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This is an underground warehouse that has been converted into a private shelter. The walls are covered with hydrological maps of Tokyo Bay, stratigraphic profiles of the Kanto Plain, and old black-and-white photographs with Russian annotations.

There were three rows of open laptops on the table, each displaying different real-time monitoring footage: the construction progress of the Hongjing Tunnel, the on-site transmission of the Kanto Branch's surprise attack on the Tamagawa River, and aerial footage of Kotaro Fuma confronting Caesar at the entrance of Takamagahara.

At the far end of the room, Herzog stood up from his chair.

He wasn't wearing the official mask, revealing an old and thin face beneath, with deep lines at the corners of his eyes and lips that only someone who has truly lived a long time would have.

He was wearing a faded old lab coat with an old-fashioned fountain pen tucked into the pocket, and a temporary KGB identity card from the Black Swan Port era pinned to his chest. The young face in the photo was completely different from his current one.

"How did you find me?" he asked, trying to remain calm, but his finger had already quietly pressed the activation button on the full-frequency signal jammer in the inside pocket of his lab coat, but there was no response.

I pressed the emergency deadbolt button that controls the blast-proof doors of the safe house again, but there was still no response.

All the monitors on his desk were turning into static and noise, one after another, as if someone had physically cut off every signal line to the outside world.

“The trajectory of the soul.” Frillian stood in the doorway, the tip of her wand lightly touching the ground before stopping.

"You've fragmented your soul and implanted it into every puppet you've brainwashed, thinking that as long as they act independently, call out different names, and speak different political beliefs, no one can trace your true identity. But no matter how many copies you make, the soul essence between the original and the duplicates is exactly the same. After those two empty shells you sent to the top of Tokyo Tower performed your final act, I only need to follow the direction their souls returned to find the other end of this thread. Over the past twenty years, you've contaminated the genes of countless hybrids with evolution drugs, but you yourself have never been contaminated. Your soul is the most complete of all the copies; its scent is more conspicuous than a lighthouse in the night."

Herzog was silent for a very brief moment, then suddenly pulled a Stechkin submachine gun from behind the lab table, which was hidden in a drawer.

Instead of aiming at Frillie, he pointed the gun at his own temple.

He knew that the woman in front of him was the same woman who had pierced his strongest puppet last night in the back alley of Ebisu with a spear whose power he did not understand at all, through the blast-proof roller shutter and several layers of concrete walls.

But Herzog never gave up. His life had been one of constant pursuit since the dawn when he was surrounded by Soviet tanks in his Berlin bunker. He survived crawling out of Black Swan Harbor, turned Tachibana Masamune and Bondarev into puppets in his hands, and injected evolution drugs into the spines of hundreds of hybrid fetuses, extracting serum with a concentration close to that of divine blood from their cerebrospinal fluid.

He absolutely refused to let himself die at the last moment.

Without hesitation, he pulled the trigger. The bullet would pierce his left temporal bone, but not fatally; a spare body was in the cold storage next door.

The trigger is rusted shut.

He looked down at the submachine gun in his hand, which had turned back into a piece of scrap metal, and his fingers desperately pulled the trigger repeatedly.

The friction between all the moving parts inside the metal disappeared somewhere, and the gun was rendered completely physically incapable of firing.

“Negotiation,” Herzog said, tossing down his gun. “What do you want? I can give you anything. I have a cabin in the mountains of northern Maine, containing complete records from beginning to end. You’ll be the only one to see it. A complete sequence map of the dragon genome, technology for maintaining the activity of ancient dragon embryos in liquid nitrogen at -196 degrees Celsius, and the final version of three evolutionary drugs extracted directly from my own bone marrow that no one has ever touched. It can allow a hybrid to maintain a completely stable human form after receiving divine blood, without reverting to an ugly monster—all of this is yours. I don’t rule any world.”

