Tonight, Alice joins the hunt.

Nine people died. On one side were security personnel from four bases. On the other side were five ordinary people who had just arrived at the shelter according to the policy of the Eastern Continent. They were probably a family, with three adults and two children. The two groups met in the passageway, and as the security personnel walked by, the ordinary people subconsciously made way for them.

The man on the outermost side slipped and fell towards the security guards. The first guard instinctively assumed a defensive stance, but the baton in his hand tilted because the second guard beside him also made a defensive move, causing it to directly pierce the man's Adam's apple. The man, in pain, reached out and grabbed wildly, inadvertently disengaging the safety from the third guard's unfastened holster.

The gun misfired, hitting the third security guard in the foot. He jumped up in pain, but the back of his head collided with the fourth security guard's face. The fourth security guard fell to the side, and his instinctive outstretched hand tore out the eye of the little boy among the two children!

The little boy screamed and struggled desperately, his chaotic running into the first security guard's hand holding a stun gun—the battery inside the gun exploded due to the impact, a very small probability. Flying shards pierced the man's neck and another woman's knee. The woman, her knee bent backward, fell, and the heel of her high heel, pointing upwards, pierced the groin of a third security guard.

This devastating blow caused the third security guard to fall to the ground, triggering the misfire that fired several bullets. The bullets bounced through the narrow corridor, killing most of the nine men. The tip of one bullet struck another man in the chest, causing the nib of a pen hanging in his breast pocket to fly out and kill the second child who had miraculously survived.

They were all dead, dead in the blink of an eye. The shelter's alarm system failed to respond due to interference from the solar wind. Faced with this situation, after sensing the still-functioning anti-aircraft expulsion machine was still operating, only four words could come to Patchouli's mind.

Final Destination

Section 4: Final Destination Part 2

"What... what a mess." Patchouli rubbed her head hard. Although the puppet body she was in charge of didn't feel any pain, what was happening before her eyes was hard for her to understand.

The angels' dispersal devices were running; she could feel the information disturbances caused by the electromagnetic pulses sweeping across the atmosphere. She was certain there were no signs of angelic activity nearby. And there shouldn't be many angels on the Earth's surface at this moment, but if not angels… could it be a coincidence?

Is it a coincidence? I'll just assume it is...

【but……】

Why is my doll-like body here?!

She looked to both sides and realized she was on a wide platform. The group of poor people lay dead in the forking corridor ten meters away. Their blood was still fresh, still slightly warm, while the platform she was on was completely empty.

The hall was empty, and none of the shelter's alarm systems had been triggered—the latter, while theoretically explainable as malfunctions of precision electrical components caused by the escape of solar wind particles, was, as far as she knew, a solar wind factor had been considered during the shelter's construction, and all electrical wiring had been protected against interference. While the effect might not be perfect, it wasn't entirely useless.

[An unexpected situation.]

[The nine people couldn't have been dead for more than five minutes, and judging from the lack of signs of struggle or running on either side of the corridor, they must have been in a peaceful and calm state before they died. If my puppet avatar had been lying on this platform before then, it would have inevitably attracted their attention... In other words, was my puppet moved here after these people died?]

[And who broke the doll's neck?]

Patchouli racked her brains, trying to recall what she had done. She remembered that after dealing with the new recruits, she had controlled her avatar to take the elevator down and deliver the peach to the main body of the angel, who was observing the rest of the team working together to attack it. Then, her main body casually gave the avatar a free standby command, letting it return to the base on its own and find a safe place to lie low.

She remembered that this shelter could hold tens of millions of people—although she had prepared the stellar extraction tower, she hadn't interfered with the Eastern Continent people filling the shelter with residents in this massive underground base. If her memory of the data was correct, then there should currently be over eight million residents and around sixty thousand security personnel in this giant shelter—however, considering the habits of the Eastern Continent people, it wouldn't be surprising if this shelter, with a maximum capacity of ten million people, ended up crammed with twenty million. To maintain stability, the shelter's personnel would only inform the residents of the truth after the solar winds subsided and assign them tasks to ensure the shelter could operate normally.

