Killing Barton
Black Bear No. 1 hovered twenty meters above the street. The hatch slid open, and Lu Yuan dropped down alongside his two companions.
He sent Black Bear No. 1 climbing higher to keep it safely out of reach. Two King Grade geniuses were about to descend on this area — that aircraft was his transport and his field shelter out here. If it got wrecked, he'd have nowhere to cry.
Over the past few days they'd swept through no small number of towers, and this was the only aircraft they'd found. That fact alone said everything about how lucky he and Amy had been.
Amy blinked her wide eyes, glancing between the Mechanical Guardians ahead and Lu Yuan and Yeye.
"So what's the plan?"
"Barton and Bai Lin are operating separately right now," Yeye said, her tone even. "We can't pin down their positions, but someone's almost certainly already tipped them off."
Lu Yuan thought it over. "Then they'll be heading our way. Let's clear the Mechanical Guardians first — business as usual. We'll deal with those two once they show up."
Amy and Yeye both nodded.
Between everything they'd pulled from the eight ten-thousand-meter towers, handling a pair of King Grade geniuses wasn't an insurmountable task — especially when one of their own was a King Grade genius herself.
The three set to work. Thunder rolled through the air in a continuous wave. At their level, clearing Mechanical Guardians took less than a minute.
They didn't hold back on purpose — no point in tipping anyone off that something was wrong.
Before long, even the gate sentinels were down. Mechanical Guardian bodies blanketed the ground, light orbs drifting lazily above the wreckage. Lu Yuan's group moved through the aftermath at a leisurely pace, picking up their loot.
Then two silhouettes dropped from the towers flanking them.
Barton hit the ground like a falling meteorite, cratering the stone beneath his feet.
Bai Lin descended like a wisp of cotton, landing without a sound — the picture of effortless elegance.
A moment after the two touched down, six more Gene Warriors of various races landed around them, each radiating a Lord Grade aura. And beyond them, atop the rooftops of the surrounding towers, the pressure of numerous Chief Grade geniuses pressed down from above.
Every eye was fixed on the three.
Barton stepped forward and sized them up, a vicious grin spreading across his face.
"Night King. We meet again."
Bai Lin's expression was flat. He glanced up at Black Bear No. 1 drifting overhead, then shifted his gaze to Lu Yuan and Amy.
"So it was you two who knocked Yangqian and Jigong out of the running?"
Lu Yuan raised an eyebrow, a faint smile playing at his lips. "That's right. What of it?"
Bai Lin's eyes stayed cold, but the corner of his mouth curled upward.
"What of it? *This.*"
A black cube materialized in his hand.
Lu Yuan stared at it. Something about the shape felt familiar.
The next instant, Bai Lin fed Spirit Power into the cube. Ghostly blue light rippled across its surface, and a low hum resonated through the air.
A pale blue curtain of light bloomed outward, swallowing the surrounding ten-kilometer radius in its glow.
All three of them felt it. Their expressions shifted almost imperceptibly.
Bai Lin caught the change and let a thin smile settle on his face.
"A lucky find — a jammer that disrupts Departure Crystals. I honestly didn't think we'd get a chance to use it. Turns out it was saving itself for you."
Barton bared his teeth in a feral grin, wild laughter erupting from him.
"Surprised?! Hahaha! Today, every last thing you've collected is ours!"
Lu Yuan, Yeye, and Amy exchanged a glance. All three wore the same peculiar expression.
Then Lu Yuan reached into his storage and produced an identical black cube.
A small smile crossed his face. "What a coincidence. We just happened to pick one of these up too."
Spirit Power poured in. A second pale blue curtain rose and folded over the first.
Two interference fields, layered across the entire area.
The sight made Barton's and Bai Lin's pupils contract sharply. Shock flickered openly across their faces.
Before they could recover—
Towering forms erupted into existence in front of Lu Yuan's group.
Ten meters tall. Each one a Mechanical Guardian.
Fifty of them. Every single one radiating a Second-rank peak Lord Grade aura.
Fifty peak Lord auras pulsing in unison. Barton's and Bai Lin's expressions collapsed. The six Lord Grade Gene Warriors behind them went wide-eyed — staring, frozen, barely believing what they were seeing.
Fifty-odd Second-rank peak Lords. This couldn't be real.
What was even the point of fighting?!
Bai Lin didn't waste a single heartbeat. His entire body dissolved into white mist and streamed away into the distance.
