I’m not as cold as you imagine
by M1zushi[Deep sea]
A vast swarm of smoke jellyfish whistled past An Yu.
Their loose caps expanded and tumbled in the water, as their tentacles trembled, smoke diffused amidst specks of light.
“Watch out for the venom,” Qin Zhilu reminded him in his earpiece.
A tentacle approached from behind An Yu, wrapped around his waist, and pulled him back.
A few spurts of bizarrely colored liquid grazed past An Yu’s hair and dissipated quickly in the seawater.
Due to the water’s resistance, Qin Zhilu’s movement as he pulled An Yu was very slow. An Yu watched the venom move away from him as if in slow-motion. The massive swarm moved further away. Behind the jellyfish was a school of sharp-bodied fish— they were the true mission target. A group of deep-sea fish had laid their eggs in the nearby Bait City water source. A large number of pregnant women had given birth to fish-shaped aberrants, with dozens or hundreds in a single birth.
Distorted human faces had gills, which pulsated menacingly in the water. Their sharp fins and teeth refracted the specks of light from the jellyfish, stirring up colorful waves of light in the pitch-dark seabed.
There were thousands of aberrants, but the mission operators were only Qin Zhilu and An Yu.
An Yu took a deep breath behind his oxygen mask. In his earpiece, the Commander’s voice sounded as if it was passing through layers of fog: “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Mhm.”
Qin Zhilu strangled the jellyfish with his tentacles and said, “The world has many layers of truth. ‘Aberrant’ is just a relative concept. All creatures are merely maintaining the order they established.”
A searchlight hung before An Yu’s forehead. In its small spot of light, he saw a massive black octopus slowly swimming, its hundreds of thick, long tentacles expanding and contracting in the water as if breathing.
Qin Zhilu was like an elegant and enormous sea demon. He spun in the water, retracted his tentacles, and changed back to his human torso. Then, he lightly kicked his feet. His two water boots fell off. He pressed his legs together, slapped the water, and quietly closed his eyes.
His joined legs gradually transformed into a sleek fish tail. Pitch-black scales lay flat in one direction along the current, serene and magnificent. When he opened his eyes, his dark pupils were vacant for a moment. He then swished his tail and swam toward the aberrant swarm.
An Yu watched all of this from a distance.
The sea creatures were driven in all directions by the aberrant tide. Only his Commander swam alone toward the deeper, darker depths, stirring up a giant vortex in the tide. Countless severed limbs and scales churned and scattered in the whirlpool.
The battlefield on the seabed was silent yet bloody. Amidst the riot of color, the vortex churned larger and larger, until it finally stopped. At the center of the whirlpool, only a merman remained.
Qin Zhilu leisurely swished his tail, letting the seawater wash away the filth clinging to him.
Soon, he had returned to a flawless, pitch-black state.
He panted lightly in the earpiece. “Let’s go.”
An Yu instinctively said softly, “Your aberration is very different from others.”
Qin Zhilu waited nearby for him to approach, asking casually, “How’s it different?”
“It’s beautiful.” An Yu hadn’t yet learned subtlety or shyness. He only expressed what he honestly felt. “Not the beauty of a deformity, but a very pure aesthetic feeling. It makes one yearn to touch it.”
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The seabed was too quiet. An Yu heard his own heartbeat. It was loud and strong.
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“What do you want?”
Don't scrape
Don't copy
He didn’t know what the Commander was going to do; he just instinctively reached his own hand out.
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It was smooth, tough, and firm to the touch. When he poked it, he received an extremely elastic feedback.
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The deep sea was boundless. One combat zone after another.
Don't scrape
Don't copy
In the swamps, he would transform into lush, twining vines. All sorts of flowers bloomed on the vines. If An Yu looked at them for a few extra seconds, he would casually pick one and give it to him.
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Broad shoulders, narrow waist, long legs. He was like a straight, sharp blade, quietly returning to its sheath, waiting for the next time it would be drawn.
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An Yu suddenly realized that by staying by the Commander’s side, he could possess all kinds of beauty at once.
Missions without Super-Aberrants were all easy. Qin Zhilu could clear a whole string of them in one day. The Spire forums said the big boss had activated his emotionless cleanup mode again, reminding people of when he was sixteen. It was precisely this cold-blooded efficiency that the sixteen-year-old Qin Zhilu had used to conquer the Spire.
But An Yu, who was always by his side, didn’t think the Commander was cold-blooded. On the contrary, he felt the Commander was smiling more and more during missions. He wasn’t cold and dark like when they first met, but was closer to his state between the ages of eight and sixteen.
—The young Qin Zhilu who had just stepped into the mortal world, before he had fallen into the abyss.
After An Yu had fully recovered from his previous mission fatigue, he began to casually provide the Commander with minor support.
Their teamwork seemed to have a natural synergy. Qin Zhilu quickly got used to distant aberrants suddenly appearing within his firing range, and would calmly stare at his wounds when injured, until they healed rapidly.
The moment a venomous wasp, the size of a small fighter jet, sprayed venom at him, the wasp froze in mid-air. The venom congealed at the edge of its mandibles. High in the sky, his expression was composed. He raised his arm and blasted the wasp’s bulging abdomen with one shot.
The venom splashed toward the ground. Qin Zhilu looked down. On the ground, An Yu gave him a slight smile.
During a mission break, Qin Zhilu tore open an energy bar and said, “You’ve been smiling a lot lately. Do you have new social relationships?”
An Yu was chatting with the octopus chibi. Hearing this, he looked up from the screen in confusion. “I’ve been on missions with you this whole time. Other than you and your AI, I barely interacted with anyone.”
Qin Zhilu looked at him for a moment and snorted. “Then perhaps it’s just my imagination.”
In the earpiece, he said coldly, “Could you possibly be any more detached?”
“Sorry.” An Yu immediately put away his terminal.
Qin Zhilu flapped his wings. The instant he was about to smash a wasp, that wasp suddenly appeared several hundred meters away.
He had hit empty air.
For a moment, both Qin Zhilu and the wasp were stunned.
The battle ended. A tentacle shot out from behind Qin Zhilu, lashing toward An Yu. But as it neared, it shed its force, only wrapping him tightly, coil by coil, and pulling him in front of him.
He demanded with a cold face, “What are you trying to do, rebel?”
An Yu struggled to pull his hand free from the tentacle’s bind. He held up his terminal and said, “Your AI told me to joke with you more.”
Qin Zhilu raised an eyebrow. “It seems it taught you some bad habits.”
An Yu reminded him quietly, “All his words and actions came from learning from you, Commander.”
He was a little nervous saying this, but Qin Zhilu had no angry reaction. He just snorted, and the tentacle squeezed his waist even harder.
An Yu had long since adapted to the Commander’s various forms, especially the octopus.
But sometimes, a touch that was too tight or too deep would still make him instinctively want to flee for a moment, yet he also found himself sinking into that novel physical stimulation.
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