Chapter 46 (2) - The Last Day Without Armor

Two mountains flanked a cove beneath an endless, clear sky. Sunlight glittered on the water.

The small mountain reservoir wasn’t big. Dense forest surrounded it, and even the small mound of earth poking up at the center of the lake was overgrown with tall grass and shrubs.

Dormitory 11 sat on a patch of grass by the water’s edge, wearing swim trunks they had hastily bought from the living base. Not one of them had gotten in.

“We might have taken this a bit too far... She’s our platoon leader after all.”

“Yeah, yesterday we were all too stunned to say anything. Nobody thought to tell her she didn’t have to.”

“I actually said something today, but she seemed annoyed and ignored me,” Wen Jifei sighed.“I mean, how could I have known that she’d actually go through with it? When I brought it up, I was just joking around. I wanted to see her get flustered, that’s all.”

“Yeah, this really does feel a bit inappropriate.”

Mira was in a black and red bikini. The thin, tight fabric showed off her tall, shapely figure and her fair skin to an almost nosebleed-causing degree.

This type of two-piece swimsuit would have been perfectly commonplace at a Western pool or beach, but wearing one in the Oriental Republic, and in front of eight young men at that, took real courage.

So, the moment Mira had stripped down to her swimsuit, she’d gone straight into the water. She seemed to be an excellent swimmer, diving under for long stretches at a time.

More than ten minutes passed. The young men of Dormitory 11 didn’t even dare to look in her direction. If this had been a crowded public beach or pool, a passing glance could have been excused, but with this setting, this atmosphere...

“So we’re just not going in, then?”

“Nope. I can’t swim anyway. Can you guys swim?”

“I can only do the doggie paddle.”

They laughed.

Suddenly, a strange humming and clanging filled the air.

Several of them turned toward the sound at the same time.

Three figures had already burst out of the tree line at tremendous speed. They wore maneuvering devices, making them almost too fast to see clearly.

“Little Qing,” Wen Jifei cried out.

In truth, calling out to him was useless. He was just as unarmed and unarmored as the rest of them, in nothing but swim trunks. Wen Jifei had instinctively shouted his name only because he’d realized the attackers’ primary target seemed to be Han Qingyu.

Then a worse thought struck him. Mira doesn’t have her device either!

In the few seconds it took him to process all of this, the gap had closed to forty meters, thirty meters. The assassins’ blades had been drawn back and leveled.

Two of the three stomped off the ground and launched into the air, diving in for the kill.

“Relax.” Han Qingyu looked up and smiled. “Amateurs. They don’t even know that they aren’t supposed to jump.”

The first airborne assassin was about to swing his blade when a figure many times faster slammed into him from the side with a thud, then struck them with a slash. The assassin’s body went flying upward.

Regiment Commander Li, maneuvering device strapped on and glowing blue, launched toward the next target without a moment’s pause.

The body he’d sent flying had barely started to drop when Lao Jian came barrelling into them from the side, slashing their sword in a move that sent the first assassin skyward once again.

Lao Jian then shot toward the third.

Once again, the first assassin had barely started descending when a wham launched upward for a third time before Zhang Dao’an moved to the next.

Everyone in Dormitory 11 watched in stunned disbelief. Is this really necessary?

Not thirty meters from where they stood, three streaks of blue light crisscrossed along the ground, while in the air, three assassins, now hacked beyond recognition, were juggled between them, never touching the ground once.

The three bodies would go rigid and start to fall, only to be smashed or slashed right back up again. Up and down, up and down. By now, all three were almost certainly dead.

“Enough playing around. Conserve your source energy,” barked the regiment lead advisor as he emerged from the trees on the opposite side, also wearing a maneuvering device. “We lost the live captures. They swallowed poison.”

Three bodies finally hit the ground with dull thuds.

“Ugh, and here I was hoping they’d send someone decent. If not, at least send more of them.” Regiment Commander Li deactivated his maneuvering device with a genuinely disappointed sigh.

Zhang Dao’an and Lao Jian stopped and shed their devices too. They looked similarly let down. Neither of them had seen real combat in a long time as well.