Barton's face twisted. He triggered a full-body Power Burst, those short thick legs slamming into the ground, and launched himself away like a cannonball — the air booming in his wake.
Lu Yuan's group had already anticipated this. His eyes sharpened, and every Mechanical Lord surged forward to attack.
At the same moment, six Shadow Clones erupted from Yeye's body.
Yeye herself and two Shadow Clones peeled off toward Barton. The remaining clones and Amy wheeled around to chase the drifting white mist.
They'd gone through the trouble of activating the jammer — they weren't about to let anyone slip through. Every Lord Grade genius here had almost certainly accumulated a haul worth taking.
Everyone who had made it this far was extraordinary. The assembled force — Barton and Bai Lin at King Grade peak, six Lord Grade warriors, and a crowd of Chief Grade geniuses — had been entirely convinced this was unwinnable for Lu Yuan's group. Two to one, possibly three to one in raw combat power. At absolute worst, they expected to drive the three into a retreat.
Not one of them had imagined that these three would casually produce fifty Lord Grade Mechanical Warriors. Peak Lord Grade, no less.
The fight was over before it started.
Every single one of them bolted without a second thought, scattering the instant those fifty Lords appeared.
Ten kilometers wasn't an impossible distance. A speed-type Second-rank Lord Grade Gene Warrior could sustain a hundred meters per second at full sprint, clearing ten kilometers in just over a minute. At their speeds, reaching the barrier's edge in time was possible.
But as they ran, Lu Yuan smiled and reached into his storage again.
He produced a silver-white pyramidal device.
Spirit Power poured into it. A crackling electromagnetic hum rolled outward.
Electromagnetic arcs fanned in every direction from his position, expanding until they formed a pyramidal barrier with a base roughly two kilometers to a side.
The runners hit the wall.
Their faces drained of color.
> **Electromagnetic Barrier Generator (Third-rank):** Lord Grade Mechanical Artifact. > > *Generates a powerful electromagnetic barrier, adjustable in size by the user. Exceptional defensive strength — capable of blocking attacks from Second-rank Gene Warriors without difficulty. Internal breaches are equally impossible. The barrier cannot be broken from within — only the user withdrawing their Spirit Power and shutting down the device will cause it to collapse.*
Lu Yuan had no intention of doing that.
Nobody had seen this coming.
Barton was fast. He'd nearly crossed the full distance before slamming into the electromagnetic wall. He spun, drove his axe in a single savage sweep that sent all four of Yeye's Shadow Clones stumbling back, then fixed his gaze on the barrier. A fierce gleam lit his eyes. Blood-red flames erupted across his body as he cleaved into the electromagnetic wall.
**BOOM!!**
White light cracked and sprayed, trailing arcs of blue electricity. A gap tore open — thirty, forty centimeters wide.
Barton's grin hadn't even fully formed before the electromagnetic current surged back in and sealed the gap shut.
His expression froze.
"That's impossible—?!"
At the far end of the field, Lu Yuan stood with utter composure, feeding a steady stream of Spirit Power into the barrier while simultaneously directing every Mechanical Lord to press the assault.
Facing Second-rank peak Lord Grade Mechanical Warriors, even a fellow Lord Grade genius could barely hold their ground. These geniuses had only just broken through to Second-rank — they were nowhere near peak condition.
Holding out against a peak Lord's sustained attack at all was already an achievement.
Even Lu Yuan himself — with every gene at Lord Grade and three Lord Grade Armaments boosting his stats — would be driven back step by step under a peak Lord's assault. The others had nowhere near that level of equipment. Some of them might have only a single Lord Grade gene to their name.
Lu Yuan assigned six Mechanical Lords to the six Lord Grade geniuses of various races. Four more went to Barton. Four to Bai Lin. The remaining thirty-six fanned out to hunt down the Chief Grade and Boss Grade geniuses scattered across the field.
If even Lord Grade geniuses struggled against Mechanical Lords, Chief Grade and Boss Grade fighters had no chance at all.
A Kaman Guardian Type fighter — Chief Grade — found himself with a Mechanical Lord bearing down on him. It moved with ponderous, earth-shaking steps — and then it was simply there, directly in front of him.
The greatsword came down, lightning snarling along its edge.
Heavy. Fast.
There was no time to dodge. He roared through his teeth, golden light flooding across his body and condensing into a barrier before him. He raised his great shield in a two-handed guard and poured everything he had into defense.
