Chapter 44: Pursuit

Chapter 44: Chapter 44: Pursuit

Xiang Yi’s eyes went wide the moment he saw it.

But he caught on almost immediately — the force behind Shi Tie’s stomp on the rooftop hadn’t been right.

There was no way that single step could have shattered reinforced concrete. The building’s age alone couldn’t explain it either.

It was the Dead Spirit Dust. The vortex it had formed moments ago had been eating away at the ground beneath Shi Tie’s feet.

Xiang Yi had barely processed what was happening before the rooftop began to crack and splinter outward from where Shi Tie stood, and the chain reaction that followed brought the entire floor crashing down in an instant.

Only Xiang Yi and Wang Wu reacted fast enough to throw themselves to the edge of the rooftop, using the lip of the ledge to slow their fall by just a beat.

Everyone else plummeted straight down to the tenth floor along with the cascade of broken concrete and debris.

That floor had been swarming with Shuffling Monsters ever since Sun Yifei and the other two had come up — falling into it was no different from dropping into the mouth of hell.

The one saving grace was the thick layer of rubble that had rained down with them, buying just enough time before the Shuffling Monsters could close in.

Even so, a scream tore through the wreckage almost immediately.

But there was nothing anyone could do about that. Not now.

The moment Xiang Yi hit the ground and got his bearings, he was already scanning through the dust and debris for the path to the fire escape stairwell.

The door had already been knocked open by the Shuffling Monsters earlier — he didn’t need to climb through a window this time.

Looking down, there were still Shuffling Monsters clogging the staircase — but that’s where an exterior fire escape had its advantage.

He could swing out over the railing and drop a floor on the outside. Inside the hospital, a blocked stairwell would’ve meant fighting through. Out here, he had options.

Xiang Yi had barely set foot on the fire escape when heavy footsteps sounded behind him.

Nothing like the shambling gait of the other Shuffling Monsters.

He didn’t need to look back to know it was Shi Tie. And he didn’t need to guess why — as a Spiritual Ability User, he had a pull on Abnormalities that he couldn’t switch off.

Xiang Yi bolted down the fire escape, sidestepped a Shuffling Monster blocking the fourth floor, and made it to ground level.

By now, most of the Shuffling Monsters in the abandoned district had already flooded into the hospital, and the gunshots and the collapse of the tenth floor were drawing them upward.

Outside was, for the moment, the safest place to be.

All he had to do now was find a way to shake Shi Tie off his tail—

Thud—

The sound of something heavy slamming into the ground cut through his thoughts.

He glanced back mid-run. The Shuffling Monster that had tried to block him on the fourth floor was now flat on the ground beside the base of the fire escape.

Shi Tie had knocked it off on the way down. The thing was barely hurt — it was already dragging itself back to its feet.

Xiang Yi looked up toward the higher floors of the fire escape.

Shi Tie was descending one floor at a time.

Whatever habits and instincts had been left over from its human days still seemed to be guiding it — he couldn’t think of any other reason it hadn’t just jumped straight down from the tenth floor.

That wasn’t the important part, though. What mattered was that Shi Tie was drenched in fresh blood, chunks of flesh clinging to its body.

It had killed a Scavenger in under ten seconds. Torn him apart.

Xiang Yi tore his gaze away and pushed himself faster.

He had to run. And he had to run toward the densest part of the district, where the buildings were packed together the tightest.

If Shi Tie caught up to him, he’d end up exactly like that Scavenger.

From what he’d seen of the other Shuffling Monsters, their mobility wasn’t any better than a normal person’s — if anything, it was slightly worse.

Their perception was the same story. Sharp enough up close, but noticeably duller than a human’s in every other regard.

If he kept to tight, uneven terrain, sooner or later he’d lose them.

Shi Tie was a special case — a Shuffling Monster that had once been a person — but it had to share at least some traits with the others.

Running somewhere like that was still the best bet.

Fifteen minutes later.

Xiang Yi hauled himself through a window on the side of a building, gasping for breath.

He looped through half the building’s interior, climbed to the second floor, then threw himself through a window into the building next door.

