A Guide to Humanity’s Extinction

At 2:00 p.m. on July 15, over a dozen sinister-looking figures gathered inside the Grey Pigeon underground bar. The waitstaff had quietly slipped away at some point, leaving no trace behind.

In the corner of the room, Clock Imitator stood locked in a staredown with Blue Pigeon.

"Next, we're going to start a livestream, just like Clock Maker," Clock Imitator said. "Then we'll reveal your face and torture you to death, just like he did... Scared yet?"

Blue Pigeon stayed silent for a moment. He lowered his head, sighed, then looked right back into the man's eyes.

"I suggest you run. You don't have much time left."

Clock Imitator glared at him, his eyes like those of a ravenous beast. A second later, he threw a brutal punch straight into Blue Pigeon's gut.

"Ow... so painful. But you could try a little harder," Blue Pigeon coughed, spitting out a mouthful of saliva. "Haven't you eaten?" Clock Imitator narrowed his eyes and slammed another punch directly into Blue Pigeon's helmet, shattering a corner of the visor. A shard pierced the boy's left eye, and his face quickly reddened and swelled.

"You really haven't eaten. Look how weak hunger makes you..."

Blue Pigeon tilted his head back up. Through the broken mask, his right eye locked onto Clock Imitator's face.

He didn't want to kill Blue Pigeon just yet, so he limited the blast to a localized explosion on his waist and immediately stepped back.

In an instant, a burst of flames erupted from the center of the combat suit, illuminating Blue Pigeon's helmet. Yet in that very same moment, a paper puppet slipped out of his sleeve and chanted:

"Superman Philosophy."

A faint layer of golden light instantly enveloped Blue Pigeon's body. The explosion's flames kicked up a cloud of smoke, completely obscuring his figure.

Clock Imitator grinned savagely. He stared at the smoke-shrouded figure, eagerly waiting for wails of agony and terror. Instead, the bar was completely quiet, save for the low murmurs of the patrons behind him.

A moment later, as the smoke and dust dispersed, Clock Imitator scanned the area.

The small explosion had blown a hole through the outer shell of the metal combat suit, but it hadn't left a single scratch on Ke Mingqing's body.

"You should have tried harder and blown apart the chains tying me down. Then I could have fought back," Blue Pigeon mocked, tilting his head. Clock Imitator was momentarily stunned. Then, amidst the jeering laughter of the crowd behind him, that shock swiftly warped into uncontrollable rage.

"You bastard!" he growled.

Just as he reached out to grab Blue Pigeon by the throat, a deafening roar echoed from overhead.

In that instant, a sudden beam of pitch-black light pierced straight through the ceiling of the underground bar. The lighting in the entire room dimmed as a girl in a gothic dress descended from above.

The magical girl Ember touched down gently on the floor.

Her gaze swept through the gloom, quickly settling on a figure in the corner: Blue Pigeon in his ruined combat suit. Through the shattered corner of his helmet, she could see the bruises and red swelling on Ke Mingqing's face. The boy's left eye was clamped shut, blood trickling down from his eye socket.

Ember's pupils constricted. She parted her lips, but couldn't force a single word out. A moment later, she slowly lowered her head, her face twitching slightly as her drooping bangs concealed her eyes.

She drew a katana from the handle of her umbrella. The glint of cold light reflecting off the blade illuminated her furious, icy expression. The lighting was poor, and with one of Ke Mingqing's eyes swollen shut, he could only catch vague glimpses of what happened next.

The girl shot forward, her figure arcing like a bright, pale moon. The katana swept out in a horizontal slash, a streak of cold light flashing through the darkness. In a single heartbeat, the six men rushing to surround her were decapitated.

Amidst a shower of flying blood, six heads flew into the air at the exact same time.

Raising Cinderella with her other hand, Ember pulled the trigger repeatedly.

"Bang!"

However, it wasn't pitch-black magic missiles that shot from the umbrella, but streaks of black-blue light. Each beam instantly blew apart one of the airborne heads before piercing straight through a figure aiming a gun at her in the distance.

Absolute silence descended upon the bar. The walls were riddled with massive craters left by the beams.

Liquor bottles completely shattered across the counter. Headless corpses slumped to their knees on the floor. Blood mingled with crimson wine, pooling into a gurgling river.

The girl stepped over the river, walking toward Clock Imitator step by step.

Clock Imitator stood frozen for a long time before finally turning to look around. All ten of his accomplices had been wiped out in a fraction of a second. Some hadn't even managed to activate their esper abilities.

"Stay back, or else I'll—!" Clock Imitator roared.

He went to grab Blue Pigeon by the neck with his right hand, ready to apply the preconditions for an explosion. But in that very moment, his right hand suddenly felt slightly cold, followed instantly by a complete loss of sensation.

Clock Imitator fell silent for a second, then slowly looked down.

His right arm had already been severed from his shoulder. With a wet smack, it dropped to the floor, washing away along the long river of blood and wine.

Terrified, he clutched the stump of his arm and wailed. Suddenly, a chilling wave of killing intent washed over him from behind. Trembling, he turned his head. The girl in the gothic dress was already standing right behind him.

She flicked her katana to shake the blood from the blade while simultaneously opening her umbrella.

