Chapter 73: Fire Within the Lake (Part 2/2)
Permeability did not matter to the incorporeal.
Luo Nan’s gaze concentrated into the night sky. The cool autumn breeze passed through his current location. The stream of air was like an incorporeal river, rippling with fine waves that were hard to see with the naked eye.
Luo Nan never experienced this before; he sensed clearly how much he had improved in this way. His soul body could intervene with the material plane, leaving a trace of himself in the air.
He instinctively raised his hands to size them up.
Luo Nan hadn’t paid much attention to his soul body per se. From his understanding, the soul body was like a specter. It was transparent and fuzzy like a simple projection.
But now, the act of raising his hands was the same customary action of an ordinary person. He was also able to see two slender arms. And these arms were even covered in the jacket he was wearing today. He was semi-transparent at first glance, but a shallow aureola of light was radiated from inside to outside. It was a sort of alternative sense of reality.
It wasn’t just his arm. Every part of his soul body was like this as well.
The aureola was the product of the interference between the mental and the material plane. It gave Luo Nan a practical reference that he could feel.
If he deliberately interfered with the material plane, the intensity of the aureola would increase. His actions caused the light to manifest outside.
And if he were to deliberately pull away from the material plane, the aureola would rapidly fade away, causing his soul to return to being hard to see with the naked eye.
Of course, this was merely the most basic method of execution. A great amount of energy would be wasted upon use. It was completely inefficient. A truly highly efficient method…… would be known just by looking at Rui Wen.
Right now Rui Wen was “running” on the outside wall of the apartment building. The word “running” was extremely suitable for what she was doing.
The scale of this apartment building was quite decent. It had a height exceeding a hundred stories, which meant it was over three hundred meters high. Rui Wen was moving on the vertical face of the building. She was slow at first, using both her hands and feet. But soon she grasped the way to maintain her balance, relying only on her two legs. Once in awhile she would do a coordinated jump. It didn’t matter if there were any balconies protruding out, she borrowed the support of the railing to move as if she were on flat ground.
Luo Nan felt that her abilities were every bit a match with those veterans of the Society. At least on the Friday night operation, Cat Eyes had descended down the side of a building at flying speeds from a high altitude. It seemed that her rush down wasn’t as sharp and fast as Rui Wen's was right now.
And separated around twenty stories below Rui Wen was the figure of Jack rapidly descending.
Jack obviously knew that Rui Wen was chasing him. Though his leg had been snapped off, he could rely on the state of his superhuman body, use his arms and feet, and rely on the effects of his Deep Sea EM Field to be like a gecko dropping down at rapid speed. His speed wasn’t considered slow…… But the problem was, Rui Wen was faster!
In the space of a single breath, the distance between the two was drawn to being less than ten floors and to be within thirty meters.
Jack turned his head and swept a glance. Then he looked back down again. There were still forty stories of height left…...
He suddenly screeched and suddenly jump down. This action seemed to be deadly, but the direction he moved was extremely accurate. He crashed through the middle of two decorative glass terraces and was stalled by a steel support structure for a moment before smashing onto the ground.
The time was midnight. The pedestrian vehicles in the vicinity were scarce in number. Yet amidst the sound of a rumbling motor came an accelerating military all terrain vehicle. It drew in at rapid speeds.
Jack got up with a jump, colliding into the ATV.
This was far too coincidental. Who would believe that this wasn’t pre-planned?
Luo Nan had seen Jack use the terraces as a buffer as he broke them. Rui Wen couldn’t copy this, so he probably broke free from her. And once that ATV would drive onto the high-speed magnetic rails, Rui Wen would find it hard to chase after Jack even if her courage and strength were incomparable.
With a churning of his mind, Luo Nan locked onto the driver of the ATV. He borrowed a bit of strength from the Human-Face Arachnid, which was being cultivated. The Siege Hammer was unleashed, the attack hit dead on, and the driver grew weak and collapsed.
The ATV rapidly switched over to its autopilot function, but high-speed motorized movements would certainly need the input of a driver during the heat of battle. Right now the ATV lost a bit of control and needed some time to automatically recover from this backswing. Rui Wen took this time to jump down from the apartment building.
