The blinding white light, like a red-hot branding iron, brutally pierced the thick fog of Acheron Cemetery.
Lilith was dazzled and couldn't open her eyes. She raised her left hand to shield them, a patch of scorched purple afterimage burned into her retinas. That was a "Helios" high-power searchlight, manufactured by the Inner City Arsenal of Eden City, specifically designed to blind vampires accustomed to darkness.
The exhaust pipes of the heavy steam-powered off-road vehicles spewed thick clouds of black smoke. Their enormous rubber tires rolled over the unclaimed graves, making a crunching sound like breaking bones.
"Everyone, fan out in a sector formation!"
A hoarse male voice, amplified by a loudspeaker, was deafening.
It was the Crimson Guard.
Lilith lowered her hand and observed through her fingers. At least five modified steam armored vehicles were circling in from the outer ring. The high-pressure silver-bullet machine guns mounted on their roofs were already warming up; the whirring of their rotating barrels was piercingly loud in the night sky. A dozen soldiers in silver-gray composite battle armor jumped out of the vehicles. The infrared goggles on their faces gleamed with cold light in the dense fog.
"Drop your weapons! Hands on your heads, kneel on the ground!" The leading officer wore a heavy bulletproof trench coat. The chainsword at his waist was idling at low speed, the vibrating bite of its teeth giving off a pungent smell of machine oil.
Lilith glanced at Kane beside her.
The duke, who had slept for a thousand years, still stood at the edge of the altar. Moonlight outlined his pale profile. He didn't flee, didn't even furrow his brow. But in those crimson pupils, killing intent was spreading like ink in water.
"They're telling you to kneel," Lilith said, gripping her holy-water-coated short dagger tighter, lowering her voice. "These aren't ordinary patrolmen. They're the special operations unit of the Crimson Guard. Their guns can turn you into a sieve in one second."
Kane let out a disdainful snort.
"Mere mortals, playing with these clattering toys." He extended a finger and traced it through the air, as if plucking an invisible string.
The thorn pattern on Lilith's wrist suddenly burned hot.
"Don't!" she cried out.
But it was too late.
A Crimson Guard soldier spotted the unnaturally tall dark figure on the altar. Without hesitation, he pulled the trigger of his high-pressure silver-bullet gun.
*Rat-tat-tat-tat!*
A stream of silver streaks crackling with electric arcs tore through the night, shooting straight toward Kane's chest. Those were special hollow-point silver bullets, filled with high-concentration silver nitrate solution. Once they entered a body, they would explode like small bombs, completely carbonizing a vampire's internal organs.
Kane stood still, not even lifting an eyelid.
The bullets stopped bizarrely in midair less than half a meter from his body, as if hitting an invisible wall. Ripples visible to the naked eye appeared in the air. The electric arcs on the bullet surfaces still crackled wildly, but they could advance no further.
Lilith could even smell the ozone from the bullets' friction with the air.
"Return them," Kane said coldly.
He flicked his finger.
*Whoosh!*
The stationary silver bullets shot back at an even faster speed.
"Aagh!"
A scream instantly tore through the encirclement. The soldier who had fired didn't even have time to react before he was struck in the shoulder by his own bullet. The composite ceramic plates of his battle armor shattered under the impact. He was thrown to the ground, white smoke billowing from his shoulder.
"Free fire! It's a high-level aberrant!"
The officer let out a frantic roar.
In an instant, all the searchlights locked onto the altar. Five heavy machine guns opened fire simultaneously. The dense rain of bullets, like a silver wall, seemed intent on obliterating the ancient bronze door and the figure before it.
"Get down!" Lilith threw herself toward Kane.
She knew this thousand-year-old relic might be powerful, but she also understood the power of these modern weapons. These silver bullets weren't just physical damage; the high-voltage charges they carried could instantly dissolve a vampire's regenerative abilities.
Kane grabbed the back of Lilith's collar and lifted her like a cat.
"Calm down."
He pressed his right hand downward with force.
An overwhelming wave of dark energy exploded from beneath his feet. For a moment, the earth seemed to stop trembling. Then, with the altar at its center, the ground within a hundred-meter radius collapsed with a roar.
*Boom!*
The once-hard stone pavement and muddy ground turned into deadly quicksand. The heavy steam vehicles, engines roaring in despair, spun their wheels frantically but could not stop sliding into the pit.
The soldiers who had been preparing to charge lost their footing and tumbled into the mud.
Kane, still holding Lilith by the scruff, blurred and transformed into a thick, impenetrable cloud of black smoke, charging directly into the densest part of the soldier formation.
Lilith couldn't open her eyes against the wind. She only heard screams coming from all sides, along with the teeth-grinding sound of metal being forcibly twisted.
When she landed again, they were standing on top of an overturned steam off-road vehicle.
Kane's hand still held the back of her collar firmly, while his other hand gripped the throat of the guard officer.
One of the officer's goggles was shattered, revealing a bloodshot left eye filled with unprecedented fear. He frantically pressed the switch on his chainsword, but the weapon—normally capable of cutting through rebar—was now pinched between two of Kane's fingers.
"So this is your proud… weapon?" Kane looked at the vibrating saw teeth beneath his fingertips and pressed slightly.
*Crack.*
The fine steel chainsword was twisted like a fragile noodle into a pretzel.
"Devil… you are… aah—!" Before the officer could finish, Kane closed his fingers, crushed his throat, and tossed him casually into a nearby fire.
Lilith's feet touched the ground, and she immediately shook off Kane's hand.
