Escape from the Dormitory

“What about the garrison soldiers in the dormitory?” Huang Xiu asked, running toward the stairwell.

“I’ve already loosened the binds for those two.”

Huang Xiu gritted her teeth. “As long as we all leave, Guang Hongfang wouldn’t blow up an entire building, would he!”

While speaking, she turned to look behind.

Only after seeing Jiang Qing and the others running over did she relax—the 606 temporary squad had not, after all, died before achieving anything.

“Hurry, let’s just charge out!” Huang Xiu shouted, waving.

But before her words faded.

Another violent explosion came from above.

Bang!

The acrid smell of detonator gunpowder drifted into Huang Xiu’s nostrils on the dry night wind.

Guang Hongfang seemed determined to bring down the entire building before stopping!

Crack!

Three massive explosions in quick succession within seconds shattered the sixth floor’s ceiling completely.

The whole building trembled uncontrollably.

Heavy stone slabs reinforced with steel fell, hitting the ground with dull thuds.

The solar panels fixed on the roof came down in large pieces, clattering as they shattered.

The ground was covered in black debris, reflecting the dismal moonlight.

The giant water tower originally placed at a corner of the roof had been affected by the detonator explosions from the start.

The steel supports holding the water tower twisted and deformed under the repeated violent explosions.

Until they finally broke from fatigue.

Creak!

A teeth-gritting sound rang out as the five-meter-tall water tower tilted and then fell towards the ground.

It crashed to the ground with a loud bang.

The tower body was dented and deformed, and the stored water gushed out from the cracks, flooding the ground and finally seeping into the parched earth of the ruined walls.

After the violent shaking from the explosions subsided, a chorus of angry shouts and footsteps rang out from downstairs.

“Holy shit, are they crazy?!”

“They’re going to blow the whole building down! Going this big!”

“I don’t want to be buried! Run!”

The three consecutive explosions left everyone completely stunned.

They had anticipated that Guang Hongfang would use tactics to attack the building, but they hadn’t expected him to simply flip the table and refuse to play by their rules.

“Guang Hongfang, you’re such a badass!” Huang Xiu got up from the ground, covered in dust and soot.

This third explosion had been directly above the stairwell.

She had been running at the front and took the brunt of it.

The shockwave had knocked her flat on the ground.

Such a coincidence led them to suspect whether this was also part of Guang Hongfang’s deliberate scheme.

She looked up at the stairwell.

The stairs were littered with rubble and steel-reinforced slabs.

The light bulbs on the wall used for illumination had shattered, and sparks flickered from broken wires.

The air was thick with dust, reducing visibility.

Moonlight streamed through a large hole, barely providing a sliver of visibility.

Huang Xiu was about to turn and check on her teammates.

But she saw over a dozen black figures drop down from the remaining ceiling, landing lightly on the sixth-floor corridor.

They wore heavy body armor and carried large-caliber firearms.

The green light from the front of their six-eyed night vision goggles, connected to their helmets, glowed like the eyes of nocturnal beasts, sending chills down one’s spine!

The Reality Garrison—and over a dozen of them!

They seemed unaffected by the tremors, quickly scattering to occupy the entire corridor.

Then they trained their guns on every direction.

Huang Xiu’s heart skipped a beat.

She and her teammates, who had just gotten up from the ground, were right in the garrison’s line of fire!

Without time to speak, she instantly activated [Forest of All Things].

The anomalous plants behind her quickly rose and stacked together, forming a two-meter-tall wall of vegetation with barely any gaps.

Even as a storm of bullets rained down, the plant wall absorbed the concentrated attack head-on, with dull thuds sounding continuously.

In an instant, several anomalous plants died.

And because it was a saturation attack, stray bullets even pierced through the gaps in the plant wall, landing near Huang Xiu and her five teammates, startling everyone.

Wen Zhan scrambled up from the ground, and as she looked up, she saw Jiang Qing in front of her, her eyes dazed, clutching her calf.

A trickle of red blood seeped through her fingers.

Her head drooped as if filled with lead, and her bucket hat slipped forward from its proper position, threatening to fall off at any moment.

“I’ve been hit,” Jiang Qing said in a low voice, visible drowsiness on her face. “You go on ahead.”

“No, we go together!”

Wen Zhan pursed her lips and rushed over to support Jiang Qing, but was pushed away.