It was forty stories! It might even be a bit higher…..
Luo Nan was just stupefied in place.
Right now Rui Wen made a graceful jump as if everything was normal. She jumped into the night sky of Xia City from the vertical face of the building.
The dusky color of night blended with the neon lights of the metropolis to form a messy smear of a background. Rui Wen’s slim figure was the most eye-catching silhouette within it.
When the force of her jump was nearly exhausted, when gravity was about to become the prevailing force on her body, a wave of air exploded from her body with a bang. It was as if she shook off some shackles of some sort. Her entire person became like a glider. She swept past at low altitude, combining speed and gracefulness perfectly. Gravity was forced back.
Rui Wen couldn’t completely overcome gravity, but she could control the direction. She found a place where she could borrow some force and grabbed the long extending pole of a street lamp. She did something that even a world-class gymnast would find difficult to do. She rotated once around the pole and flipped into the air, completely eliminating the damage that would have been brought by gravity and completely entering a domain that could be controlled.
Rui Wen dropped to the ground gracefully in the next moment. Her position was about thirty meters to the front-right of the ATV.
Luo Nan saw first hand the entire course of events of Rui Wen leaping down from high in the sky. He could only gasp in admiration at this.
During the course of events, Rui Wen’s merged-as-one body and soul tempo had reached the end-limit of change. It was like her entire body was shifting back and forth between the material plane and the mental plane. The boundary between the two was completely blurred. There were even a few flashes where she seemed to transform into the void.
Luo Nan was closely linked to Rui Wen, so he was able to lock onto those inconceivable flashes of time. Because of this, he was able to start understanding the single logical principle behind all of Rui Wen’s combat abilities.
She was a person who roamed at the edge of the world. The merged-as-one body and soul tempo was an inconceivable superpower. It gave her the gifted instinct to shift back and forth between the material plane and the mental plane. It made each and every one of her actions hard to pin down and impossible to withstand.
But Jack wasn’t moved emotionally the same as Luo Nan.
“Go f**k yourself!”
The unconscious driver had been pushed out from the ATV. Jack ground his teeth as he switched to manual mode. The ATV’s speed didn’t decrease but increased, facing Rui Wen as it came charging over.
Rui Wen dodged out of the way and Jack went “Humph” from within the vehicle. The ATV completely couldn’t be hindered. A flame shot out from his shoulder; another attack was sent at Rui Wen. The Format of Fire seemed to be out of control.
Perhaps it was because things were like this that Jack didn’t slow down the ATV at all. He deviated to the side and cut into a green park nearby, crashing into the flower bed that surrounded the park with a boom. Jack flew directly out of the front car window under the effects of the intense inertia. He had saved some time getting out of a car. After a roll, he ducked his way into the trees.
Rui Wen maintained her silence. She was like a ghostly phantom, sweeping over the treetops, continuing her pursuit.
Jack practically had no chance to catch his breath and he had lost the courage to face Rui Wen head on in combat. He tunneled his way through the shrubs of the park using his hands and legs. He used this sort of sorry and humiliating method with gritted teeth to buy time for a contact signal that should have long arrived.
This was the second battlefield confirmed by Yan Yongbo’s underlings to him. This was an expansive area where the Deep Blue Walkers could truly display their abilities.
As soon as Rui Wen was lured here, the in-position five-to-seven Deep Blue Walkers would launch a joint attack. They would use their absolute power to suppress and capture Rui Wen.
But who was going to tell him where the team of Deep Blue Walkers was at?
The bushes reached their end. Ahead was a small artificial lake. The pitch-black surface of the water blocked the way ahead. Jack couldn’t stop his body in time and he didn’t dare to stop still. He charged into the lake head first.
Rui Wen arrived noiselessly to the skies above the lake the instant he entered the water. Her deathly-silent blade aura erased across and fine ripples were shaken onto the water’s surface. A muffled scream came from the lake’s surface, as well as the sudden illumination of dark-red flames.
Rui Wen locked onto the deranged and suddenly weak air at the bottom of the lake. She adjusted her stance slightly and was just about to enter the water to finally settle things once and for all when a tiny laser dot shined on her body above the lake’s surface.
A terrifying attack descended in the next moment!