"Dad!!"
The moment Ch'en Hui-chieh cried out, every Ursus man in the van went on alert.
"What the hell? Why didn't you gag the brat?"
"She looked completely out cold, so I didn't bother."
"If this little wretch starts crying and screaming later, that's on you!"
"..."
At first, when they realized only Ch'en Hui-chieh had woken up, the Ursus men did not think much of it.
That was, until a voice came over from the other van through the car radio.
"Boss, bad news! Someone's catching up!"
The faces of the Ursus men in the van changed instantly.
"What?!"
"How is that possible?"
"This is the lower city, isn't it?"
"..."
Petrov's face darkened as he silenced the noise inside the van.
"Shut up, all of you!"
Then he asked, "How many pursuers?"
"O-Only one."
"Hm?"
For a moment, Petrov suspected his subordinate was messing with him.
One person counted as a pursuer?
"B-But he's insanely fast!"
A panicked voice came from the other side of the vehicle communicator.
"H-He's almost caught up to us!"
Petrov immediately rolled down the window and leaned out to look behind them.
Sure enough, trailing tightly behind their two vans was a single figure, flickering in and out of sight through the darkness.
Petrov's pupils contracted at once.
Damn it, could his luck really be this rotten? Had he seriously run into one of Yan's Imperial Guards in the lower city—one who just so happened not to be at Wei Yenwu's side and was out on assignment?
Their beat-up van was already doing eighty kilometers an hour!
If you could compete with a car on foot, were you an Imperial Guard—or one of Kazimierz's Silverlance Pegasi?
"Push it to top speed!"
Dropping back into his seat, Petrov roared at the driver.
"Tell Rourke and the others to hold that bastard off. We've got the speed advantage—if he dares keep chasing, fill him with bolts!"
His heart had lurched in panic for a moment, but once he sat back down, the battlefield-hardened nerve he had forged through war forced him back into calm.
"Once we hit the overpass, it's over for him. These streets in the residential district are too cramped. The moment the terrain opens up, there's no way two legs beat four wheels."
So what if it really was a Yan Imperial Guard?
This was no longer an age in which a single man could rampage by personal strength alone. The power of the collective was not something an individual could defy. No matter how strong one person was, could he really outmatch a high-speed warship?
He had seen fast enemies before.
Those descendants of the Kuranta and Hippogryph clans—weren't they all fast too?
In the end, hadn't they fallen just the same beneath arrows?
And sure enough—
after the vans accelerated, another two minutes passed, and the figure behind them visibly began to slow.
"Hah... hah..."
Behind the van, Chen Zhaoming slashed aside a crossbow bolt flying toward him. After sustaining a full two-minute sprint at near-maximum speed, even he was beginning to feel the strain.
"Is this what happens when you don't train properly?"
He had kept practicing swordsmanship, yes, but in terms of physical conditioning, he was really only at the level of light aerobic training. His short-term explosiveness was good, but his endurance was another story.
How was a person supposed to outrun a machine?
He could probably still manage if he just trailed them from a distance, but if he kept pressing the chase, then even if they stopped, how much strength he'd have left to fight was hard to say.
"Got it."
Suddenly, Chen Zhaoming noticed that the buildings just one street over were all brightly lit.
Only then did he realize that, in the course of the chase, he had actually run all the way to the largest nightlife district in Sector 6.
Bars. Dance halls. Nightclubs...
After a long day of work, plenty of young people came here to unwind. And naturally, a large number of gang members mingled among them as well.
If he shouted here that the Rat King's daughter had been kidnapped, hundreds of gangsters would come pouring out at once.
Unfortunately—
that was not what he needed.
He wasn't looking to call in backup for a brawl. By the time those gangsters got moving, the Ursus men would already be long gone.
What he needed was a vehicle.
Chen Zhaoming ran across the rooftops, his gaze locked on the direction the Ursus men were fleeing while he searched for any vehicle he could commandeer on the spot.
Then suddenly, he spotted one:
a two-wheeled ride.
You'll do.
Leaping straight down from the sixth floor of a building, Chen Zhaoming nearly scared a group of gangsters drinking and eating skewers out of their skins. He sprinted to a sleek black bike, grabbed the middle-aged man on it—a guy with a thick gold chain around his neck and tattoos down both arms—and threw him right to the ground.
Then he blurted out the first thing that came to mind:
"Lungmen Guard Department! Pursuing criminals—borrowing your vehicle! Go collect it from the Guard Department tomorrow!"
With that, he twisted the throttle—
VROOOOM!
—and shot off, leaving the man standing there in stunned silence.
Half a second later—
"May your whole family drop dead! Somebody actually stole Brother Fugui's bike? Boys, stop him!"
The middle-aged man's shout was like kicking a hornet's nest.
In an instant, the entire nightlife strip boiled over as hundreds of toughs came flooding out. They were all low-level gangsters working security in the district—but no matter how fast they were, they couldn't possibly match Chen Zhaoming with a vehicle under him.
The whole nightlife street was only a few hundred meters long to begin with. By the time the man had finished shouting, Chen Zhaoming had already covered half the distance.
At a moment like this, there was no way Chen Zhaoming could stop and explain himself. Every extra second he lost could mean losing the Ursus men entirely.
But what Chen Zhaoming absolutely did not expect was this—
Just as he was about to break free of the street, a hand suddenly caught the rear grab bar of the bike.
Even though the two-wheeled vehicle was already close to a hundred kilometers per hour, it failed to break free from that single hand.
It dragged forward for several dozen more meters. Had Chen Zhaoming not forcibly wrestled the bike under control, the whole thing might have flipped over on the spot.
Then a voice sounded from behind him—
somewhat unfamiliar, and yet a little familiar too.
"Hey. Stealing isn't a good habit."
Chen Zhaoming twisted around—
and found himself staring at a face he had seen only that morning.
"You?"
"Boss Chen?!"
Who else standing there could it be but Hoshiguma?
Chen Zhaoming had not expected to run into Hoshiguma at a time like this. And Hoshiguma herself had never imagined that the guy who had stolen a gang boss's bike right in front of several hundred people would turn out to be the shop owner who had shown her kindness that very morning.
"There's no time to explain. I've got an emergency—please don't stop me!"
Chen Zhaoming looked at Hoshiguma with a splitting headache.
Had they met somewhere else, at some other time, he would not have minded sitting down for a drink with her to build some rapport.
But right now he was chasing kidnappers!
Every second wasted meant the kidnappers gaining dozens more meters. If he lost them now, finding them again would be far harder.
If it had been an ordinary person, Chen Zhaoming could simply have knocked them out and moved on.
But with the physical strength Hoshiguma had just displayed—stopping a hundred-kilometer-per-hour charge with one hand—
By the time he beat her down, the kidnappers would be long gone and the whole thing would be over.
"Fine!"
Thankfully, Hoshiguma was not the stubborn type. The moment she heard the urgency in his tone, she let go at once.
"My thanks! Next time, fishball noodles are on me!"
Throwing her a grateful glance, Chen Zhaoming gunned the engine again.
And then—
he felt the back of the bike sink.
A pair of long, strong legs swung up and straddled the rear seat.
Chen Zhaoming: "???"
...
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