After looking around in the room, Thomas and Detective Kuhn found two corners on which they could push on a pillar that was crushing down on a table, under which a woman and her two children were trapped.
"On three! One … two … three!" Detective Kuhn and Thomas pushed together, the pillar, which weighed easily over a few hundred pounds, was gradually lifted, revealing the almost completely crushed table below.
"Alright! Can you come out?" Thomas was grunting due to his overexerting his power, the majority of the weight was handled by him. He was still undergoing the process of body tempering, and as of now, he was already a few times stronger than the average adult man. but when trying to lift a pillar this size up high enough so that the people trapped underneath could escape still required him to give his all.
"No! Not yet!" the mother cried out but with hope in her voice: "Just a little bit more!"
"Thomas, push it towards me!" Detective Kuhn looked under the pillar and said: "Then we can flip it over and away from the table!"
"Okay! On three!" Thomas put his left shoulder against the pillar: "One, two, three!"
Thomas pushed while Detective Kuhn pulled and then pushed from the side, the pillar rolled over to the right and fell onto the ground while Detective Kuhn jumped to the side to get away from it.
"Miss? Are you okay?" Thomas took a short moment to catch his breath, then he lifted the table and asked.
"I'm okay! Just get my children out first!" the woman trapped under the tap had a few cuts on her forehead and shoulders and the wounds were bleeding all over the place, but she still pushed her two crying children out from under the table.
"Okay, we've got them now, come on out Miss!" Thomas held each child with one hand, slowly passed them to Detective Kuhn, then lifted the table with his left arm and extended his right arm towards the wounded mother.
The woman clenched her teeth and pushed herself forward to grab onto Thomas' right arm. With another count of three, Thomas pulled the woman out - even though her legs were scratched in the process and started bleeding again.
"Okay, we've gotta deal with this wound and get you outta here!"
"Boom! Boom!" two more explosions occurred in places some distance away while Thomas and Detective Kuhn were carrying the mother and her two children out of the apartment complex building. And just when Thomas looked back at Caroline, he saw that Caroline had tossed out her orange and red translucent battle axe, slicing a pale grey mantis monster into pieces, but she was also ambushed by a giant wolf with silvery white fur the very next moment. Caroline was able to block the wolf with silvery white fur with her glowing right arm, but her arm was also clenched by the wolf's mouth.
"Send them away! I'm going to help her!" Thomas said to Detective Kuhn when they approached Detective Kuhn's car: "Go! Go!"
"Be careful! I'll be back as soon as possible!" Detective Kuhn nodded.
Thomas turned back and picked up his phone - turned out he was still on hold after calling Josephine Wong and then being redirected to another station trying to connect him with a team member.
Caroline screamed in pain when her right amr was struck by another tail attack from the wolf with dark purple fur, and she exploded her Xuanli fully around her and from her meridians, creating a fiery shockwave with thousands of wind blades and thin, condensed and incredibly fast streams of jetted air inside to push the two wolves away.
But the damage done to her was done - Thomas watched in fear and fury when the wolf with silvery white fur swallowed Caroline's broken right arm.
"You fucking bitch!" Thomas shouted at the top of his lungs and pushed both of his hands forward. A fiery arrow shot out from a vortex of fire in front of him, aiming at the wolf with silvery white fur.
The wolf roared with a mouth full of blood and unleashed an explosive shockwave, but the fire arrow was only slowly weakened by the shockwave's crush, and it landed right on the right side of the wolf's face.
Caroline tapped a few meridian points on her right chest and right shoulder with her left hand attempting to stop the bleeding from her broken arm. This was a technique taught by Jianmen to stop bleeding from the body, but it was not enough - the blood flow was minimized, but the wound of a broken arm was too severe for the bleeding to be stopped this way.
Thomas' furious attack blinded one eye of the wolf with silvery white fur. This made the wolf with dark purple fur switch targets and lunged against him instead. And exhausted from the powerful spell he just cast, Thomas was not able to even detect, much less evade the attack.
"Bang!" all Thomas could see and hear was that a purple shadow rushed to the place in front of him, and the shadow of a spinning orange and red shield was thrown at him and collided with the purple shadow in midair. The energy explosion threw Thomas back onto the ground, and the wolf with dark purple fur bashed into the ground by a spinning and flying shield.
After throwing her shield away, Caroline concentrated her Xuanli on her left palm, then she placed her hand on the stump of her broken arm.
Another scream, of pain, of fury and of determination, Caroline drank up all of her wine from her flask after charring her wound to stop the bleeding completely. Then she raised her left arm in the air, her battle axe and shield lifted from the ground at the same time and flew towards her. These two weapons became smaller in size when flying towards Caroline and merged into one single translucent ball inside Caroline's left palm.
A translucent orange and red gauntlet appeared on Caroline's left hand, with a small round shield at the back of her wrist, and a sharp sword-like blade extending forward from the back of her hand.
A rush of clarity came from the depths of Caroline's mind, as if she just had an epiphany of sorts. Her entire body felt lighter, and the time seemed to be flowing slower around her - just that she was not sure if it was because of her lost arm and adrenaline, or because of some other reasons.