From there he dropped through a window facing another street, hit the ground in a roll to kill the impact, and kept running toward the nearest building across the road.

The sequence wasn’t pretty, but it held together.

The heavy footsteps behind him hadn’t let up for a second. That massive, hulking silhouette had already appeared at the window he’d just jumped from.

Xiang Yi raised the Mining Gun — he wasn’t even sure when he’d grabbed it.

He swept the blood-red laser across Shi Tie.

The beam hit Shi Tie’s ashen-grey skin, and crystals laced with Living Iron immediately began forming across its surface.

But the growth was agonizingly slow, and as Shi Tie kept moving, every crystal that had just formed crumbled apart — too brittle to hold.

The fragments that had already pierced into the skin and muscle were simply pushed back out, and the wounds sealed themselves in moments.

But Shi Tie itself wasn’t Xiang Yi’s target. He’d already watched this play out several times during the chase.

What he was really aiming for was the window ledge Shi Tie was in the middle of climbing over.

The blood-red laser produced Blood Crystals when it hit living things — or things that were roughly living enough to count.

But against inorganic material like stone and concrete, it worked just fine as a straight-up cutting tool.

He swept the beam across the top and bottom of the window frame. At full power output, the Mining Gun tore straight through it.

The support gone, Shi Tie dropped clean from the second floor and was buried under the concrete that collapsed on top of it.

It bought him maybe a few seconds.

A massive grey-black hand shoved the rubble aside almost immediately, and Shi Tie climbed back to its feet.

"Is this thing actually a Shuffling Monster..."

The thought surfaced in Xiang Yi’s mind before he could stop it.

Over the past fifteen minutes he’d pushed himself into every cramped, difficult corner of the district he could find — the tears all over his protective suit were proof enough of that.

But no matter how tight the terrain, no matter how rough the path, none of it had shaken Shi Tie off his back.

It had turned into a Shuffling Monster, and yet its body moved with exactly the same range of motion as a living person.

The jagged, cluttered terrain barely slowed it down at all.

Anywhere Xiang Yi could walk, Shi Tie could walk. Anywhere he could crawl, it could crawl.

Even the narrow gaps he’d deliberately chosen — spaces crammed with junk, barely wide enough for a normal-sized person — Shi Tie would just smash straight through if they weren’t solid enough, clearing the obstruction with sheer brute force.

At one point a rebar spike from a makeshift trap Xiang Yi had rigged out of the ruins had driven clean into its body. Shi Tie pulled it out like it was nothing.

No pain. No fatigue.

Fifteen minutes of continuous pursuit, and it hadn’t affected its movement in the slightest.

Xiang Yi felt both. Pain and exhaustion.

The fifteen-minute chase had shredded his protective suit and left his arms and legs covered in scrapes and cuts.

He was bleeding.

The blood seemed to set something off in Shi Tie — its pace had picked up after that.

And it wasn’t just Shi Tie. Some of the Shuffling Monsters that had been lurking at the outer edges of the abandoned district had caught his scent once the blood started flowing, and now they were closing in too.

So on top of watching his back for Shi Tie, he had to worry about what might be coming at him from the front.

Fifteen minutes of hard running through broken terrain had done more than just hurt him — it had burned through what little stamina he’d managed to scrape back, and then some.

He was genuinely running on fumes.

If Shi Tie’s grotesquely overdeveloped muscles hadn’t weighed down its speed, he probably would’ve been caught two streets ago.

And if it caught him, he’d end up no different from the obstacles it had smashed through.

Xiang Yi heaved himself through another building, lungs burning, and came out into the next block.

Two, maybe three more minutes. That’s all he had left before his body gave out entirely.

He couldn’t keep going like this.

Think. Think harder. There had to be something — some way to stop Shi Tie in its tracks.

His eyes swept the length of the street.

Without realizing it, he’d run clear past the heart of the abandoned district and into a commercial strip running through a residential neighborhood.

On one side of the street, a staircase ran up the outside of a building all the way to the roof.

Xiang Yi saw something in that. He pushed through the last of what he had, climbed the staircase, and hauled himself up onto the rooftop of the shops at the far end of the strip.

At the same time, he flipped open the control panel on his Mining Gun.