Dragon Raja: Lu Mingfei finds a Freylian

As he jerked the steering wheel to shake off a modified Civic that was trying to flank him from the left, he glanced at the rearview mirror out of the corner of his eye and saw that the waiter in the black suit with a nobleman's mask on his face was catching up again.

Like a crow flying close to the ground in a downpour, appearing and disappearing from the shadows of alleyways, each time emerging from the darkness closer than the last.

His crimson-gold pupils stretched into two intermittent streaks of light in the rain, and the dignified smile on his mask never faded.

Then a beam of light shone from behind the passenger seat.

Frillie leaned over from the back seat, her long silver hair fluttering in the wind and rain, the wet ends clinging to her dark gray off-shoulder dress.

She held her wand horizontally in front of her, and with her left index and middle fingers together, she quickly drew a series of runes on the wand that Lu Mingfei couldn't understand.

The runes were ignited one by one in the rain, like the pale gold of the first rays of sunlight piercing through the forest canopy at dawn.

Then she removed her fingers from the wand and gently pressed them on Lu Mingfei's temples.

Something extremely cool seeped into his temples.

The fragmented images that kept flashing through his mind—the icy plains, the flock of crows, the girl's face covered in snow—dissipated as if gently blown away by a light, still breeze, leaving no trace. The lingering sound of the wooden clapper also vanished, leaving behind a true tranquility that he might never experience again in his life.

Lu Mingfei's hands and feet stopped trembling, his breathing returned to a steady rhythm from rapid panting, and his fingers gripping the steering wheel became steady again.

The Heart-Cleansing Mantra.

This kind of magic wouldn't take up more than half a page in any ancient elven book; it's so basic that it's ignored by the vast majority of magicians.

But it took Frilian over a thousand years to truly understand why the elven ancestors placed it at the beginning of all mental protection spells: it was not used to create illusions or distort memories, but simply to help a person temporarily set aside fears that were not their own, allowing them to regain their judgment and will.

There are two kinds of fear in humans: one that belongs to oneself, and one that comes from external suggestions.

The Heart-Cleansing Mantra can only deal with the second type, but in most cases, it is precisely the second type that drives people to the brink of collapse.

When Lu Mingfei opened his eyes again, he found that he had resumed normal driving.

Then he heard Frilian breathe very lightly from behind the passenger seat, a change in Frilian that would be almost imperceptible to anyone.

He glanced at her in the rearview mirror; she was as calm as a still pond, but the fingers holding her wand were struggling to suppress a slight tremor.

The consumption of the Heart-Cleansing Mantra shouldn't be this high, unless she didn't just use it on him.

“Eri.” Lu Mingfei suddenly realized the change in the other person’s state.

Erii curled up in the passenger seat, her swollen eyelids still bearing blood-red tear stains on her cheeks, but her eyes no longer held only blankness and confusion.

She had been slumped in her seat like a porcelain doll whose soul had been ripped away, but now she was bowing her head, wiping away the red tears from the corners of her eyes with her fingers. After wiping a few times without getting them clean, she tore a piece of paper from her notebook, folded it into a small piece, carefully dipped it in the rainwater that had fallen on the leather seat, and then gently wiped her cheeks as if washing her face.

She was pulling herself back from the fear. After wiping herself, she folded the soaked paper and put it in the storage compartment next to the car door. Then she picked up a small notebook and pencil, wrote a few words, and pushed the notebook to Lu Mingfei's right.

"I'm not afraid anymore. Frilian, thank you." followed by a small, crooked, three-petaled flower.

Before Lu Mingfei could answer, he saw those crimson-gold eyes again in the rearview mirror.

The waiter in black had already crossed two alleys and was leaping over the wreckage of a motorcycle he had overturned with his bare hands.

The smile on his mask remained unwavering despite the constant bombardment of armor-piercing and blunt-firing bullets. He was now less than thirty meters from the rear of the Lamborghini.

Frillie turned around in her seat, kneeling on one knee on the rain-soaked leather seat cushion, facing the rear of the car.

She pressed the end of her wand against the trunk lid of the Lamborghini, her long silver hair flying in all directions in the downpour, turning into a fluttering silver flag.

Then she began to gather her strength.

All the attacks that Lu Mingfei had ever seen in his life that required charging up—Chu Zihang's Monarch Flame, Caesar's Weasel, and even the Dragon King's Breath—were becoming increasingly violent and uncontrollable.

He assumed that Frilian's power-gathering would be like that, with the silver light becoming increasingly dazzling, the concentration of magic in the air increasing, and the surrounding rainwater evaporating into white mist.

But Frilian's power-gathering was the opposite. The storm around her gradually subsided, and the magical light emanating from the tip of her wand did not grow brighter, but rather dimmer, settling from silver-blue to deep blue, and then slowly fading into a deep purple that no longer emitted any light.

