter than I thought.”
“The fools made too much noise in Cangnan; someone leaked.” A man’s deep voice came from the phone.
“No matter—this just makes the game fun.”
Her tongue, long and scarlet, flicked over her lips like a snake.
“Then I’ll pay Cangnan a personal visit… and greet our little star.”
She rose, eyes alight with sick excitement, and casually smashed a cowering stone man beside her. Blood and gravel splattered across the floor.
Beneath her feet, drawn in glistening blood, glared a single monstrous serpent’s eye.