Dragon Raja 3; Chapter 273: A Friend of Justice (9)

Dragon Raja 3

“Burning them alive, huh? Not a bad idea, but they can still escape. If they can enter through the elevator doors, they can leave the same way,” Caesar said.

Chisei pointed above the elevator doors. “There’s a steel beam supporting the doorframe. We can place C4 there, and the explosion will be strong enough to sever it. The wall will collapse, and they’ll have no way out.”

Chu Zihang calculated quickly. “With a delayed fuse, the explosion could occur twenty seconds after detonation—enough time for us to escape into the elevator shaft and get out of the blast range.”

Caesar thought it over. “But we’ll need to lure the Death Servitors deeper into the hall. The more concentrated they are, the better the fire will work.”

“No problem. I’ll be the bait,” Chisei said.

Meanwhile, Lu Mingfei and Uesugi Erii had jumped onto the rooftop. The work elevator had brought them up there and then stopped working, as if their journey had come to an end.

The rooftop was cluttered with pipes and water tanks, but there was no one else in sight. The iron doors leading back into the building were all sealed. Lu Mingfei kicked the doors repeatedly, but aside from hurting his foot, nothing happened. They were trapped, hundreds of meters in the air, with no way up or down and surrounded by a raging storm.

Lu Mingfei pulled out his phone to try and call for help from Lu Mingze, but… damn! The phone had arrived with only a tiny bit of battery left, and now it had finally died.

Just as Lu Mingfei was panicking, the iron doors began to shake. Loud banging came from inside the stairwell, followed by the deafening sound of gunfire. Lu Mingfei staggered back in fear—clearly, someone inside was trying to break through the doors and get onto the rooftop. No doubt it was people from the Yamata no Orochi clan, and while the doors were sturdy, it was only a matter of time before they managed to open them.

He desperately hoped they wouldn’t resort to torture. He’d heard that modern intelligence agencies didn’t use torture anymore, relying on interrogation drugs that made people spill everything they knew. Lu Mingfei thought if Yamata no Orochi gave him one of those drugs, it would be fine—he could reveal his master and senior’s whereabouts without feeling too guilty. After all, they were skilled fighters, bound to escape and come rescue him later.

He turned to look at Uesugi Erii. She was standing at the edge of the rooftop, gazing out at the city in the midst of the storm. The earthquake seemed to have subsided, and buildings that had lost power were lighting up again. Police cars, with their lights flashing, sped down the elevated highways. The city remained magnificent, shrouded only in a veil of rain.

Her silhouette in the rain was breathtakingly beautiful, with water droplets clinging to her long eyelashes and her delicate nose. Her clear eyes reflected the entire city.

Lu Mingfei thought to himself, Your plan to run away has totally fallen through! In a moment, they’ll break in and capture us. They’ll whip me with a wet leather strap and lock you back in that strange room. You won’t even get to drink that New Arakaki-endorsed orange juice or chat with me using that little notebook… Could you at least show some disappointment so I can feel like you’re a normal person?

“美しい (Utsukushii),” Erii wrote in the palm of his hand with her finger.

The word in Japanese meant “beautiful.” Erii was saying the city was beautiful. After she finished writing, she continued gazing at the rain-soaked city, shading her eyes with her hand and standing on her toes as she pointed to the distant golden Tokyo Skytree for Lu Mingfei to see.

Lu Mingfei suddenly understood. She wasn’t unaware that her plan to run away had failed; she just wanted to make the most of her time to take one last look at the city. She had always lived in this city but rarely had the chance to freely admire it. Her plan to run away didn’t have a destination; she just wanted to keep going further and further until she got caught. That’s why she wasn’t disappointed. For her, ever since she had stepped onto the work elevator, this journey had already been worth it.

There was an old saying, something like, “The world is an inn where we rest for the night.” Everyone spends their life running a race with death. It tries to catch you, while you run to see a more beautiful world. Even though you know it will eventually catch up, as long as you can still breathe, you’ll run as fast as you can.

“That’s the Tokyo Skytree, the tallest radio tower in the world. You can go up there, and they say the view of Tokyo from the top is the most beautiful,” Lu Mingfei said.

He handed Erii the hot coffee he had just bought. In moments like this, hot coffee was the best thing—it warmed your hands and made it feel like you were holding the whole world. That New Arakaki-endorsed orange juice had nothing on it!

Erii cupped the warm coffee in her hands and took small sips, with white steam drifting in front of her nose.

Lu Mingfei suddenly found this girl quite likeable. She had an amazing figure, was obedient, and just like him, enjoyed looking out over the city from rooftops… If only she weren’t a monster.

He took off his trench coat and draped it over Erii’s shoulders, lifting the collar to shield her from the cold. He looked at her for a long time with deep emotion, hesitating before finally blurting out what he had been holding in for a while: “Hey… when your family catches us, could you plead for me? I swear I wasn’t trying to kidnap you…”

His face was a picture of misery, but his sincerity was genuine.

The iron door was shaking violently as if the people inside had found a heavy tool and were trying to break it down. Erii nodded but didn’t even look at him. Lu Mingfei wasn’t sure if this monstrous girl even understood the concept of “pleading,” but he could only hope she did.

He sighed, giving up on thinking about it any further.

Tokyo in the rain was unbelievably beautiful but also a bit lonely. In every brightly lit window, there were families relieved that the earthquake had passed. Fathers kept an eye on the earthquake warnings on TV, mothers kissed their children’s foreheads and told them to go to bed, gamers resumed their progress from before the quake, and girls applied face masks while chatting with their boyfriends about how scary the quake had been. Ahead of them, a sheer cliff loomed, with a chasm separating them from those bright windows. Erii stood on this side of the rain, her eyes faintly reflecting longing. But on the other side, the people in those windows had no idea someone longed so deeply for their ordinary lives.

Suddenly, blinding lights and a loud roar descended from the sky. A black shadow loomed over Lu Mingfei and Erii. A black helicopter hovered overhead, its steel rotors cutting through the torrential rain. Painted on its body were a golden cherry blossom emblem and the letters “MPD.”

MPD stood for “Metropolitan Police Department.” It was a Tokyo Metropolitan Police helicopter.

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