Chapter Seven: Sierra Strikes Back

Tang Yi appeared in the conference room!

“Alright, now that everyone’s here, let’s start the meeting!” Oriman announced.

“Damn, I’m actually the last one to arrive! That’s just not fair!” Tang Yi glanced around the room and saw Liu Shanquan winking at him.

Eight hours earlier, Sela had brazenly appeared in the northern Kaizhou. This time, not only did he kill people, but for some unknown reason, he abducted many others, declaring that he would now launch a fierce counterattack against the peacekeeping forces!

Five hours ago, the special task force of the peacekeepers had assembled—excluding Tang Yi, who was in Egypt at the time.

Three hours ago, the fifteen members of the task force arrived in northern Kaizhou.

They encountered Sela at a leisure plaza. Without a word, Sela unleashed a dozen bolts of lightning. Before Claire and the others could react, trash cans, benches, and anything else Sela could move around the plaza were hurled at them, forcing all fifteen back dozens of meters!

When Sela realized Tang Yi hadn’t arrived, he arrogantly flew atop a statue’s head and, pointing at the group surrounding him, said, “You’ve always hounded me relentlessly. Today, right here, you’ll pay the price you deserve!”

With that, Sela attacked, but the task force was ready and by no means pushovers. They fought back fiercely. Lightning flashed, thunder roared, and rain of fire fell in torrents.

Sela suddenly closed in to within twenty meters of Liu Shanquan, freezing Liu’s body in place. His abilities also failed to work properly. Luckily, Liu had long practiced using his powers without physical movement. With a thought, five jets of water shot from the ground between him and Sela, angled sharply toward Sela, catching him off guard. Sela struck with his palm, blasting Liu Shanquan fifty or sixty meters away. As Liu rolled to the ground, a gentle fountain surged up to cushion his fall, sparing him injury.

Claire, Nair, and the others charged in, guns raised to fire, but Sela immobilized them. Yet before Sela could act, Ludi arrived beside Claire and the rest, neutralizing the effect on them, forcing Sela to retreat. He had no wish to have his powers suppressed by Ludi; in that case, he’d be nothing but a sitting duck.

Sela’s immobilization ability had a radius of around forty meters, as did Ludi’s power, resulting in a stalemate: whenever Sela approached, the others were frozen, but Ludi would move in to free them, prompting Sela to withdraw. After a dozen rounds of this, both sides settled on bombarding each other from fifty meters apart.

With a sinister grin, Sela conjured a blue spherical energy shield. No matter if it was Chris’s shadows or Liu’s fountains, anything that touched the shield bounced off instantly—it was like a turtle shell. Meanwhile, Sela could still launch attacks from inside, leaving the task force battered and exhausted. Back and forth, the battle raged for two hours; Sela’s strength was monstrous, but still human. After two hours, his shield began to waver. Sela knew that if this dragged on, he’d be worn down and defeated.

With a roar, Sela unleashed a wave of energy straight at Liu Shanquan and the others. Instantly, the ground shook and split open—a hundred meters long, fifty meters wide—sending Liu and the rest flying a hundred meters away.

With that, Sela departed with a wave of his hand, leaving behind a light, taunting message: “Come to the nuclear power plant tomorrow, or bear the consequences.”

After Oriman briefly explained the situation to Tang Yi, he let out a long sigh.

“At this point, only you have the ability to capture Sela, so you must kill him immediately upon capture. It’s the only way to ensure he won’t threaten society any longer,” Oriman said gravely.

“Well… capturing Sela isn’t a problem, but… I’ve never killed anyone before. I’m afraid I won’t be able to do it, to be honest,” Tang Yi replied awkwardly.

Inside the Kaizhou nuclear power plant—

A dozen people were tied up atop the nuclear reactor; all had been abducted by Sela. Each had a sensor switch pressed to their back. If any switch was triggered or released, the TNT and G4 high-performance explosives buried inside the reactor and throughout the plant would detonate immediately.

Sela sealed their mouths with duct tape, checked his arrangements one last time, and, satisfied that all was in order, left the nuclear plant.

