"Kaiwen, look out!" Wang Chenxi yelled.

Kaiwen was completely distracted, throwing his full weight into using his telekinesis to slam a massive mutated Dovos into the dirt.

The monster let out a deafening, wet shriek as the psychic pressure crushed its ribcage, but a second Dovos was already zooming straight for his blind spot.

Chenxi reacted instantly, unleashing a roaring hurricane of fire that blasted directly into the diving monster’s path.

At the exact same second, Xinyuan’s dark mist whipped across the clearing, wrapping tightly around Kaiwen’s torso and yanking him out of the danger zone, tossing him onto a safer patch of sand.

They had succeeded in slaughtering dozens of the mutated Dovos, but the chase had dragged them incredibly far from the primary camp.

Xinyuan stood perfectly still amidst the corpses, a sudden, suffocating sensation wrapping around his chest.

A bad feeling was clawing at his gut. Wenzhi felt.. distant and it wasn’t just the physical distance between them. This was different.

The steady, comforting buzz of their bond was abruptly thinning out into nothingness.

Why did he suddenly feel so far away?

"Must you guys be so rough when you’re trying to rescue me?" Kaiwen groaned. He rubbed his bruised shoulder and ran his fingers through his hair as he dragged himself up to his feet.

Chenxi didn’t answer, his eyes fixed on the shifting horizon. The grim, red haze of the wasteland was thickening, the atmospheric pressure dropping rapidly. There was definitely a massive storm rolling in.

"When are we ever going to get a damn break?" he muttered, rubbing the back of his neck.

"With these monsters? Never," Kaiwen said, coughing up a lungful of red dust. "The red zone is spreading everywhere. Honestly, it’s a good thing our underground city is already functional. It’s an oasis. The other factions can claw each other’s eyes out for surface territory while we live in our own paradise."

Chenxi’s lips curled, turning his attention to Xinyuan. The disaster class Esper hadn’t moved a muscle, his gaze locked back in the direction of the camp with a deeply unsettled expression. "What’s wrong, Xinyuan?"

"Wenzhi," Xinyuan breathed, his left eye flashing a faint crimson. "We need to get back. Now. Chenxi, call the jets and tell them to land."

Chenxi nodded, instantly pressing his fingers to his earpiece, his face tightening in concentration. After a few seconds of heavy static, he frowned. "The atmospheric interference is too thick. I can’t get a signal. Let’s head toward higher ground and wait a bit."

Xinyuan’s jaw clenched, the silence in his mindscape growing louder by the second.

"Fine," he muttered. "Let’s move fast."

"Are you aware that Doctor Bai is in the camp?" Kaiwen suddenly asked as he trotted up to join them.

"What?" Chenxi’s jaw dropped in surprise.

Xinyuan actually froze for a second. "She is?"

"I honestly thought you’d killed her, or did something worse. Crippled her, maybe," Kaiwen said, leaning in with a provocative smirk. "I guess you couldn’t pull the trigger, huh? Not with all that deep-rooted brainwashing she did to you."

The temperature in the clearing plummeted instantly as Xinyuan lashed him with a murderous glare. Kaiwen immediately took a smart step back, throwing his hands up in a quick surrender. "Sorry, sorry! My bad. But it’s true, isn’t it? Right, Chenxi?"

"It is annoying that we have to share a space with Espers like Xibo and that entire crowd again," Chenxi muttered, deliberately sidestepping the bait. He kicked a stray piece of debris out of his path. "But the rifts are getting out of hand. The red zones are everyone’s problem now, whether we like it or not."

"Do you guys really believe it can be fixed, though?" Kaiwen asked, his tone shifting into something a bit quieter as he scuffed his boot against the red sand. "This whole grand theory about capturing Xinyuan and making him fix the world."

"No," Chenxi said without a single shred of hesitation. "I don’t believe a word of it. Even if the world can be saved, it definitely won’t happen the way they think it will. Neither the CEA’s methods nor the Old Blood’s theories align with the reality of fixing a broken system."

Kaiwen let out a heavy, defeated sigh. "Yeah, figures."