Frillie listened quietly as he finished speaking. She watched every wrinkle on his face twitch as he spoke faster, watched the unreal bitter smile that quickly gathered at the corners of his mouth, and watched the thin fingers of his that were still secretly groping for another invisible wireless transmission bracelet hidden under the edge of the table.

This man's performance in the last few seconds before his death was still impeccable. In his life, he has played the roles of the Nazi chief scientist, KGB agent, Soviet meritorious researcher, Japanese yakuza godfather, and his own mortal enemy. Now he is playing a destitute old man who is willing to pay for his life with his wealth.

“Eri doesn’t need your serum. She has someone better. Genji saw the last text message you sent him. Genji mixed me a drink in the kitchen tonight; he thought I was just a waiter,” Frillie concluded each of his topics with six words.

Herzog's expression changed drastically.

He opened his mouth to tell one last lie, but a silver light pierced through the only emergency light still on in the safe house.

A spear made of pure magic shot out from the tip of Frillian's wand without any charging motion, giving him no time to finish his sentence.

The spear tip pierced through his sternum directly below, penetrating every layer of his diaphragm, and then exited through his back, bringing with it fragments of bone and copious amounts of blood, pinning him to the wall covered with deep geological and hydrological maps of the Kanto region.

The gun was too fast; he didn't even have time to look down at the spreading silver-blue halo on his chest before the halo contracted inward, crushing every still-beating ventricle and atrium in his chest cavity at the same time.

The magic dismantled his autonomic nervous system from within, stripping his cerebral cortex and brainstem of all oxygen and nutrients.

He had no chance to wake up again, no chance to climb into any usable body again.

Herzog died in the underground safe house he had hidden for over a decade, a place he thought no one could find, filled with unspoken curses and unspoken terms of the deal.

The maps on the wall still exude the smell of old paper; each one was hand-drawn and stamped by Tachibana Masamune himself, and then handed over to Genji Chisei with an honest face.

Now they're stained with his own blood, and there won't be another one.

Chapter 848 Yamata no Orochi

Five days later.

At the end of the tunnel in Hongjing, the diamond drill bit of the super tunneling machine penetrated the last rock wall at 3:17 a.m.

It wasn't granite or quartzite, but a layer of biological sediment that had been compressed for tens of thousands of years. The moment the drill bit broke through the wall, a stream of dark red, high-pressure liquid gushed out of the borehole, staining the front half of the entire tunneling machine a deep, rust-red color.

That was fetal blood, the blood of a dragon, which had been soaking in the dark depths of the earth for ten thousand years, and now it had finally seen the first ray of artificial light.

Shigeo Miyamoto stood on the command platform, only twenty meters away from the drill bit, wearing a full set of heavy protective clothing and holding a walkie-talkie.

As the fountain of blood gushed from the borehole, alarms throughout the tunnel blared simultaneously, and red warning lights made everyone's masks look as if they had been splattered with blood.

He didn't back down, but simply raised his hand to wipe the blood mist off his mask and said into the walkie-talkie, "Continue. Pull the drill out completely and widen the passage."

The tunnel boring machine roared deafeningly as the diamond drill bit slowly withdrew from the rock wall, bringing out a whole layer of fragmented biological sedimentary material.

Behind that layer of rock is a huge cavity that has been eroded by an underground river for tens of thousands of years.

The size of the cavity exceeded everyone's expectations. It was over sixty meters high and wide enough to accommodate two Shinkansen bullet trains passing side by side. The cave walls were densely covered with silver-blue viper scales, which reflected a nauseating fluorescence under the searchlights. The entire cave wall looked like a living wall covered with glowing mold.

In the very center of the cavity, the flow of the Akagami River makes a slow bend, forming a huge underground whirlpool. At the center of the whirlpool, that thing lies on the bottom of the water.

Its size is larger than any living creature. Its eight not-yet-fully-developed heads face eight different directions, each with its eyes closed, its grayish-white scales not yet hardened, and through its translucent skin, one can see a dense network of branching blood vessels.