“I see this is truly difficult for you. In that case, just capture Sela and let us handle the rest,” Oriman suggested, finding a solution Tang Yi could accept.

It was undeniable—asking a college graduate, whose hands had never been stained with blood, to commit murder was as daunting as scaling Everest barehanded, at least for a regular human without superpowers.

“No problem, I’ll hand Sela over to you at once,” Tang Yi replied, relieved.

Truth be told, though he knew all the evil Sela had committed, Tang Yi couldn’t bring himself to kill him personally. Whether he’d ever be able to was an open question. Ever since gaining his powers, Tang Yi had aspired to become a figure like Chu Liuxiang, living a life without taking a single life. He knew it was a difficult wish, but it was his code.

Sela had barely left the nuclear plant’s entrance before vanishing—he hadn’t disappeared on his own, but was snatched away by Tang Yi’s space-time powers.

Peacekeeper Headquarters, Interrogation Room—

Sela was strapped to a special interrogation chair, forged from unique steel, resembling the regal thrones of Western courts. A circular hood hung from the rectangular backrest, covering Sela’s forehead and half his eyes. The armrests were oversized, each of Sela’s forearms secured by three steel rings. The four steel legs of the chair were wired to hundreds of thousands of volts of high-voltage electricity.

The interrogation room was small, barely over ten square meters. Ludi stood by the glass window, expressionless, clearly exerting himself to suppress Sela’s powers. Sela was so formidable that even after receiving ten times the normal dose of power-suppressing drugs, he could still partially resist Ludi’s suppression.

Originally, after capturing Sela, Oriman had decided to execute him immediately by electrocution. However, upon hearing Tang Yi’s report that the nuclear plant was rigged with a massive amount of explosives, and wanting to ensure nothing was overlooked, they had to interrogate Sela. Unfortunately, Sela was immune to threats and torture, unafraid of death, determined to drag them all down with him.

“What? This Sela is ruthless—no, he’s long since lost all humanity. Outrageous!” Oriman was beside himself with anger.

The bomb disposal experts said there was no guarantee they could safely and completely defuse the explosives. Without absolute certainty, a nuclear plant explosion would be catastrophic. They also warned that Sela had likely installed double-circuit, multi-stage bombs—which meant even if they dismantled the outer layer, the inner bomb would detonate immediately.

After hearing the experts’ explanation, Tang Yi fell into deep thought, then walked over to Ludi and whispered something. Fixing his gaze on Sela, Tang Yi watched as Sela’s face turned pale and cold sweat broke out on his brow. Ludi remained expressionless, though his brow furrowed. Tang Yi’s own face began to flush. After several minutes, Sela’s complexion slowly returned to normal, but his eyes became dull.

The combined effort of Tang Yi and Ludi finally suppressed Sela’s powers completely, preventing him from resisting Tang Yi’s mind-reading. After reading Sela’s thoughts, Tang Yi was shocked, gasping sharply.

“What’s wrong, Tang Yi?” Liu Shanquan, hearing Tang Yi’s gasp, came over to ask.

“This Sela is vicious beyond belief. The bombs are linked to the reactor; whether you dismantle them or not, they’ll explode. And he’s planted over a dozen timed bombs as well. I have to go and remove them immediately, or… well, you know the consequences! Old Liu, please tell Oriman,” Tang Yi said, then entered a time rift, freezing everything around him.

In an instant, Tang Yi arrived at the nuclear plant, swiftly transported the abducted people to peacekeeper headquarters, and dismantled all the timed bombs Sela had set, tossing them and the reactor’s core explosives into the Pacific Ocean. Afterward, he stood dazedly before the reactor. It had already detonated, though time was still frozen, so it wasn’t apparent yet. Tang Yi knew that as soon as he returned to the normal timeline, he’d witness the explosion. He paced anxiously around the massive reactor—at least as large as a villa, five or six stories tall. No matter where he threw it on Earth, its explosion would bring catastrophic consequences.

Tang Yi thought of tossing it into outer space, but he couldn’t do so while time was stopped. In his frozen-time state, only his time-travel powers worked—none of his other abilities. And his time-travel powers couldn’t move something as massive as the reactor; even if he could, he couldn’t survive in space, not even for a second. In this moment, Tang Yi was just an ordinary man.