Before the conversation could spiral any deeper, Xinyuan suddenly tilted his head up toward the darkening sky.

Through the heavy haze, the silhouettes of two jets and a massive airship appeared, cutting through the red at full speed. They were heading directly toward the main campsite.

"Seems they noticed the airspace is finally clear of Dovos," Xinyuan noted coldly. He didn’t wait for the others, his long strides already taking him briskly down the direction of the camp.

"Yeah," Chenxi agreed, picking up his pace.

"I can’t wait to get guided. Everything hurts." Kaiwen stretched his arms over his head with a loud, dramatic grunt, jogging to keep up with them.

BOOM!

A cataclysmic explosion ripped from the main camp. The shockwave cracked the earth and leveled the terrain, unleashing a blinding, white-hot force that sent a violent wall of ash and debris screaming across the plains.

Chenxi and Kaiwen instantly threw their arms up, turning away to shield their eyes as the brutal, superheated gale threatened to rip the skin right off their faces.

But the moment the shockwave hit Xinyuan’s chest, the thread of his bond snapped into terrifying silence.

"Wenzhi."

The name left his lips like a choked gasp. In the next second, the dark mist exploded from his body in an unhinged torrent, swirling into a massive tornado that tore space apart and warped him straight to the center of the camp.

When the shadows cleared, the campsite was entirely gone.

The entire space had been completely leveled into a smoking, blackened crater. The inbound jets and the massive airship hadn’t even had a chance to touch down; they had been swatted out of the air by the blast, their crushed, burning chassis scattered across the dirt alongside the ruptured remnants of the transport trucks.

Screams echoed through the thick, black smoke, but mostly, there was just the horrific silence of the dead.

Xinyuan moved through the burning wreckage like a man possessed, his eyes wild and bloodshot. "Wenzhi! Wenzhi!"

He couldn’t feel him. Why couldn’t he feel him? The internal compass that always pointed directly to his Guide was completely dead.

His heart hammered violently against his ribs, his large hands trembling as he aggressively threw smoking metal plating and burning parts out of his path.

He stumbled past the shredded bodies of the rift Bureau Espers and Guides, completely blind to their agony. He sprinted toward the path where the CEA tents had been stationed, but that space had been targeted with the exact same brutality.

Every single person lay disemboweled and broken by the explosion.

Among the carnage, he didn’t see a single trace of Doctor Bai Qinian.

Xinyuan’s mind began to short-circuit, the lack of guiding energy and pure adrenaline causing the black chain to rise dangerously beneath his jaw.

Where was Wenzhi?

Was he dead?

If he was dead, he could have felt it, right? He would have felt it. He had to believe that.

"Xinyuan! Over here!"

Kaiwen’s panicked voice cut through the roaring flames from the edge of the crater. Xinyuan bolted toward the sound, his boots skidding in the bloody dirt.

He found Chenxi crouching in the smoke, using his arms to prop up an injured Jiang Zhaohe. She was completely unconscious, her clothes torn, with a severe, heavy wound bleeding profusely from the side of her head.

"The blunt-force trauma on her skull doesn’t match the blast ," Kaiwen said, his voice shaking as he looked around the ruined space.

He looked utterly distraught, the thin black veins on his neck pulsing erratically. "Someone ambushed her directly before the explosion. And Xinyuan... I can’t find Duan Ze. I can’t find Ru Yi. They’re just gone."

Kaiwen spun around in a frantic circle, desperately scanning the field of burning trucks and corpses, completely lost to the panic.

"I can’t find Wenzhi either," Xinyuan’s voice dropped into an empty whisper. His face creased with raw agony as his eyes darted across the charred remains. "What if I can’t recognize..."

He stopped himself, the words catching like glass in his throat. He tightly closed his eyes, his fists clenching so hard his fingernails sliced into his palms. "No. No, he’s alive."

"Xinyuan... Kaiwen," Chenxi muttered, his voice cracking as he looked between the two crumbling Espers.

He stayed on his knees, his hands trembling as he held up Zhaohe’s limp, bleeding form. He didn’t know what to say.

He was the last Esper to console Espers who had just lost their Guides.