On Cold Rain Street.
"Mom, Mom...?"
A girl covered in blood stains leaned against the wall and slowly walked forward. Her left leg twisted unnaturally, her eyes scanned through the thick, lifeless fog, and her face was filled with fear and despair.
A strange howl sounded from the front of the street, and the girl's face turned pale instantly. She huddled into a ball by the wall, her body shivering uncontrollably.
Just then, a hand gently patted her shoulder.
The girl let out a startled cry and instinctively shrank forward. She looked up in terror and found that it wasn't a monster behind her, but a young man wearing a black windbreaker.
"What's wrong, little one?" Xi Renjie squeezed out a gentle smile from his pale face.
Perhaps because of that smile, the fear on the girl's face dissipated slightly, and she whispered,
"I... I got separated from my mom."
Xi Renjie looked around. On the foggy street, he couldn't see a single person.
"When did you get separated?"
"Just now..."
"Which direction did she go?"
The girl pointed her hand towards the empty street ahead.
Xi Renjie sighed and bent down, "Let me take you to find her, okay?"
The girl nodded, and Xi Renjie picked her up, holding a bloodstained steel sword in one hand, and staggered towards the thick fog.
After several hours of searching and fighting, Xi Renjie's body was nearing its limit, but he couldn't rest now. With Han Meng gone, he was the pillar of District Three. He couldn't fall until all the streets were cleared.
Xi Renjie carried the girl and walked slowly forward. The storefronts on both sides of the street were covered in blood, and mutilated corpses were exposed to the air, their blood dried up...
"What's your name?" Xi Renjie suddenly asked.
"Xiao Qi."
"Xiao Qi, close your eyes first. When I find your mom, you can open them, okay?"
"Mm-hmm." The girl obediently closed her eyes.
Xi Renjie walked through the silent street for about ten minutes when a series of noises came from the distance.
There were still people!
Xi Renjie immediately sped up.
As he got closer to the noise, he saw a group of people huddled around a bloodied body in a house on the street corner, anxiously discussing something.
"I said he can't be saved... Let's go!"
"Yeah, if we don't leave, those things will catch up again!"
"But he's still alive. We can't just leave him here. He saved our lives just now!"
"I think it's more dangerous to run outside. Maybe hiding in the house is the safest."
"..."
There were about six or seven people in this house, each with dust and blood stains on their faces, as if they had escaped from other streets. At this moment, two or three people were surrounding a heavily injured man, urgently bandaging him.
Hearing their voices, Xiao Qi, who was sitting on Xi Renjie's back, suddenly opened her eyes and exclaimed in surprise,
"Mom!"
Everyone in the room turned their heads simultaneously.
They saw Xi Renjie wearing a black windbreaker outside the door, standing in place. Then, one of the middle-aged women suddenly stood up and anxiously ran towards the door.
"Xiao Qi!! Where did you go just now? Mom has been looking for you for so..."
"Stop!"
Xi Renjie's low growl suddenly sounded.
This shout startled everyone in the room. The middle-aged woman who had run halfway also stopped and looked at him with confusion.
Xi Renjie grabbed Xiao Qi's arm, which was about to jump off his back, and protected her as he stepped backward... He tightly gripped the steel sword, staring at everyone in the room. In the thick fog, their shadows writhed in the darkness.
These people were all targeted by calamity.
"Mom..." Xiao Qi reached out towards her mother but could only watch as the distance between them grew. Her eyes were filled with confusion.
"Enforcer, what do you mean by this?"
The middle-aged woman frowned, anxiously trying to hug her child back. However, Xi Renjie instead opened the door of the house opposite and pushed the little girl inside, locking the door.
"Mom!"
Rustle—
As the middle-aged woman stepped halfway out of the door, dark shadows suddenly erupted from the house, instantly pouncing on the nearby figures in the narrow terrain. In an instant, screams and the sound of flesh being torn mixed wildly together!
Seeing this, Xi Renjie's eyes turned red. His body was stained with a trace of black, resembling steel armor. He unhesitatingly rushed into the house with his steel sword!
He tried to save the middle-aged woman who was closest to him, but when he slashed his sword at the shadow centipede, most of the woman's head had already been bitten off. Even though Xi Renjie had cut the shadow centipede with one sword, it was too late to save her life.
The bloody massacre was completed in an instant. All the centipedes crawled rapidly along the walls, completely sealing the door. The figure wearing the black windbreaker was trapped in the narrow room, surrounded by the fine legs of crawling centipedes.
Xi Renjie tightly gripped the handle of the steel sword, took a deep breath, and the blade was stained with the same black color as his body, emitting a cold aura around it.
After such a long battle, his physical strength was already nearing its limit, but now that things had gone this far, he could never retreat...
The eight shadow centipedes that were just inches away simultaneously erupted. At this moment, Xi Renjie's steel sword drew an arc around him, and a thin, extremely dense black line swept out from the tip of the sword, cutting three of the closest centipedes in half!
Xi Renjie wanted to dodge, but two centipedes had already bitten his shoulders. At such a close distance, he had no room to dodge.
At the same time, the other centipedes also rushed forward together, wrapping him like a writhing black ball. They tore at Xi Renjie's body. Even though most of his skin was covered in black and hard as steel, there were still some areas being gnawed at, and crimson blood stained his windbreaker...
Xi Renjie's eyes widened. Just as he was preparing to make a desperate fight, a figure descended lightly outside the door like a graceful red butterfly.
At this moment, all the shadow centipedes stopped moving. They simultaneously turned their heads to look outside. In the swirling fog, a figure held seasoning in their left hand and a blazing torch in their right, looking at the inside of the room with slightly squinted eyes.
"Who?!" Xi Renjie subconsciously asked.
Chen Yifei casually twirled the torch in his hand into a sword-like motion, chuckled, "Even an enforcer is no more than this."
As he finished speaking, he disappeared outside the door. At the same time, the shadow centipedes crawling on Xi Renjie's body seemed to have gone mad, scrambling to crawl out of the room through the doors and windows, chasing after that rapidly departing trail of flame!