Welcome to Ability Store

Chapter 263 - 262: Advancing Side by Side

The instant the elevator doors opened, a hail of bullets poured in like a torrential downpour, covering the entire car!

Shrapnel and muzzle flashes scattered in all directions, the metallic clanging of impacts ringing nonstop. The elevator, still intact just a second ago, was riddled with holes in the blink of an eye.

The ones firing were a group of humanoid robots.

They blocked off the elevator corridor completely, with no intention of dodging enemy fire at all.

For a mature industrial product, losing a few units was nothing but a matter of money.

When the smoke cleared, the car was empty.

"Target disappeared."

"Initiate further search."

Silent signals passed between the robots.

But Chen Xuan and Liuli hadn’t vanished; they had simply cut open the elevator’s ceiling panel in advance and climbed onto the roof of the car. The moment the bullets stopped, Chen Xuan used two Thousand Thoughts Swords to sever the suspension cables and the locking mechanism connecting the car to the guide rails. The entire elevator immediately began to fall, revealing the already-damaged elevator doors.

Liuli casually hooked her legs and swung herself out through the doorway upside down.

The robots’ reaction was indeed fast. The instant her head and torso emerged from the hole, every gun muzzle swung up to aim at her. But just as they opened fire, four other Thousand Thoughts Swords formed a transparent shield, standing between her and the enemy. Liuli needed about 0.2 seconds to draw her blade; what Chen Xuan was buying her was precisely that window of time.

The long blade left its sheath—

The blade light swept out together with the Thousand Thoughts Swords, like crashing waves. Not only were the robots blocking the doorway sliced apart, but even the corridor walls and the armed robots queued up behind them were all shredded to pieces in one stroke!

Liuli slid her blade back into its sheath. All that remained before her was a floor full of twitching wreckage.

"Nicely done." Chen Xuan also jumped down, looking around at the elevator shaft covered in sharp sword marks with an approving nod. He’d known Liuli was strong, but hadn’t expected her ability to be this perfectly suited for clearing out small fry. Her slash was actually divided into two parts: first the appearance of a fine line, then that fine line being projected into reality, cutting through everything. There was a tiny delay between the two. By the time the long blade fully fell and that fine line appeared on someone’s body, any attempt to dodge was pointless—there was a distinct sense of slicing through space itself.

In other words, if you couldn’t even see that spider-silk-thin white line, you weren’t qualified to stand in front of Liuli at all.

Below that boundary line, no matter how many enemies came, they’d all be dealt with in a single swing.

If Chen Xuan had to handle this many robots himself, winning wouldn’t be hard, but the time spent would probably be several times longer.

Within this reduced range on the same floor, he no longer needed Ji Yun’s guidance to locate the Demon. It was less than a hundred meters away from them, with about five or six walls between.

Just then, a second wave of enemies charged in—them even showing up was unnecessary; Chen Xuan had already sensed them. Their light points were dim, not as condensed as humans, matching the traits of Demon Fiends, with strength similar to the puppets he’d seen at Five Rings Machinery Factory.

"Someone’s heading this way," Liuli said under her lowered hood.

"Yeah, leave this wave to me," Chen Xuan replied in a low voice.

Just as he expected, the first enemy to burst into view from the corridor was wearing a proper business suit, dressed exactly like a normal person, but with a mantis-like head and arms fused into scythe-like blades. They were all victims whose souls had been taken, reduced to the Demon’s minions, no longer possessing any will of their own.

The good part was, they were only minions.

Since the Demon could be classified as a specific target by the Seed of Flesh and Blood, its minions naturally fell within that category as well.

Having pre-switched his ability, Chen Xuan reached his hand out toward the mutated monster—

Decomposition and Re-Fusion!

...

Lin Qing took the elevator down to Basement Level 2 and, following the direction of data flow, locked onto the location of the core machine room.

This wasn’t her first time doing something like this.

The core machine room generally controlled all of a building’s security systems and electronic infrastructure. The higher the level of informatization, the stronger the defenses here. In a sense, the upper floors where senior management liked to stay were just lavishly decorated; the truly dangerous area was always the machine room.