It's not that the light has stopped shining, but that she has compressed the magic to a frequency that is almost imperceptible to the human eye.

The air began to vibrate as the entire alley was placed under the base of a giant bronze gong, its surface being struck at an extremely slow pace.

Each wave of vibration caused an indescribable sense of pressure to resonate in Lu Mingfei's chest.

Then Frilian released her grip and pushed the wand forward with both hands.

A dark purple bolt of lightning erupted from the tip of the wand, but its shape was completely unlike any lightning bolt.

It is a complete, straight, barbed spear.

Each barb of the spear reflected a cold, sharp purple light in the rainy night. The spearhead tore through the air at a speed far exceeding that of a Lamborghini. Wherever it passed, the rainwater was not evaporated, but directly repelled from the trajectory, creating a brief vacuum.

The air exploded around the gun, emitting a piercing shriek that transcended any definition of "sharp" in human language.

The thorn spear pierced through layers of rain and through the vortex of white steam whipped up by its own speed, and with an incredible speed that could not be captured by the naked eye, it pierced the black-clad waiter's chest.

The long, barbed spear pierced through his chest and exited from his back, pinning him to the concrete wall at the end of the alley.

The deep purple magic burst into countless tiny thorns the moment it pierced his body, spreading along every blood vessel and nerve bundle to his limbs and bones, pinning his hands and feet into an outstretched position, and fixing him firmly to the wall, like a butterfly pinned to a specimen box with a pin.

The waiter lowered his head, his crimson-gold eyes fixed on the piercing wound in his chest, still crackling with magical energy. His lips twitched slightly, then he remained still.

Frillie released her wand and slumped back into her chair.

Lu Mingfei saw her face in the rearview mirror; it was pale and tired, like the moment she had just retreated after holding up her wand to fend off the dragon-blooded zombie horde in the deepest part of the arena for several consecutive nights.

Her magic was almost completely exhausted in this attack. The Thorn Spear did not consume skill or elemental manipulation in the usual sense, but rather all of her own stored energy compressed to the extreme.

With her current remaining magic power, she probably couldn't even maintain the simplest lighting spell for more than a few minutes.

"Frilian, you—", Lu Mingfei was interrupted by a sharp engine noise before he could finish speaking.

The biker gang surrounded them from all directions.

Motorcycles and modified cars poured out from every street leading to this alley, their blinding headlights shining simultaneously on the Lamborghini that was slowing down and readjusting its direction. The increasingly dense engine noise transformed the quiet residential area west of Ebisu into a giant arena of engines and shouts.

They all witnessed what had just happened: a silver-haired woman in a long dress used a glowing stick to pin another person, who didn't look human at all, to the wall.

But the billions of yen had completely blinded them; fear was crushed by greed, and they charged at the banknotes with their bare hands at an even faster pace.

“It’s your turn to drive,” Lu Mingfei said. He bent down, opened the glove box on the passenger side, and pulled the scabbard of the short knife from the wet toolbox.

Frillie threw off her seatbelt from the back seat, her figure flashing into the driver's seat like a silver shadow scattered by the wind, instantly getting both hands on the steering wheel.

She was still wearing a pair of stilettos soaked through by the rain, and she pressed the accelerator with extremely steady force.

Lu Mingfei flipped from the driver's seat to the back seat, then from the back seat to the rear of the car. He glanced down at the short knife in his hand; it was Caesar's, one of his ever-present swords, its blade extremely sharp. Then he raised his eyes, looking at the horde of biker gang motorcycles surging in from all four alleyways simultaneously, and took a deep breath.

Time zero, start.

The world around us became quiet.

The raindrops fell from the sky as slowly as crystal beads suspended in the air by silken threads. The roar of the motorcycle engine was drawn out into an extremely low and long muffled sound, like the cry of a whale in the deep sea, slowed down several times.

The biker gang members' distorted expressions froze on their faces, their two fingers resting on the brake levers frozen in mid-air.

Every raindrop in the headlight beam was clearly countable, moving through the air at an extremely slow speed, while he moved consciously alone in this frozen rain curtain.

Lu Mingfei did not hesitate.

He gripped his dagger tightly in the darkness forgotten by time, and leaped from the rear of the Lamborghini into the stagnant sea of ​​headlights.

The short knife drew its first arc in his hand, severing the front wheel spokes of the foremost motorcycle.

Then, like a fish leaping from a deep pool, he swam through the frozen rain towards every approaching rider, slicing their tires, snapping their brake lines, and knocking the baseball bats and chains they were slowly raising, still several steps away from him, from their fingertips into the air.

No one was fatally injured. He set a bottom line for himself the moment he activated Time Zero: the blade would only be used against vehicles and weapons, not against people.

