"You are so good, you don't take good care of your own little piece of land, but you have to run thousands of miles out of your comfort zone and bring the landlord style that you got used to in Siberia to Changkong City. Haven't you ever thought that your brain is not that useful? Do you trust the intelligence system of Anti-Entropy so much that you are sure that no one will jump out to cause trouble for you?"
Cocolia sneered. Although her head was pointed at by a machine gun, she did not show much fear. "You are so arrogant even though you know I am from Anti-Entropy. It seems that the store manager is not an ordinary person. Let me guess, were you sent to Changkong City by that guy Otto?"
Before she could finish her words, the young store manager suddenly swung the machine gun in his hand, and the steel gun body hit her face hard, making Cocolia's face red.
However, the slap from the gun did not cause any real harm to Cocolia. At most, she suffered only some physical pain.
Rather than an attack, it seems more like venting anger.
"My relationship with Otto is not that bad." The young store manager looked at Cocolia, who was beaten and turned her face away, expressionlessly, and said quietly, "If he dies one day, I don't mind setting up a tombstone without words for him and hanging a donkey-ear hat on it."
"Hmph, is that so? Then why do you look like someone has hurt you?" Cocolia turned her face and said coldly.
"Don't get me wrong, I'm just helping others vent their anger." The young store manager said with a smile, "Since you can use Otto to test my reaction, then of course I can also represent that guy's enemies and help them vent their anger against the people who mentioned this name in front of me - it makes sense, right?"
"That's indeed reasonable." Kokolia sneered, "On the other hand, you shouldn't mind me venting my anger towards that bastard bishop on you, right? After all, don't you claim to have a good relationship with that guy?"
Chapter 23: Textbook-like pretense and slap in the face
The young store manager squinted at Cocolia who had suddenly swelled up again, and said in surprise, "Are you tired of living?"
"You are tired of living, right?" Cocolia stood up, as if she didn't see the machine gun in the manager's hand. "Do you know what the main combat power of Anti-Entropy is?"
The young store manager pulled the trigger of the machine gun without hesitation. Amid the dense gunfire, the black barrel flashed with fierce flames, and the bullets in the magazine were emptied in a matter of seconds.
However, none of the bullets could touch Cocolia's body. Sparks flew in front of her, and all the bullets were bounced away not far in front of her, as if there was an invisible shield protecting her.
At the same time, Mei Raiden's exclamation suddenly rang out: "Manager! Behind me!"
As the light twisted, several mechas that were in a deployed state appeared inside the department store. They then rotated, deformed, and unfolded amid the sound of metal colliding and rubbing against each other, eventually breaking through the ceiling of the department store. Gravel and soil fell to the ground one after another, and strong air currents carried dust in all directions.
"The mecha has transformed from a quantum state into a physical entity..." The young store manager carried the empty magazine of the machine gun on his shoulder. He turned around and said in surprise, "You have already mastered this technology?"
"If you want to capture this girl, how can you do it without some preparation?" Cocolia turned her head and directed her gaze towards Mei Raiden, who was showing a little fear due to the huge pressure of the mecha. Her inner vanity was greatly satisfied. "The latest model of Titan mecha, although the quantum technology can only allow me to carry three with me for the time being, but as long as I don't encounter those S-level monsters, it is still enough to deal with arrogant brats like you."
Mei Raiden's body trembled slightly. Judging from the appearance alone, these three steel monsters that were several meters tall were indeed quite visually impactful. The young store manager standing in front of the mecha was almost no different from a tiny baby.
"Wait!" Mei Raiden suddenly shouted, her eyes full of awe-inspiring determination, her righteous brows full of an expression of willingness to die bravely, "Your target is me, right! Then don't involve other innocent people!"
"Innocent? You don't think this guy is a good guy who came to help you, do you?" Cocolia sneered, as if mocking Raiden Mei's ignorance, "However, there is nothing wrong with your choice. Compared to going back with this guy, we are a better choice for you to go back with Anti-Entropy-"
"After all, no matter what, that fellow, Raiden Ryoma, is your father, and he is also my colleague." Cocolia said, "For his sake, as long as you follow me obediently, I will not do anything to you."
"Father?" Mei Raiden was shocked to hear a name that should not appear here. "Do you know my father?"
"Not only does she know her, she was the one who sent your father to jail." The young store manager shrugged. He didn't look at Raiden Mei and Cocolia, but stroked his chin and looked at the three imposing mechas.
"What?!" Raiden Mei's pupils suddenly shrank, she took a step back slightly, and a surging anger suddenly surged up from the depths of her heart.
She stared at Cocolia's profile and bit her teeth: "Is what he said true?"
"Humph." Kokolia snorted in dissatisfaction. "Anyway, you will find out sooner or later after you and I return to the Anti-Entropy Base. He is right. Your father was indeed imprisoned under my design."
"Why?" Raiden Mei's eyes were almost spitting fire. She said angrily, "Didn't you claim that you were my father's colleague? Then why did you want to harm my father?!"