In the past, missions targeting the core zone were handled by an entire squad, usually at least ten people, and they had to bring specialized cracking devices to deal with the counter-intrusion systems formed by supercomputer clusters. Relying on Lv’s computing power alone clearly wasn’t enough to contend with a full-fledged supercomputer.

She walked through a few corridors and stopped in front of the restricted area’s door. There wasn’t even a single guard posted here, for a simple reason: one more step in, and she’d be facing countless traps and concentrated defensive fire. Even if she died, the company would bear no legal responsibility.

"You do not have clearance to enter. Please vacate the area immediately, or bear the consequences at your own risk," the female synthetic voice above her head repeatedly warned.

Lin Qing removed the key panel by the door and pulled out a data cable from her palm to connect to it.

The information protection level here was clearly two grades higher than the elevator’s. After Lv probed for a moment, it gave an estimated cracking time: 351 days.

"Makes sense," Lin Qing shrugged. The tech here still couldn’t compare to the Dimensional Limit Mechanism... If she were hacking the flagship company under the Mechanism, she’d probably already be counterattacked by their resident hackers. Following the wiring inward, she could "see" that the auto-turrets and laser systems behind the door were all fully activated. The caliber of those turrets was all above 30mm, their firepower on a completely different level from standard infantry weapons. Even with military-grade subdermal armor, she wouldn’t dare charge through that kind of barrage.

"From here on, it’s up to you," Lin Qing said, taking out N959—the circuit board Liuli had given her—and connecting it to the key panel.

A strange sensation surged up in her heart.

As if something had crawled inside.

Lv’s voice also changed. "Deploy?"

"Deploy," Lin Qing answered without hesitation. "Turn this place into your repair shop."

As soon as she finished speaking, a huge burst of electrical sparks erupted from the door panel!

The synthetic voice seemed disrupted. "Bzz... you do not... have clearance... bzz... unknown data stream detected... bzz— Not bad, matching hardware’s pretty good, you even gave me speakers. Mm... it feels great to be conscious again!"

By the end, the female voice had turned into that of a boy around ten years old.

Lin Qing knew: this was N959.

Now it had a "voice," "eyes," and "sense of touch."

"But there aren’t many tools for repairs. I’ll have to spend some time doing modifications," it added.

"Do whatever you want. You saw those weapons, right? You can use them for modifications," Lin Qing said. "Also, clear the path to the core machine room for me, if you don’t mind."

"Why should I help you?" N959 shot back. "Can’t you tell? I’m already free—no one can restrain me anymore!"

As it spoke, the control panel snapped shut, swallowing the circuit board.

"Were you planning to shove a gun to my head and force me? Too bad you’re late! This building is nice—it’ll be my body. And you’re nothing but an impurity inside my flesh!"

Lin Qing sighed and opened an audio recording on her phone. Liuli’s message came through: "You’re going to listen to Miss Lin, understand? Otherwise I’ll come over and hack you into pieces myself."

N959’s bluster instantly collapsed. "Impossible, you’re lying! Why would N21 be speaking for you?"

"You should be able to tell whether I’m lying," Lin Qing said coolly, tapping the second recording—also Liuli’s voice: "Oh, and N5’s here too. Even if I don’t show up, he won’t let you off."

The speaker fell silent.

A moment later, the control panel opened again, and N959 was spat back out, returning to her hands. "I’m sorry, I was just joking earlier. I hope you don’t take offense. You want to get to the core machine room? I’ll open the way for you right now."

One by one, the restricted area’s automatic doors swung open, revealing a corridor of green-lit clearance all the way through.

That worked pretty well, Lin Qing thought. Liuli had been right—there was indeed a hierarchy among strange artifacts, just like when she’d had no choice but to serve the mother body, Lucy. While this suppression wasn’t absolute—most strange artifacts would, like humans, judge the situation—for the currently weak and isolated N959, the combined pressure of N21 and N5 left it with no courage to resist.

"Thanks," Lin Qing waved and stepped into the corridor.

"You’re welcome," N959 replied with exaggerated politeness. "Safe travels."