"Boss Chen, what are you staring at me for? Drive!"
"You…"
"Isn't Boss Chen in a hurry?"
"..."
Swallowing the words that had risen to his lips, Chen Zhaoming held them back.
Hoshiguma was right. He really did not have time to argue with her right now.
"Hold on tight!"
He twisted the throttle to the limit. The vehicle beneath him gave a deep, throaty roar, and under the power of its Originium engine, it shot forward at once, carrying both Chen Zhaoming and Hoshiguma into the distance.
Behind them, a whole crowd of gang toughs stood there, staring at one another in confusion.
"Wasn't that Sister Hoshiguma just now?"
"Why'd she run off with that guy?"
"Didn't she only join the gang this afternoon?"
"..."
Jiang Fugui of the Fierce Tiger Gang came panting over, only to see the ace recruit he had just brought in that afternoon riding off with the thief who had stolen his bike. He stood there dumbstruck.
"Do any of you know that bastard who stole my bike?"
"I'm putting out a hit!"
"An underworld kill order!!!"
…..
On the gradually widening road, the two-wheeled vehicle tore forward at over a hundred kilometers an hour. The wind from its speed sent both riders' hair streaming behind them.
Chen Zhaoming's hair was short, so it did not look like much.
But Hoshiguma's long green hair flew far back in the gale.
"Boss Chen, can you explain now?"
Feeling the wild wind battering her face, Hoshiguma sat behind him and shouted at the top of her lungs.
"I joined the Fierce Tiger Gang today, and the first thing you do is steal the gang boss's ride and tell me to let you go. If you don't have a very good reason, then the debt from that one bowl of noodles is nowhere near enough!"
"It wasn't stealing, it was borrowing!"
Seated in front, Chen Zhaoming raised his voice to correct her.
"Boss Chen really is as nitpicky as ever."
"That's what running a business does to a man."
Chen Zhaoming could only feel helpless. He had never expected that simply grabbing a vehicle would end up dragging Hoshiguma into this mess too.
But then again, thinking it over, it made sense. Hoshiguma had only just arrived in Lungmen. She had strength, but no roots here. At the beginning, her only real option was to join one of the more visible gangs.
The Fierce Tiger Gang of Sector 6 was one of them.
Chen Zhaoming did not know whether to say Hoshiguma was lucky or unlucky. The Fierce Tiger Gang might not be one of the gangs directly under the Rat King's command, but they were closely connected. If Hoshiguma stayed with them and put in a little effort, it would only be a matter of time before she caught the Rat King's attention.
And the reason her luck was bad—
was because she had happened to run into him tonight and gotten dragged along with him.
If he did not explain this properly, then forget the Fierce Tiger Gang—there might not be many gangs left in the lower city willing to take her in afterward.
"I'm chasing kidnappers!"
That very first sentence made Hoshiguma's expression turn interested.
A fishball-shop owner chasing kidnappers?
But Chen Zhaoming's next sentence wiped that amused interest right off her face.
"They kidnapped the niece of Lungmen's governor."
"…Huh?"
Hoshiguma had thought her own life story was already bizarre enough. Even when she was around Chen Zhaoming, she had done her best to hide her former background so that an ordinary man like him would not be frightened.
But after hearing what he just said, she was the one left momentarily stunned.
How exactly had a fishball-shop owner wound up entangled with Lungmen's governor?
And he still claimed he had no connections?
"Don't get the wrong idea."
Chen Zhaoming curled his lip as he rode.
"My family does have some connection to Lungmen's governor, and the little girl who was taken can technically be counted as my niece. But our relationship with Lungmen's governor isn't good. It's bad. Very bad."
"So that's why you opened a fishball shop down in Lungmen's lower city?"
"Something like that."
At first he had felt a little guilty for dragging Hoshiguma into this. But when he noticed that, even while chasing after him, she had not forgotten to bring that shield of hers along—
Chen Zhaoming instantly felt reassured.
This was in the bag now.
If it were just him alone, he could still deal with that band of Ursus men, but he could not guarantee they would not go desperate and threaten him with Ch'en Hui-chieh's or Swire's lives.
But with Hoshiguma added to the equation, the difficulty of this operation dropped through the floor.
"Found you!"
The moment Chen Zhaoming rode the vehicle up onto the lower city overpass, he immediately spotted the two vans far ahead, already reduced to tiny dots in the distance.
From here, they were already very close to Lungmen's harbor district. If those Ursus men escaped Lungmen and made it into the wasteland, finding them again would be like searching for a needle in the sea.
And now—
"I never asked your name."
"Hoshiguma."
"My name is Chen Zhaoming. I need you to keep this bike steady for me. I've got them in sight."
"Got it."
She had been about to tease him—something along the lines of didn't you say you'd only tell me your name after I came back to settle my tab at the shop? But one look at the stern profile of his face, and Hoshiguma swallowed the words again.
She decided instead to see what exactly Chen Zhaoming was planning.
And then she watched him take both hands off the handlebars and rise to his feet on the speeding vehicle.
"—?! Boss Chen?!"
That move startled Hoshiguma badly. The bike was currently doing a hundred and twenty kilometers an hour, and they were on an overpass dozens of meters above the ground.
If his balance shifted even a little, not even she could guarantee she would walk away from it unharmed.
So Hoshiguma lunged forward at once and seized the handlebars.
That movement made Chen Zhaoming feel something soft brush against his calf.
He could even feel the pounding heartbeat beneath that soft pressure.
Unfortunately, now was not the time to notice any of that.
In fact, Chen Zhaoming's attention was not there at all.
All he saw were the vans racing ahead beneath the night sky.
He raised the sword in his hand.
Only then did Hoshiguma notice that Chen Zhaoming had been carrying a long sword at his waist the whole time.
Its blade was straight and narrow, with a square, upright form.
A faint breeze passed by.
But this time, instead of stirring Hoshiguma's hair, it felt like a knife slicing through the air, severing a single strand of green hair, which drifted away on the wind.
Hoshiguma felt danger.
Chen Zhaoming was not even aiming at her, yet she felt as though her body might be ripped apart all the same.
And then, all at once, she understood what Chen Zhaoming intended to do.
Reason told Hoshiguma that it should have been impossible.
But the instant Chen Zhaoming raised his hand—
she saw a light.
Chengyi — Chasing Light!
A sword-light more than a hundred meters long burst forth at once, filling Hoshiguma's entire field of vision.
In that moment, she thought of her own birth. She thought of the fragments of her life back in Higashi. She thought of how she had been unable to control the power inside her, and how that had forced her to leave her homeland and come to Lungmen.
"So beautiful…"
Hoshiguma heard herself whisper that.
And then came a thunderous, earth-shaking roar.
The two vans were forced to a stop.
Because ahead of them—
there was no road anymore.
Chen Zhaoming of the Chen family had drawn his sword in Terra for the first time, and its brilliance fell like an overturned river of stars, severing the path of escape. From more than a hundred meters away, with a single stroke, he cut down an overpass wide enough for four vehicles to drive abreast.
Sitting inside the van, Petrov laughed from sheer disbelief.
Really?
You're going to play it like that?
...
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