118: Chapter 118 Azu VS Dongfang 5C

Above the White House, the red glow in A-Zu's eye sockets slowly shifted from iron-red to scorching red, and in the next second, two crimson beams shot out.

The beams cut into the center of the White House dome, like a blade of light held in the hand of a god, sweeping back and forth slowly and evenly along the central axis of the building.

The white sandstone exterior walls melted continuously under the high heat, leaving behind only a wisp of extremely thin white smoke.

The Corinthian columns of the circular colonnade were cut in half at the waist; the upper halves tumbled in the air for half a turn before crashing onto the roof of the East Wing, smashing a huge collapse into the roof.

A fissure split the triangular gable right down the middle, and the framework snapped from the center, emitting a continuous sound of breaking.

The heat rays swept across the Oval Office; the wooden floor along with the carpet ignited, and flames erupted from the windows, curling into an orange-red tongue in the air.

The White House, from the portico to the East Wing, from the dome to the West Wing, began to collapse entirely.

The Old Butler stood beside the Resolute Desk, straightened the presidential seal that had been knocked askew on the table, picked up several scattered picture frames from the floor, and placed them neatly back into a cardboard box.

Then, he crossed his hands in front of him and looked up at the ceiling as it collapsed; the White House butler closed his eyes at the exact moment the White House officially turned into ruins.

A-Zu retracted his red light, glanced at the burning ruins, adjusted his angle, and flew rapidly toward the East, dragging an increasingly thin trail behind him in the setting sun.

A-Zu lifted off from above the ruins of Washington, crossing the North American continent at a cruising speed of Mach 1.5.

The North American continent receded rapidly beneath his feet, the snow line of the Rocky Mountains glowing with a final touch of golden-red in the setting sun. When he entered the airspace over the Pacific Ocean, he maintained an altitude of 20,000 meters, with the open sea about three hundred nautical miles west of Midway Island directly below him.

The sea surface was calm, the clouds were thin, and the starry sky above was lighting up one star at a time from the east. At this speed, he would enter the airspace of the East in fifteen minutes.

Suddenly, his mind jolted violently, his heartbeat accelerated abruptly for no reason, and the scalp on the back of his head felt as if it were being pricked by countless needles simultaneously, his antennae uncontrollably tensing backward into two straight lines...

The last time he felt this sensation was when he was a child, the night his father threw him out of the royal palace, and he had to face an adult Rift Beast alone in the wilderness.

Before that Rift Beast pounced on him, he had felt the exact same tremor.

He stopped abruptly in mid-air, the sonic boom cloud exploding around his body and then quickly being left behind. He hovered there, his pupils shrinking to the size of pinpoints, the red light in his eye sockets like two ignited warning lights in the night sky.

He turned his head, scanning the surrounding airspace 360 degrees.

Very quickly, he locked his gaze in the direction slightly north of straight ahead; about thirty kilometers away, a tiny black dot was flying toward him at an incredible speed.

"So fast."

In the time it took to say just those two words, that black dot had already enlarged to the point where its outline could be seen.

As A-Zu's pupils captured the line of numbers on the side of the missile body, he subconsciously read it out: Dongfeng 5C.

In less than a breath's time, the missile had almost rushed right in front of him.

His body reacted faster than his brain, and he dove vertically toward the sea surface below.

He focused all his energy on downward acceleration, his body like a cannonball thrown from the edge of the atmosphere, plunging straight into the Pacific Ocean.

"BOOM!!!"

The nuclear bomb above was instantly detonated remotely, with the explosion occurring about 1,200 meters directly above him.

The initial fission reaction was completed in less than one microsecond, the temperature instantly climbed to several times that of the sun's core, and light radiation expanded in all directions at the speed of light, forming a fireball at the center of the explosion that was ten million times brighter than the noon sun.

In just a few seconds, the diameter of the fireball expanded to nearly two kilometers, swallowing the position where A-Zu had just been hovering, along with the surrounding clouds.

A-Zu felt a kind of heat he had never experienced in his life, as if he had been thrown into the interior of a star, and he couldn't help but emit bursts of screams.

His cape was vaporized the moment the edge of the fireball reached his back, followed by the skin on his back, the tips of his antennae, and his hair—all of it vanished.

But he still gritted his teeth and dove downward; the shockwave slammed into his back, and the force it generated caused his internal organs to shift entirely in that instant, his ribs emitting a brittle cracking sound he had never heard before.

His eardrums were also shattered; his ears were filled with sharp buzzing, and then even the buzzing was swallowed by the low-frequency roar of the shockwave.

He continued to plunge into the sea. The sea surface was evaporated by the heat of the fireball, creating large plumes of water vapor; the white steam and the black mushroom cloud swirled together in the air, forming a strange, grayish-white dense fog beneath the center of the explosion.

A-Zu rushed into this dense fog and then plunged headfirst into the waters of the Pacific Ocean.

The moment he entered the water, the temperature difference between the seawater and the surface water heated by the nuclear explosion gave him a brief buffer.

He was carried by the shockwave and continued to be smashed into the deep-water zone; the seawater boiled around him, and hundreds of millions of bubbles surged up from the depths.

His skin was severely burned over a large area starting from his back, the tips of his antennae were scorched halfway, and his whole body dragged a trail mixed with blood and ionizing afterglow in the water, tumbling backward several times before he could barely stabilize his figure.

He was still conscious, but his consciousness was blurred for about dozens of seconds. He opened his eyes underwater; the red afterimage of the huge fireball from moments ago remained on his retinas, his ears were still filled with sharp buzzing, and his mouth was full of the salty taste of seawater and the metallic tang of his own blood.

He reached out his hand underwater, grabbed the edge of a reef, and dragged himself a bit deeper.

Then he looked back at the water surface. Several hundred meters above the water layer above him, the mushroom cloud was surging into the stratosphere, and the light of the fireball was still persisting, illuminating the entire surface of the Pacific Ocean like broad daylight.

The giant waves pushed out by the shockwave on the sea surface were spreading in all directions in the shape of concentric circles.

He had dodged the core heat of the fireball, withstood the direct impact of the shockwave, and used the Pacific Ocean's seawater to offset some of the thermal radiation.

But he was already severely injured; at least six or seven of his ribs were broken, he couldn't lift his left arm, his right leg had been twisted by the shockwave when he entered the water, and every stroke of his knee in the seawater made the corners of his mouth twitch in pain.

Yet he suppressed all his anger and disbelief behind gritted teeth, continuing to swim toward New York.

He understood that if humans sent a second one of these things at him, he would undoubtedly die.

And as things stood now, only New York, where Commander Chen Mu was stationed, was his only path to survival. Even if you gave those Blue Star people two guts, they wouldn't dare to drop a nuclear bomb on New York!