New Eden: Live to Play, Play to Live-Chapter 1124: A Descisive Move

Cheng Weilong was the first to react to the attack, since he hadn't taken his eyes off the boy.

Spinning his glaive at the claws, intending to deflect them away, he growled at the boy.

"He is not yours to take down, you bloodthirsty little beast!"

Even though Alexander's words kept echoing inside Cheng Weilong's mind, he couldn't bring himself to trust him. The man was a danger to anyone who wasn't a powerful warrior, even if he refused to admit it himself.

Letting him walk among regular civilians was like hiding a nuclear reactor among a pile of batteries. It was bound to blow up eventually and melt everything around him.

Weilong himself had cut his interactions with civilians to a minimum ever since he had awakened to his powers from within New Eden. He only went out to meet regular people when the agency ordered him to, in PR stunts and the likes.

He would never admit it to anyone, but he was most scared of doing something mundane, like a handshake or a playful hug, and hurting someone he cared about.

Such incidents were already commonplace almost everywhere around the world for people who had awakened without noticing. Strength they weren't used to, suddenly affecting their day-to-day lives in ways they couldn't have predicted.

Cheng Weilong had two very young siblings, whom he had barely seen since awakening, out of fear of hurting them with so much as a playful push or pinch.

His father had given his life to work, so he hadn't seen much of him in a long time, but his mother had stopped looking at him with love a while back, and now looked at him with a mix of fear and apprehension when they met.

All of these factors meant he couldn't put it past any awakened person to be a danger to themselves and others. Even if they had all the good intentions in the world, they no longer fit the human standard of trust.

They needed to be better, to do better.

Weilong could tell Alexander Leduc wasn't inherently evil, as he had heard him command his friend to help evacuate the civilians as their fight started. But that wasn't enough for him to trust the man.

It could have been simply because he didn't want the guilt of killing an innocent. Nothing proved it was because he cared about people.

His mind snapped back to the fight as a flurry of swipes was aimed at him, forcing him to rotate his glaive like a windmill again, trying to block all the attacks. It was in vain, of course, the attacks coming in faster than he could react, and a few of them connecting with his arms and legs.

He was managing to limit the strikes to flesh wounds, but he already had a few from fighting Alexander, and with the bruises and cracked bones from the latter's punches as well, he was starting to feel the burden of this stretched-out fight.

It needed to end soon, or he would start taking injuries that put him and his men at risk.

Alex had stopped attacking the Chinese man altogether, trying to get him to understand through action that he wasn't a menace, but Cheng Weilong still launched the occasional baiting strike at him, keeping him from fleeing.

'What a stubborn fellow,' Alex lamented mentally.

'I just need him to trust me this once, so we can push back this monster and I can leave with everyone intact. Why is he so hell-bent on bringing me to justice? It's not like I murdered anyone. I just broke into the country, for Christ's sake!'

In his moment of distraction, Alex had stepped toward a small pile of rubble, the little monster nipping at his heels and launching all kinds of swipes trying to cut him to pieces.

He dashed away, trying to skip over the rubble without tripping, but as he jumped over it, something caught his eye.

Lying under the rubble, unconscious but breathing, was an old man, his head bleeding severely.

His life force was almost gone, which is why he hadn't noticed him until now.

Alex's heart froze as he realized the attack that was coming at him would hit the pile of rubble after he moved.

And he could guess that Christoph had already felt the presence of this civilian, as the attack seemed much more vicious than the previous ones.

His face had warped into an evil grin, his serrated teeth only exacerbating his monstrous appearance and his nefarious intentions.

From afar, Cheng Weilong noticed the person too late as well; his senses too focused on the battle all around him and his own combat, that he missed the fading presence.

He gritted his teeth in contempt at both the little monster and his own misstep. He would have to bear the shame of letting a civilian die on his watch.

But Alex's eyes became glacial.

"Thousand Thoughts," he murmured, his skill already back off cooldown.

Time slowed to a crawl around him as his brain accelerated a thousandfold.

His body was still gliding in the air over the rubble, and he knew he wouldn't be able to shift his movement in time to block the attack.

So he did the only thing he could think of in the moment.

"Asmodeus. Teleport me in front of that attack, facing the man. Bael, reinforce the mana on my back. Make it as hard as you can."

He could feel the confusion from both the demon kings' minds in his.

"Why?" Asmodeus asked.

"We are not letting this innocent man get torn to shreds, that's why," Alex snapped back.

"Who cares about one person? You humans reproduce like rabbits, anyway?" Bael mocked.

Alex's wrath slammed into the demon's mind like a sledgehammer, forcing him to one knee.

"Don't talk back to me, you bastard. Do what I asked and do it now!" he spat with fury.

Both demons could push back on him if they so wished, and they knew this. But they also knew it was a bad idea, as Sanguis' gaze landed on them.

The nephalim was not something they wanted to mess with. Even if they were confident that they could batter him together, it was something they weren't keen on trying.

After all, they would never trust each other either. Trusting a demon was like trusting a snake not to bite you.

Their nature was to deceive and betray.

They still couldn't understand why their master was ready to take a dangerous blow to protect such a weak being, one whose life was already flitting away, but they couldn't disobey.

In an instant, Asmodeus channelled his powers and moved his master in front of the dying old man, his back to the attack, as he had asked, while Bael focused his mana into making a shell on his master's back.

But he knew very well it wouldn't hold. After all, this little creature had pierced his skin more than once. Those claws were sharper than they looked.

*Shlirk*