“This one...” Zhang Dao’an nudged a body with his blade and squinted. “This one looks like he’s from this batch of recruits. The other two are too mangled to tell, but one of them looks like an outsider, based on age.”

“Mm.” Regiment Commander Li nodded.

Dormitory 11 stood with their backs to the lake, still in shock.

“So what you’re saying is, Regiment Commander Li, the regiment lead advisor, Instructor Zhang, and Platoon Leader Lao all happened to be here with their maneuvering devices on... to peep on Mira while she swims?”

At that moment, on the small mound of earth in the center of the lake, less than fifteen meters from the shore and barely twenty meters from Han Qingyu’s back, a black shadow moved. There hadn’t even been the sound of a blade being drawn, but the hmmm of a source energy maneuvering device gave them away.

A black figure, body nearly parallel to the water, blade in hand, was already lunging at Han Qingyu.

Then,without warning, a figure spiraled up from beneath the surface, rocketing out of the water.

Still in her bikini but now wearing a maneuvering device that blazed with blue light, Mira, dual-wielding blades, thrust both hands upward and slashed straight through the dark figure, cleaving them clean in half.

A bloody rain fell. Mira’s fair, striking body continued its arc straight into the sky, the picture of raw ferocity and bloody beauty.

The two halves of the dark figure splashed into the water, making it murky with blood.

Mira, having landed in the water near the other end, dove under immediately and swam toward the drainage outlet to rinse the blood off. Despite only being an E-ranker, she was still a nine-year veteran and a four-year deputy platoon leader.

“Is that all of them?” Regiment Commander Li asked after a moment of quiet.

“If there are more, they won’t show themselves now,” Zhang Dao’an said.

Next to them, Lao Jian kicked one of the bodies over and spat. “I’ve been saying this forever. Pure Purgatory is filled with idiots. They’re trash. Garbage.”

All three bodies wore the same insignia: a triangle set inside a circle. They also had seventh-generation devices.

“Hey, you guys can talk and kick all you want, but stop sneaking glances here,” Han Qingyu called them out with a grin, catching the drift of their eyes.

Mira was climbing out of the water behind him.

Without turning around, Han Qingyu tossed her his long autumn coat.

Mira caught it and wrapped herself up.

“So, what the hell just happened?” Wen Jifei couldn’t help but ask.

Both Han Qingyu and Mira were clearly in on it. Regiment Commander Li and the others probably hadn’t strapped on maneuvering devices to spy on Mira’s swimming either. Wen Jifei’s eyes swept over all of them.

“This kind of thing happens every year. One or two infiltrators always slip through. It’s unavoidable. There are ways to smoke them out, though,” explained Zhang Dao’an.

This was the reality of the Coalition’s recruit intake. Nearly every year, a few Wiper agents managed to sneak in.

This year at the 425th was different, however, because there happened to be an A-rank recruit who hadn’t suited up yet. On top of that, this recruit had killed two Pure Purgatory operatives before enlisting, foiling their plans, and earned a Silver Azure Guardian Medal for it.

Both pieces of information had leaked out. For those destruction-addicted lunatics, there was nothing more satisfying, more glorious, than the idea of taking this recruit down with them. They had come with no intention of leaving alive. They’d come only to kill.

“Yesterday, the original plan was to use energy cores as bait to lure them in,” Han Qingyu explained to Wen Jifei. “Last night, when I checked the lock, I found no signs of tampering whatsoever. The locker and lock were both completely untouched. Nobody had come into Dormitory 11 at all. If they could resist even energy cores, then the only thing they could have wanted was obviously my life. Since they were being extremely cautious, Regiment Commander Li had no choice but to ask Platoon Leader Mira to help create an ambush environment as good as this one.”

***

The classified nature of this operation meant the battle quickly drew a large number of garrison soldiers and veterans from the base below. Trailing behind them was a crowd of recruits.

Could there still be Pure Purgatory agents among them? Maybe even Snow Lotus operatives or Preservers? Han Qingyu wondered, watching as the soldiers collected equipment from the dead, carefully extracting and stowing away the energy cores. This is torture. I want so badly to provoke whoever’s still hiding. Just to remind them that next time, they should pick somewhere with fewer people to try to kill me.

Soon, I’ll have armor.