The canopy bloomed open, blasting outward with a ripple of black-blue magic. The magic swept forward like a magnificent curtain of flames, violently launching Clock Imitator's figure more than a dozen meters away.

His body smashed brutally against the bar's wall, caving it in to form a crater two meters deep. At the same time, the headless corpses kneeling across the floor crumbled into ash as the ripples washed over them.

Ember kept her head lowered, letting out a long sigh. Her dark bangs completely obscured her face, making it impossible to see her expression.

After a long while, she finally turned back to face Blue Pigeon, who was chained to a pillar. She raised her katana and swung it toward him.

With a sharp crack, the chains instantly shattered, clattering to the floor.

"How did you know I was here?" Blue Pigeon asked after a moment of silence.

"Someone told me... but I don't know who." Ember didn't lift her head. Instead, she kept her eyes fixed on the tip of her umbrella, as if terrified to look at his wounds.

Did Kuroki Hitomi get my sister's contact info from Little Red Riding Hood? Blue Pigeon thought. That Japanese girl really is too sharp.

The girl in the gothic dress slid her katana back into the umbrella handle. She took a deep breath and finally looked up, laying eyes on his bleeding left eye. Her throat hitched, and the rims of her eyes instantly reddened.

"Your eye..." she whispered, her voice slightly hoarse.

"It's nothing. The super-human species has pretty strong healing. Give it a couple days and it'll—" He hadn't finished speaking.

"I'll heal you. Don't move."

Ember cut him off, speaking as if giving an order. She reached out, gently tracing the injury at the corner of his eye and wiping away the blood with her black leather glove.

She summoned a thick black tome from nowhere and pulled a Magic Card from one of its pages. She crushed it, and a shower of warm, firefly-like light drifted down, settling over Blue Pigeon's wounds.

Feeling the warm current wash through his body, the stinging pain on his face eased. Blue Pigeon raised an eyebrow and touched his cheek in curiosity as he asked, "Is this the thing you used to heal your wounds in my bedroom last time?"

Ember didn't answer. Keeping her eyes downcast, she gathered the courage to look at his ruined combat suit.

But right at that moment, Blue Pigeon suddenly lifted his head, raised his right hand, and aimed his five fingers directly at Ember.

The girl in the gothic dress didn't dodge or flinch. She didn't even bat an eyelid, acting as if she hadn't seen a thing.

She merely kept her eyes lowered, quietly checking his body for any other injuries.

In the very next heartbeat, crackling bolts of pitch-black lightning coalesced at Blue Pigeon's fingertips, morphing into an arrow of electricity that violently shot forward.

The lightning streaked right past the side of Ember's head, the fierce, crackling arcs whipping her hair back. It crossed a ten-meter gap and slammed directly into the trench-coated man who was just struggling to crawl out of the wall.

An agonizing wail instantly followed: "Aaargh!"

Only then did Ember slowly turn her head, glancing over from the corner of her eye.

Clock Imitator's head blew apart completely, detonating into a fine mist of blood that settled over the cramped bar. The gun he had been clutching slowly slipped loose, dropping into the pool of blood.

"Guy's pretty tough. Still moving after you lopped off an arm." Blue Pigeon shrugged as a Pop-up notification panel appeared in his vision.

[Detected that the player has killed a C-Rank Superhuman. 500 EXP rewarded.]

[Level Progress: LV.10 (1600/5000 EXP)]

[Congratulations, you have completed Weekly Task 2: Kill a super-human species. (Reward received: 1 Item Roulette Spin)] "I originally planned to keep him alive so I could torture him a bit," Ember murmured, keeping her head lowered. "But I forgot." A flicker of black-blue flame suddenly danced at the edge of her cold eyes.

Shifting his gaze away from the panel, Blue Pigeon happened to catch sight of the flame flickering at the edge of her eyes. He paused, taken aback.

Thankfully, the flame vanished just a second later.

Since Blue Pigeon's injuries were limited strictly to his eye and cheek while the rest of his body was unscathed, Ember stopped checking. She lifted her eyes, quietly locking gazes with him.

After a long while, she finally spoke.

"Are you... an idiot?"

"Why are you scolding me?"

"You tell me," the girl in the gothic dress said, her voice dropping lower. "You're so weak, yet you wander around out here all alone. What would you have done if I hadn't made it in time?"

If you hadn't come, I would have just wiped them out myself, Ke Mingqing thought, though that carried the risk of exposing his identity as a player. "I didn't expect things to turn out like this, to be honest. I just accidentally walked into a trap."

"Accidentally?" she echoed, enunciating every syllable.

Blue Pigeon shook his head, offering a breezy explanation:

"One of them was an esper whose ability forces anyone who signs his notebook into a deep sleep... So, a little girl came up to me with a notebook, asking for my autograph. You can guess the rest."

He reached up to touch the corner of his eye. Aided by the Magic Card Firefly, the wound on his face was rapidly healing right before their eyes. "The person who contacted me earlier... was it Kuroki Hitomi?" Ember asked abruptly.

Blue Pigeon nodded. "Yeah."

Surprisingly, Ember didn't seem angry at all. Instead, she nodded, turning her face away as she spoke in a soft voice:

"Oh... tell her 'thank you' for me."

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