The thunderclap blade hit the golden barrier and shattered it instantly. The greatsword swept on, smashed his physical shield to splinters, and cleaved him cleanly in two.
The gap between a Second-rank peak Lord and a low-rank Second-rank Chief was simply too vast.
Screams erupted in all directions. Waves of spiritual energy and the thunder of impacts rolled across the field without pause.
The Chief Grade and Boss Grade geniuses here were numerous — but they represented the finest from more than ten races across all of White Cloud Continent, hand-selected from among every First-rank Gene Warrior in existence. By any outside standard, every one of them was exceptional enough to qualify for the Red Maple Empire's Talent Camp.
Yet under the Mechanical Lords' systematic slaughter, not one of them could mount a real defense. Whatever techniques they threw out bought them nothing but a few more seconds.
If not for the interference fields, they could have simply activated their Departure Crystals and vanished.
But both sides had deployed jammers. Departure Crystals were useless now. There was no escape.
On the other side of the field, Barton was locked in combat against Yeye and her two Shadow Clones.
He was powerful — but Yeye's gene composition was deep and strangely layered, and within moments of their first exchange she had already seized the upper hand. He was holding, but only barely.
He was still trying to fight off her pressure and find some angle to crack the electromagnetic barrier when the earth trembled beneath approaching footsteps. A wave of terrifying spiritual pressure rolled in from behind him.
He turned.
Four Second-rank peak Lord Grade Mechanical Warriors were bearing down on him.
His face cycled through colors that had no business on a human face. The corner of his mouth twitched violently.
"Where in the hell are you getting all this—" He choked the rest back down. "Did you loot the entire central Floating City?! How many towers did you clear?!"
Yeye's expression didn't waver. She said nothing and kept attacking.
Under her pressure alone, Barton had been barely managing to hold on. The instant the four Mechanical Lords joined the assault, it took only a moment before a massive Spirit Cannon blast caught him dead-on.
**BOOM!!**
The impact hurled him backward. He smashed into the wall of a skyscraper hard enough to punch a crater into it, then plummeted.
Mid-fall, he twisted with desperate agility — feet found the wall — and pushed off, vanishing from the spot just before a streak of black sword light carved through where he'd been.
He reappeared on the roof of another tower.
His armor showed no visible damage, but blood was seeping through the gaps. His breath came in ragged heaves.
"Damn it all."
He turned and fixed his gaze on the electromagnetic barrier. Something manic surfaced in his eyes.
He reached into his storage and pulled out Talismans and Psionic Bombs, hurling them at the barrier one after another.
**BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!!**
The barrier shuddered with each detonation. Its glow began to dim.
At the far end of the field, Lu Yuan felt the fluctuations and frowned slightly.
He reached into his storage and produced a second silver-white pyramidal generator, feeding Spirit Power into it without pause.
*Hmmm—*
A second electromagnetic barrier rose alongside the first.
Barton, who had been watching the first barrier begin to crack, went rigid.
"You have got to be—"
*One isn't enough, so you pull out a second one?! Do you even know how to lose?!*
His expression went flat and cold. He had already steeled himself to burn through every high-damage item he'd collected in these ruins — but before he could commit to that plan, Yeye's brow furrowed, and she reached into her own storage with visible reluctance.
She produced a blue-violet talisman.
> **Magnetic Confinement Talisman (Third-rank, 100%):** Lord Grade Talisman.
She fed Spirit Power into it. The talisman dissolved into a concentrated surge of electromagnetic force that crossed the distance in an instant and locked Barton in place.
The shock crossing his face hadn't even finished registering before a Spirit Cannon from a distant Mechanical Lord connected with him.
Dark green blood misted through the air.
Suspended helplessly above the ground with no way to defend himself, he was torn through by a rapid series of black sword streaks — and Barton was dead before he hit the earth.
When he dropped, so did his inventory. Item after item cascaded out, piling into a mound over thirty meters high — something close to a small hill.
Everything Barton had gathered inside the Aier Mechanical Ruins.
Yeye looked at the hill.
Her brow creased, just barely.
"Wasteful."
The talisman she'd just used was one of her own finds from this excursion — a Third-rank peak Lord Grade Talisman. Among everything she'd collected here, it ranked among the most precious items in her haul.
She hadn't planned to use it at all. But the calculus had shifted just enough that not using it carried real risk.
Reluctantly, she'd used it.
One spent. Fifteen left.
Such a waste.