Somewhere on the edge of downtown Ventura, an almost completely empty indoor shopping center with dirty glass ceilings covered in dust, dried leaves and spots of grey, dark green and black spots of bird poop. The stores and shops in this shopping center inside the shopping center also seemed deserted, all the workers in them were all taking naps, watching their phones, or even just straight up doing drugs behind the counters or in their break rooms.

“Boom!” something seemed to have exploded from a distance, and the ground shook. Some goods placed on high shelves were shaken, and some of them even fell onto the ground. A few glass bottles of soft drink shattered when they hit the hard floor and the overly sugary drinks just spilled everywhere.

“Fuck!” the clerk behind the counter was playing on his phone, and he almost fell off his chair when it happened: “Fucking piece of shit! God! What the fu - ”

Just when this clerk was about to pick up some cleaning supplies to clean the mess, another remote explosion occurred, and the ground shook along with it. This time, it seemed to have become more violent.

“Boom!” before any of the people in this deserted shopping center could react, another explosion occurred right under the central dried up fountain. The fountain was thrown straight into the sky as if it was just some random object placed on top of the lid of a boiling kettle. A few human figures rushed out from the whole underground, tearing the hole even bigger and sending debris of cement, bricks and burning and smoking rocks everywhere.

“Go! Go!” one of the figures that rushed out was a man with many tattoos all over his body, but now he had a few grevious wounds on his chest and arms, one could even see his forearm bones through some of them: “Head back! Headback!”

The other two figures that came out were a half man half beast whose body was covered in brown fur and bristle and a young woman in a suit of dark leather armor wielding a long one handed sword and a short one, with her eyes gently glowing and flickering. The half man half beast also had many severe wounds on his body, but those were being healed at an elevated rate. The young woman, on the other hand, only had a few small scratches and cuts on her body.

“Use the portal scroll!” the half man half beast yelled in a low voice: “Or we’ll just die here!”

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“Bang bang bang bang!” someone hiding in the corners holding a Division-issued enchanted gun opened fire on the three figures that emerged from the hole on the ground. The young woman seemed to have seen this attack coming just mere moments before, and with her body lighting up in dark red, she leapt to the side. Two of the four bullets just barely missed her body, one of which hit the half man half beast, and the other just flew into an old toy store in the back. The half man half beast was blasted away with his right arm almost completely blown off.

“I will need a moment!” the young woman raised her voice, and she used the long one handed sword of hers to unleash a dark red energy bolt at the man in full black tactical gear. The man raised his left hand and conjured a round energy shield from an artifact on his wrist, but that energy bolt just turned into a spinning energy saw blade and sliced right through the energy shield and the man’s body.

“You will not get away this time!” a team of four figures in dark cloak and face coverings burst out from underground surrounding the team of the young woman and her two injured teammates: “Emilia Corin! Your time is up!”

“You will NOT!” the tattooed man raised both his arms and struck the air above him, grey and shadowy energy exploded and two shadow serpents appeared out of thin air and lunged at the figures in cloaks around them.

One of the figures in cloaks jumped and left a string of afterimages behind him. A curved blade with the rough length of an adult man’s whole arm sliced through the tattooed man’s right shoulder and severed his entire right arm.

“Fuck you!” the tattooed man cursed in fear, but still commanded the two shadow snakes to lunge at his enemies.

Two of the figures in cloak tried constructing an energy shield to block off the attacks of the two shadow snakes, and another figure in cloak just lunged at Emilia Corin with a wrist blade extended from her right arm and a handful of tiny sharp blades in her left hand.

“Bang!” the two shadow snakes collided with the energy shields put up by the two figures in defensive positions. Some kind of energy wave still seeped through the energy shield and struck the two figures from inside of their very bodies. These two figures in cloaks were thus thrown back on their backs and started bleeding through their eyes, ears and nostrils.

“Psssh...” the sound of liquid gushing into the air appeared, it was the tattooed man who just lost his head, at the hands of the cloaked figure wielding a curved sword, and blood was gushing into the air from his cleanly cut neck.

Emilia Corin swung her shorter sword at the cloaked figure charging at her and unleashed two crescent shaped dark red energy blades at the opponent. The cloaked figure swung her wrist blade while shifting to the side. The two dark red energy blades were deflected and ended up destroying three shops behind her, and her momentum was only momentarily halted.

The cloaked figure flailed her left arm through the air, and a batch of six tiny sharp blades were hurled at Emilia Corin aiming at her face, her chest and legs.

Emilia Corin’s eyes glowed, her skin around her eye sockets cracked up and started bleeding, and her dark leather armor lit up in dark red as she rolled on the ground in an attempt to evade the tiny blades.