Chapter 266

Chapter 266: Support Unit

Yu Sheng had no idea how many eerie figures had surfaced from the fog in that instant. He only knew they were everywhere—wobbling, swaying, multiplying until they flooded his vision and gathered into a tide that swallowed the entire block.

Swarm-type entity. Now he understood what “swarm” meant when it was attached to an entity.

And he strongly suspected he’d just run into the maximum swarm size of Carnival Revelers. There had to be over ten thousand of those swaying figures in the street.

The crowd surged forward. Unreal cheering filled the fog—party poppers, balloons bursting, out-of-tune celebration music that seemed to come from above and below. Every kind of noise layered together until it pressed into Yu Sheng’s skull. The ridiculous yet terrifying figures reached out toward him. Cracks bloomed across their chaotic heads, and the rifts looked like wild laughter welcoming guests into an unseen, endless revelry.

“Awoooo—!”

A howl tore through the noise. Countless shadow wolves slammed into the oncoming line-drawn entities, shredding them into writhing wreckage. Then fox fire swept in. Foxy held her nine-tailed demon fox form, her silver-white tails flaring behind her as waves of dense heat cracked like whips across the swarm.

But there were too many. No matter how hard the wolf pack and fox fire hammered the tide, revelers kept slipping through and closing in.

Yu Sheng swung his war club, smashing each laughing figure that rushed him into pieces, doing his best not to touch them directly. Even brushing against the bright scraps that burst out when they died felt like a risk.

One reveler wasn’t much of a threat. The feedback from striking them was even weaker than when he’d fought Big Bad Wolf in the black forest. But their endless numbers—and that mind-splitting noise—quickly became crushing pressure.

Every time one was destroyed, its body burst into bright scraps, like confetti blasted from a party popper. Within minutes, the street was carpeted in color.

More revelers poured out. Tens of thousands formed rapidly in the fog, faster than they could be destroyed.

“This is worse than the Ink Mark!” Irene screamed. “Doesn’t it have a weak spot?!”

“In theory, if we were in Nameless Carnival, all you’d have to do is find a plaster clown wearing a balloon hat and drink the sweet wine he offers. Then the crowd would leave!” Little Red Riding Hood shouted, struggling to maintain the ring formed by her wolves. “But this place—this place isn’t Nameless Carnival! Where am I supposed to find a clown?!”

“If it really comes to it, we should retreat,” Irene said, yanking at Yu Sheng’s hair. “We can’t finish this. All the restrictions on these entities were tied to their original otherworld. Now that they’re here, it’s like they’ve broken free. They don’t have weaknesses!”

Yu Sheng clenched his teeth. He didn’t want to retreat—they’d come to save someone—but they still hadn’t even seen a human in the fog. And staying here was starting to feel pointless. The revelers were forming at an abnormal speed, and the worst part was the mechanic: don’t touch. Most breakout methods would be dangerously risky.

In a situation like this, the only option left might be Door Opening and running.

Then he heard it—a strange buzzing in the air, like high-frequency interference cutting through the chaos.

“Ahhh!” Irene yelled. “What is it this time? Is it ever going to end?!”

She barely finished when a bright streak tore through the air and fell into the reveler crowd. It detonated in a shocking explosion.

Then more streaks came. Some kind of fire support swept across the block, ripping open huge gaps in the swarm.

Yu Sheng instinctively looked up.

One after another, gigantic figures in black powered armor—two to three meters tall—materialized directly out of the air more than ten meters above, then slammed down like artillery shells onto the street.

Dozens of heavily armored warriors dropped from the sky without warning. Before their boots even hit, their jetpacks and waist thrusters blasted enemies away in a wide arc. In the next instant, with dazzling coordination, they formed seven or eight fire-support anchors across the battlefield, covering each other as they poured insane firepower into everything that didn’t look friendly.

