Chapter 522

The echoing scream abruptly ceased; the armored window again fell silent. Lin Xian broke into a cold sweat, breathing tightly, staring at the outside—now a crimson void—and his heart still raced. Had it not been for Kiki’s warning, he would have launched an energy leap in that instant to pursue. Only now did he realize he’d been tricked!

“The hunter’s perspective is completely different from ours. They perceive our thought fragments through dimensions, so they can sniff out fear and simulate fragments to lure us. Be extremely cautious.”

Kiki used her mental force to disperse the thick crimson mist outside the train, then landed beside Lin Xian and said, “This thing’s ability isn’t just physical—it’s more dangerous than the weird bodies.”

“Huh… huh”

“We’re definitely locked on. We need to eliminate it.”

Lin Xian’s mechanical heart surged into operation, suppressing the surging adrenaline. A clarity seized his reason. He immediately directed the drone swarm to converge, while rapidly repairing the armored section that had been attacked.

As the mechanical repairs activated, the dented armor groaned and hummed, visibly restoring its shape.

Kiki maintained her mental shield and said, “No other option—we can only wait for it to reveal itself, then strike.”

Lin Xian nodded, looking at Kiki: “Since it uses crimson to move, we strike at the source.”

Kiki understood. The two stood back-to-back inside the carriage, on guard. Facing this elusive hunter for the first time, Lin Xian and Kiki dared not let their guard slip for a moment.

The Infinite rested silently on the tracks amid ruins. The crimson world was as dead and silent as hell. Lin Xian and Kiki moved in perfect sync—within the train, they remained alert. Lin Xian monitored the outside through his drones and the onboard sentinel system, while Kiki extended her mental field to detect any anomalies beyond.

Outside, it was unnervingly quiet.

In the darkness, Lin Xian held his breath. His holographic interface displayed dozens of surveillance feeds from the sentinels and drones. The radar operated at full power. Then, without warning, a tall, eerie figure appeared in one drone’s view—a dark silhouette standing rigidly amid the ruins, radiating a twisted unnaturalness. Through the drone’s lens, Lin Xian couldn’t see its face, yet he instantly felt a chilling sensation—as if that black-hole-like visage were now less than a centimeter from his own.

“Nine o’clock.”

Lin Xian’s voice dropped lower than his breath.

“It’s observing us,” Kiki whispered back.

Lin Xian’s heart tightened. He forcibly suppressed his emotions. Then, deliberately, he redirected all the drones on the train’s side to focus on that figure. Countless angles converged on it. More images flooded his vision. He stared directly at the silhouette—and gradually, his mental defenses loosened. He gazed into the abyss, allowing fear to seep into his reason.

As expected, the moment cold dread flooded his body again, the towering shadow in the distance vanished. Simultaneously, a detonation erupted behind them—the static field tore apart, and thick crimson mist surged in!

It was precisely within Kiki’s mental field. She had already prepared. The instant the monster entered her field, the girl’s eyes flared violet lightning. Her immense mental force instantly locked and immobilized the creature. The monster tried to flicker through the crimson—but the entire surrounding mist was swept away by Kiki, leaving a vast vacuum.

Whoosh!

In that single second, the 1130 close-defense gun mounts on the roofs of Car 5 and Car 12 instantly pivoted, locking onto the black shadow in the crimson. A storm of metal bullets erupted!

Doooon!

The metal stream struck at 2000 meters per second. The hunter’s biofield flared crimson waves—but shattered completely under the torrent of kinetic force in under two seconds. High-temperature flames burned through its flesh, skull, and brain in 0.1 seconds. Blood mist mixed with golden flashes, exploding like a radiant, jetting firework amid the pitch-black ruins.

The hunter had no chance to flee—it was reduced to blood mist in a breath. Black blood, like a living thing, retracted into the ground.

At that moment, Lin Xian felt the chilling lock vanish. He exhaled deeply.

“Eliminated?”

“Yes.” Kiki raised her hand, using mental force to clear the thick blood mist outside. “But don’t lower your guard. Firing may have attracted other weird bodies.”

Lin Xian approached the window, opened several shutter covers, and observed outside, wary: “Should we use decoy rounds to divert the risk?”

“No.”

Kiki immediately halted his thought: “Unless a crimson tide erupts, hunters rarely move in groups. Provoking chaos in the dark will only put us on the defensive. In this crimson, stillness is safer than motion. One misstep could trigger an avalanche.”

Lin Xian’s expression grew grim: “That’s a real problem. Worse than the polar night.”

“Exactly. In the polar night, once we resolved the marking issue, we could catch our breath. But here, because theoretically—”

“Day and night make no difference?”

“Yes. Once the anomaly tide is triggered, there’s little chance to rest—you can only keep running.” Kiki crossed her arms and turned, retracting her power armor’s faceplate. “The Same-Force Device greatly reduces the chance of being marked remotely. So as long as we stay quiet, theoretically, hiding inside the train is safe. And with our armor, ordinary zombies and weird bodies can’t break through.”

Lin Xian nodded: “We’ll need to be even more careful.”

Outside, in the crimson, faint rustling sounds emerged—like footsteps, like climbing. Some crimson zombies, drawn by the cannon fire, began hobbling closer from the blood mist—twenty or thirty of them, converging from all directions around the train.

Seeing this, Lin Xian instinctively shut down the fire control systems of the 1130s and the electromagnetic railguns, preparing to deploy dozens of Lei Sun drones to silently eliminate them with laser pulses. But he soon discovered: every pulse from the Lei Sun drones was blocked by the zombies’ biofields—causing zero damage. Worse, it enraged them!

Several crimson zombies, their bodies covered in strange tentacles, suddenly extended those limbs from dozens of meters away. The tentacles passed through thick crimson mist, then shot through the air—instantly shattering several Lei Sun 2000 drones.

“Can they do spatial refraction?!”

Lin Xian’s eyes widened in shock. He instinctively prepared to deploy his “Iron Man, Dragon Girl” to handle it—when Kiki halted his motion.

“Let me handle it. Your actions are too noisy.”

Kiki stepped forward. Her eyes flared violet lightning. The mental field enveloping the entire Infinite was instantly pulled inward, becoming a vacuum. In the next instant, the crimson zombies outside were crushed into dust by immense shearing force—not a sound emitted, as if the entire world had been muted.

Lin Xian stared at Kiki in astonishment: “Your mental force has become this powerful?”