In other words, this place should be packed with people right now. She's currently on one of the main thoroughfares inside the shelter base; there's no reason why no one should have passed by for five minutes straight.

This is as absurd as saying that a dam opens its gates and releases water, but not a single wave splashes out!

[Including the time I spent thinking, it should have been six minutes now. But why haven't I been able to detect a single breath or heartbeat? Although the various parts of this avatar are mostly mass-produced, they should at least be able to sense life activity within a hundred meters... Are there no living people around anymore?]

My head hurts... Ugh, the person who destroyed my doll can't be found anywhere now.

[The data has been transmitted to Alice in real time, but she hasn't seemed to respond. Is something happening to her too...? Damn it, in this situation, the vast majority of computing power needs to be used to support the Stellar Extraction Tower, and even the Great Library is difficult to access. Not to mention those nearly paralyzed satellite systems.]

Now I can only rely on myself.

Patchouli instinctively wanted to take a deep breath, but then realized she was merely controlling an android and had no need to breathe. So she gave a wry smile and gave up. She then chose a direction and floated towards the safe house where the newcomers had been.

The safe house contains the newcomers and the main characters of the story. Since the main god hasn't yet reported the Zhongzhou team's side quest failure, it means the main characters are still alive. And since they're alive, the Zhongzhou team members will inevitably head towards their location to ensure their safety. After all, it's an A-rank reward side quest, and one that would fail if even one main character died. Having ensured their own safety, the Zhongzhou team's current focus will naturally be on these main characters. Even if the team members get separated for unknown reasons, it doesn't matter, because everyone knows they can regroup here.

[A quick calculation shows the distance... it's about 700 meters from where I am right now.]

Patchouli thought to herself as she walked, activating the storage spells within the doll's body. With bursts of radiant light, her speed, reaction time, and physical exertion all increased dramatically in a very short time. By the time she reached the door of the safe house, the doll's body had reached one-seventh of her normal combat strength.

[Barely enough.]

Her gaze swept across the ground; several dead guards lay scattered haphazardly at the entrance to the safe house. Like the nine unfortunate men before her, these guards, whom she had assigned to watch over the new recruits at the safe house, had all died from some kind of 'accident'—some from accidental discharges; some, startled by the gunshot, twisted their backs and broke their spines in their quick reaction; some, trying to help their fallen comrades, were struck by ricocheting bullets that pierced their glasses and the eye behind them; some, witnessing their colleagues shot in the head, had their throats slit by flying shards of their glasses before they could even react—their times of death were very close, and after a brief examination of the scene, Patchouli immediately concluded that this group of people had died minutes earlier.

—They died at the same time as the nine people over there. Quickly, simultaneously, and without attracting anyone else's attention. Because when she crossed that 700-meter distance to get here, she didn't encounter a single living person along the way.

There were quite a few dead people, all of them died in 'accidents'. Their exact appearances need no further description, but every hundred meters or so, Patchouli would inevitably see some corpses lying on the ground. And these corpses all had similar times of death.

No, perhaps a little earlier.

She looked up at the open door of the safe house. She remembered clearly that when she controlled the puppet to leave, she had sealed the safe house again, locking Zhu Wen, the unconscious Wang Xia, and the other main characters inside. Opening the safe house should be a complex process; without supernatural intervention, it would take at least five minutes to open the door.

She floated in lightly. The sensor's view revealed an empty safe house lobby. She then moved towards her target. But when she reached the compartment where the main characters were kept, she discovered that two of them, whom she had sealed within her dream, were missing.

—The female lead, Kimberly, and the male lead, Thomas.

There were signs of activity on the bed where the two people were placed, and there were also signs of pushing and shoving on the other people. It seems they were awakened from their dream by some unexpected factor, then checked their surroundings and tried to wake their companions. Unable to do so, they chose to leave together.

