Dragon Raja: Lu Mingfei finds a Freylian

Everything connected. The reinforcements were a ruse. The executions were real. Not just Frillian. Including himself, including the entire Third Squad.

Because they belonged to the Kassel College faction. Because Masamune Tachibana wanted to ensure that the operation would proceed without any surprises, and to ensure that any potential questioning or resistance was eliminated before the door was even opened.

How ironic.

Kuroda coughed up blood, the froth a dark purple color. The toxins had already entered his circulatory system. He had only three to five seconds left to regain consciousness.

That's enough. Kuroda gripped the wakizashi tightly, adopting the most decisive move in the starting stance of the Kyoshin-ryu school: Sacrifice. With his last ounce of strength, he crashed into the shadow warrior in the middle.

Caught off guard by this suicidal attack, the opponent was knocked back two steps. Kuroda seized the opportunity to plunge the wakizashi into his own abdomen and twist it violently. The intense pain briefly brought him back to his senses. Then he detonated the miniature stun grenade hidden in his belt.

"Bang!" The incandescent light engulfed the entire corridor.

The three shadow warriors froze simultaneously; their modified vision was extremely sensitive to bright light.

It only lasted a second, but that was enough.

With his last ounce of strength, Kuroda knocked on the VIP room door with his backhand. Three long knocks, two short knocks, one long knock. This was a secret code he and Inuyama Nashi used to play when they were kids, meaning: "Run! Don't look back!"

Then he slowly collapsed.

Just before his vision went dark, he saw the VIP room door silently slide open a crack.

A slender hand reached out, its fingertips gleaming with a faint, icy blue fluorescence. The hand gently brushed across his forehead.

"Thank you," he heard her say.

Then darkness descended completely.

Chapter 450 Escaping the Snake-Headed Eight Family - Frillie (Part 1)

When the bright light faded, only three corpses remained in the corridor.

Kuroda lay in a pool of blood, his own wakizashi embedded in his abdomen. The two shadow warriors had their modified cochleas and visual sensors shattered by the shockwave of the stun grenade, temporarily incapacitating them. The third, the one in the middle who had been knocked back by Kuroda, tried to retrieve an antidote from his tactical pouch.

The VIP room door opened fully. Frillian stood in the doorway, her brows slightly furrowed, a silver pen in her right hand, its tip pointed at the shadow warrior who was still standing there.

"Time, please stand still," she said softly, as if reciting a nursery rhyme.

But the shadow warrior's movements really stopped.

It wasn't a physical freeze; although his muscles were still moving and neurons were still firing signals, the process of those signals reaching the effectors was infinitely prolonged. It was like falling into viscous amber, where every movement took a thousand times longer than usual.

Words of power? No.

Frillie kept her eyes closed. She could "see" the invisible ripples spreading out from the silver pen—not energy surges, but subtle distortions of local physical constants. That old madman Flamel had actually created something theoretically impossible: a portable, controllable local spacetime interference device.

But the cost is enormous; this thing is not something an ordinary person can use.

Frillie felt her magic draining away at a rate of two percent per second. At this rate, it would be depleted in fifty seconds. For her, the depletion of magic was not just the loss of her ability to cast spells, but a rapid decline in her life force; her very existence was bound to magic.

Forty-five seconds.

Frillie stepped over Kuroda's corpse and walked towards the frozen shadow warrior. She took the antidote from his pouch and injected it into her own arm. A trace amount of toxin had seeped into her skin when the blade had brushed past her.

Forty seconds.

She checked the other two shadow warriors. The stun grenades had caused permanent sensory damage, but their biological instincts remained; their fingers twitched as they reached for their weapons.

Frillian crouched down, placing her fingers on the sides of their necks. Her magical perception deepened.

The modifications were more extensive than anticipated. Artificial organs replaced over 40% of their human tissue, and the emotional areas of their cerebral cortex were surgically removed, replaced by alchemically created neural connection chips. They were no longer human; they were merely breathing puppets.

She hesitated for a moment. Then, an icy blue light shone from her fingertips. With magical vibrations precise to the cellular level, she disrupted the core circuits of those alchemical chips.

