Elara's question hung in the air, wrapped in the celestial light of the Stone and her own sharp ambition. She watched Zhèn's face, a masterpiece of open-hearted simplicity, for any sign of suspicion.
The boy's eyes widened, not with greed, but with the excitement of a pup offered a grand adventure. "Yeah!" he exclaimed, a bright grin breaking across his face. "That sounds fun! Like a treasure hunt Master Hanzo would tell stories about!"
Fun. Elara almost laughed. To him, this was a game. To her, it was the culmination of two years of desperate searching, of dead ends and near-fatal encounters in the underworld of relic hunters. She nodded, her smile tight. "Good. Then we should go. Now. The... the energy from the Stone, others might have felt it too."
She didn't wait for a reply. She strode to the shrine, hesitated for only a second under Zhèn's watchful eye, then carefully, reverently, wrapped the glowing Celestial Stone in its silk cushion and placed it in a padded compartment of her backpack. The light was muted, but not extinguished. A faint azure glow seeped through the fabric.
"Come on, country bumpkin," she said, heading for the door. "Your first trip to the city starts with a walk. My car's... indisposed."
Zhèn looked around his home, the only one he'd ever known. He bowed once to the empty shrine, a silent promise to his master. Then, with nothing but the clothes on his back and a heart full of naive courage, he followed Elara Kensington down the mountain.
The wrecked car was a sorry sight. With another display of terrifying, casual strength, Zhèn righted it and, at Elara's frantic direction, helped rock it free from the thicket. It was drivable in the loosest sense, the hood was crumpled, one headlight winked blindly, and a persistent grinding noise sang a duet with the engine. But it moved.
Zhèn climbed into the passenger seat, marveling at the cracked leather, the glowing dashboard lights, the strange, citrus-chemical scent of it all. "It's like a tiny, smelly house!" he declared.
Elara smirked, putting the car in gear. "Just wait."
The journey down the winding mountain road was Zhèn's first lesson in velocity. He gripped the door handle, his knuckles white, as the world became a dizzying blur of green and grey. Yet, as his initial terror subsided, wonder took its place. He pointed at everything: a distant hawk, a rushing river far below, a cluster of power lines.
"Master Hanzo said cities have buildings that touch the clouds," he said, his voice full of awe. "Is that true?"
"Some of them try," Elara said, her eyes flicking between the damaged road and her unusual passenger. "Tell me about your training. How does someone get... like you?" She gestured vaguely at his physique.
Zhèn shrugged. "Every day. Meditation at dawn. Forms until the sun is high. Conditioning. Master said strength is a river, it must flow from a calm source, or it becomes a flood that destroys everything."
"Poetic," Elara muttered, her tone implying impractical. "And the Stone? He just... left it to you?"
"It is my duty," Zhèn said, his voice firming. "To protect it, and to use its yearly wish for the good of Moonshadow Pass. Last full moon, I wished for Old Man Feng's apple trees to recover from the blight." He said it with the gravity of a statesman sealing a treaty.
Elara stared. She had met collectors who would murder for a single shard, corporations that would bankrupt nations for the power he described. And he'd used it on apple trees. It was staggering. It was also the perfect cover. No one would look for the completed Celestial Stone in the hands of a monastic fruit-tree enthusiast.
She was about to probe further when her eyes caught a flicker of movement in the rearview mirror, a sleek, metallic shape dropping silently from the clear sky. It wasn't a bird.
"Zhèn, hold on—" she began, but it was too late.
With a heavy THUMP that shook the car on its axles, a figure landed directly in the center of the road twenty meters ahead, crouched in a three-point stance. It straightened, revealing a humanoid robot of brushed steel. Its head was a smooth, featureless oval save for a single red scanning lens. Where its right hand should have been was a matte-black rotary barrel, already spinning up with a high-pitched whine.
A synthesized voice, flat and without inflection, grated from a speaker grille on its chest. "Cease locomotion. Hand over the Celestial Stone artifact. Compliance will spare your organic forms."