Patchouli lowered her gaze and easily discerned two complex sets of footprints on the floor of the safe house—one of the reasons she had been hovering without landing, to ensure the clues were there. However, when she examined the direction of the footprints, she discovered that the traces left by the male and female protagonists ended abruptly at the doorway of the side room of the safe house.

Not only them, but Zhu Wen and Wang Xia's footprints were the same. All the footprints stopped at the side room or in front of the main door. No one left, and no one entered, as if they had been cursed and vanished into thin air.

“Disappeared into thin air… If we don’t consider the possibility of flying away with wings, then she was either teleported or fell into another dimension. But the spatial structure in this area is so stable…” Patchouli clenched her fist in frustration. She quickly constructed a series of deductions in her mind, only to reject them all at once.

[I placed a signal on the guards at the gate, and also issued orders through official channels of the Eastern Continent. If they were still alive before the gate was opened, they would inevitably take some action. And the opening of the gate might be the trigger that set off this series of 'accidents'.]

[There were no footprints indicating their departure, and no large molecules in the air capable of detecting their location... What a pity, the beacons I previously attached to the others dissipated due to energy loss, and I was so busy dealing with the stellar extraction tower that I didn't have time to get them to cooperate with me in resetting their coordinates... Ah, has the difficulty increased again?]

However, one thing is certain: their disappearance was sudden, and they are currently relatively safe. Combining this with the previous sudden disappearances of other team members, I can draw a basic conclusion.

[This base... or rather, this entire space contains a folded spatial rift, or something similar. It could be another world, some kind of advanced life form, or some kind of treasure or machine... It has been operating within this space, following some strange pattern, and it devours anything that overlaps with it on the real number line. And the missing people are probably inside its belly now.]

The fact that the main character didn't die means that the area is a viable habitat for ordinary people. Therefore, my other team members should also be able to survive in that alternate dimension.

Her fingers tapped unconsciously, and her brain started working faster and faster.

[A dynamic alternate dimension with the ability to hunt independently could solve the problem of my teammates and the main character's sudden disappearance. This might also explain why, in this underground base that can hold so many people, I've walked almost a kilometer and only seen a few scattered corpses and a silent cluster of buildings… Is it because everyone capable of movement has been captured by this alternate dimension?]

[This development seems unlikely, but for now, it's the most plausible guess. However, the fact that an alternate dimension where ordinary people can survive, yet even a powerful figure like Zheng Zha could be silently and forcibly captured... something just feels off.]

[Forget about that deduction for now. Regardless of whether this alternate dimension exists, the current underground base is in an extremely unsafe state—to have everyone wiped out due to a series of accidents… If it happened once, that would be one thing. But it happens again and again… If it really is an 'accident,' then I'd be a fool to believe it.]

Patchouli wasn't stupid, so she wouldn't believe it. And after ruling out 'accidents,' and excluding the angels who couldn't possibly have come, she had to sadly admit that there was something else in this world that wasn't within her calculations.

[...Is it truly 'Death'? Because everyone in the world is supposed to die in the solar storm, it plans to kill everyone after the stellar extraction tower takes effect? ​​What kind of joke is this? So dedicated to killing a whole group at once, why didn't it kill us for the previous six days?]

Is this horror world really *Final Destination 2* instead of *Bayonetta 2*?! We've already proven that the angels are indeed Death, and we've prepared all the necessary facilities for the final battle, so why is the original protagonist of this movie only now arriving so late?!

She tried her best to calm herself down, floated out of the safe house, and returned to the corridor she had come from. She still couldn't understand why her doll was on the platform outside the safe house with its neck broken. But she knew very well that if she didn't take action soon and continued to waste time like this... even more serious consequences would await her.

"This is... inexplicable." She lightly tapped her head. "How come all these bizarre and outlandish things have suddenly appeared in the blink of an eye?" The girl sighed angrily, feeling utterly frustrated. Too lazy to think about it anymore, she randomly picked a direction and flew straight towards it.

