This building had been the Whitechapel District’s largest brewery in the early Victorian era.

Later, after several catastrophic boiler explosions and a cholera outbreak, the owner declared bankruptcy, and the factory fell into complete disuse.

Through the glass, Lin Jie could see the factory’s extremely complex internal layout.

Dozens of enormous red-bronze fermentation vats, each requiring several people to encircle, stood irregularly erect on the concrete floor below.

Above those copper vats, crisscrossing steel walkways and maintenance catwalks formed a spiderweb, fragmenting the tall interior space into a chaotic tangle.

It was practically a natural three-dimensional maze.

“It’s in there.”

Julian removed a bird-beak-like gas mask filter and lowered his voice.

“That sharp smell of white phosphorus mixed with rotting flesh peaks near the row of ventilation ducts on the second floor. It must have made its lair in some high, dead corner.”

Lin Jie nodded.

He used the tip of his knife to gently pry open the rusted iron latch on the skylight.

Then, slipping soundlessly through the skylight gap, he slid into the plant and landed steadily on one of the suspended steel catwalks.

William and Julian followed close behind.

The interior was even bigger than it looked from outside, the air thick with the pungent scent of malt fermentation and old iron rust.

Lin Jie signaled, and the three formed a triangular defensive formation, moving along the swaying catwalk deeper into the factory.

The terrain here was too complicated.

Chains hung everywhere, abandoned pulley systems swayed, and rebar jutted broken and twisted.

For a creature with extreme vertical mobility, this was a perfect hunting ground, but for humans limited to planar movement, it was full of lethal blind spots.

“Look.”

As they rounded a massive water tank, William abruptly halted and pointed his barrel at a high maintenance platform not far ahead.

The platform hung nearly twenty meters above the floor, originally used to clean vents.

Now, its rusted wire mesh was piled with grotesque detritus.

There were dried animal carcasses, tattered clothing, and more of various glittering metal objects.

Pocket watches, silver coins, copper buttons, even a few police whistles were heaped together, like a crow’s nest built by a collector with hoarding tendencies.

At the very top of that pile sat a ghastly pale human severed hand.

The cut at the wrist was jagged and torn, and on the middle finger of that stiffened hand, a heavy brass ring set with a deep red gemstone engraved with a scales emblem glinted with a dim sheen.

Master’s Signet Ring.

“Found it.” Julian’s eyes flashed with a trace of triumph.

“Don’t move.” Lin Jie’s voice whispered low in both their ears.

His gaze fixed on the support steel beam hidden in the darkness above the nest.

There, a shadow moved.

Its outline twisted oddly in the faint moonlight.

“Hee hee hee…”

A sharp, grating laugh with a distinctly nervous edge suddenly exploded above the cavernous factory.

The sound made their scalps prickle and their nerves tighten.

It had discovered them.

Even with the Curator’s Seal blocking spiritual detection, this notorious UMA that had stalked the East End for years still relied on beast-like instincts and absolute territorial control to sense intruders.

The shadow moved.

It dove straight down from the high steel beam at incredible speed, but just before impact, its unnaturally long, somewhat backward-jointed legs bent sharply.

Bang!

A heavy impact.

Using unbelievable springing power, it snapped into an exaggerated angular ricochet and lunged toward the side of the catwalk where Lin Jie and the others stood.

Bathed in the cold moonlight pouring through the skylight, Lin Jie finally saw the true face of this famous Victorian urban legend.

Spring-Heeled Jack.

It resembled an extremely emaciated human whose limbs had been forcibly lengthened.

It wore a tattered, clown-like circus leotard and a water-resistant cloak so faded its original color was unrecognizable.

Its hands had no fingers; in their place grew five razor-sharp bone claws.

A bizarre metal mask, as if a gas mask fused with a demon skull, covered its face.

Behind the mask’s eyeholes, two pools of crimson light flashed with murderous intent.

“Spread out!”

Lin Jie shouted, leaning his body back.

Sss—!

Five cold glints sliced past the tip of his nose, cutting the rusted steel guardrail into five segments.

Spring-Heeled Jack missed, but without the slightest hesitation it stamped its feet into the catwalk’s iron plate, setting the whole walkway violently shaking.

It launched itself again.

This time it bounded onto the maze of ventilation ducts above their heads.

Like a gravity-defying flea, it performed bewildering three-dimensional leaps among the intricate metal structures, moving so fast it left only streaks of black afterimage.

It was searching for the optimal attack angle.

“Fire!”

William half-crouched, the barrel tracking that streak of motion.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Three rounds screamed out, but all struck empty air, sparking off a steel beam.

