Chapter 213: Disappearance
Chapter 213: Chapter 213: Disappearance
Confident in its formidable defense, the creature didn’t even attempt to dodge. Instead, it opened its jaws and spewed hundreds of ice spikes, shooting toward Luna Dawson in a dense, lethal swarm!
"A dual-element Fourth Rank? Not bad!"
Luna’s eyes lit up with even greater excitement. The stairs of water beneath her feet shifted nimbly in sync with her movements. She leaped and side-stepped, effortlessly evading the brunt of the assault. Simultaneously, a semi-circular water shield rose around her. CLANG CLANG CLANG! The barrier deflected the remaining ice spikes, sending fine mists of water splashing into the air upon impact.
Laughing maniacally, Luna charged at the bat, acting as if its Crystal Core were about to grow legs and run straight into her arms.
At the same time, a harsh SIZZLE pierced the air. A corrosive acid melted right through the bat’s pitch-black scales, eating away at the flesh until deep, bone-exposing craters appeared. Plumes of yellowish-white smoke billowed from the wounds, releasing a pungent, nauseating odor.
Howling in agonizing pain, the bat flapped its wings violently, whipping up a fierce gale that swept toward Luna.
"Yeesh... that looks like it hurts!" Luna remarked, though her eyes brimmed with amusement as she watched the creature bare its fangs in agony. The watery steps beneath her feet suddenly surged upward. In her right hand, she condensed a Water Blade several meters long. "Since you’ve got such thick skin, I’ll just chop you to pieces!"
The Water Blade cleaved downward, slicing through the air. The bat frantically raised a wing to block it. CRACK! The blade sheared a massive gash into the creature’s tough wing, sending dark blood spraying into the air.
Driven completely mad, the bat opened its jaws and unleashed a hybrid blast of ice and sonic waves at Luna. The sheer force of the attack snapped the surrounding trees completely in half.
Pushing off the watery steps with her toes, Luna darted backward several meters, easily dodging the barrage of ice. In the same breath, she thrust both hands forward. Hundreds of bubbling Water Bombs instantly condensed, compressed, and transformed into a torrential flood of water arrows.
WHOOSH! The fierce projectiles tore through the air, hurtling straight for the bat’s forehead.
The bat’s scarlet eyes bulged as if they were about to burst. Instinctively sensing the lethal threat, it frantically beat its wings to dodge while subconsciously activating its invisibility superpower, attempting to meld into the darkness.
But the moment its cloaking shimmer appeared, it suddenly froze in place!
Luna’s Spirit threads had already enveloped it like a dense, inescapable net. Its limbs and wings were bound tight, and even its aura was completely locked down. Her gaze turned sharp and cold. While the corrosive acid was highly effective, her current superpower rank severely limited the amount she could produce. She had to end this battle quickly.
The torrent of water arrows plunged into the seemingly empty space without the slightest resistance. A split second later, the bat’s agonizing shriek tore through the forest. Its massive, invisible form violently shimmered back into view as it plummeted straight toward the ground. Its scarlet eyes were filled with lingering defiance and sheer disbelief. It slammed into the earth, twitched twice, and finally lay dead.
"Done! Thanks for delivering the goods to my front door!" Leaping down from her watery staircase, Luna bent over and dug out the two Crystal Cores oozing from the bat’s corpse, her eyes curving into joyful crescents.
Since Luna’s battlefield was quite a distance from the main forces, Francis Grant had been keeping a close eye on her through his binoculars. After all, she was the possessor of the spatial pocket, making her arguably the most valuable asset in the entire team. Watching her fight, he could barely resist the urge to sprint over and record her masterful application of her superpower.
He knew all too well that countless Water Ability Users considered themselves strictly support units. They believed water was too soft to possess any real offensive power. In fact, many focused on leveling up just so they could produce larger volumes of water for drinking and washing, never once realizing that water could be compressed into deadly, high-speed Water Bombs! Luna’s usage of her superpower allowed her to effortlessly play around with Aberrant Beasts of the same rank as if they were toys in the palm of her hand. She had truly elevated the manipulation of water to an art form!
It was absolutely brilliant—she could actually conjure stairs of water to step directly into the sky! How extraordinarily vast must her superpower reserves be to pull off something like this?!
Meanwhile, down on the ground, the other Fourth Rank bat was thrashing about in a frenzied struggle, desperately trying to break out of the inescapable encirclement forged by humans and beasts alike. Its left wing had already been mostly incinerated by roaring flames, leaving only a charred, blackened stump that flopped wildly against the dirt. With every frantic beat, a shower of fine embers and dark red blood splattered across the battlefield.