Things had spiraled far out of her control. It seemed that only after Alice's conversation with the Emperor did the world reveal its terrifying side—she even suspected the Emperor was behind it all. However, after a brief moment of reflection, she realized that doing so would be pointless for the Emperor.

It's meaningless and worthless.

She doesn't want to waste extra effort on an ant that can be crushed with a single finger.

Section 5: Final Destination - Part 3

Anger as much as she was angry, and confusion as she was confused, the problem still needed to be addressed. Patchouli summarized the current situation, and the key points immediately became clear in her mind.

First, figure out what is happening right now and deduce a solution to break the deadlock.

Second, find the missing team members and reunite with them.

Third, ensure that side quests can be completed normally.

Leaving aside the third point for now, while the rewards for Rank A are tempting, they are not necessarily something that cannot be abandoned in a necessary situation. The second point is basically the same as the first, and it needs to be followed up closely, but right now there seems to be no clue where to start.

After the Stellar Extraction Tower was activated, communication with Alice was unilaterally cut off… He could still send messages, but there was no response. However, Alice's situation could be put aside for now. She was capable of protecting herself, and being located on the Apennine Peninsula, halfway around the world, she could handle any trouble independently. As long as time was delayed slightly, and the aftershocks of the solar wind subsided under the effects of the Extraction Tower, communication between him, Alice, and the Great Library would surely be restored. At that time, he could naturally concentrate all his forces.

So, Alice's situation isn't the problem; the problem lies with the newcomers and veterans here. The two newcomers who are still alive have had a lot of things done to them by Saito, so dying won't be easy for them. And the veterans… perhaps their situation is even more dire than anticipated.

[Zhan Lan's mental scan and mental communication capabilities extend to a hundred kilometers. If she were currently within the scan's range, she should be able to contact me through the scan. However, I have not received any mental communication so far, indicating that something is definitely obstructing this process.]

Patchouli thought to herself as she walked down the corridor toward the direction where the smell of blood was strongest. She hadn't seen a single living person yet, but the remains of those who had died 'accidentally' kept appearing in her field of vision.

Sometimes it's one or two people who break their necks because of a fall or something similar.

Sometimes it's three or four people who die because of accidental discharge of a security guard's weapon or mechanical malfunction in the surrounding area.

She had walked this far without hearing a single scream. Not even a cry for help. This shelter, two kilometers underground, now resembled a silent mausoleum, filled with a chilling, deathly atmosphere. It sent shivers down her spine.

The alarms failed to trigger, and the entire surveillance system malfunctioned due to the solar wind. Every death she witnessed appeared to be 'accidental.' Yet, this sheer frequency of deaths constantly spoke to her of inevitability. She recorded the number of deaths she witnessed and their approximate times. And the current conclusion is—

The dead numbered 370. The time of death was simultaneous!

About three minutes later, she stopped in front of a shelter restaurant. What she saw was pure hell.

[One, two, three... a total of seventy-five people: six staff members and sixty-nine shelter residents, including nine children under the age of ten. They all died here.]

The still-wet blood spread out on the ground in a small, deep red pool, and fear remained in the eyes of those who had unfortunately died in "accidents." Patchouli glanced at the camera on the ceiling, casually used a gravity field to pull it down, but could only obtain a bunch of garbled video recordings from the database where the pipes were connected—so she had no choice but to throw the camera aside and examine other clues instead.

Her target quickly settled on the body of a man lying at the restaurant entrance. The man's face bore undisguised...and unconcealed fear. Moreover, there were several clearly visible, widely spaced footprints on his back, and numerous wounds of varying sizes on his body; clearly, he had tried desperately to escape before his death. Although he ultimately couldn't escape death—pierced through the head by a chopstick propelled by the explosion of a small steamer—his death was undoubtedly relatively late among the seventy-five people.

So……

"Sorry to bother you."