She looked at the mess around her. Dozens of elite guards had been wiped out in less than a minute. There were burning vehicles, twisted metal, and wounded soldiers wailing in the mud.
"You killed them all." Lilith's voice was dry.
"It was their honor." Kane brushed nonexistent dust from his cuffs. His crimson eyes looked almost demonic in the firelight. "Nightshade, is this your so-called 'new era'? They've merely replaced spears with burning sticks."
"Shut up." Lilith suddenly crouched down, pressing her ear to the vibrating roof of the vehicle. "You have no idea what trouble you've caused. That was just the first patrol. Eden City's bell tower has already sounded—that's the highest alert level. In less than ten minutes, the Inner City's Hunters' Guild and the Vampire Council's enforcers will seal off every exit."
She pointed to the distant sky.
Three enormous steam airships were slowly rising from the direction of the clock tower. Suspended beneath their huge gondolas were heavy artillery pieces capable of leveling half the cemetery.
"If you want to be blown to ashes by those big things, then keep standing here striking your duke pose." Lilith grabbed Kane's shirt sleeve, her eyes fierce. "Follow me. I know a hidden passage to the abandoned sewers."
Kane looked at this girl who showed no reverence for him, a glint of amusement in his eyes.
"You have quite the nerve."
"My life is now tied to yours. I don't want to die." Lilith didn't waste words. She turned and crouched low, slipping into the rolling fog.
She knew this cemetery intimately. The position of every tombstone, the direction of every drainage ditch—all of it was imprinted in her mind.
They moved through the burning wreckage. Lilith was as agile as a young forest leopard, avoiding all open spaces that might expose them, leading Kane into a long-abandoned family mausoleum.
The stone door of the mausoleum stood half-open, filled with the stale smell of formaldehyde.
"Hurry!" Lilith pushed open a heavy stone coffin at the back of the mausoleum.
Beneath the coffin was not a skeleton, but a dark, damp flight of steps, emitting a foul, fishy odor.
"You expect me to crawl into that filthy place?" Kane frowned. As a vampire duke of extreme cleanliness and high nobility, the environment disgusted him physically.
"Better than being blown apart by artillery." Lilith jumped down first. In the darkness, she looked back; the light of a match illuminated her eyes. "Your Grace, put away your pride. In Eden City, the only noble etiquette is surviving."
Kane was silent for a moment, then finally stepped into that stinking darkness.
The moment they closed the stone coffin—
*BOOM!*
An earth-shattering explosion came from above.
The entire cemetery shook. It was a high-incendiary bomb dropped from the airship. The blazing flames instantly consumed everything around the altar. A sliver of red light from the molten magma seeped through the cracks of the stone coffin, sucking the air out of the tomb.
Lilith leaned against the cold well wall, listening to the explosions overhead, feeling the thorn pattern on her chest pounding wildly.
She turned her head to look at the man standing in the shadows.
"Welcome to Eden City, Lord Kane." She wiped the mud from her face and gave a self-mocking smile. "This is the hell we'll have to survive together."
Kane said nothing. He simply reached out and pressed his hand against Lilith's wrist, covered with red markings.
The icy touch made Lilith flinch involuntarily.
"Hell?" Kane's voice echoed through the dark pipe with a chilling certainty. "If I don't crush it underfoot, then yes, it's rather like hell."
From deep in the pipe came the rustle of rats scurrying.
Lilith fumbled in her bag and pulled out an emergency flashlight. She clicked it on. The thin beam illuminated the moss-covered brick walls ahead.
"Let's go. Before dawn, we need to find you a place to… feed." Lilith walked ahead, the flashlight shining on the sticky sewage at her feet. "You've slept for three thousand years. If you don't drink some blood, the next time we meet the Crimson Guard, I don't expect you to be able to crush a chainsword with your bare hands again."
Kane followed behind, his steps still light, not a trace of sewage sticking to him.
"Since when did a descendant of the Nightshade family start worrying about her master's appetite?"
"Because if you're too weak to walk, I'll have to carry you," Lilith replied without looking back. "And I really hate carrying extra weight."
In the darkness, a flash of blood-red flickered in Kane's eyes.
This abandoned graveyard keeper girl seemed far more interesting than he had imagined.
They crawled along the winding sewer for about two kilometers. From time to time, the heavy sound of machinery rumbled overhead—factories in Eden City's residential district working late shifts.
Finally, Lilith stopped beneath a rusted iron ladder.
She pushed open the manhole cover at the top, and a wave of smells hit her: cheap perfume,劣质酒精, and coal smoke.
This was the slum outside Eden City—"Gray Street."
An illegal zone the Crimson Guard itself was reluctant to enter.
Lilith climbed up first, then reached her hand down to Kane.
"Come on up, Duke. The blood here isn't very clean, but the advantage is that no one asks where it comes from."
Kane ignored her hand and leaped up in one bound, landing neatly in a pile of rotten vegetable leaves and discarded cardboard boxes.
He looked around.
In the narrow alley, neon signs of every color flickered in the thick fog. Broken electrical wires, like spiderwebs, crisscrossed between the dilapidated buildings on either side. In the distance came the sounds of a drunk vomiting and a woman screaming.
This was the world after three thousand years.
Kane tugged at the collar of his black shirt. His crimson pupils locked onto a burly, ugly human man staggering out of a tavern.
"Him." He took a step forward.
Lilith did not stop him. She just leaned against the wall, and by the dim light, began to clean the mud off her short dagger.
She knew that her own game had only just begun.