They talked for a long time. Until, in the distance outside the window, a few shadowy figures appeared near the fire-wrecked ruins. They moved with a cautious speed, and their faint aura felt similar to Raelf Pence’s…

  They were probably sent by The Blood Tonic Aldrich to check on what happened to Grave-Touch Raelf.

  “Looks like… the ‘cleanup crew’ is here,” Nicole murmured, glancing that way. “We should head out too.”

  Pandora nodded. Without another word, they stood up together. After quickly gathering their things from the table, they slipped out separately through the burger joint’s back door, melting into the city’s thick, dangerous night.

  Pandora and Elsa didn’t go far. Once she was sure the area was safe and they weren’t followed, she stopped in a relatively hidden corner cluttered with old construction junk.

  “Elsa.”

  “Yes, My Lady.” Elsa gave a slight bow.

  The next moment, her figure began to blur and fade. A crimson glow gathered, stretched, and took shape where she’d been standing. Finally, it formed that ornate, fierce broadsword—its blade looking like it was coated in slowly flowing, congealed blood.

  Elsa’s Sword hovered silently before Pandora.

  Pandora reached out and took a firm grip on the hilt. The familiar, cold power traveled up her arm. Her Witch-blood stirred faintly in response. Her height seemed to gain an inch, her shoulders broadening slightly.

  She didn’t move right away. Instead, she took a small, thumb-sized glass vial from her bag. Inside was a thick liquid the color of old blood, shimmering with a strange sapphire-blue light.

  Disguise Potion.

  She pulled the stopper, tilted her head back, and drank it all. The liquid slid down her throat with an oddly cool feel.

  A few minutes later, Pandora raised a hand, her fingertips lightly touching her cheek. The texture had changed. Her skin’s usual warmth and bounce were gone, replaced by a weird, slightly rubbery feel—a brief, remarkable plasticity.

  She placed both hands over her face. Faint, almost silent sounds of shifting flesh and sinew rose and fell in the quiet shadows. It took less than two minutes.

  When Pandora lowered her hands, the face they revealed wasn’t Pandora’s anymore. It was the weathered, sharp-angled face that belonged to “Ember.” Even her smile seemed to carry an extra chill.

  She rolled her neck, adjusting to the feel of this “new body.” Then she slung Elsa’s Sword across her back. With a few light leaps, she vanished into the shadows of the construction debris.

  She didn’t head straight for the botanical garden. She went back to her “home” in Tsukimidaira first.

  This day had been a lot. From the morning’s Death Sprint challenge at Echo Quarry, to the midday meet with the broker and the ambush at the flower market, then the afternoon’s face-off with Raelf Pence, the talk, and the final fire… and finally the long evening chat and info swap with Nicole…

  A lot to handle in one day. For someone who’d been “lying low” or just “working on potions and shooting” for seven months, this kind of back-to-back, high-intensity action and constant watchfulness was pretty draining. Both her body and her mind needed some quiet time to rest and reset.

  ………………

  The night was deep. No clouds, just the eternal, ominous crimson moon hanging high, its big, cold eye blinking as it watched the land below.

  The scarlet moonlight lit up the abandoned botanical garden below, overrun with unnaturally wild plants—a picture of broken beauty and savage life.

  It also lit up a figure leaning against a broken window frame on the top floor of a nearby abandoned four-story building.

  A young woman. Her skin looked extra pale under the red light, almost see-through, hinting at mild anemia. But it didn’t slow her down a bit right now.

  Her eyes were bright and focused, like stars in the dark. Her expression was all alert, completely fixed on the botanical garden not far below, like a panther waiting for its prey to slip up.

  Beside her, the sharp edge of the crimson broadsword quietly caught the cold, scarlet moonlight from outside the window, gleaming with a keen, dangerous light.

  Pandora—or rather, “Ember” right now—was set up on the top floor of this abandoned building near the garden. A carefully picked watch spot. The view was ideal.

  It was wide enough to see most of the garden’s key areas and several important ways in and out. At the same time, it was plenty hidden. The building itself was a wreck, tucked between taller ruins, making this corner hard to spot from the garden.

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  More importantly, the way this window was broken made a natural “lookout slit” and “cover.” She could see clearly while keeping the chance of being seen low.

  Good spots like this weren’t easy to find around the garden now. Because neither of the fighting sides, Echo Quarry and Ascension Road, were stupid. They were watching for other players, afraid they’d wear each other out only for some hidden third party to swoop in and take the garden. That would be the real joke.

  So, those high spots and hidden nooks around the garden with good views were either already wrecked or trapped by both sides. Or they looked empty but were actually manned or rigged with snares, waiting for “fishermen” to bite.

  But Nicole’s skill as an info dealer really was something. Even with both sides on high alert and the place layered with traps, she’d still found a few “high watch points” like the one Pandora was using now—spots that were both hidden and practical. She’d used her know-how of the land, her sense of how people think, and her sharp call on what was “safe” versus “risky.”

  Pandora stood quiet behind the window, her gaze moving over the moonlit garden below. It looked eerie and still.

  A thought crossed her mind. Maybe Nicole, right at this moment, was also hiding in some other well-picked, hidden high spot. Watching the garden’s moves just like she was. Waiting… for that long-planned “counterattack” to start.

  Just then, movement came from the direction of the garden.