The weapons in their hands were huge. The glowing rounds weren’t bullets—when they touched anything, they exploded into searing spheres over a meter wide, instantly burning and vaporizing everything inside. Another dozen soldiers in lighter armor weaved through the chaos, clearing anything that broke through with beam sabers.

And they didn’t worry about touching the revelers’ line-forms at all. Their bodies were fully sealed inside the armor, and thick energy shields shimmered outside the plating.

Irene sat on Yu Sheng’s shoulder, staring at the scene. After a long beat, she breathed out, “Whoa.”

“The Special Operations Bureau finally sent people,” Little Red Riding Hood said with a long exhale, though shock still filled her eyes. “But why so many… That has to be seventy or eighty deep divers. I’ve never seen a scale like this.”

Yu Sheng didn’t answer. He just watched those towering armored figures carve through the street like they were chopping vegetables, and the more he watched, the more familiar their gear looked.

Then one black can over two meters tall stepped out of formation, followed by two slightly smaller armored soldiers. They approached Foxy in her demon fox form. The leader lifted a hand and tapped his helmet.

The heavy faceplate opened, revealing Xu Jiali’s goofy grin.

Xu Jiali looked up at the imposing nine-tailed demon fox. Then he looked at the thick layer of colorful paper scraps blanketing the ground around Yu Sheng’s group. After a long pause, he finally said, “…You guys can really fight. When I was halfway through the dive and saw ten thousand swarm entities surrounding you, my blood ran cold. I even picked out where I wanted the director to bury me after I got back…”

“Stop flattering us,” Little Red Riding Hood said, exhausted. “If you’d been two minutes later, we were already planning to run. Good thing you brought a lot of people.”

“Everyone on standby at HQ came,” Xu Jiali said. “We heard things were weird, and the deep-sea echo from the locator was seriously off.”

Without even turning his head, he raised a hand and fired once, shattering a few revelers wobbling out of the fog. The gun looked heavier than Little Red Riding Hood, yet he held it one-handed like it weighed nothing.

“If we’d had more time,” he added, “we would’ve brought in the Hunter Owl too.”

Irene blinked. “What the hell is that?”

Xu Jiali grinned. “An atmospheric bomber. It has a machine spirit, so it can run Deep Dive missions like we can. It just takes longer to prep.”

Yu Sheng, who’d been silent, suddenly blinked as something clicked in his memory.

“Ah! I know what that is!” He pointed at Xu Jiali’s powered armor. “When I used Door Opening and saw two guys fighting on an alien planet, one of them was wearing that kind of—”

Xu Jiali’s expression froze.

He’d almost managed to forget that incident.

Yu Sheng caught the shift in his face, and his mind jumped straight to the closer truth. “…Was that you?”

Xu Jiali lifted a hand to scratch his head, only to knock against his helmet with a clunk.

“Yeah,” he said awkwardly. “That was me.”

Yu Sheng: “…”

Xu Jiali: “…”

Then they spoke at almost the same time.

“Why didn’t you say so?”

“You didn’t ask!”

Xu Jiali let out a breath. “Well… at first it was about secrecy. That was a secret mission. After that, I just never found the right moment. Some things… once you don’t say them at the start…”

As he spoke, he fired again, blasting a few lucky revelers that slipped through his teammates’ net into a storm of colorful scraps. Then he finished, “…you never find the chance.”

Yu Sheng thought for a moment, then tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Fine. I get that.”

He studied Xu Jiali’s full kit more carefully.

“So this is what you look like fully armed. No wonder you said you weren’t in ‘combat state’ before.”

“Fully armed would also include a psionics-controlled fire-support shuttle, two walking tactical robots, a bunch of light drones, and a psychic attendant,” Xu Jiali said with a shrug. “But that’s expedition configuration out there. Over in the borderland, we have to downsize.”

He looked faintly proud—and a little annoyed. “What you saw last time was an accident. I ran into a cultist and got dragged into a fight with no time to prep. Luckily… I was just better in the end.”