Its speed and bouncing trajectory defied conventional physics.

“Hee hee hee!”

The manic laugh sounded again, this time from directly overhead.

Spring-Heeled Jack hung inverted from a thick water pipe, its masked head dropping low.

Hoo—!

It opened its mouth.

A cascade of bluish-white flame erupted like a waterfall, pouring toward the three below.

“White phosphorus gas! Hold your breath!”

Lin Jie barked the warning.

That flame came from white phosphorus powder igniting on contact with air.

Not only did it burn at extreme temperatures and instantly sear flesh, its combustion produced poisonous smoke that immediately damaged the nervous system, inducing severe hallucinations and eventual asphyxiation if inhaled.

“On me!”

Julian snatched a glass vial filled with pale blue liquid from his tactical pack.

It was the alchemy potion he had painstakingly prepared at Roscoff Harbor—the Phantom Barrier.

Julian swung his arm and smashed the vial onto the steel catwalk in front of them.

Shatter!

The glass broke.

The liquid underwent a violent endothermic reaction the moment it hit air.

A thick, bone-chilling white fog bloomed like an explosion, forming a heavy, low-temperature shield above them.

The bluish-white phosphorus flame slammed into that icy fog.

Although white phosphorus has a very low ignition point, in the ultra-low-temperature environment artificially produced by alchemy, oxygen was displaced and heat was instantly siphoned away.

The fire waterfall hissed in midair, rapidly losing combustion conditions and turning into ashy-black toxic dust that fell helplessly around them.

“Nice work!”

William praised as he raised his gun in vigilance.

Seeing its spout attack so easily neutralized, Spring-Heeled Jack pushed off the pipe with a violent kick, the enormous reaction force crumpling the rusted pipe beneath it.

Like an arrow from a bow, it altered trajectory and lunged at Julian, who was closest.

“It’s heading for you, Julian!”

Lin Jie moved swiftly, searching for the best tactical fulcrum.

Against such hyper-mobile enemies, raw firepower alone was useless. They had to limit its movement.

As the metallic claws descended from above, Julian slammed his blackthorn wood cane into the iron plate with his left hand.

Withered Thorns activated.

A gray field spread from the cane into the air around them.

When Spring-Heeled Jack’s high-speed falling body entered that gray field, it sensed something wrong.

Its speed abruptly dropped and its movements stiffened.

In that brief stiff moment, Julian raised his right hand.

Discipline’s muzzle had already locked onto the airborne monster.

Bang!

Julian applied absolute rational tactics, aiming for the knee joint of the right leg Spring-Heeled Jack was powering from.

The rule of guaranteed hit triggered.

The bullet ignored the ballistic deviation from the fall, made an eerie turn, and precisely struck the knee armor.

Clang!

Sparks flew.

This UMA’s bone hardness exceeded expectations; ordinary lead rounds did not penetrate the knee, but the enormous kinetic energy still threw its balance.

Spring-Heeled Jack tumbled awkwardly half a turn in midair, losing its original landing point, forced to extend its claws and viciously slash at a nearby thick load-bearing iron column.

Skraa—!

The metal bone claws gouged a long streak of sparks across the iron column with a shrill grinding noise.

It used that brutal method to arrest its fall, hanging from the column like a giant spider.

“Now, Lin Jie!” William roared.

William didn’t need to tell him; Lin Jie was already in position.

While Julian used the field and bullets to force Spring-Heeled Jack to change its landing, Lin Jie had slid beneath the load-bearing column, using Black Mercury coat’s properties.

The coat, made from Oil Ghost Skin, gave him planar mobility in this rusted, obstacle-strewn environment comparable to the UMA’s own abilities.

He looked up, his deep dark eyes locked on the monster hanging above the iron column.

He knew well the most dangerous thing about this creature was its jump.

As long as it had a fulcrum beneath its feet, it could launch infinite, physics-defying aerial ricochet charges.

To kill it, you had to destroy its fulcrum.

Spring-Heeled Jack’s crimson eyes locked onto Lin Jie below.

The thigh muscles bulged and contracted in that eerie way again, ready to unleash a devastating stomping strike.

It was going to crush this fool of a human.

Its legs powered, and the body catapulted from the column like a cannonball, carrying murderous momentum straight at Lin Jie’s head.

Lin Jie stood his ground, his right hand steady on Serene Heart.

He slightly angled the muzzle, aiming at the load-bearing column that Spring-Heeled Jack had just used as a spring point—more precisely, at a rusted rivet node where the column connected to an upper crossbeam.

Under the hyper-processed calculations of the Mental Staircase, time around him seemed to slow a thousandfold.

