Chapter 24: Spider Silk Hanging from the Ceiling (4)

Bres’s voice came through the earpiece.

“Qiao Anni? Can you hear me?”

The sounds of gunfire and explosions came through the earpiece.

“Hearing you loud and clear. Including the background noise. Did you mess up again?”

“No time to explain… Next… I’ll tell you the route, come help me here!”

“Hold on.”

“What?”

Qiao Anni lowered her hand from the earpiece. Bres’s voice disappeared, and the intense gunfire temporarily stopped.

Panicked crowds were scrambling toward the entrance, a mix of curses and cries filling the air. Qiao Anni’s small figure moved against the tide, like a rock in a raging river.

“Who’s there?”

The guards inside the bar, who had been pushing the crowd out, seemed to have received word of an intruder. They raised their weapons warily at the red figure slowly approaching them.

“Stop right there and get out! Or I’ll shoot!” one guard shouted nervously.

The next second, Qiao Anni, who had been over a dozen meters away, was right in front of him.

“Wh—”

He tried to pull the trigger, but found his gun missing. Looking up, the dark muzzle was staring back at him.

Then, the muzzle spat a tongue of flame like a snake’s.

Bang.

Before he could even scream, the guard was shot dead. The other guards raised their guns and opened fire wildly at that spot.

The dry ice by the dance floor and the gunpowder smoke from the shell casings spread and mixed in the air, obscuring vision and creating a hazy, eerie atmosphere.

A few seconds later, only a mutilated corpse from stray bullets remained where Qiao Anni had stood, and she had vanished.

Amid the guards’ confusion and bewilderment, Qiao Anni emerged again from behind the corpse.

She held the corpse with one hand as a shield while firing with the other, her movements precise and deadly.

Aim, fire, shoot.

Repeated several times.

With unimaginable accuracy, she put bullets into the guards’ vital points. For a moment, screams and groans even drowned out the still-wailing alarm.

At the center of this bloody symphony, Qiao Anni frowned.

“Quiet.”

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Alarms and groans alike—everything fell silent.

Qiao Anni tossed the empty pistol onto the ground and casually wiped the blood splattered on her hands onto her raincoat.

She bent down, picked up a relatively intact gun from the pool of blood, loaded a new magazine, then kicked open the door marked with warning signs.

“Alright, Mr. Bres. How do I get there?”

The girl sprinted through the corridor.

“Go straight, turn at the emergency exit sign! Then come out through the second door!”

Bres shouted directions to Qiao Anni on her way while emptying the magazine of his gun.

He was currently behind a makeshift barricade made of Forest Gang members’ corpses and metal shelves. After being exposed, he quickly took out those gang members and set up a simple barricade at the entrance to buy time.

The shouting and footsteps grew louder as more Forest Gang members converged.

Bres cursed under his breath and grabbed a new submachine gun from beside him.

Luckily, he was in an armory, so ammunition wasn’t a concern.

At the same time, because it was an armory, the newly arriving Forest Gang members couldn’t act rashly, afraid of accidentally blowing up the entire warehouse.

Thus, a bizarre sight emerged: Bres single-handedly suppressing dozens of enemies with firepower.

But the creator of this spectacle couldn’t bring himself to laugh.

Although he wasn’t in immediate danger, he was trapped. The Forest Gang had surrounded the place tightly—how was he going to break out?

He could only place his hopes on Qiao Anni’s arrival, Bres thought.

Suddenly, the sounds outside the warehouse ceased.

The gang members’ shouts and groans vanished without a trace, as if someone had pressed a mute button.

‘Half-time break?’

Just as this absurd thought crossed Bres’s mind, a tremendous force came from the other side of the barricade.

‘Not good.’

Bres quickly rolled away from the barricade. The next moment, two spikes pierced the spot he had been leaning against.

Then, the barricade of steel and flesh was torn in half like a sheet of A4 paper. Iron shavings and bits of flesh flew in the air, falling like snowflakes.

Thud.

The sound of a cane striking the ground came from the entrance.

‘Who?’

Pressing his body against the shelf, Bres peeked in that direction.

A stooped man appeared in Bres’s field of vision.

“Which rat sneaked in here?” he asked coldly.

Bres didn’t reply. Instead, he grabbed a grenade, pulled the pin, and threw it at the man.

The grenade traced a beautiful arc through the air—or it should have.

A flash of cold light. The grenade exploded mid-air with a loud bang, leaving Bres’s ears ringing.

“Found you.”

Before he could recover, the two spikes sliced through the shelf he was leaning on, cutting it into pieces. The shelf, which had seemed sturdy, was like butter under those blades.

Bres leaped backward, twisting in mid-air to unload his weapon at the man.

Shell casings clattered to the ground. Along with them came the man’s cold laugh.

Bres focused and saw a strange wall standing before him, about a person’s height, gleaming with an odd metallic sheen.

The next second, the wall cracked, reshaped, and returned to its original form.

They were blades.

“Who dares to cause trouble in my Belmont’s territory?”

It was no longer accurate to describe him as “stooped,” because Bres saw the true appearance of his back.

Eight dancing blades, like a spider’s sharp fangs, were now moving in a certain rhythm behind Belmont.

Bres drew in a sharp breath.

Now he knew who had taken that cyberbody.

Belmont—or rather, the combat prosthetic installed on his back—attacked Bres with lightning speed. Before Bres could react, the prosthetic grabbed him and slammed him heavily against the wall.

Pain from the impact hit him from both front and back. Bres grimaced, and a spike was pressed against his throat.

Tap, tap.

Tapping his cane on the floor, Belmont approached Bres step by step. Bres tried to struggle, but the spider-leg-like prosthetics held him firmly in place.

“Who sent you?”

Belmont asked coldly.

“Well, take a guess?”

“I’m not interested in playing guessing games with you.”

Suddenly, a commotion broke out outside the door, with faint sounds of gunfire and screams.

Bres broke into a smile, then spoke.

What he revealed was not information.

“Left side, crash straight in!”

Boom!

Belmont spun around, swinging his prosthetic to deflect the flying debris.

Dust flew.

A large hole opened in the warehouse wall. A red figure coughed as she stepped in.

“Cough… like this?”