Patchouli offered a soft apology, then knelt before the corpse, reached out, removed its eyeballs, and touched the man's optic nerve—an old-fashioned interrogation method used by outsiders before implanting surveillance networks into every registered living being. This involved stimulating specific areas of the recently deceased's brain with a microcurrent to reconstruct the light signals collected by the visual system in the tens of seconds before death. Because the current information environment was too chaotic, and because this body was merely a substitute puppet, Patchouli couldn't use complex soul-summoning rituals, so she had to make do with this method.

The next moment, a slightly rough and blurry, but perfectly discernible, first-person photograph was projected into Patchouli's doll's eyes. She then saw, as she had wished, everything that had happened there earlier.

..........................................

What came into view was a bustling public restaurant. Yes, bustling. Although the video only contained optical signals and no sound, this fact was easily confirmed from the cheerful and vibrant faces. From the man's perspective, she could clearly see everything in the restaurant.

There was an electronic clock in the upper right corner of the restaurant, showing the time as exactly fifteen minutes ago. Comparing it to the timeline, she easily determined that it was two minutes before the solar storm subsided and the stellar extraction tower activated. At that moment, the man, carrying a plate of food, sat down at a table near the edge.

Across from the man stood a young woman; they seemed to know each other, but weren't familiar with each other. As the man put down his plate, the woman gave him a slightly forced, polite smile. Perhaps due to a lack of security, she subconsciously withdrew her hand.

Clearly, the man understood the emotions conveyed by the woman's subtle gesture. He put down his chopsticks and began to speak, and the woman's slightly tense and uneasy gaze gradually softened. A genuine smile appeared on her lips. Just as she was about to say something, their gazes simultaneously shifted to a large loudspeaker in the corner of the restaurant.

—A voice came from inside, though the signal was no longer audible, but it must have been some kind of important information or official announcement. Almost everyone present, including the base staff, turned to look at the speaker at the same time, their expressions showing intense focus. And when the communication ended, the entire restaurant erupted in a frenzy, like water boiling over.

Patchouli didn't know what they were talking about, but from their excited expressions, she could guess that it must be some good news that concerned everyone present. Through the man's eyes, she could see many people jumping up excitedly, hugging each other, jumping and shouting, and several people even ignoring the food on the table, rolling up their sleeves and heading for the door.

The man turned his head, averting his gaze, and saw the woman's face, also beaming with a joyful smile. Her lips moved, and from the changes in her lip movements, Patchouli could roughly discern most of the words she was about to utter. And organizing those words would only take Patchouli a split second—

"Did you hear that?! The apocalypse is over! It's over! The solar wind was dispersed outside the Earth! How did they do that?!"

'We'll be back on the ground soon, right? Are we going to the dorms? Or do we meet at the plaza?'

'How about we leave now—ee-ya!'

The woman's excited cheers suddenly turned into a scream of terror. She abruptly covered her mouth, her finger pointing straight behind the man. The man's view swung sharply backward, revealing a bloody scene!

it has started.

The first to die were the two people who were excitedly planning to leave the restaurant. One of them tripped over a crooked chair, broke his neck, and knocked down the other person. The other person's eyes happened to meet the tip of a chopstick in the hand of a diner next to him.

The man's vision began to shake violently. He panicked, but just as he was about to stand up from his seat, the small steam pot on the next table suddenly exploded. He jerked to the side and turned around, only to find a piece of metal from the steam pot piercing the neck of the woman behind him. She made a hissing sound and then went silent. Terrified, he collapsed to the ground and scrambled towards the door. In that brief moment of tumbling, nearly three-quarters of the people in the restaurant had died.

The exploding boiler ejected components that severed a pipeline in the dining area. The gas explosion sent numerous pieces of tableware flying like bullets, each one precisely killing one or two people like a group of sharpshooters. The falling corpses created chaos and smashed the orderly restaurant into a mess. The crooked tables and chairs became new murder weapons—tripping people over and then killing these poor souls with their sharp edges.