The two shadow warriors convulsed violently and went completely limp. They had returned to their destined fate: brain death.

Thirty seconds.

Frillie stood up and walked to the fire extinguisher cabinet at the end of the corridor. In the mirrored cabinet door, she saw her reflection: pale-faced, with blood seeping from the wound on her left abdomen.

She took a fire extinguisher from the fire cabinet; she needed the pressurized container inside. She unplugged the nozzle, inserted Flamel's silver pen, and tightened it.

Twenty seconds.

Then she turned to face the wall opposite the VIP room. Her magical perception was extended to its limit.

The wall structure appears translucent in view, consisting of three layers of alloy plates sandwiching two layers of cushioning gel, with a total thickness of 32 centimeters. Behind it are ventilation ducts, and beyond that, there is emptiness. A space labeled "Abandoned Equipment Room" is only the size of a fingernail on the Sumeru pedestal's architectural drawings, but its actual volume is large enough to hide three people.

Fifteen seconds.

Frillie raised the modified fire extinguisher canister and aimed it at the wall. The silver pen continuously released a spacetime interference field within the sealed container, causing frost to form on the surface of the canister, and the internal pressure to rise sharply in a manner that violated the laws of thermodynamics.

ten seconds.

She released her grip. The canister hovered in mid-air, trembling violently.

Five seconds.

When the temperature on the surface of the tank drops to -150 degrees Celsius, the alloy begins to become brittle.

three seconds.

“Broken,” Frilian said softly.

The tank shattered. At the unstable boundary of the spacetime interference field, the structural strength of the matter was weakened to its limit. The walls, as if struck by an invisible hammer from a giant, caved in and tore apart, revealing a jagged hole. Cold wind rushed out of the hole, carrying the smell of rust and mildew. The passage had opened.

Frillie's magic was also completely depleted. A wave of weakness washed over her, and she staggered, grabbing the wall to keep from collapsing. Black spots began to appear at the edges of her vision, and her ears rang with a sharp, metallic ringing. But she didn't stop.

Before disappearing into the opening, she glanced back. Kuroda's body lay silently in a pool of blood. This young executive member had maintained his guarding posture until his death. And there were the two shadow warriors she had dismissed. Their empty eyes stared at the ceiling, finally bearing the appearance of a human dying.

“I will never forget you,” Frilian said, turning and disappearing into the darkness.

Three seconds after she left, the alarm system belatedly activated. A red light spun, and the siren blared. But the VIP corridor was already deserted. Only the frost-covered holes in the walls testified to an extraordinary event that had occurred there.

Deep within the platform, Tachibana Masamune frowned as he watched the monitor screen suddenly turn into static. "Flamemer, he's got some skills."

He pressed the communication button: "Target escaped. Initiate a platform-wide lockdown and issue an arrest warrant. She's injured and can't have gone far."

"Yes." The communication was cut off.

Masamune Tachibana looked at the deep-sea surveillance screen. The beacon of light from the Trieste had reached the Shrine of the Gods.

The door is opening. The offerings are about to be placed. With the escape of this variable, Frilian alone will likely be unable to withstand it.

"It doesn't matter. Tokyo is the hunting ground of the Snake Clan. Wounded prey can't escape this sea."

Outside the window, the blood moon rose high in the sky. Beneath the sea, the phosphorescence of the demon-toothed dragon viper converged into a torrent, surging towards the Sumeru pedestal.

...

Upper level of the Sumeru pedestal, western outer edge platform

Frillie leaned against the cooling vents of the backup generator, her breathing as low as possible. The wound on her left abdomen was hastily bandaged with strips of torn shirt fabric; the bleeding had temporarily stopped, but each heartbeat brought sharp pain.

Her magical perception had dwindled to less than five percent, its range reduced to a radius of fifty meters. She "saw" at least three search teams approaching, each with six members, equipped with thermal imagers and sonic detectors.

What's more troublesome is that she can sense the energy flow across the entire platform changing. It's like a giant heart beating on the seabed, each contraction causing the platform's metal frame to hum.