Zhèn leaned forward, fascinated. "Whoa! A metal man!"
"Idiot!" Elara hissed, slamming the brakes. The car screeched to a halt, the smell of burnt rubber joining the mountain air. "That's not a man! What do you think you're doing, talking to it? It's gonna get us killed!"
"Non-compliance noted."
The robot's gun-arm snapped up. There was no flare, just a staccato BRRRRT of compressed air and searing light. A trio of crystalline projectiles, glowing with contained plasma, streaked towards Zhèn's side of the car.
Time seemed to slow for Elara. She saw the bolts, the certain death. She flinched, waiting for the impact.
It never came.
Zhèn's arm was a blur. He didn't dodge. He swatted. The back of his hand connected with the first projectile. There was a sound like a gong being struck, and the plasma bolt ricocheted into the second, causing a mid-air detonation that shattered the third. The concussion rocked the car, and the shockwave hit the robot, staggering it back a step. Its red lens flickered.
Before the echo died, Zhèn was out of the car. He crossed the distance in two bounding strides. The robot recalibrated, swinging its arm toward him. Zhèn stepped inside its reach, grabbed the gun-arm at the wrist and elbow, and with a sharp, twisting torque, wrenched it from its socket in a shower of sparks. He swung the severed limb like a club, caving in the robot's featureless head with a deafening CRUNCH. It sparked, jerked, and collapsed into a heap of inert metal.
Silence, broken only by the ticking of cooling metal and Elara's ragged breathing.
Zhèn poked the wreckage with his foot. "Whoa," he said again, this time with dawning understanding. "It was a machine. Like a... a very rude tool."
Elara stared, her mind reeling. She'd seen the bullet bounce off him. But this... this was different. This was active, conscious, impossible speed and power. The calculations in her head spun faster. He wasn't just handy. He was a tactical asset of unimaginable value.
"Don't just stand there admiring your work!" she yelled, her voice cracking. "Hurry up and get back in! If there's one, there are more!"
She was right. As Zhèn climbed back into the passenger seat, a low hum filled the air. From over the ridge line, three more identical silhouettes descended, their gun-arms already tracking the car.
"Go, go, GO!" Zhèn shouted, surprisingly into the spirit of things.
Elara stomped on the accelerator. The battered car lurched forward, swerving around the smoldering wreckage and racing down the mountain. In the mirror, she saw the robots give chase, not running, but using jet boosters in their feet to glide swiftly after them.
The road leveled out, leaving the protective cover of the trees for open, rolling foothills. The robots were gaining, their humming an ominous drone. Ahead, the landscape was barren save for a single, lonely structure, a weathered, two-story farmhouse standing defiantly in a sea of overgrown grass. It looked abandoned, a relic of a time before the mountains were so quiet.
Elara's eyes darted between the house and a small, sleek device she pulled from her pocket. It was a scanner, its screen a mess of topographic lines and a single, pulsating dot. The dot was directly ahead. Right on top of the farmhouse.
"The next shard," she breathed, a desperate hope cutting through her fear. "It's in there!"
"It's a house!" Zhèn said, as if identifying a rare animal.
"It's cover!" Elara corrected, wrenching the wheel. The car left the road, bouncing violently across the field, heading straight for the derelict building. The humming behind them grew louder, closer. A plasma bolt sizzled past the rear bumper, setting a patch of dry grass ablaze.
They skidded to a halt beside a sagging porch. Elara killed the engine, grabbing her backpack. "Inside! Now!"
Together, they burst through the creaking front door, leaving the daylight behind for the dusty, tomb-like silence of the abandoned house. The hum of the pursuing robots was just outside, as Elara's scanner glowed, pointing its insistent pulse deeper into the shadows. The hunt had found them, and the next piece of the puzzle waited in the gloom.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡF4t5Khtz7Z
and then Add to home screen.