MM Racing 014 He witnessed the end of the world.
014 He witnessed the end of the world.
Nono suddenly understood.
This idiot wasn't trying to jump into the lake; he was measuring the depth to see if what lay beneath the surface was just an empty shell or something he really cared about.
Unfortunately, Lake Ashi is just a lake. The bottom contains only silt, aquatic plants, and fish.
In Lu Mingfei's memory, this lake had long been replaced by armor plates and hydraulic push rods. Unit-01 was submerged in the dimly lit underground shaft, its system lights illuminated in rows. Unit-00 was parked next door, with Ayanami watching him from the side. Asuka, while muttering about how this loser could actually pilot an EVA, impatiently helped him put on his neural connector.
But now, there's only cold water under my feet, and the emptiness is unsettling.
He slowly bent his knees, kneeling on the shimmering water, and covered his face with his hands. He didn't cry or shout, just curled up in a ball. Like a little dog that had trekked half its life through the desert, finally finding an oasis, only to discover that all it could lick was sand.
"Lu Mingfei..." An absurd yet immense sorrow crashed down on Nono.
"Buzz—!"
Nono's eyes widened in shock; she had witnessed a miracle.
The dark gold hexagonal light screens lit up in layers, spreading outwards one after another, like a lake in winter freezing into amber ice in a single second.
The waters of Lake Ashi, which were originally churning in the night wind, seemed to be held down by an unseen hand of God!
A suffocating sense of despair permeated the air, almost freezing her soul.
"What... exactly did you go through...?"
With a loud crash, blood filled the field of vision.
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wreckage.
The ruins of a city.
The buildings were uprooted by incredible brute force, the fragments of steel bars and concrete piled up like a continuous gray mountain range. The sky hung low, the murky clouds resembling a rotting old felt cloth. The air was thick with the smells of burning and ozone, along with a lingering, rusty, sweet odor.
Then she saw the dragon.
A group of white dragons without eyes, their wide mouths splitting their faces from one side to the other like an eternal smile slashed open with a knife. Their bodies were as pale as alabaster, their forms long and deformed, their huge teeth jagged and interlocking, and they had a pair of degenerated wings and limbs.
They were devouring the carcass of a red dragon in a sea of blood.
The red dragon lay in a sea of blood, its internal organs scattered like mountains, a crimson spear piercing the heavens and earth embedded in its body.
Nine white dragons were tearing it apart piece by piece and swallowing it. Red liquid gushed out from the gaps and dripped down the white dragons' pale jaws.
Just then, the white dragons all raised their heads and looked into the distance.
The earth cracked open.
An even larger purple dragon rose from the other end of the ruins.
The nine-headed white dragon lifted Him into the sky, His posture resembling that of a martyr nailed to a cross, or a natural disaster about to devour everything.
That was the black dragon that gnawed at the roots of the World Tree, the final prologue to Ragnarok.
The being in the sky completely broke free from the constraints of form, transforming into a colossal tree woven from light and bone, its roots piercing the earth and its canopy reaching into the clouds. White dragons circled the trunk, opening their enormous mouths and emitting a chorus that shook the very soul.
Nine blood-red spears hovered around the giant tree, their tips pointing downwards, aimed at everything on earth that was still breathing.
Nono sensed that the boundaries were melting away.
Life is pulled from its form, and the soul is emptied from its vessel. This is Ragnarok, a will to destroy once more after all destruction has been done, a power that is not content with ending but also wants to erase ending itself.
The world is beginning to melt!
Starting from the horizon, all the colors faded and dripped as if splashed with sulfuric acid, revealing the scarlet beneath.
The ground turned into a red sea.
The sky turned into a red dome.
The air turned into a red mist of blood, and the stench of blood filled Nono's nostrils, giving her a suffocating feeling of being slowly drowned.
This is the collapse of the laws, the collective dissolution of life, the final lament of a planet.
The sea of blood receded, revealing the dried-up ruins at its bottom.
Lu Mingfei sat in the very center of the ruins, holding a girl in his arms.
Nono couldn't see that face clearly.
The light of the whole world slanted in another direction, and that face was forever in shadow, hidden by Lu Mingfei's arm, hidden by the mist of the sea of blood, hidden by the immense sorrow that she could not reach.
But Nono saw the hair.
The sea of blood stained everything red, but that particular color—
That was her own color.
Red hair spread out in the sea of blood; the girl seemed to be asleep. Lu Mingfei lowered his head; the red seawater had already reached above his knees, melting the girl.
He was the last being in human form during the entire apocalypse.
Someone broke in.
Lu Mingfei raised his eyes blankly, a wisp of long red hair fluttering in the air.
For a fleeting moment, he thought Asuka had come back to life, grabbing him by the neck and calling him an idiot. But when he looked down, he only saw his hands covered in LCL solution. The whole world was dead and gone, and he sat there under the crimson sunset, sword in hand, looking around in utter bewilderment.
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"ah--!"
Nono let out a piercing scream.
The mental backlash was like a red-hot steel knife churning her brain. Her knees buckled, and she collapsed heavily onto the cold, damp earth by Lake Ashi.
"vomit--!"
She lay on the ground, vomiting uncontrollably. The bitter taste of stomach acid and bile burned her esophagus, and tears streamed uncontrollably down her face.
But those weren't her own tears.
That was a drop of sadness belonging to Lu Mingfei that she inadvertently picked up during her profiling.
As she suffered from alkali poisoning due to hyperventilation, Nono's world began to darken. In the last second before losing consciousness, she saw the boy standing on the water slowly turn around and walk towards her.
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Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
The sound of water droplets falling into the copper basin.
Nono opened her eyes.
My gaze moved down from the wood-grained ceiling to the soft glow of a paper lamp beside the tatami mat. She was covered with a blanket, and a cold towel was draped over her forehead.
She turned her head to the side.
Lu Mingfei sat by the window not far from her, having changed out of his clothes which were damp from the lake, and was now quietly looking at the moon outside the window.
Nuonuo propped herself up, her body feeling weak, and a wet towel slid down her forehead.
The boy before me is a shattered god. Buried within this body is a fragment of a broken myth. He witnessed the true end of the world, and then, dragging his broken soul, he crawled alone back to this human world that pretends to be peaceful.
"Awake?" Lu Mingfei asked without turning around, his voice light and airy.
Nono's heart suddenly clenched painfully.
She wanted to ask him what that world was, what those white monsters were, what that enormous being that rose into the sky was, and what that red-haired figure in the blood-red ruins was...
The moment Lu Mingfei turned around, Nuonuo opened her arms and hugged him tightly from behind.
thump.
The two bumped into the window frame.
Nono buried her face in his stiff back.
"Lu Mingfei." She gritted her teeth, her voice trembling, "If you can't find him, then forget it. Don't look for him anymore."
Her arms involuntarily tightened, holding the boy burdened with the weight of the apocalypse even closer.
"Now that we're back here... let's live well."
Outside the window, Lake Ashi flows quietly under the moonlight.
Nono closed her eyes, and tears fell one after another.
"From now on, I'll protect you."