Arknights: The Holy Son's Leisurely Life — Chapter 11

Chapter 11: Close Quarters

The Slums of Lungmen existed entirely outside official jurisdiction. There was no household registration system, no census, and certainly no safety guarantees. This sprawling, chaotic outer ring served as a haven not only for the oppressed Infected, but for hardened criminals and syndicates who preferred the shadows over the neon-lit prosperity of the inner districts.

Because Lungmen was a highly developed commercial hub, merchants, dignitaries, and drifters from across Terra constantly flowed through its borders. This staggering population turnover made the city incredibly difficult to police. Even though the Lungmen Guard Department maintained strict entry and exit checkpoints, they could never fully stop the endless game of cat and mouse. Just like the underground arms dealers Lucian had dealt with a few days prior, wherever there was a demand, a black market would naturally rise to meet it.

There were countless methods to smuggle undocumented foreigners into the city. It was a mature, highly lucrative industry. Even reputable businesses like Penguin Logistics occasionally dabbled in such services. After all, who was to say living people could not be classified as cargo? As long as the delivery fee was paid, it fell within the scope of a logistics company’s operations.

Naturally, the vast majority of these smuggled individuals had no choice but to settle in the Slums. The L.G.D. turned a blind eye to the daily grind of the outer ring, only interfering when absolutely necessary. In return, the Slums maintained its own brutal system of checks and balances, ensuring that local disputes rarely spilled over into the pristine inner city. This was the absolute, unwritten rule of Lungmen. It was the sole reason the Slums had been allowed to exist as a gray area for decades. Those who understood the rules survived by them.

But in a place overflowing with desperate people, there were always bound to be a few who refused to play by the rules.

Right now, Lucian was experiencing the consequences of those broken rules firsthand.

Deep inside a claustrophobic alleyway formed by haphazardly stacked illegal housing—a gap so narrow it barely allowed a single person to squeeze through—two figures were pressed flush against one another. From the tips of their noses down to their boots, virtually every inch of their bodies was in contact. To an oblivious bystander, they might have looked like a young couple sharing a deeply intimate embrace in the dark.

But there was absolutely zero warmth between them. Only the biting chill of lethal intent.

A jagged dagger rested flush against Lucian’s neck, hovering a mere fraction of a millimeter from his carotid artery. In a trashy romance novel, this kind of extreme physical proximity would guarantee the dagger-wielding woman became his girlfriend by the end of the chapter. Reality, however, was far less romantic. Lucian had his left hand resting casually on the woman’s waist, while his right hand jammed the cold muzzle of a pistol directly into her abdomen.

“Personal space is a virtue, Miss,” Lucian smiled amiably, his tone entirely conversational. “If you don’t want your spine shattered by a hollow-point bullet, condemning you to a wheelchair and a lifetime of needing someone to help you use the bathroom at such a young age, how about we both step back?”

The red-haired woman, half of her face concealed beneath a heavy hood, glared at him with icy, feral eyes. She spat a harsh Ursus curse. “Before you pull that trigger, I will perform a full amputation on you. The kind that removes everything above the collarbone.”

“It seems you don’t understand just how fast a Sankta can draw and fire,” Lucian replied.

“Then do you understand how fast a Lupo can slit a throat?” she countered, the hairs on her wolf tail bristling with raw hostility.

Lucian nodded slowly. “I actually do.”

The killing intent rolling off the red-haired Lupo was suffocating. She was a wolf-kin, much like Texas, but her aggression was entirely untamed.

How had a simple morning turned into a life-or-death standoff? To understand that, one had to rewind a few hours.

Earlier that day, Lucian had heard from Xiao Ling that a few of the neighborhood children had failed to show up at the compound. While attendance wasn’t mandatory—if parents could provide for their kids, that was always the better outcome—Lucian felt a nagging sense of suspicion.

The child Xiao Ling had specifically mentioned was a little Ursus girl nicknamed ‘Little Bear’, who had recently fled to Lungmen with her mother. Both of them were Infected. The Ursus Empire’s brutal persecution of the Infected was infamous across Terra, and Little Bear’s father had already been worked to death in a forced labor mine. Escaping to Lungmen must have required a miracle, but the harrowing journey had left the mother with severe psychological trauma. When they first arrived in the Slums, she was convinced the city would be just as cruel as Ursus, treating everyone who approached them with hysterical paranoia.

Little Bear, possessing the resilience of youth, adapted much faster. She accepted Xiao Ling’s invitation to the compound and even brought warm food back to her mother every evening.

For a deeply traumatized woman to suddenly pack up and tell her daughter, “We can go home,” meant something was horribly wrong. The Slums were crawling with predators. Fearing the mother and daughter had been lured into a human trafficking ring or a cult, Lucian decided to investigate the address Xiao Ling provided.