"It's just a normal factional struggle." Kokolia said calmly, "You don't need to worry too much about your father. As one of the executors of the super-governmental organization, he will not completely lose his freedom after being imprisoned. If I'm not mistaken, your father has probably escaped from prison a long time ago, but he can't show up in front of you because he is under accusation."
"Factional struggle..." Mei Raiden clenched her right hand tightly, "Just because of this reason... I sent my colleague, someone else's father, to prison..."
"The real world is so cruel." Kokolia looked deeply at the resentful Mei Raiden, "Just like now, no matter what choice you make in the end, you can only return to Anti-Entropy with me in the end, because there is a huge gap between you and me now, like the difference between heaven and earth."
"I don't mind telling you that even if you finally obey me and go back, I will never let that brat go."
"Letting him go is equivalent to telling the bishop everything that happened here. I can't let the people of the hostile organization return to their base camp after seeing all this."
At this moment, a clear clapping sound rang in the ears of the two.
"Well said." The young store manager tucked the machine gun under his armpit and nodded in agreement. "When there is an absolute gap in strength, any exchange and communication is essentially unnecessary."
With a loud bang like the collapse of heaven and earth, the ground of the entire department store suddenly shook violently, and all the lights flickered with the sound of electricity, went out, and then lit up again.
Cocolia suddenly turned around and stared in amazement at the Titan mecha that was turned into three piles of steel scraps in the blink of an eye, and the young store manager who was patting the dust off his hands.
"I was originally thinking that it would be difficult to attack if they were all human beings, but I never expected that you would be so considerate as to call out a few pieces of lifeless inorganic matter." The store manager laughed, "You have already given me face and entered the state of a villain. If I don't accept your favor, wouldn't it seem that I don't know how to read the atmosphere?"
"You——" Cocolia's scalp tingled, and she screamed, "Deploy all the mechas present! Now!"
The sound of breaking air came with a huge airflow, and the ground shook continuously. The ceiling, which already had little left, cracked further, and pieces of brick fragments and countless gravel fell from the sky.
"This is a textbook villain style..." The young store manager sighed in boredom, "Then I will also give a textbook response."
"Look at this, your grandpa - bah! This one won't work, change another one."
"Let's borrow some lines from that guy Rita."
"Former Hyperion Captain Yufan."
"Begin to clean up the battlefield."
Chapter 24: Heavy Rain is Coming
The night is getting darker.
The lobby of the department store has completely changed.
The load-bearing columns and walls collapsed completely, and the broken bricks turned into gravel and dispersed in the cold winter wind.
The floor of the hall and the streets were littered with countless metal debris. The exposed half-length cables were emitting tiny sparks in the dark night, and blazing flames were swaying and roiling in the ruins.
"Um...ah..."
In the firelight, the young store manager, whose clothes were not even a mess, stretched out comfortably, and his joints made a series of creaking sounds with excitement.
A carefree voice, accompanied by a wisp of hot mist, rang out from his open mouth: "It feels good. It's been a long time since I had a good exercise like this."
The dancing flames blended into the dark night, and the crackling sound of the burning flames echoed continuously.
Looking at the young store manager standing on the metal wreckage with his limbs and chest stretched out, Cocolia's face turned pale and her forehead was covered with cold sweat.
"Who...are you?" she whispered.
"Hmm?" The store manager tilted his head. "Didn't I already tell you my position and name? Why, do you need me to say it again?"
"Then listen carefully."
He bowed slightly and closed one eye.
"Former Captain Hyperion, current manager of the Hyperion Cafe, Yufan greets you, the executor of anti-entropy."
Kala——that humble self-introduction made Cocolia bite her teeth hard.
At this point, even with Kokolia's arrogance, he had to admit that the failure of the operation was a foregone conclusion.
However, the process of failure was so unusual that at the first moment, she felt more confusion than fear and frustration.
Hyperion...Hyperion - is that what it means? Why didn't I realize it at the beginning?
Isn’t this name the ace flagship of the Far East Branch of the Destiny?
"Humph... It seems that this failure is not accidental." Cocolia looked directly at the store manager's face, with a hint of self-mockery on her lips. "Thunder Ryoma was so arrogant that he thought he had controlled every tree and blade of grass in Changkong City, but he never expected that there was a S-class fighter with destiny secretly active right under his nose."
"What are you misunderstanding?"
"Misunderstanding?" Cocolia snorted coldly.
Although there were dozens of anti-entropy guards surrounding her, she crossed her arms and released all her strength, posing as if she was ready to let you do whatever you want. "Whatever you say, I don't expect to escape from your hands at this point. With my body alone, I disintegrated more than 20 Titan mechas in an instant with movements that I couldn't even see clearly. Even the strongest Valkyrie of Destiny is probably no more capable than this."
"It is such an honor for me, a small anti-entropy executor, to force out a trump card that has been hidden so deeply in the hands of the Bishop of Heaven's Fate. "
"I've already explained that I'm not from Otto..." Yufan sighed, "Forget it, communicating with a self-righteous person like you is really a pure waste of my time."
He jumped off the metal wreckage, put his hands behind his head, closed his eyes, and walked step by step towards Cocolia.
Cocolia clenched her right hand and pursed her lips tightly.
Just as she had said before, the confrontation between the store manager and the Titan mecha really ended in an instant.