  Pandora’s spot didn’t give her a clear view of the details. But she could feel it—in a certain western area of the garden, the wind sounds suddenly turned chaotic. Faint, hurried footsteps, metallic clangs, and muted shouts reached her.

  Then—a few flickering, dim or bright flames sparked to life in that area like wicked eyes snapping open in the dark.

  BANG—!

  A heavy, air-ripping gunshot exploded, shattering the false, tense quiet of the deep-night ruins!

  What followed was shot after shot—clear or muffled, thick or thin—ringing out!

  Bang-bang-bang! Rat-tat-tat!

  The gunfire was like lit firecrackers, like sudden rain on a tin roof. It echoed from the garden’s west side and quickly spread to other directions.

  Clearly, that sound of standardized firearms, all too familiar to Pandora, meant Echo Quarry’s attack had officially begun.

  But Ascension Road wasn’t helpless.

  Under that first surprise hit, a few short, sharp screams did come from the west—someone had been hit. But in just moments, the area with the heaviest gunfire was swallowed by a thick, viscous fog that seemed to pour out of nowhere.

  This wasn’t normal mist. Under the crimson moonlight, it shimmered with a faint, eerie blue glow. From far away it looked strangely, unnervingly beautiful, like the glowing organ of some deep-sea creature.

  But once that pale blue fog completely covered the intense fighting zone, more screams—from different directions, different sides—erupted, one after another. They sounded more pained than before.

  “Argh—!”

  “Damn it, where are they?!”

  “Over—over there!”

  “Poison! The fog’s toxic!”

  “Fall back! Now!”

  Screams, roars, curses, and even more chaotic gunfire and close-up fighting tangled together inside the thick fog.

  That meant the fight had moved into a messier, uglier stage… close combat mixed with sneaky poison.

  Soon, similar pale blue glowing fog, as if it were alive, started appearing and spreading from a few other spots inside the garden. The whole place was “awake” now.

  At the same time, under the garden’s plant-choked ground, intricate, ghostly blue lines and sigils—like awakening veins and nerves—lit up one by one. The light cut through soil and roots, drawing a clear, huge warding array on the surface.

  The ghostly blue glow mixed with the crimson moonlight, throwing the whole garden into a weird, unreal, heart-thumping, eerie mood.

  The complex warding array Ascension Road had laid down for this key resource point was now fully active.

  Tonight’s fight had officially begun its bloody start.

  “So then…” Pandora stood behind the window, quietly watching the distant garden wrapped in ghostly blue and red light, full of gunfire and screams. Her eyes reflected the flickering glow.

  “Which side… will win in the end?” she murmured softly, as if to herself or to some nonexistent listener.

  After speaking, she turned away from the dusty window and moved into the inside of the abandoned apartment. There was an equally wrecked bedroom here. In a corner stood a full-length mirror with a crude wood frame. The glass was covered in thick dust, cracked like a spiderweb, but it could still faintly show a blurry shape.

  In the mirror, the weathered, sharp face of “Ember” was barely visible.

  Pandora looked at her reflection and reached into her robe to pull out another small glass vial. Inside was the same sapphire-blue, thick Disguise Potion.

  The potion worked, but it didn’t last forever. To be safe, to keep it from suddenly wearing off at a bad time during a hard fight and showing her real face… she needed to take more early.

  She tilted her head back, and the second vial slid down her throat.

  Because it was a system-made, 【Perfect-Grade】 brew—pure formula, stable effect, almost no side effects—the two potions’ powers blended inside her without fighting or causing trouble. Like two streams joining a river, they merged perfectly, stretching out the time of the “Ember” disguise.

  “Like this…” Pandora felt the small, steady shifts in her face muscles and skin and murmured to herself. “No need to worry now.”

  As her whisper faded, the bedroom window opened without a sound. Outside was the deep, dangerous night of the ruins.

  A crimson figure, like a bat melting into the dark, slipped nimbly out the window. After a few jumps, it vanished into the tangled shadows of the buildings, speeding toward that garden wrapped in light and death…

  ………………

  Botanical Garden, Western Sector, Outdoor Ornamental Plant Zone.

  Once neatly planned, planted with lots of sun-loving decorative stuff—roses, hydrangeas, sunflowers—drawing crowds of people back in the old days.

  But now, years after people left, order broke down, and growth went wild. Most of the delicate decorative plants were long since choked out, gone. Replaced by one or two kinds of crazy tough, invasive, no-name vines and broad-leaf plants.

  They spread madly, climbed, strangled, taking over almost every bit of space, turning the once pretty garden into this primitive, sinister green maze.

  But tonight’s main players weren’t these plants living it up without humans.

  Right now, this area was drowning in that pale blue, glowing, creepy fog. The fog was thick, visibility was terrible. The air stank of a sharp mix of rotting plants and some chemical poison.

  With sight messed up, sounds turned muffled and warped.

  Deep in the fog, on the narrow stone paths weaving between patches of wild plants… stood a few figures.

  The most obvious one was a man built all wrong, his posture twisted in a way that looked painful. His feet were planted wide, shoved at an impossible angle into cracks in the stone path, like they were really rooted, stuck firm, totally unmovable.

  His arms had muscles bulging weirdly large, veins squirming under his skin like worms.

  And his hands held steady on the grips of a heavy, long-barreled machine gun… with a dangling ammo belt.