Eight tails curled up together, enveloping the central torso that had not yet fully separated from its embryonic form.

The torso is translucent, and under the bright light of a searchlight, you can see a complete internal organ system slowly pulsating inside, including a heart, liver, and a fourth gland unique to dragons used to control and distribute elemental forces.

The shape of those organs was exactly the same as the anatomical diagram of the eight-headed serpent drawn in the secret ancient book of the Snake-Gathering Eight Families. The only difference was that they were still soaking in fetal blood and had not yet taken in their first breath of air.

It was still asleep, but its eyelids were already twitching involuntarily.

Miyamoto Shigeo put down the walkie-talkie, wiped the lenses of his mask, which were covered in blood and cold sweat, with his gloves, and then spoke.

The voice, amplified by all the loudspeakers inside the tunnel, reached the ears of every operative standing behind the tunnel boring machine: "Target confirmed. Execute the first phase of the anesthesia protocol. All gun positions, listen to my command, three, two, one, fire."

From the tunnel entrance to the top of the tunnel wall, all the pre-set tranquilizer gun positions opened fire simultaneously.

Dozens of armor-piercing tranquilizer darts, filled with a high concentration of dragon-like sedatives, flew toward the giant embryo lying in the river of blood, trailing plumes of smoke.

The bullet made a teeth-grinding tearing sound as it pierced the translucent scales.

The first salvo penetrated its outermost epidermis, the second salvo followed closely by penetrating the subcutaneous fat layer, and the third salvo finally injected the drug into its muscle tissue.

Those anesthetics are the most extreme hybrid of human science and dragon alchemy. They were repeatedly formulated and adjusted by Shigeo Miyamoto over the past six months using neurotoxins extracted from Deadpool fetuses. Each dose is enough to stop the heartbeat of an adult blue whale within thirty seconds.

The eight heads of the Yamata no Orochi opened their eyes simultaneously. There were no irises, no pupils, only a murky dark gold color, like churned lava.

It let out its first roar. The sound did not come from any of its mouths, but rather from deep within its chest cavity, vibrating the entire cavity.

The roar shook off most of the swarm of demonic dragon vipers clinging to the cave walls, sending them crashing into the bloody waters of the Crimson Demon River and churning wildly.

It tried to stand up from the water, its eight tails spreading out simultaneously, each strike sending the entire tunnel trembling in the aftershocks.

Several operators on the drill platform were knocked to the ground, and their protective suits and helmets cracked from the impact.

But the anesthetic had already begun to take effect. The first to lose its effect was its leftmost head, which had been trying to reach out of the vortex to bite off the nearest set of lighting arrays. Halfway through, it suddenly lost all muscle tension and slumped into the water like a snake whose spine had been removed.

Then came the second, and the third. Its body was losing strength at a visible rate. The tendons and bones that had not been fully developed since the embryonic stage could no longer support this enormous body that had exceeded the limits of physics after being soaked in high concentrations of sedatives.

It fell down extremely slowly, as if all the screws had been removed but it was still barely maintaining its standing posture.

The massive torso tilted to one side, crashing into the water and creating a huge wave that swept onto the platform, overturning several monitoring devices that hadn't been secured in time.

The Yamata no Orochi finally collapsed on the shallows of the Akakiri River, its eight heads scattered on the blood-red water, each breath becoming shallow and slow.

Those dark golden eyes, as if boiling lava, were still open only a narrow slit, and his chest was still heaving, but he was no longer able to roar.

Miyamoto Shigeo stepped down from the command platform, wading through several inches of bloody water, and stopped all evacuation procedures in front of the tunneling machine's drill bit.

He looked up at the enormous object that stretched across the center of the cavity and remained silent for a long time.

Then he picked up the walkie-talkie and reported to Genjiro on the ground: "Master, Yamata no Orochi has lost its ability to move. The anesthetic is still being injected, and the heart rate has dropped from eighty beats per minute to eleven beats per minute. Requesting to proceed with the second phase of the treatment plan."

