"Hah! Break!"
Hua's muscles tensed. At that life-or-death moment, boundless strength erupted from her body.
With one desperate burst of energy, she split the motorcycle in two.
However, after Hua dragged her mire-bound body forward and exhausted every ounce of strength to cleave Landro's motorcycle apart, Landro was nowhere before her.
Landro's voice came from the distance. "Heh, so you really did still have enough strength to counterattack?"
Hua immediately realized what had happened.
Oh no! His real target is Vill-V!
Landro had already reached Vill-V and extended a hand toward her. With her body affected by the bloodstock, Hua had no chance of stopping him in time.
Moreover, before Landro even attacked Vill-V, his subordinates had begun pouring fire onto Hua.
The Ghostfire Syndicate's motorcycles were no ordinary machines. After the bikers' modifications, they had been fitted with every strange weapon imaginable.
After several volleys of pulse fire, most of the equipment Vill-V had given Hua stopped functioning.
In Hua's current weakened condition, she could not deal with so many enemies armed to the teeth.
Indeed, Landro was extremely cautious. Since he had already decided to save Hua for dessert, his style was to eliminate every other threat first, then sit down and savor her at his leisure.
Landro reached the blood bubble surrounding Vill-V. When he was less than a centimeter away from her, the hydraulic pump instantly increased the pressure within 0.3 seconds.
The liquid inside the chamber nearly crushed the cannon barrel apart.
"Fire!"
Bang!
A brilliant crimson lotus blossomed layer by layer before Vill-V, bursting and crackling against her barrier.
Even with Vill-V's central mechanism bracing its supports, the shield was still driven backward, plowing a bloodstained trench through the shattered ground.
Steam once again billowed from Landro's arm.
Yet despite the blood bubble grinding against it for so long, Vill-V's barrier remained perfectly still before this shot.
"A barrier designed by Expert is no joke. It may not be as useful as a physical shield, but it can still withstand a shot from a naval cannon."
Vill-V's voice came from within the barrier.
She clearly had absolute confidence in it.
Landro, however, revealed the vicious smile of a man whose scheme had succeeded.
Underestimating him came at a price.
A barrier? It was not as though he had never encountered one before. The mobile response forces used them too.
"Got you! At this distance, my hit rate is—one hundred percent!"
In an instant, the blood transformed into countless pellets.
The pellets on opposite sides seemed to exert an immense attraction on one another, pulling violently inward.
The force was so great that it directly crushed dents into the barrier.
Crack!
The device sustaining the barrier overloaded. In an instant, the shield vanished, and the blood needles formed from the pellets pierced Vill-V until she resembled a sea urchin. "That's the price of underestimating me! Blood Needle Hell can even pierce basalt!"
After all, Landro had once encountered an opponent whose body consisted of prosthetic limbs, rendering blood control ineffective. Although that opponent had taken him by surprise and killed him, only for Landro to resurrect and kill them in return, Landro still had no desire to suffer unnecessarily. It hurt.
As Landro spoke, he fired another shot to finish her off.
But in the blink of an eye,
Vill-V vanished from before him, and Landro's blood needles naturally struck nothing. "She disappeared? No, my Blood Needle Hell never hit her in the first place!"
Confusion and unwillingness filled Landro's face. His judgment had actually been wrong. This woman had transformed into thin air before countless watching eyes.
The instant the barrier disappeared, she had vanished with a soft pop. In her place stood only a decoy balloon printed with a mocking smile!
No, his judgment had not been the problem. That woman's ability was simply too bizarre.
People had been watching from every direction. Forget tunneling underground, there was not even a hole in the ground.
What normal person could vanish into thin air and turn into a balloon?!
"This is only the opening act of the spectacle, my dear audience. Surely an ordinary escape trick isn't enough to surprise you?"
Vill-V's voice emerged from the balloon on the ground.
Even Magician would find it difficult to disappear into thin air. After all, she could not teleport, and even transportation through Cosmic Juggernaut required a process. To repeat, every magic trick required meticulous preparation. Something produced merely by speaking was sorcery, not stage magic.
However, escaping while enclosed within the blood bubble had been easy enough.
It was an uncomplicated escape trick without any technical difficulty.
Naturally, the voice that had taunted Landro from inside the barrier had come from a recording and the balloon.
Magician could have given Landro a "grand surprise" the moment the barrier shattered.
But at that moment, she cared more about Hua's safety behind her.
Meanwhile, the bikers of the Ghostfire Syndicate were adding fuel to the fire as they attacked the injured Hua. This was not a metaphor. They were actually carrying fuel cans and burning clothes, preparing to douse Hua and Reporter Tan in oil before burning them alive.
"Let it burn, woohoo~"
"Feel the passion of the flames!"
"Burn!"
Taking advantage of Hua's bloodstock-induced paralysis, the Ghostfire Syndicate's bikers attacked without restraint.
Two fists could not contend with four hands, and there were hundreds of hands here. Worse still, Hua had to protect the defenseless Reporter Tan behind her.
"Aaaah—"
A scholar was helpless before soldiers. Faced with these hooligan bikers, Reporter Tan could no longer think of anything to say.
He wanted to help Hua, but he only knew a set of civilian self-defense techniques. He knew nothing about martial arts.
Even those self-defense techniques were useless against bikers mounted on motorcycles.
All he could do was watch Hua fight desperately to protect him.
And silently record everything.
It felt as though he had returned to a battlefield consumed by war.
Back then, he had still been a young reporter coasting through a secure government position.
The world had been peaceful for far too long. War seemed to have become ancient history, distant from all humanity, while true heroes were even rarer.
He had grown up with a silver spoon in his mouth and believed completely in law and public security. Young and hot-blooded, he had never taken danger seriously.
During one covert filming operation, he had become trapped within the encirclement of an armed criminal organization.
Then a white-haired warrior had suddenly appeared.
Standing alone against a multitude, the man had fought his way through the encirclement and brought him to safety.
That had been the first time Reporter Tan ever saw a hero.
In his eyes, only someone like that deserved to be called a hero. Those hollow, superficial clowns in idol dramas could never compare.
He had thought he would never witness such a person again, but in Hua, Reporter Tan seemed to see that man's shadow once more.
"Mr. Siegfried, I'm truly useless. My camera has never protected a single smile. It can only record the blood, tears, and deaths of others."
"But I will keep my eyes open. Even in the face of death, I will record a hero's final moments!"
...
The balance of the battlefield continued tilting further.
Hua could no longer hold them back alone.
The next instant, Vill-V appeared behind Hua without warning and wrapped her arms around Hua's waist.
"Hua-chan, my capable little assistant, head backstage and rest for a while. Please leave the next act to the Great Magician."
"After all, this particular member of the audience... truly is rather troublesome."
Based on the information she had just gathered, Vill-V had already analyzed Landro's condition.
Grave concern filled her heart.
A vampire...?
That bastard was clearly a MANTIS!