This left him frustrated. He tried countless ideas, none of them workable. At a loss, he fetched an office chair and a pack of sodas, sat sipping cola as he stared at the reactor in a stupor.

Finishing a can, he crushed it and tossed it toward a trash can. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of the circular opening—and inspiration struck.

“Ha! That’s it. Piece of cake—solved in a flash!” Tang Yi cried out in excitement, having found his solution.

After a quick round of measurements and calculations, Tang Yi positioned himself a hundred meters from the reactor, snapped back to the normal time flow, and instantly conjured a hundred-meter-diameter black hole that engulfed the reactor just as it began to explode. The reactor disintegrated as it was swallowed by the black hole, along with the entire nuclear plant, debris and all.

When Liu Shanquan, Claire, and the others arrived, they found nothing but a wasteland—no trace of Tang Yi anywhere.

“Cough, cough… Ptooey! Why am I so unlucky? Sent elsewhere again—who knows what strange place this is now?” Tang Yi checked the source of his powers—everything was fine. He tested his abilities: still able to run, leap, and fly. He summoned a fist-sized rock and crushed it to powder.

“Good, good. As long as I don’t lose my powers, I can go anywhere. Hahaha…”

His laughter startled the birds in the forest, and with a great flutter, they took flight.

It turned out that, after Tang Yi released the black hole, the reactor’s explosion inside it strengthened the black hole’s energy. Originally, the black hole wasn’t enough to pierce a passage between universes, but the added energy did just that, and Tang Yi, caught off guard, was sucked through. He plummeted from a hundred meters up, snapped seven or eight massive trees in half, rolled fifty or sixty meters down a slope, and ended up with a mouthful of dirt.

“Tsk tsk, the sunlight here is so bright, the air a hundred times fresher than on either of those two Earths. Even the trees are especially tall—it’s actually pretty nice here. But I’d better find something to eat, I’m starving!” Tang Yi muttered, strolling along as he took in the scenery.

Two hours later, Tang Yi reached the foot of the mountain. “As the saying goes, ‘The horse will die before it reaches the mountain.’ If I wasn’t so worried about causing a sensation in an unfamiliar place, I wouldn’t bother with all this walking. Sigh!”

After so long, he was growing impatient, so he activated his keen hearing. He caught the sound of fighting a thousand miles away. “Sounds just like those old martial arts dramas on TV! This could be interesting. To hell with secrecy—I’m bored stiff!” With that, he teleported.

Tang Yi perched on the branch of a tree so massive it would take five men to encircle it and saw a group of nine attacking three others. The attackers all wore cyan garments, reminiscent of Song Dynasty martial artists, with their faces masked in blue and a badge at their waists inscribed with the character 'Qing'. The three being attacked wore matching simple outfits: plain shirts and pants, gray cloth boots, pale blue overshirts, and accessories all in pale blue, each wielding an identical sword—clearly disciples of the same school.

Back to back, the three held their own against the nine, but as time passed, their strength began to wane, and one had already suffered a minor wound. The nine gradually gained the upper hand, and by the time Tang Yi arrived, the three were at the end of their rope.

“Nine against three, and masked—these must be villains!” Tang Yi thought.

“To think that we three brothers will die here today. Who could have orchestrated this, hiring the Bloodkill Sect’s Cyan Robe Hall to send nine assassins at once? Clearly, they want to wipe us out. If I, Bai Jianyuan, survive this, I will uncover the truth and repay it doubly,” one of the three, Bai Jianyuan, thought. He had taken a sword wound to his left arm and leg—though not deep, the bleeding was sapping his strength.

Tang Yi, hiding in the tree, read this thought. “So these masked men are all assassins. I’d better step in and save these three. But what pose should I strike for my entrance? I am a hero, after all…” As he mused, Bai Jianyuan took another slash to the wrist, his grip loosened, and his sword fell to the ground.

At that moment, Tang Yi leaped from the tree and shouted, “Stop!”