Chapter 247: Surprise Attack

He had been standing in the ruins of a street that existed almost a hundred kilometer away, looking at buildings that were half memory and half lie.

The first thing that crossed his mind was the possibility of an Illusion, but he knew that was wrong. It was not an Illusion, it was some other trick that he could not quite identify.

Was there something around him that could reach and see his memories. That was the worst kind of opponent he could think of…

’No, no, no Fuck!’

Then he suddenly felt as though his visibility was getting less and less. The first thing that told him something was wrong was the light.

He looked up and his pupils constricted.

There was no gradual shift, no long-drifting front of weather rolling in from the distance. One moment the sky was the color of dirty glass; the next, a sheet of dark cloud slid over it like an eyelid closing.

The temperature dropped a fraction. The air thickened. Somewhere above the broken line of rooftops, thunder rolled once.

’Screw that, it was way too fast.’

He had lived long enough under open sky to know how storms behaved. Even in this ruined world, even with Synth Energy and System activity warping local conditions, weather did not simply decide to change on a whim.

“This isn’t right,” he gritted his teeth.

There was no one to answer him.

Shiro was gone, so was the guy in black suit. The street he had been walking on had already revealed itself as not his street, not the place he thought it was. It was as if some kind of cloth was placed over this place… just like a movie set.

And, now for fucks sake, the sky was wrong too.

He turned back the way he had come.

The ruins behind him were still — a corridor of broken buildings and leaning frames and shadowed interiors, the same as they had been when he walked through them ten minutes ago, except for the light.

The shadows had thickened now, drawn out and inked in, the edges of things less clear than they had been.

He started running.

He pushed his legs harder than he needed to — not because speed would necessarily change anything, but because the part of his brain that had survived multiple situations understood that when the environment started lying to you, time was the first thing you had to drag back under your control.

The ruins blurred around him as his boots hammered the broken ground. Dust and small fragments skidded under his soles.

Half-formed thoughts flickered across his mind.

’If I get back to the truck, I can at least see what is happening. If they’re there, it’s not complete. If they’re not—’

He looked at the sky once more and found that the stormy clouds now even covered past the walls in the distance. They had consumed the wards as well.

’What the heck is happening… and why now?

’

The scream cut across the ruins like a knife.

Not close or right beside him. It was distant and from the direction of the wall. From the direction of the gate. From the direction where the mini truck sat parked at the end of the barren lane, with the old driver.

The scream lasted less than a second.

It was a human scream and It was cut off mid-word.

Then, after the silence, came the sound of an engine turning over.

The mini truck’s engine.

It coughed once — the sound of an old machine that hadn’t expected to start so soon — then caught, then rose into a steady, accelerating growl.

Ishiki skidded to a halt.

“…Fuck.”

[Ghost Blade] had been active since they stepped into the ruins in an area of 100 meters. He had suppressed the range in order to increase the effectiveness and for a fact, It had shown him nothing unusual until now.

Now though. He was not so sure. It was as creepy as it could get. He was suddenly seeing a twenty existence around him almost simultaneously.

They were all around him, like someone had pressed twenty fingers into the membrane of his perception from every angle at once.

Xenons!

Just then, he heard another scream.

This one was close and clearer.

“Kashima-san!”

It was shiro’s voice.

“We are under attack, thirteen Xenons are visible and converging on me, where are you—!”

Ishiki bit down hard enough on the inside of his cheek that he tasted blood.

“I am currently being attacked by twenty of them,” he shouted back. “I believe you can take care of thirteen!”

There was no answer from the other side.

Then, a second later, the sound of automatic fire — short, controlled bursts, the rhythm of a professional.

Not panicked spray, but aimed shots. That would be Shiro. Black Suit might have been firing too, but there was no way to tell with the sound coming from all sides at the same time.

The engine noise from the direction of the gate rose, then began to fade, the truck was moving away.

’Was it that Black suited bastard? Did he leave us here? No that seems very unlikely. ’

He didn’t have the bandwidth to decide which interpretation was truer in this moment.

Soon, the first Xenon hit the edge of his vision.

He summoned Sorrow’s Edge.

The sword formed in his hands from white motes of light…

The blade was long and straight, with a greenish tint to its surface. Then at the edges where it thinned, it was consumed by purple flames that burned constantly to consume.

Powered by the endless hunger of the two tassels behind the grip that writhed with black flames.

The first wave of Xenons converged on him from all directions. They jumped out of the shadows under the safety of black clouds. Now that they were closer, Ishiki could tell that out of the twenty, fifteen were normal Xenons.

While five were superior Xenons!

Leaving tht for latter, Ishiki first focused on the normal Xenons attacking him.

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