His brain crunched numbers furiously: the monster’s fall speed, his own reaction time, and the stress limit of that rusted node.

At that instant, Lin Jie pulled the trigger.

The bullet, carrying ravaging kinetic force, drilled precisely into the long-decayed connection point.

Kraak!

Deprived of that critical rivet and coupled with the massive reaction force from Spring-Heeled Jack’s jump, the heavy load-bearing column could no longer hold and began to snap.

The upper half of the column gave way, collapsing with several crossbeams and crashing downward.

The structure’s mechanics were disrupted.

Spring-Heeled Jack, midair, had already computed its fall trajectory and the angle for its next bounce.

But its support behind it collapsed.

The column it had used for leverage became a giant falling rock chasing its rear; it lost the subsequent spring point and the previously perfect downward assault turned into chaos because of the sudden collapse.

It flailed midair, searching for new grips, but around it were only empty air and falling scrap iron.

It was left suspended.

For a creature that lived off jumping, being left hanging with no foothold was its most fragile grave.

“William!”

Lin Jie had already slid back while firing, avoiding the falling column.

No more words were needed.

This was the Iron Triangle’s unspoken tacit understanding forged in countless life-or-death trials.

As Lin Jie’s shot destroyed the fulcrum, William had already stepped forward and leveled the Church Holy Cannon.

The veteran’s breathing stilled; all of his attention focused on the airborne, unbalanced monster wildly flailing its claws.

“Die, freak.”

William pronounced the sentence in a low voice and squeezed the trigger with his thick, strong fingers.

Boom!

The Church Holy Cannon roared deafeningly.

The sanctified mercury patterns inside the barrel activated under the high temperature at firing, and the large-caliber bullet emerged wrapped in a dazzling holy radiance of purification and annihilation.

The recoil was tremendous, but William’s strong frame braced the impact and held firm.

The sanctified round carved a straight golden path through the air.

A howl—!!!

A piercing, agonized scream echoed through the brewery.

The bullet not only tore through its tough flesh and bone, the holy attribute of the round dealt a catastrophic blow to the UMA’s abnormal spiritual nature.

The airborne monster went rigid.

A massive hole burst open in its chest; bluish-white phosphorus flames and black blood erupted together.

Like a ragged sack, it lost all strength and crashed heavily onto the concrete floor below.

Thunk!

The floor dented and a cloud of dust rose.

Spring-Heeled Jack’s limbs twitched, the crimson light behind its eyeholes flickered twice, and then went out.

The fight was over.

The three quickly descended by ladder from the high catwalk to the first floor.

William kept his gun up, vigilant, kicking the corpse to confirm it was dead.

“Good coordination.”

Lin Jie holstered his pistol and crouched beside the body.

This creature, notorious in London folklore, actually made biological sense under scrutiny.

Its thighs were extremely muscular; the tendons at the Achilles had a striated, metal-like quality—that was the source of its terrifying jumps.

Lin Jie hadn’t forgotten the mission’s primary objective.

He rummaged through the nest debris that had fallen from above.

Among the rusted pocket watches and coins he found the desiccated severed hand.

Without hesitation, Lin Jie pried open the stiff fingers and removed the red-gem-set signet ring.

The ring was heavy; the scales emblem on its surface looked especially icy in the dim light.

This was the key to the deepest levels of the Underground City.

“Got it.” Lin Jie slipped the ring into the inner pocket of his coat.

Julian walked over, adjusted his glasses, and glanced at the corpse.

“If this body stays here, it could attract other problems.”

“Take the useful parts.”

Lin Jie tightened his grip on his knife and looked at Spring-Heeled Jack’s mutated legs.

Although his Gravity Dancer boots provided unparalleled grip and explosive mass for short bursts, they still lacked in absolute mobility and vertical jump capability.

This UMA’s tendons—structures capable of perfectly storing and releasing potential energy—were top-tier materials for upgrading boots.

Lin Jie brought the knife down.

Silencer’s sharp blade precisely cut the skin on the back of the creature’s thigh.

Carefully, he peeled away two silver-gray main tendons that shimmered with a faint spiritual glow, like high-strength composite springs.

Even separated from the body, those two tendons trembled slightly, showing strong biological activity.

Lin Jie took a sealed glass preservative tube from his pack and placed the precious materials inside, securing them properly.

“Materials collected.”

Lin Jie stood and checked the time.

“We should go.”

“The patrol could be drawn by the earlier gunfire at any moment.”

William nodded and chambered another round into his rifle.

The three turned and headed toward the brewery’s battered main door.