Chapter 10 : Before the Battle

“Hh… hh… hh.”

Blake sat on the bed, gasping for breath.

He was no longer wearing his red overcoat, but was shirtless.
Blake was thin, so thin he was skeletal.
His chest and abdomen had unhealthy muscle definition, his arms were absurdly skinny, and the vertebrae on his back were clearly visible.
His left shoulder was wrapped in gauze and bandages, with faint traces of blood seeping through.

“Yuhui, what a troublesome man. That guy, he actually managed to pierce my defenses with ordinary bullets. How did he do it?” Blake gently stroked his bandaged wound.
On the table not far away lay tweezers, a syringe, needles, povidone-iodine, alcohol, a vial of 10mg/ml lidocaine hydrochloride, a large amount of blood-stained gauze, and two bloomed, blood-stained lead-core copper-jacketed bullets.

If not for the pre-set defenses that had absorbed most of the bullets’ kinetic energy, his arm would probably be useless now.
But for a sorcerer who knew healing magic, as long as he wasn’t dead and didn’t wait too long, it could definitely be healed.

Blake stood up and went to the kitchen.
He opened the refrigerator, took out a bottle of cold milk, twisted off the cap, and drank it in large gulps.

“Oh… that’s better,” Blake said, wiping the milk from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Drinking a glass of cold milk in dry weather is such a wonderfully comfortable thing. It’s so refreshing.”

Blake Morton’s habit of drinking milk was developed after he entered the Astral Academy.

In his early years, he didn’t have the privilege of drinking milk.
He didn’t even have the right to eat his fill.
Because he was the child of poor people, a pitiful person who lived with his mother in the slums.
The food and drink he had were the dirtiest and worst.
He could only eat dry, hard bread, or salty, astringent sweet potato leaves.
He had even eaten slop.
He had no money for school and had to work to make a living.
He started working in a sand mine at the age of 10, digging sand all day long.
This was work for adults, but he had no choice.
The rainy season was the best time to find work.
Only when the adults were unwilling to work did he have a job.
The rain fell heavily, and Blake couldn’t stop while working, because once he did, he would be freezing cold.
Every time he went home after work, his whole body would be trembling.

Even so, life was still a struggle.
He didn’t even have shoes to wear.
The other children in the slums always liked to bully him, calling him a fatherless bastard.
Some even cursed his mother, calling her a prostitute, a witch.
Sometimes he wanted to beat the hell out of that group of ill-bred bastards, but he was always outnumbered and beaten, sometimes until his head was bleeding.

The only gain this period brought him was growth.
Blake’s diligence, tenacity, and strong mental fortitude were all “gains” from that time, but that didn’t mean he was grateful for the experience.
Although these hardships made him who he is today, suffering is suffering, and it is never worthy of praise.

He hated this past, hated his childhood, hated his biological father, and hated everyone except his mother.

Blake moved his body, trying not to touch the wound.
He picked up the milk and walked to the window to observe the weather.

“Huh? Why is it overcast?”

Sometime, large dark clouds had covered the sky.
The surroundings were a gloomy gray, and it looked like it could rain at any moment.

“Damn overcast weather,” Blake’s face immediately darkened.

Every time it rained, Blake would remember the house he lived in as a child, the dirty room, the damp earthen walls, the rainwater dripping from the roof, making the unpaved mud floor wet and sticky.
A small, thin boy, dragging his trembling body in the wind and rain, desperately digging sand, digging for a whole day.
He remembered the sand mine owner’s humiliating laughter, the pain of walking barefoot on the muddy ground, the despair of his mother dying in his arms, and the discriminatory gazes and deep-seated inferiority he felt when he first entered the academy.

Blake began to frantically rub his golden hair, making it more and more messy.

“Wait, what’s that…”

Blake noticed a black car driving down the road not far from the villa.
The car’s destination seemed to be this place.
It drove directly to a spot not far from the villa and stopped.
Then, a man and a woman got out of the car.

It was Yuhui.
Blake recognized the man who had injured him at a glance, but how did he find this place?

“Something must have gone wrong. His appearance here is definitely not a coincidence. He’s found my hiding place,” Blake bit his fingernails.
“Damn it, how could this be? Things are always getting worse. Why? Why have I been so unlucky lately?”

Blake calmed down.
He returned to the bedroom and grabbed his shirt and coat from the back of the chair.

He had to check.
He had to know why his whereabouts had been exposed.

Blake carefully checked his red overcoat and his shirt.
He turned out all the pockets and even emptied the contents of his fanny pack onto the bed to examine them closely.
He even took off his pants and shook them.
Finally, after he took off his boots, he found the tracker Yuhui had stuck to the sole.
It was a miniature metal signal transmitter, firmly attached.

“Damn it!” Blake threw the shoe to the ground in anger.

‘When did he put the tracker on me? During the conflict yesterday? How did he do it?’

“Calm down, calm down. I must calm down now. Yuhui is already here, and he has a woman with him. She must be the help he’s found,” Blake took a deep breath.
He put his clothes back on and calmly combed his hair.

“I’ll have to reflect on this failure later, but before that—” Blake looked coldly at the two people outside the window.
“I have to deal with this danger first.”

Outside the villa.

“It’s raining,” Rachel said, extending her hand forward after getting out of the car, feeling the cold touch of raindrops on the back of her hand.

“This is really good news for me,” she said with a happy smile.
For Rachel, whose psionic ability was related to ice and low temperatures, a rainy day was indeed good weather.

‘In other words, today is a good day to rack up points,’ she thought.

“Why is the rain good news for you?” Yuhui asked, taking out his two pistols.

Rachel looked at the two black Beretta F92S pistols in Yuhui’s hands and remembered the game she had lost all night yesterday.
Her eyelids couldn’t help but twitch.

‘You’ve got to be kidding me, man. Do you have to be so accurate?’

“You’ll see in a bit, probably. But I hope we won’t need to use it,” Rachel said, snapping back to reality.

Anyway, this kind of weather was helpful for those who used ice or temperature-related psionics or magic, at least in a fight.

Rachel noticed Yuhui’s left hand holding the gun.
The metal prosthetic on his ring finger couldn’t rest on the grip but was sticking up, looking a bit awkward.
After all, it was a prosthetic finger, without flexible joints, and couldn’t be controlled by the body.

‘That must be very inconvenient,’ Rachel thought.
She suddenly wanted to ask Yuhui about his left hand, but now was definitely not a good time, so she had to give up the idea.