Chapter 593: Receding

Aileen shattered rather crisply.

Actually, it might have been better if she hadn't raised her arm to block, but the key point was that she subconsciously raised her arm to parry. With a loud crash, the 66.6-centimeter-tall little doll was broken apart by the brass knight's single stomp. Arms and legs scattered all over the ground on the spot, and her head flew a long distance away.

In almost any other setting, this scene would have been at least a tragic, sudden death. In fact, even Yu Sheng panicked at the sight. After blanking out for a second, he practically jumped up: "I spent an entire hour putting her together!"

Hu Li, hearing Yu Sheng's exclamation, immediately shrieked as well: "Sir spent an entire hour!!"

Aileen's head was still rolling along the ground at this point. Hearing Yu Sheng and Hu Li's reactions, she immediately launched into a string of loud complaints: "Is that any way to talk? Is that any way to talk? Is that any way to talk…"

Babbling like this, the little doll's head rolled right up to Yu Sheng's feet. She craned her neck up, furious: "Are you even human?! In a normal story, seeing me like this, shouldn't you at least be filled with grief and rage and trigger some kind of power-up or something—even if you can't power up, you could at least pretend to be grieved!"

Yu Sheng raised a finger, pointing at the spacetime fissures still opening nearby and the waves of mass-produced Aileens teleporting out of the valley and firing everywhere. Mass-produced dolls were being knocked down by brass knights one after another—some instantly teleported back to the valley, others were shattered into pieces before they could be teleported: "There are even more broken pieces over there. Do you expect me to grieve over your four regiments' worth of backup bodies?"

"It's already five regiments!" Aileen yelled, then quickly swiveled her eyes to look at the brass knights. "No, I have to get revenge…"

Just then, Yu Sheng was about to bend down and pick up the little doll's head, thinking that while the small body hadn't been crushed into even smaller pieces, he could still salvage some large chunks to make reassembly easier later. But before he could take action, he saw threads glowing with faint golden light emerge in the mist—

Strands and strands of golden lines, as if alive, swiftly "flowed" through the murky fog. The threads overflowed from every fragment of Aileen's broken shell, almost instantly reconnecting the shattered body into a whole. Then the little doll's body began to reassemble at an astonishing speed!

Yu Sheng had seen Aileen use these golden threads to reassemble parts of herself at home before, but it had never been as exaggerated as this!

And in the blink of an eye, the brass knight that had shattered Aileen reacted instantly. The tall, silent figure charged at the little doll again, his massive sword raised high, the disassembly field on the blade twisting the fog into a blurry halo.

At this moment, Aileen's limbs were not yet fully connected. Her loose body was still wobbling on the ground. But in the next second, she flipped up eerily—like a marionette, her small body bent at impossible angles, and in a completely non-physical manner, she was dragged by the threads and flashed into the air.

Immediately afterward, large amounts of golden threads wrapped around the brass knight's force-field greatsword. The blade, which could easily split metal and stone, sparked and screeched against the "threads" that were thinner than hair. The energy lines inside the blade began to overload rapidly, emitting a strained hissing sound. Then, with a series of harsh metallic tearing noises, the greatsword was directly strangled into countless fragments by Aileen's golden threads.

In the next second, Aileen climbed directly onto the brass knight's back. While scrambling up quickly, she raised a hand, and the frying pan, almost as big as her body, flew through the air into her hand.

"Clang!"

A swing of the pan, and the tall, hollow armor fell to the ground. Before it even hit the floor, it had already broken apart, and from the fractured limbs oozed large amounts of deactivated black "mud."

Aileen jumped to the ground before the knight fell, then, holding her not-yet-fully-fixed head, charged at the nearest enemy. In between, she continuously released golden threads, either to disrupt opponents or to propel herself. She darted and leaped like a swift bolt of golden lightning.

With every passing second, she seemed to be growing more accustomed to her "new" body, recalling more combat techniques. She grew faster and faster, her reactions sharper and sharper.

The only pity was that her most effective move was still jumping up and bashing the opponent's knee with the frying pan—she could jump higher, but dodging in midair was difficult, and she could easily be slapped back down by a sword.

This 66.6-centimeter-tall doll shell was ultimately too limiting.

"Sssssst—"

Over a dozen tiny blood needles cut through the air, piercing into the armor gaps of a brass knight. The knight's thrown greatsword smashed two dolls and even heavily injured a shadow wolf, but after a brief and violent struggle, the knight twitched all over and fell, then rapidly disintegrated.

In the process, Yu Sheng had also tried to temporarily control some isolated brass knights with blood needles and blood grenades, attempting to see if he could use the blood-soaking method to wash away the cognitive masks inside their minds, just like he had "rescued" Luna back then—saving the people trapped inside those metal armors. But both attempts failed.

