Chapter Nineteen: The Appearance of the Mysterious Organization

The glowing orb emitted a halo like a liquid galaxy, twisting and elongating the shadows of the group, casting flickering silhouettes against the rune-covered walls. The runes shimmered faintly in the shifting light, as if whispering an ancient curse.

Lin Yu had just stepped forward when a subtle metallic scraping sound echoed from the soles of his combat boots—the warning sign of a finely tuned trap being triggered. His pupils instantly contracted to pinpoints, and the hairs on his neck stood on end. Relying on years of combat instinct, he grabbed Su Yao beside him and rolled backward to the side.

Su Yao stumbled as she was pulled, the shock pistol at her waist nearly slipping free. As she steadied her weapon, she felt the tension trembling through Lin Yu’s palm. A purple laser beam grazed the hem of their clothes, scorching the basalt floor beneath them into smoking blackened fissures. The acrid smell of burning metal mingled with ozone, filling their nostrils like the breath of a demon.

A wave of heat from the laser blast hit their faces, burning their skin painfully. Lin Yu could even smell the scent of his singed hair.

“Welcome to the endgame, little rats of the Temporal Management Bureau,” a hoarse voice, distorted through an electronic modulator, hissed from speakers surrounding the chamber like a viper’s tongue.

The voice echoed hauntingly throughout the hall, layering into a chilling cacophony. Above the altar, the dome rumbled with the grinding roar of turning gears—like the awakening roar of an ancient beast. Spiderweb cracks slowly split apart, and dozens of figures clad in liquid-metal battle suits plummeted vertically like a venomous black rain.

They landed silently. At the moment their suits touched the ground, ripples spread across the liquid metal surface. The serpentine emblem on their chests flickered in the dim light, refracting a cold, ghostly glow—as if the eyes of snakes prowling in the darkness.

At the forefront stood the leader, wearing a translucent snake-shaped mask. Beneath it, crystalline patterns writhed sinuously beneath his skin like living creatures, pulsating in time with his breath. The purple crystal atop his staff was as large as a basketball, its surface etched with complex neural network-like structures, emitting a pulse of eerie light. Each flicker caused subtle spatial distortions, the air humming softly.

“They’re equipped with phase interference weapons! Their energy output is triple ours!” Chen Mo’s mechanical eye flared with piercing blue light, data windows exploding like snowflakes before him. Streams of data on his lens left faint blue afterimages in the air.

His mechanical limb whirred with faint gear friction as he typed furiously on the holographic keyboard, searching for a countermeasure. Before he could finish, the enemy ranks unleashed countless silver threads, which multiplied geometrically in midair, weaving an energy net shimmering with strange ripples.

Wherever the net passed, the air twisted and distorted like boiling mercury, refracting light into dazzling yet warped patches. A Jie reacted swiftly, pressing the launcher button. Gray smoke instantly billowed, filling the hall with a pungent chemical stench that burned the throat.

Yet the enemy’s tactical goggles, equipped with thermal imaging, pierced the fog. Several energy beams struck the stone pillars he was hiding behind, reducing the hard rock to fine dust. The dust rose like mist, engulfing A Jie, who coughed as he struggled to see through the haze. His battle suit was coated with white stone powder.

Lin Yu pressed close to the cold wall, moving silently. The friction of his suit fabric against the surface emitted a faint rustling, piercing the hall’s silence. His gaze swept over the still-wet silver liquid metal stains on the floor, which shimmered with a strange glow in the dim light. Suddenly recalling the hidden mechanism discovered while solving the puzzle, he shouted into his tactical communicator, “Draw them to the east side! There—”

Before he could finish, a tracking missile streaked overhead, trailing blazing red flames. The hot exhaust blasted his hair backward. The violent explosion’s shockwave knocked him to the ground, his eardrums aching from the impact. The sharp scent of gunpowder and ozone filled his nostrils. Struggling to rise amidst the smoke, he saw Su Yao grappling with two enemies wielding energy blades.

The shock pistol was nearly useless in close quarters. She relied on agile maneuvers to evade, but the nanoweave suit was already scarred with several deep, smoking brown wounds. Each injury seared briefly with sharp pain, yet Su Yao gritted her teeth, her eyes resolute as she searched for an opening to counterattack.

The mysterious leader slowly raised his staff. The basketball-sized purple crystal suddenly exploded into a blinding light, instantly dropping the temperature in the hall to freezing. Frost quickly formed on Lin Yu’s tactical goggles, his breath fogging the lenses. Panic surged as he noticed the energy gun’s charge bar reversing at a visible speed.

“They’re disrupting the quantum field!” Old Zhou’s voice trembled with despair. The quantum entanglement device he operated emitted a piercing buzz, blue sparks leaking from its seams. Thick smoke billowed from its cooling vents.

“We can only hold for five minutes at most!” Old Zhou’s fingers danced frantically over the control panel, trying to stabilize the device. Sweat poured down his forehead and cheeks.

Just as the situation reached its bleakest moment, Lin Yu caught a subtle resonance between the flickering light of the leader’s staff and the pulse patterns on the bronze floor disc. Clenching his teeth despite the searing pain from a shrapnel graze on his left shoulder, warm blood dripped down his arm, tracing dark red paths on the floor.

Each drop burned with excruciating pain, but Lin Yu endured, embedding the last spare crystal into the disc’s recess.

The ground suddenly roared as a barbed energy barrier surged upward like an iron fortress, precisely blocking the enemy’s concentrated assault.

The energy shield emitted a sharp hum, its barbs flickering with a menacing light. To their astonishment, the silver threads recoiling from the spikes began to intertwine against physical laws, grinding together with a teeth-gnashing metallic screech. Sparks flew from the twisting strands.

“So that’s it!” Lin Yu’s eyes blazed with hope. “The temple’s mechanism can neutralize their weapons!”

He quickly relayed orders over the tactical channel, his voice trembling with excitement. The team immediately scattered, using the mirrored floor traps and rotating pillars to maneuver against the foes.

A Jie lured enemies toward the mirrored traps. The instant they stepped on the mirrors, the surface warped, reflecting their attacks back upon them. Old Zhou set electromagnetic trip mines behind pillars, waiting for the enemy to fall into the trap. Su Yao seized a fleeting chance, hurling a magnetic pulse grenade precisely into the enemy’s weapon cache.

The fierce explosion unleashed a powerful electromagnetic pulse, causing parts of the enemy’s gear to smoke and malfunction. Panic rose among them.

But the leader remained unmoved. With a languid wave of his staff, a purple force field surged outward like a tide, swallowing the blast’s aftershocks whole.

As the purple field expanded, the surrounding space visibly warped, stretching light into eerie shapes. Then the counterattack came—a barrage of energy beams like a torrential rain, blasting blackened craters into the ground, sending shards of rock flying. The air thickened with the acrid stench of gunpowder.

The life-or-death struggle raged on. Beneath the mysterious leader’s mask lay a terrifying power capable of turning the tide. Standing there like a demon lord commanding all, he coldly watched the battle unfold.