The Fire Chaser of the Collapsing World

Carol, who was originally the liveliest, supported his chin with his left hand, and controlled the fast noodles with his right hand to pick up barely touched noodles one by one.

As for Hua, who was originally taciturn, she put her hands on her knees, stared down at the smooth bottom of the bowl, and said nothing.

"Uh... everyone can't say a few words... It's embarrassing to keep silent..."

Kevin scratched his head, thinking he had found an excellent topic: "Hey! Hua, Carol, I heard that you were rescued twice by Mikael in Canghai City... Ah! Mei, why are you stepping on me? !"

"..."

"Hey..." Carol put down his right hand, put his hands together to hold his cheek, and sighed twice, "Hey..."

Kevin patted the upper of the leather boots that had been trampled by Mei with his hands in distress, and asked through gritted teeth.

"Why are you sighing!"

"Why else are you sighing...Brother Mikael is so strong...how did he disappear without a sound?"

"Let's go."

Hua suddenly bounced off the stool.

Suddenly becoming the focus of the other three people's eyes, she did not feel that embarrassing feeling to her surprise, instead she pointed to the teacher's wall clock in the noodle shop flatly, and said:

"It's getting late, we should go back...Tomorrow, we will resume daily training..."

Speaking of this, Kevin took a deep breath.His physique is indeed unreasonably strong, but training...

Nobody really likes to train, does they?

He even felt... Anyway, his physique is so good, those physical training contents are dispensable, so it's better to take this time out to date Mei.

Uh, wait, there's another problem, even if he can escape the training, Mei doesn't seem to have much time to date him now... Even his boyfriend can't figure out what Mei is researching.

A group of people just walked in the streets of New Moth City in such a dazed manner.

There are still piles of finely crushed cement slag on both sides of the street, and there are only three or two street lamps scattered along the street, and a faint light can only be glimpsed from a long distance.

The inside of the noodle shop just now is similar. From the outside, it looks like a blank room with no paint on the walls, and the tables and chairs are all simply cut thick metal plates...

These remind the four of them all the time: there was a collapse here not long ago.

Even though the Honkai beasts in the whole city have been wiped out, even though the city center has been rebuilt in just a few days after adopting modular construction technology, the traces of Honkai on the city already exist.

Just like the whole world.

Except for a very small number of areas such as Tianqiong City, the eastern part of China and the extreme east are basically completely destroyed. The coalition government does not even plan to rebuild this area. The reason is very simple-there is no population to fill it...

As they walked, the four of them finally became distinct because of their closeness. Carol and Hua fell behind, while Mei and Kevin walked ahead side by side.

"Hey! Hua! There's news from my parents, I plan to let them live in Moth City, and come to our house to play during the weekend!"

"..."

"Ah Hua, why don't you talk today? By the way, your father..."

Carol silently covered her mouth, and she finally realized that she had made the same low-level mistake as Kevin just now.

"Oh ah!"

Hua suddenly uttered two syllables in surprise, "I...I haven't contacted him yet..."

"Have not been contacted" means a lot of meanings, it may mean that it has already been... so it cannot be contacted, or it may be that the survivors lack contact equipment, coupled with the statistical confusion, they cannot be contacted for a while...

But it doesn't matter anymore, the important thing is, what kind of expression does Hua want to express?Carol couldn't figure it out either.

If it's the former, her emotion seems to be too smooth, and if it's the latter, her emotion seems to be too suppressed.

"Ah Hua..."

Carol was about to say something else, but Mei and Kevin who were walking ahead suddenly stopped. Kevin took a step across and stood in front of everyone, looking warily at the dark alley on the right.

"Da... da... da... da..."

The sound of chaotic footsteps came from the alley, and Kevin's vigilance is still necessary, because disasters often mean an increase in the crime rate, and no one knows what the purpose of the people coming out of the alley is...or they are not human at all. , but the dead who have not been cleaned up.

There are no street lights in this section of the street, Hua slightly squinted his eyes, but he couldn't even catch the outline of the dark alley.

Kevin took two steps back in silence, and the rest followed suit—only Hua Zhi stayed where he was.

When she recovered from Carol's soft cry, she was alone at the entrance of the alley, facing what was about to come out.

Kevin just wanted to pull Hua back, but it was too late.

Hua could see clearly that there were four people in total, each wearing a thick and wide cape and a hood to conceal their figure.

When they walked out of the alley, the cold moonlight fell far away, coating everyone's body with a layer of silver.

Three short figures in a row, who looked like girls, hurried past Hua. They lowered their heads, and Hua couldn't see anything clearly.

Walking at the end was a man who was about the same height as Kevin. The hood only covered the upper half of his face, but not the lower half.

Hua glanced blankly, and a familiar feeling came to his heart.

The other party seemed to sense her gaze, and raised his head imperceptibly. From Hua's perspective, that familiar face that couldn't be more familiar was imprinted in his eyes.

"Bang!"

"Bang!"

"Bang!"

The sound of the heart suddenly came to her ears loudly and quickly, but Hua didn't do anything, allowing the figure to stay half a step in front of her, then quickly turned and left.

"Huh... Fortunately, there was no conflict."

"Yes, yes, they look really scary!"

The voices of Kevin and Carol seemed to reach Hua's ears after traveling a long distance.

It's like crossing an ocean, and it's like crossing the border of two different worlds - Hua thought so.

Until she found that the eyes of the other three were focusing on her.

"Let's go, Hua, those four people have no malicious intentions."

"oh oh."

Kevin and Mei still walked ahead, towards the direction of the moon.

Carol jumped and stepped on the shadow left by Kevin under the moonlight, and Hua's mind was full of the glimpse just now:

Who is that?