But he swiftly and precisely sliced ​​off every fragile part of those motorcycles and modified cars at an incredible speed.

He was like a destructive artist wandering among vast static sculptures, his movements continuous, leaving behind fleeting afterimages in the rain.

The effects of Time Zero slowly faded from his body.

Lu Mingfei heard the world return to his ears, the motorcycle's front wheel losing balance behind him one after another, the crisp sound of the brake cable snapping, the sound of a baseball bat rolling in the puddles, and the only sound of a Lamborghini's engine roaring continuously in the downpour.

Dozens of biker gang vehicles collided with each other like dominoes behind him, falling over in a haphazard fashion, their headlights lying haphazardly on the cobblestones of the alley, casting countless bright halos of light into the puddles.

Lu Mingfei shook the rainwater off the short knife and put it back at his waist.

He walked back to the Lamborghini, wiped his eyes with his soaked sleeve, and climbed back into the back seat.

Without turning her head, Frillie turned the steering wheel with one hand and used the other to embed a newly taken-out magic crystal into the cigarette lighter socket next to the dashboard.

The crystal surface emitted a faint blue light, which was her only remaining backup magic source. This energy storage crystal, about the size of a fingernail, was probably the last bit of reserve she had taken from her temporary space bag before setting off.

The Lamborghini's taillights trailed two red arcs, cutting through the still-rain-drenched alleyway, and continued speeding towards a place where there were no roadblocks to stop it.

Chapter 825 Frilian: Erii Rests in the Small World

Lu Mingfei suddenly sat up in bed, his whole body covered in cold sweat.

Outside the window, it was a pitch-black night with torrential rain. The raindrops pounded against the French windows, making a dense, muffled sound, as if someone was punching the glass.

He woke up from a nightmare in Tokyo, still in late spring or early summer. Red gauze curtains hung from all four sides of the round bed, swaying gently in the breeze coming in from the air conditioner vents. He was covered with a soft down comforter, the cover of which carried a faint scent of laundry detergent.

He sat on the edge of the bed, his hands supporting his knees, head down, breathing heavily.

The images from his dream still lingered in fragmented remnants beneath his eyelids: the motorcycle gang's formation collapsing like dominoes in the rain, their headlights illuminating the cobblestone alleyway haphazardly; his own hand gripped a short knife in the gap of time zero, the crisp sound of the blade slicing through brake lines and tire spokes still echoing in his ears.

Then came endless running, the roar of the accelerator floored, and Frilian's long, silvery-white hair fluttering like a flag in the night wind.

The final image froze on a scene he never imagined he would witness: Erii stood in the pouring rain, her eyes burning with an unprecedentedly bright crimson gold, like a bloodthirsty empress who had returned to the mortal world from the underworld, looking down at him. The inhuman majesty and cold beauty in her pupils made him almost unable to recognize her as the same person for that instant.

His head ached as if he had been hit with a blunt object all night, and his back and shoulders also hurt.

He lowered his head and touched his ribs and arms. The wounds from being struck by the biker gang's chains and cut by flying shards of car headlight glass had already formed a thin layer of dark red scabs, and the edges were starting to itch, showing signs of healing.

This proves that the massacre on the long street late at night actually happened, and was not a nightmare he had while lying in the bathtub.

He remembers being dragged into a car and shoved into the back seat. In his hazy state, he felt someone pressing his carotid artery with cool fingers to measure his pulse.

But he couldn't remember anything that happened after that, or how he got back to the love hotel from Ebisu.

He groped his way up from the edge of the bed, intending to go to the bathroom to get a glass of water. His bare feet touched the soft carpet, and after taking just one step, he suddenly jolted up as if electrocuted. He then realized something terrible: Erii was gone.

On the coffee table in front of the French windows were still the dolls she hadn't had time to tidy up last night. Barbie was still sitting in the driver's seat of the red toy car, and Rilakkuma and the little yellow chick were still surrounding the rough ceramic teacup. But the cushion next to the coffee table where she often leaned to write notes was empty, and the down comforter on the other side of the bed was partially pulled back, with faint indentations on the pillow where she had slept.

He turned his head to look towards the bathroom; the frosted glass door was open, and there were no lights inside.

His heart tightened suddenly, and he was about to shout out—

"Eri is alright. She's asleep," a familiar voice drifted from the corner of the room.

Lu Mingfei turned around abruptly. Frillie slowly walked out from a spatial rift that had not yet fully closed. The edges of the rift shimmered with a faint silver light. After she stepped over it, it quickly shrank into a thin line and then silently disappeared into the air.

She changed out of the dark gray, off-the-shoulder dress that had been soaked through by the rain during the battle last night, and put on her signature dark green trench coat again. Her long, silvery-white hair was not completely dry, draped over her shoulders, with a water droplet occasionally dripping from the end.