Pushed to a dead end, the bat’s eyes burned blood-red. It opened its jaws and unleashed a dense barrage of razor-sharp metal blades that swept out in all directions, vainly attempting to carve out an escape route.
However, the metal blades barely made it halfway before they were swallowed whole by a roaring tornado of fire. The sheer force of the high-speed vortex either sent the blades ricocheting harmlessly into the distance, or the blistering heat instantly melted them down into molten slag. The boiling iron dripped onto the pavement with a harsh SIZZLE, sending up wisps of white smoke and leaving an array of pockmarked scorch marks in its wake.
"Beautiful! That combo is flawless!" The soldiers observing from afar felt their blood boil with adrenaline, unable to stop themselves from cheering at the top of their lungs.
The synergy between the Wind and Fire Abilities was seamless, completely sealing off any remaining avenues of retreat for the dying bat. Seeing that the Aberrant Beast was on its last legs, everyone stopped holding back. A dazzling array of superpowers erupted all at once, burying the creature entirely beneath a torrential storm of raging fire and tearing winds.
The bat let out a desperate, guttural roar. Refusing to go down without a fight, it swung its remaining stump of a wing in one final, furious counterattack. But the moment it propped its body up, a massive, reinforced fire tornado slammed mercilessly into its head. Its tough scales cracked and peeled away instantly under the intense heat, exposing the charred, blackened flesh underneath.
"Now!" Gritting his teeth against the searing pain in his wounded arm, Evan Olson teamed up with Rollo. Together, they channeled their Wind Abilities, condensing a massive Wind Blade that they brought crashing down onto the bat.
At the same time, three roaring Fire Dragons manifested. A split second later, they struck the creature with dead-on precision, slamming directly into an old, gaping wound on the bat’s neck.
THUD!
The bat’s entire head was severed from its neck. Its colossal body crashed heavily into the dirt, twitching twice before going completely still. The scarlet glow in its eyes gradually faded to a dull, lifeless grey. Even in death, a lingering trace of unbelievable resentment and bitter defiance remained etched in its gaze.
Initially, the vanguard troops had nearly fallen into despair upon seeing two Fourth Rank Aberrant Beasts leading the assault. Everyone knew the unspoken rule of the apocalypse: taking down Fourth Rank creatures almost always required a relentless bombardment from heavy artillery. However, with hundreds of thousands of defenseless survivors clustered around the convoy, using explosives of that magnitude was out of the question. To their utter disbelief, the Sunset Squad had stepped up. With only half of their team mobilized, they had effortlessly eradicated both mutated Bat Kings simultaneously!
This miraculous feat immediately reignited the military’s hope and fighting spirit. Empowered by the display, even some of the more daring ordinary civilians grabbed makeshift weapons, leaped off the military trucks, and fought shoulder-to-shoulder with the soldiers to hack down the remaining low-level bats swarming the area! Once they returned to the Kensington Base, they would have a hell of a story to brag about over drinks—they could proudly claim they were the brave souls who fought in the great siege against an army of over a hundred thousand mutated creatures.
Though the original bat swarm had been massive, the brunt of their numbers had already been obliterated by the military’s heavy firearms. Now, with both of their Bat Kings dead, the remaining twenty to thirty thousand low-level bats posed very little threat.
Leaderless and thrust into chaos, the horde scattered. The smarter ones immediately fled into the night, leaving behind only the mindless stragglers, who remained glued to the battlefield, entirely captivated by the overwhelming stench of fresh blood on the ground.
Seeing so many precious Crystal Cores threatening to slip away, the members of the Sunset Squad hastily downed a few gulps of Crystal Core Solution to replenish their energies. Raising their firearms, they unleashed a mad hail of bullets into the fleeing swarm.
"Quick, steal the kills!"
"There aren’t many left, hurry!"
"Don’t let the Crystal Cores escape!"
Miles Dawson’s frantic yells rang out louder than anyone else’s. Luna hastily pulled out her Gatling gun, taking point on sweeping through the dense clusters of bats. Seeing the team’s kill rate drastically spike, Little Sweet Potato and Purple Bean rapidly deployed half of their vines to accelerate the retrieval of the dropped Crystal Cores. The team’s coordination was immaculate—seamlessly integrating slaughter and looting into a single, terrifyingly efficient, fully-automated war machine!
With it confirmed that there were no more high-level Aberrant Beasts lurking in the shadows, the Sunset Squad cast aside all remaining reservations. Unleashing one hundred percent of their combat power, they went full throttle, slaughtering the rest of the horde in an exhilarating, absolute massacre!