God is awakening. And the sacrifices are Lu Mingfei, Caesar, and Chu Zihang.

Frillie closed her eyes, tracking the magical markings attached to them.

Lu Mingfei's signal was the weakest, almost extinguished, but it was still beating tenaciously; the vitality of an S-class was indeed beyond imagination. Caesar and Chu Zihang's signals intertwined, their condition slightly better than Lu Mingfei's, but they were also nearing their limit.

She has to do something, but now even protecting herself is difficult.

Chapter 451 Escaping the Snake-Headed Eight Family - Frillie (Part 2)

A search team passed by the tunnel entrance twenty meters away. The thermal imager swept over the corner where she was hiding, but fortunately, the residual heat from the generator interfered with the readings, and they only paused briefly before continuing.

Frillie waited until the footsteps faded away before emerging from her hiding place. Her target was the small speedboat berth on the west side. Kuroda's last intelligence indicated that the area was relatively lightly guarded, and that there was an emergency escape route leading directly to the sea beneath the berth.

But first you have to cross a 300-meter-long open-air platform.

Frillie crouched low, moving along the shadows. The moonlight was a dark red, casting a blood-red path across the sea. The air was thick with the smells of the sea and rust.

The sound of water came from ahead. It sounded like a viscous liquid being splashed. Then came the sound of chewing, fine and rapid, like countless tiny files polishing metal.

Frillie stopped and peered through the gaps in the container.

At the edge of the berth, a shadow warrior was dumping something into the sea. By the moonlight, she could see that it was half a corpse, wearing the uniform of the Execution Bureau, but the lower half of the body had disappeared. The cut was not a tear, but a clean mark, as if it had been bitten off by countless tiny teeth at the same time.

Ghost-toothed vipers. Those things have already gathered below the platform.

After disposing of the corpse, the shadow warrior took a test tube from his waist and dripped the dark red liquid inside into the sea. The moment the liquid hit the water, a burst of fluorescent green light erupted beneath the surface. Thousands upon thousands of Ghost-Toothed Vipers swarmed towards the drop of liquid, tearing and devouring each other.

Bait. They're feeding those things with the blood of the hybrids to keep them active and around the platform. Perfect tool for disposing of evidence.

The shadow warrior turned and left. Frillie was about to continue forward when she suddenly froze. Not because she had been discovered. It was because she sensed an immense, indescribable energy rising from the center of the platform.

Not the one in the deep sea, but closer. Right above her head, on a watchtower about thirty meters high.

Frillie slowly raised her head.

Beneath the blood moon, a slender figure stood on the edge of the tower. Her red kimono billowed in the night wind, and her long hair cascaded through the air like splashed ink. In her hand she held an ancient, long sword, its blade without an edge, yet radiating an aura of power that subtly distorted the very space around her.

Erii, the younger sister of Minamoto no Chisei. The most dangerous humanoid weapon of the Snake Clan.

But something seemed off about her at that moment.

Frillie's magical perception barely reached that level. She "saw" the energy flow within Erii's body—violent and chaotic, like a torrent bursting its banks in a narrow riverbed. It wasn't a power she could control; it felt like a forcefully awakened, near-out-of-control state.

What is she fighting against?

Erii suddenly raised her long sword. She spoke, her voice torn apart by the wind high above, but Frilian understood her lips.

One word.

"die"

Word of Power: Judgment, activated.

There was no sound. But the whole world fell silent for a moment. The sea stopped rising and falling. The wind froze in the air. Even the mechanical hum deep within the platform vanished. Then, the domain unfolded.

Frillie saw a "line." Extending from the tip of Erii's sword, it was colorless and formless, yet wherever it passed, space itself was torn apart. The boundary between existence and nothingness was redefined.

The line swept across the sea.

The first group of about two hundred mermaid corpses that surfaced were all frozen in place. Their bodies began to disappear.

It's neither burning nor dissolving; it's literal non-existence. It's like someone erasing pencil marks from drawing paper, starting from the top, inch by inch, until even transparency is gone, leaving only emptiness.

There was no sound, no light, no energy fluctuation. It was simply a complete erasure.