Dragon Clan: Avoid the College Entrance Examination to Slay the Dragon

Chapter 10 Attacked
Lu Mingfei was about to speak when Zhao Menghua suddenly interrupted. The young man, leaning on Gu Yi's desk with one hand, looked like a lion patrolling his territory. The Omega Seamaster on his wrist shone with a cold light, and his carefully trimmed sideburns drew sharp curves in the morning light.

"Gu Yi." His bony fingers tapped on the table.

"explain."

Zhao Menghua's temples throbbed. Gu Yi still bowed his head, flipping through the book, his eyelashes too lazy to flutter, as if the person standing before him was not a living person but a ball of air.

"The teacher asked you to go to the office." Every syllable was coated with ice chips.

Gu Yi glanced at the classroom clock and said, "Lu Mingfei, go find Senior Brother Chu in the senior class for me. Ask him to come to the Kendo Club during lunch break."

"What are you going to do?" Lu Mingfei almost choked on his own saliva.

Gu Yi's lips curled slightly, "Lend him a sword for practice."

Zhao Menghua vaguely saw a golden afterimage flash through the depths of Gu Yi's pupils. The shudder of being locked onto by a large predator terrified him, and he fled in panic.

Gu Yi sneered and said to Lu Mingfei, "Let's go."

Lu Mingfei looked at Gu Yi's back as he disappeared around the corner of the corridor, muttered a few words that he was not an errand boy, and then ran towards the senior year floor.

The silence of the elite senior class was like a solid wall. Lu Mingfei slid along the wall to the front door and caught a glimpse of Chu Zihang sitting alone in the last row.

He was a little nervous because he had seen the widely circulated competition video in the school: in last year's national semi-finals, Chu Zihang's wooden sword chopped the defending champion three meters away with a sound of breaking wind.

"Senior, please call Senior Brother Chu." Lu Mingfei called out to the girl in the front row in a low voice.

The girl glanced at Lu Mingfei and called out behind her, "Chu Zihang! Someone's looking for you."

Chu Zihang looked up, his eyes icing the air. Lu Mingfei waved stiffly, watching him walk toward the door.

But when Lu Mingfei retreated to the corridor, he waited for a long time but no one showed up. He leaned against the door frame and peeked out, suddenly a cold sweat soaking the back of his school uniform - Chu Zihang's seat was empty. Even more strangely, the entire classroom was as quiet as a deep well. No one noticed that a young man had disappeared into thin air.

"Senior sister, where is Senior Brother Chu?" Lu Mingfei's voice trembled.

"Didn't I go out with you?" The girl impatiently circled the wrong questions in the mock exam with a red pen.

Lu Mingfei stumbled into the corridor and grabbed the boy who was chatting: "Did you see Chu Zihang come out?"

"Are you possessed?" the boy shook his hand off. "You've always been the only one standing outside his classroom."

Lu Mingfei realized something and felt as if he had fallen into an ice cellar.

Chu Zihang slowly looked up. The classroom, now packed with people, was now filled with only the sound of the wind drifting between the tables and chairs. The front door was ajar, and from outside the corridor came the sound of heavy rain, like countless silver needles hitting the glass windows.

By the time he walked out of the classroom, the boy who had called him out had vanished like a pencil mark erased by an eraser. Even more eerie, the entire third-year floor was shrouded in a dead silence. In the cascading rain outside the corridor, he caught a whiff of the most familiar scent from deep within his memory: the sweet, fishy smell of rust mixed with humus, like a cemetery washed by a rainstorm.

He turned and walked towards his seat. The metal brackets of the desks in the front row shone coldly in the dim light. Chu Zihang's knuckles paused on the edge for a half-second before suddenly exerting force and breaking the entire leg. The dark gray aluminum alloy tube trembled slightly in his palm, its cross-section reflecting the sharp angles of wolf teeth.

At this moment, the baby's cry pierced the rain.

The sound, like a blunt knife scraping against an eardrum, spiraled up from the ground floor of the teaching building. Chu Zihang swallowed his burning breath, his nails digging deep into the metal pipe, his knuckles turning pale. He knew this melody all too well. When he was fourteen, countless dark shadows wailed in the torrential rain on the overpass.

When the first shadow reached the corner of the stairs, Chu Zihang had already held the steel pipe at his side. Its spine was strangely curved, its bluish-gray skin covered in scaly protrusions. The moment it sniffed human air, its mouth opened wide, revealing a ring of fangs.

The sound of Chu Zihang's galloping through the air and the clanging of the monster's claws rang out at the same time.

He ducked and slid between the bone blade and his throat, stabbing the steel pipe precisely into the monster's left eye socket. Sticky black blood splattered on his high-collared shirt, leaving spiderweb-like scorch marks. As the monster roared and swung another bone blade, the boy, using the reaction force, leaped into the air and slammed his knee into the monster's twisted cervical vertebrae.

Amid the crisp crack of bones breaking, Chu Zihang could hear his own pounding heartbeat overlapping with the pounding sound of the rain. His soaked hair stuck to his eyes as he clutched the blood-drenched steel pipe and headed for the corner of the stairs—where he could hear more rustling, crawling sounds.

Four hunched figures were climbing the stair railings, their bluish-grey joints scraping against the wall tiles with a sharp, tooth-grinding sound. Their sudden, collective turn was terrifyingly coordinated, and a sharp scream erupted from the depths of their scaly, wrinkled throats as they pounced on Chu Zihang.

Chu Zihang's pupils narrowed into dangerous lines, fragments of memories from that rainy night mingling with the cold light before his eyes. He spun to avoid the initial attacking claws, the steel pipe swirling in his palm, a silver arc of light, and pierced the second monster's maw, ripped to its eardrums. As foul-smelling blood gushed out, the young man used the momentum to leap into the air, his boots slamming heavily onto the third monster's forehead. The sound of bone cracking, mixed with the roar of the rain, exploded in his ears.

The necklace around her neck suddenly burned, its gilded ripples radiating across the corridor like liquid sunlight. The twisted creatures froze, their eyes crackling in the holy light. Black blood mist and corrosive slime intertwined in a strange web in the air. They spasmed and flew backward, their bone blades plowing sparking furrows in the wall, like burned night owls escaping into the darkness.

Chu Zihang was stunned for half a second, rubbing the necklace that was still warm with his fingertips. Is this thing really useful?
The sudden explosion of air tearing apart interrupted his thoughts.

A warning of danger beyond human perception sent an electric current through his spine, but it was ultimately no faster than the silver light. The instant his pupils constricted, the bullet pierced his right arm. The pale bone stump, exposed to the air for less than half a second, was stained crimson by the gushing arterial blood.

He curled up and convulsed like a snake with its spine removed, his Adam's apple rolling violently but no sound emanated. Blood gushed out from the broken wound, sliding along the floor in streaks of bright red, which were then spread by his twitching body, eventually staining the ground red.

"Where did this thing come from?"

The alien, metallic scraping of a voice pierced the darkness. The blond man fired a shotgun blast. "It seems you can't answer the question right now."

He walked up to Chu Zihang, grabbed the boy's collar with one hand, and pulled him up from the ground. The man tilted his head to study the boy's pale face, and playfully tapped his intact left cheek with the barrel of the gun.

The golden light flowing in the other person's iris was reflected in Chu Zihang's dilated pupils. The light was not like that of a human, but more like the vertical pupils of some cold-blooded animal.

(End of this chapter)