“Go, go!” Jiang Qing forced a smile. “I just… have terrible luck. I bet… and lost.”

With that, her head drooped, and she collapsed to the ground, her hat rolling away.

In the moonlight, two white, fluffy fox ears were clearly visible among her thick black short hair.

“A f-fox girl!” Wen Zhan was stunned, but the next second, Zhong Zimei grabbed her. “Who cares what kind of girl she is? Get moving, or do you want to be eliminated?!”

Was Jiang Qing like Chen Molian, with an ancestor who had dallied with a Void Realm creature?

Huang Xiu, who was continuously sending anomalous plants to reinforce the wall, naturally saw the fox ears on Jiang Qing’s head.

And since she knew more, her mind raced further.

Hu Hui… that mysterious librarian, resurfaced in her thoughts.

She couldn’t help but wonder what their relationship was.

Huang Xiu suddenly shook her head violently. She was in the middle of the competition and had dared to let her mind wander.

After the competition, she could think about it all she wanted, even go ask directly.

With strong self-control, Huang Xiu forcibly put aside her chaotic thoughts and immediately shouted:

“You go first! I’ll cover the rear!”

The plant wall was on the verge of collapse. If she dared to turn and run directly,

she would be torn apart by the bullet storm in the next second.

So before leaving, she needed to anomalize one last batch of plants to strengthen the wall!

“Okay!”

The four nodded, not daring to hesitate, and turned to go down the stairwell.

“They’re really targeting me!” Huang Xiu gritted her teeth.

Her right palm, already cut open, reached into her pocket and grabbed a handful, then threw it forward.

Over a dozen blood-stained pumpkin seeds flew through the air, glowing red.

Under the dual effects of void energy and psychic power, they bypassed months of normal growth, quickly sprouting and growing into giant pumpkins over a meter wide.

They completely filled the already narrow corridor.

Although this might also hinder other students’ escape,

but Huang Xiu felt that no student on the sixth floor could still survive under the combined attack of over a dozen garrison soldiers.

Most likely, they had all been eliminated.

After completing the anomalous transformation of the pumpkins, Huang Xiu turned and ran, casting one last deep look at Jiang Qing as she left.

She had a strange intuition that the connection between Jiang Qing and Hu Hui might be far more significant than she imagined.

Pfft!

Just seconds after Huang Xiu rushed down the stairs, the plant wall on the sixth floor burst into raging flames.

After completing a volley, the Garrison soldiers who had reloaded first swapped to incendiary rounds, allowing them to respond so quickly.

Fire is the bane of all living things, especially plants. The moisture in the anomalous plants was rapidly evaporated, and once dry, they became fuel for the flames.

In less than a minute, the plant wall was reduced to a charred mess on the ground.

Although Huang Xiu was the garrison’s primary target, she was only the primary target. The real purpose of this operation was to completely clear the dormitory building.

This would force all aberrant students to leave the building and enter the outside. So they weren’t in a hurry to chase Huang Xiu; instead, they dispersed into the dorm rooms to search for any aberrant students from various organizations hiding inside.

Thud…

A soldier who seemed to be the captain strode over the smoldering plant wall and approached Jiang Qing.

He glanced at the fox-eared girl, pressed his earpiece with his right hand, and said, “Jiang Qing, Tiandu University, Grade A, captured.”

Whether by instinct or upon hearing her name, the white fox ears on top of Jiang Qing’s head twitched.

The next second, with a flash of white light, the two white fox ears disappeared.

“Captain, the search is complete. Rooms 601 to 609, we’ve found a total of twelve aberrant students. Three and Four have also been located.”

A younger garrison soldier strode over and reported.

In the nine dorm rooms, there were eighty aberrant students in total, but most had already rushed out during the first explosion.

These twelve were mostly from rooms 607 and 608.

These two rooms were farthest from the stairwell and also adjacent to Huang Xiu’s room 606.

They were the closest to the two explosions. Under this unwarranted disaster, most of the aberrant students in those two rooms were stunned and disoriented without knowing what hit them.

And by the time they came to their senses, the Garrison soldiers had already descended from above, forming a network of gunfire.

“Good, continue the search floor by floor!” The captain nodded and turned to look downstairs.

The organization’s aberrant students either poured out from the first floor or vaulted over the railings from corridors on various floors to jump down.

Countless figures ran below, some heading for the streets, others for the alleys between buildings.

Garrison soldiers were also setting up guns on buildings outside the dormitory.