When he arrived at the dilapidated apartment block, he immediately spotted trouble.

Several figures lingered near the entrance, all wearing eerie, pale white masks. The masks were crudely fashioned, featuring only two hollow holes for vision. One glance was enough to tell Lucian these were not ordinary street thugs.

Concealing his presence, Lucian slipped into the shadows of a nearby corner, pricking his ears to catch their hushed conversation.

“How many people have been gathered?” the first masked man asked, his voice muffled. “This isn’t all of them in the room, is it?”

“Crownslayer said to act covertly and not to publicize our presence on a large scale,” the second man replied. “We only found a few compatriots who just managed to escape from Ursus.”

“Huh? That’s it? But these are mostly women and children who just crawled out of the mines. Are we seriously going to make them fight?”

“There’s no other way, this is Talulah’s direct order,” the second man insisted, his tone hardening. “Even just planting a seed is good enough. We need to let places where the Infected gather know of our existence. As long as we lay the groundwork, once the Chernobog operation is successful, a continuous stream of compatriots from all over the world will flock to our banner! This is for the greater good!”

The first man sighed. “It’s good… but they just barely made it out of Chernobog alive. And now we’re going to… never mind. You’re right. This is necessary.”

‘Chernobog, huh…’ Lucian thought, his eyes narrowing in the darkness.

Chernobog was a massive mobile city in Ursus, currently the epicenter of a violent uprising led by an extremist Infected organization known as the Reunion Movement. Lucian had never crossed paths with them before, but judging by their iconic masks and fanatical rhetoric, these men were undoubtedly Reunion operatives.

What truly alarmed him was their terrifying level of initiative. For a terrorist cell to possess the foresight to infiltrate foreign cities and radicalize local Infected populations meant they were not just throwing a tantrum in Ursus. They intended to set the entire world ablaze.

And whatever this ‘Chernobog operation’was, it was clearly designed to be a global catalyst.’Not simple at all, Reunion,’ Lucian mused, committing the organization’s name to memory. Having gathered enough intelligence, he prepared to slip away and contact the L.G.D.

It was in that exact fraction of a second that the hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

One moment, the alley behind him was entirely empty. The next, a lethal strike was hurtling toward his spine.

Before Lucian’s conscious mind could even process the threat, his battle-hardened instincts took over. His halo flared to life, casting a brilliant golden glow across the damp brick walls, accompanied by the sudden manifestation of his glowing light wings.

A crimson, crystalline blade materialized out of thin air, clashing violently against the assassin’s descending dagger in a shower of sparks.

The red-haired Lupo’s eyes widened in shock beneath her hood. “An Originium weapon? Why would an Angel use a blade?”

“Nobody ever wrote a law saying Angels are strictly limited to firearms,” Lucian replied smoothly.

Pivoting on his heel, he threw a vicious elbow aimed straight at the woman’s face. Simultaneously, his Originium Arts flared, and his free hand drew the compact pistol from his holster in a blur of motion.

But this red-haired she-wolf was no amateur. Trapped in the suffocating confines of the alley, she reacted with terrifying speed, dragging Lucian into a brutal close-quarters duel. She raised her forearm to deflect his elbow strike, twisting her wrist to drive her dagger toward his exposed bicep.

However, the crimson Originium blade floating beside Lucian possessed a will of its own. It darted through the air, parrying her strike with flawless precision and forcing a frustrated snarl from her lips.

Lucian deliberately held his fire. Instead, he stepped into her guard, grabbing her shoulder with his left hand and wrapping his arm around her waist. He drove the barrel of his pistol hard against her stomach, pinning her in place.

Which brought them exactly to their current stalemate.

“You’re not going to shoot?” the female assassin taunted. Despite being held at gunpoint, her killing intent remained razor-sharp. “I’ve heard about Lungmen’s unwritten rules. You can fight, you can bleed, but you never use live ammunition in the Slums. Do those pathetic rules still apply when you’re facing a terrorist?”

Lucian adjusted the angle of the muzzle slightly. “I will pull the trigger if it becomes necessary. But if a problem can be solved with a blade, wouldn’t wasting a bullet be a shame?”

With a mere thought, the crimson Originium blade hovering beside him shifted. Forged from pure, condensed energy and controlled entirely by his brainwaves, the floating sword glided through the air and pressed its razor-sharp edge directly against the red-haired woman’s throat.

“You have the right to remain silent,” Lucian whispered, his calm voice echoing in the narrow alley. “But everything you say will be used as evidence against you. Please take a moment to understand exactly whose territory you are standing on, Miss.”