Is that really him?

No no no, I must be wrong.

he died.

He can't be here.

But is he really dead?

Do you want to follow up and ask?

Just ask?

No, you can't act on your own...

At this time, May, who was in the front, suddenly talked about philosophical topics with Kevin.

"Kevin, have you ever heard of the law of increasing entropy?"

"Uh... Ah! I seem to have heard of it in physics class."

"Hmm..." May hummed softly.

"What I want to talk about is not limited to the entropy increase in the laws of thermodynamics, but a philosophical thinking. Entropy represents the degree of chaos in a closed space. The higher the entropy value, the higher the degree of chaos. The so-called entropy The law of increase means that in a closed space, entropy always tends to increase."

"Uh... like my dormitory?"

"Oh! Are you sharp this time? But in the final analysis, the same is true for the earth, and so are human beings. Imagine that even if there is no Houkai, due to the limitation of the speed of light, human beings cannot escape the solar system, nor can they develop the resources in the universe, so to In the end, human beings will inevitably go to extinction—especially for a single person. Then, Kevin, now you can answer me... What is the meaning of human existence? Why do people live?"

"Uh...May, can we change the question?"

However, Mei ignored Kevin's begging for mercy. She said to herself: "In fact, life is meaningless at all. Even if your life is "meaningful", it will be nothing but a piece of loess in the end. Even if you make No matter how outstanding the contribution is——sociological meaning, but human beings will eventually perish, and this so-called meaning is ultimately meaningless. Even the tens of thousands of years of human civilization itself, and even the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years after , in the face of the 10 billion years since the birth of the universe, it is nothing but a bubble."

"Uh……"

"But, Kevin... would you not live because of these desperate facts?"

"No way?"

"Yes, no. Because the meaning of human existence is existence itself—the existence of civilization itself is a kind of negative entropy. What human beings do from generation to generation is to fight against the increase of entropy and try to make this doomed to collapse. The world has become orderly again. This desperate resistance is like Sisyphus pushing the ball... Isn't this desperate resistance to the established destiny the meaning of our human existence? It is also the only What we humans can do.”

"Uh... Mei, calm down, what do you want to say?"

"Oh! Sorry, actually what I want to say is—since our existence itself is the meaning we have been pursuing, then we are struggling with ourselves: just let go and do what you want to do, and be bold if you want to ask Since the ending is doomed, then we should do what we want to do, so that when we reach the end, we can look back on our life and save a lot of regrets, right?"

"Mei... I don't understand..."

"..."

Kevin could understand every word, but couldn't understand a whole paragraph, but he accepted every bit of the helplessness and encouragement contained in it.

So he knew what to do, he took Mei's hand silently, and the latter did not resist, and even took the initiative to hold Kevin tightly.

But not long after, Carol, who was walking behind, suddenly let out a scream:

"Ah! It's not good, it's not good! Ah Hua is gone!"

Chapter 1 Snowfield Solitary Village

"The catkins are caused by the wind, the green salt is scattered by the wind, the world is vast, and there is no way back."

Walking on the bone-chilling snow field with one deep foot and one shallow foot, Mikael, who was only wearing a light coat, suddenly stopped and raised his head, speaking in succession.

Holding his trouser legs with both hands, Hua struggled to pull his calf out of the knee-deep snow, stood behind Mikael with difficulty, supported his back, and took a short rest.

With a chance to catch her breath, she couldn't help tightening her scarf, watching the white breath she exhaled mixed with Mikael's puff and floated up into the air, obscuring the slowly falling fine snowflakes, it really seemed like a mess. Sprinkled salt, but more like catkins blown by the wind.

It was only then that she belatedly remembered that the language Mikael had just used was not a common language, but a dialect of the Shenzhou region.And the cadence and the abstract and far-reaching artistic conception in the words are exactly the same as the ancient poems her father had read to her back then.

As if sensing that Hua was exhausted, Mikael reached out to her and pulled her up a small hill in front of her.Looking down from the top of the hill, a black line like a lake appeared on the border of the snowfield with the sky. Hua took a look at the telescope that Mikael constructed at random:

The black line of the mold lake is an endless birch forest, and outside the birch forest, there is a lonely village. A few wisps of smoke rise from the village, interweaving into a thick blue smoke and flying obliquely into the sky. It's like a slanted pillar standing alone between the sky and the earth.

The scale of the village is not large, with a total of twenty or thirty houses distributed in a ring shape, as if surrounded by something—like a square?

There is something standing on the square, but the height of the hill is not high, and the line of sight is blocked by a house, so the situation on the square cannot be seen at all.

"Is that our goal...ah!"

A sudden gust of north wind wrapped the dog fur hat on Hua's head and her subconscious screams far away.

Mikael chuckled, and reached into the void with his hand, the dog fur hat that had been molded into a small black spot in his sight suddenly passed through the space gap and appeared in his hand.

He gently pushed the hat back on top of Hua's head.

"I've said it all, don't say the word "target" with a very high concentration of militarization! That's a vacation spot! Vacation!"

"Uh... Mikael, your excuse is really..."

She originally wanted to say "it sucks", but she was afraid that such direct words would hurt people, so she hesitated for a long time, and only said:

"It sucks."

"..."

Mikael covered his forehead.

"Anyway, if my memory is correct, it should be here."

"memory?"

"Yeah." Mikael nodded, "I've been here before, with... Alicia, that was five years ago, or four years ago, I can't even remember the time."

When Mikael said this, Hua remembered that he and Alicia had a trip a long time ago, and they happened to pass by her house.

Home……

"So, what exactly is our mission this time?"