The intense firepower had not ceased since the first minute, but the number of people breaking out was simply too high.

A hundred people meant a hundred different psychic powers.

Let alone that the number of people rushing out this time was several times that, or even ten times!

All kinds of strange psychic powers were unleashed for self-preservation.

Even though the Garrison soldiers were as careful as could be, they couldn’t avoid falling victim to some intangible psychic powers.

Some had powers that could curse through eye contact, causing the highly reliable guns in the soldiers’ hands to jam on the spot.

Some could shoot fireballs, ice cones, or even control sand and earth to create small sandstorms that attacked the Garrison.

In an instant, the sky and earth changed color. Sand flew everywhere, blinding eyes and blocking vision.

Others used the water leaking from the water tower to form water shields, protecting their teammates.

Huang Xiu and her group were relatively slow to exit the building, but they happened to hit a good timing.

When they leaped down from the third floor, landed with a roll, and stood up, they found the battlefield terrifying. Many aberrant students had gone berserk and were actively charging at the Garrison soldiers.

No one was paying attention to them at all.

Huang Xiu scanned the battlefield and saw many familiar faces.

Liu Lu, Ying Zhiyu, Chen Molian…

They were all with their dormitory squads, desperately trying to break out.

A dense hail of bullets rained down, mostly hitting the squads at the forefront.

Or the aberrant students who actively attacked the Garrison.

So relatively few bullets landed near Huang Xiu’s group of five.

“Let’s go!”

Huang Xiu didn’t dare to be careless. As she ran, she pulled a handful of seeds from her uniform pocket and began to anomalize them.

All her anomalous plants had perished in the dormitory building.

Now, without any anomalous plants by her side, she felt extremely insecure and missed Huang Xiaoxian terribly.

Thinking back, the instructor taking away Huang Xiaoxian might have been on purpose to target her.

Even choosing a desert, a place with sparse vegetation…

“That shouldn’t be the case,” Huang Xiu shook her head.

For them to choose the training ground just to target her—she wasn’t that important.

Suppressing her thoughts, she continued running with her head down. All along the way, aberrant students were constantly being shot and falling.

The blossoms of blood that appeared teased everyone’s nerves.

In the air, the constant smell of dust was mixed with an ineradicable stench of blood.

Even though they knew it was a competition, and even though they were all anesthetic and hypnotic rounds, everything felt incredibly real. The bullets, gunpowder, blood, and explosions made their hearts pound.

Adrenaline surged to their heads.

This was the scene of war she had once fantasized about…

Huang Xiu’s voice was slightly hoarse. “We’ll take the alley between the buildings on the far left.”

The five nodded.

Whoosh whoosh whoosh…

At that moment, a loud noise suddenly came from the distant sky.

A blinding beam of light fell from the sky, sweeping diagonally from the end of the street.

Someone saw the source of the light and immediately cursed.

“f*ck, it’s an attack helicopter!”

“Ah, you’ve got to be kidding me!”

A girl with a crying face raised her right hand.

Several sharp ice cones formed in the air and then spun towards the attack helicopter.

The helicopter’s nose lifted, and it dodged effortlessly, more agile than anyone had expected.

Then, two Garrison soldiers emerged from the helicopter’s sides.

They each manned a machine gun on their side and fired a long, angled burst of gunfire that swept across the entire battlefield.

“This is bad!”

Huang Xiu’s brows jumped. They were playing too rough—they even brought out a damn helicopter!

If they couldn’t win this, would they bring out fighter jets next?!

Although the helicopter’s machine guns were also loaded with hypnotic rounds, each shot left a crater in the ground.

If it hit a person…

They’d probably be physically hypnotized before the anesthetic even took effect!

Seeing the approaching attack helicopter, Chi Xue felt a spark of inspiration.

She abruptly stopped.

She pulled a steel ball bearing from her pocket, drew her slingshot, and aimed at the helicopter’s rotor blade.

Then she released the slingshot pouch.

Twang!

The steel ball shot out propelled by the rubber band’s elastic potential energy, and was further accelerated by Chi Xue’s psychic power [Momentum].

In an instant, its kinetic energy surpassed that of a normal rifle bullet.

It struck the helicopter’s rotor blade at a speed invisible to the naked eye.

Crack!

A small hole broke through the rotor blade.

The helicopter visibly tilted in the air but quickly regained balance.