Perhaps the brass knights had a different mental pattern from the artificial saints (back then, the twelve knights beside Luna had been transferred to the soul wilderness as her "companion minds"). Or perhaps this batch of knights used some kind of "new technology"—those evil cultists of the Holy Devout Monastery had further stripped away the basic humanity of these "soldiers." Anyway, when Yu Sheng tried to wash away the shackles in the brass knights' minds, all he heard was a mess of noise. He couldn't even manage to speak with the dead.

And the increasingly desperate attacks of the brass knights, along with the chaotic battlefield, obviously did not allow him to make further attempts. He could only follow Luna's example—temporarily stop thinking about where these knights came from and focus on eliminating the enemies in front of him.

Just then, the perceptive Hu Li seemed to notice something. She quickly fired a burst of foxfire at the open space (not forgetting to go "da da da" in between), then bounded over to Yu Sheng in a few steps: "Sir! Both sides are narrowing again!"

Yu Sheng used over a dozen blood needles to seal the movements of two brass knights, then looked up at both sides of the dark alley.

At some point, the mist had begun to thin.

The alley, which had become extremely wide as the fog thickened, was now returning to normal. The buildings on both sides of the road were slowly closing in like lumbering giant beasts. The stone pavement, once stretched and deformed, was visibly fusing under the mossy, mottled walls of the buildings.

The shadow wolves were forced to shrink their defensive line. Some mass-produced dolls had no choice but to return to the valley. Luna leaped down from a nearby rooftop, bisected a brass knight in midair, then landed in front of Yu Sheng, one hand cautiously raised in front of her: "Space warping."

A strange, low-pitched sound, like something heavy being crushed, reached everyone's ears. Little Red Riding Hood, whose combat stance had caused a pair of wolf ears to pop out, felt dizzy from the weird low sound. She could only quickly raise her hands to cover her ears, but two hands weren't quite enough, leaving her flustered. In the end, she finally found a suitable gesture, barely using both hands to cover all four ears.

Hu Li had it easy. She simply plucked the two ears off her head and stuffed them into her tail.

At the same time the alley was changing, the brass knights also stopped attacking as if by common consent.

It didn't seem like they had received an order to cease fire. Instead, they seemed affected by the environment, falling into a state of confusion and disorientation.

The buildings on both sides of the alley contracted further. Some brass knights simply disappeared before everyone's eyes into the pressing walls—but rather than being swallowed by the buildings, it seemed more like they returned to another spacetime.

The remaining brass knights finally began to retreat. They staggered backward in the increasingly thin mist. Before their invisibility fields reactivated, some of them seemed to teleport elsewhere.

Just before the last enemy disappeared, Yu Sheng quickly raised his hand and fired two blood needles into the armor's body.

He didn't know if these two blood needles would be detected by the controllers behind the brass knights, nor was he sure what effect this thin trace of blood could have. These two shots were pure reflex—he was used to spreading his bacterial carpet…

Afterward, the dark alley returned to normal—at least, to how it had looked when Yu Sheng and the others first entered.

Thin mist lingered on the streets. The narrow alley fell silent. The brass knights that had emerged from nowhere seemed never to have existed. Only the residual burning smell in the air and some broken mass-produced dolls and armor fragments on the ground proved that everything that had just happened was not an illusion.

Aileen sent the remaining mass-produced selves back to the valley, then dragged her frying pan with a clatter all the way to Yu Sheng. While casually climbing up onto him, she muttered: "That's it? That was so abrupt. Where did they even come from…"

This time, Yu Sheng finally figured out how this little thing could climb up on him so fast even with a frying pan the size of her body—turns out, when she carried the pan on her back, she used several golden threads to tie it to her shoulders, like a backpack.

Who said Aileen wasn't smart? She just usually didn't feel like thinking.

Hu Li also came over, walking while blowing the green smoke from the tip of her big tail like a gunslinger who had just finished a duel. After reaching Yu Sheng, she put her ears back on, and her big ears twitched: "Sir, I just swept the alley with my divine sense. When those 'knights' disappeared, the entire alley was filled with unstable energy fields, but I feel like the source wasn't inside the alley."

"Not inside the alley…"

Listening to the fox girl's words, Yu Sheng frowned thoughtfully.

Then a rustling sound quickly interrupted his thoughts.

Looking toward the sound, he saw a large, thick shadow slowly surging out from the door of the old bookstore. The shadow pushed and rolled forward, squeezing outside the door. Many white-glowing eyes lit up inside it, and then a bunch of cat ears emerged from its edges.

The "cat" had come out. It seemed the "invaders" were truly gone.