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Before the cheers from inside the tunnel could travel far from the loudspeakers, the first array of lights went out from above the tunnel walls.

It wasn't smashed by the dragon viper; the cable was torn apart from the outside by the shockwave.

The massive body of the Yamata no Orochi, lying paralyzed in the river of blood, continued to rise and fall slowly. With each breath, it caused concentric deep red ripples to spread across the water's surface, while the storm that swept in from the tunnel entrance had quietly reached the outer perimeter of the cavity.

Suddenly, a series of short, chaotic calls erupted from Miyamoto Shigeo's walkie-talkie, coming from the surface garrison troops in Hongjing.

"Lots of Deadpools! From behind us! Flooding out of the underground pipes, everywhere!" Gunfire poured from the open channel, so dense that individual shots were inaudible.

Then came a muffled explosion, and only the hissing static of electrical signals remained on the channel.

Miyamoto Shigeo suddenly turned around and looked in the direction the tunnel had come from. In the stark white light of the emergency lights, he saw that the blast gate at the end of the tunnel was being cut from the outside.

It wasn't an acetylene flame being cut, but some kind of highly concentrated acidic secretion; the edges of the half-meter-thick quenched steel plate on the gate had already begun to burst out with a large number of orange-red sparks.

At the same moment the gate was blown open from the outside, countless tiny black shadows poured in through the cracks.

They crawled at high speed along the top and sides of the tunnel, their movements twisting and irregular, like a tailless lizard that had all its joints removed and then reassembled.

But their faces are still human.

Miyamoto Shio recognized several of them: the missing Kanto hybrid, the early test subjects of the eliminated evolution drug, and the garrison that had reported "everything is normal" to Ryoma Genichiro at the Tamagawa position yesterday.

They have all become Deadpools, the evolutionary drug injected into their bones completely activating the dragon genes lurking deep within their bloodlines within hours.

The first wave of attack crashed directly into the makeshift defenses in the middle of the tunnel. The Executive Bureau agents crouched behind the overturned tunnel boring machine, firing intensively with submachine guns and grenade launchers, but there were simply too many Deadpools.

They surged through the smoke, stepping over the shattered corpses of their comrades. The first one pounced on an operator who was changing magazines, slamming him into a running coolant pipe.

Scalding steam and blood gushed out from the crack in the pipe at the same time, instantly turning the mechanized work surface below the pipe into hell.

Miyamoto Shigeo drew his sword and severed a hydraulic line that was falling towards him. Without hesitation, he ordered into the walkie-talkie: "Abandon the tunneling platform! All personnel retreat to the red shaft! Activate the emergency lock at the bottom of the shaft immediately!"

The eight-headed serpent that lay across the center of the blood river behind him was still limp, and the dragon vipers, disoriented, fell from the cave walls like rain.

It half-opened its enormous, dark golden eyes, watching these tiny humans fight each other in the blood at its feet.

At the bottom of the Red Well, Sakurai Nanami and the remaining garrison troops are desperately guarding the last hydraulic gate leading to the main tunnel.

Her executive bureau uniform had a long tear running from her right shoulder to her waist, revealing not skin, but an emergency hemostatic gel patch.

She couldn't remember how many shots she had fired, only that a group of Deadpools had crawled out of the drainpipes on the well wall that were originally used to monitor the water level, and had bitten through the protective masks of three operators before anyone could react.

Red water is still flowing out of those pipes.

A heavy thud came from outside the gate.

One, two, then a sharp hiss of metal twisting and deforming.

Sakurai Nanami chambered the last grenade, her back against the cold hydraulic cylinder of the gate. She knew that if this hydraulic cylinder behind her were destroyed, the entire Red Well's bottom fortifications would be completely submerged by the high-pressure blood and Dead Servants surging in from the tunnel.

The crashing sounds suddenly stopped. The gate didn't open, and Deadpool didn't rush in. All the agents still firing at the bottom of the well were stunned for a moment.