She just saw the store manager's figure tremble slightly, and then the mechas that were dropped from the air and had not even been released from deployment mode, broke into pieces with a loud bang.
The whole process takes no more than second.
Faced with such a monstrous enemy, even if one still had the will to resist, one could clearly realize with reason that one did not have even the slightest hope of escaping.
But just as Cocolia closed her eyes and waited for the judgment of the young store manager, she felt her shoulder being gently touched.
She opened her eyes tentatively.
There was no other figure in her sight except for the ruins. She was stunned for a moment, then quickly turned her head away.
"you--"
--moment.
The scene before my eyes, as well as all the sounds, disappeared.
Cocolia suddenly covered her ears and her eyes closed unconsciously for fear of being destroyed.
The whole brain entered a dizzy state and the hearing was completely paralyzed.
Compared to Cocolia, who had suffered temporary blindness and deafness, the store manager who had just passed by her seemed much calmer.
He raised his head slightly, and looked with a helpless look at the strong flash that was slowly floating in the air, which was strong enough to damage the retina of a normal person. He shook his head with a sigh: "Alas, it has become like this after all."
A sharp arc of lightning flashed across the dark sky, instantly turning the street scene in the commercial street pale.
What followed was a low rumble of thunder.
In the pale street scene, the young store manager rubbed his brows and said, "It is because this situation is very troublesome to deal with that I don't want to be the nanny of those worlds one after another..."
At this time, Cocolia's vision and hearing finally returned to normal.
She slowly opened her eyes, and even though there was still some residual glare in her vision, she could finally see the scene in front of her clearly.
She looked at the girl floating in the air, she was stunned for a moment, then she smiled.
“Haha, hahahahahaha—God is really helping me!” Cocolia laughed in ecstasy when she suddenly saw a glimmer of hope from the despair she was unable to resist. “I didn’t expect that I would awaken as a Herrscher at this time! Manager! You too—”
"Shut up, you're just a bitch—"
Yufan tilted his head slightly back, and a hint of indifference flashed in his deep pupils.
——This was not a metaphor. At this moment, a pattern as gorgeous as a phoenix feather suddenly appeared in his pupil. The complex glare invaded Cocolia's brain through vision in less than a millisecond, depriving the will in her eyes without any resistance.
After using Yu Duchen to temporarily take away the thoughts of the person who was in the way, Yu Fan looked around, raised his arm, and snapped his fingers.
The crisp sound of finger snaps echoed in all directions, and with this sound as the dividing point, the anti-entropy guards suddenly dissipated and disappeared at the same time - Cocolia was completely unaware that from the very beginning, these guards following her were just phantoms created out of thin air by Yu Duchen. Now that the phantoms disappeared, besides Cocolia, only Yu Fan and the girl floating in the air were left in the ruins.
At the same time, somewhere on a street in Changkong City, a girl with pigtails who was looking for a place to live suddenly sneezed because of the cold wind. She lifted the straps of the backpack on her shoulders and looked up at the cloudy sky with her deep blue pupils full of sorrow.
"Oh, if I don't find a place to stay, I might get caught in the rain."
She pursed her lips, and whispered to herself in a tired and aggrieved tone:
"Dad, where are you..."
Chapter 25 It is not easy to educate a naughty child
——In the airspace of Vienna, Austria, which is eight time zones away from the Far East, it is now lunchtime at 11 noon.
In the windowless main classroom on the floating island at the headquarters of Destiny, a virtual earth more than one meter tall was suspended in mid-air. The actual controller of today's world sat lazily on a mahogany chair that was out of tune with the house full of sci-fi atmosphere, his emerald green pupils reflecting the translucent light curtain that quickly passed by his eyes.
"Boring, really boring." He quickly reviewed and made decisions on the various documents that poured into the main classroom, and sighed weakly, "Is there no news that can brighten my eyes?"
"Do you want me to inform the finance department to cut the funding for the next Kallen Fantasy?"
Suddenly, a calm voice sounded in his ears.
The bishop's hands froze, and a little helplessness flashed in his eyes: "Uh - Amber, you know, the bright eyes I meant don't mean the black eyes."
"I don't understand what the difference is. I just guessed from what the bishop said that you might need a certain degree of stimulation."
"Okay, okay. I admit that most of the time, news that makes me excited means that you, my subordinates, will have to increase your workload." Bishop Otto shrugged. "Is there any news you want to inform me of?"
"Yes, just now, the observation team detected a very strong Honkai energy fluctuation through the satellite in the Far East, but it disappeared soon." Amber said lightly, "According to the images sent back by the satellite, the location of the Honkai energy fluctuation is very close to the experimental subject K423 that you have been concerned about."
"There was a collapse in Changkong City?" Otto frowned and asked in surprise, "What's the situation over there?"
"There has been no reports of casualties so far. In addition, judging from the nearby real-time satellite images and the surveillance footage from Changkong City, the Honkai energy fluctuations have not yet caused any impact on the surrounding environment."
"…What's the status of K423?"
"She arrived in Changkong City at 6pm local time. So far, there are no signs that her Herrscher Core is out of control."
