Chapter 418: Foxy uses her ultimate |
Yu Sheng and his team fought as they fell back, and in the process they destroyed yet another colossal body of Yun Qing Zi.
A crystal mass dozens of meters high blazed under the concentrated thermal rays of the dolls. The stored energy tore apart the crystal heap that had taken on the form of a human elder. Pale facets veined with gray-black detonated into a storm of shards that then rained over the crystal forest like a downpour; yet just as before, within moments another Yun Qing Zi burrowed up from a distant fissure in the ground.
Every crystal tree here, every clump of crystal clusters, every crack beneath the soil was only a small offshoot of some vast main body.
Perched on Yu Sheng’s shoulder, Irene shrieked as she tried to keep the remaining mass-produced dolls laying down suppressing fire and shouted: “This is impossible to fight, Yu Sheng! This is more outrageous than giving the giant king a pedicure with a fire poker!”
Yu Sheng’s brow tightened. After realizing that the entire crystal forest was a single giant living organism and that Yun Qing Zi seemed merely to be a mimetic limb extended from it, he had to consider retreat. Yet for some reason a vague unease kept circling in his chest, the sense that he had overlooked some detail, and it held him back from deciding to withdraw.
At that moment, whether because he had lost too much blood or because the link forged through blood had strengthened again, the fugue and the murmuring that had circled in his mind surged back, stronger than before. And in that haze and whispering, something else appeared.
He lifted his head without thinking and looked toward the sky above the crystal jungle at an angle.
A strange pallor washed over everything in sight. All color seemed to drain away. The starry sky at the far horizon warped once more into a twisting vortex. In its center, the distant Sentinel Silence swelled and throbbed like a beating heart, as if calling to the crystal jungle that lay here on Garrison-3. At the jungle’s rim, translucent “limbs” like phantoms were rising into the sky bit by bit, as though answering Sentinel Silence’s Summoning.
He lowered his gaze to his feet. In his daze it felt as if his sight pierced the thick rock and soil to the lattice of buried crystal branches, fissures, and cavities. He saw a crystalline heart entombed in the crust, withered, and something else was adhering to its surface.
“Yu Sheng? Yu Sheng! Yu Sheng!”
A shout rang at his ear, followed by a bite of pain on his head. He jolted awake to find Irene gnawing on his scalp with all her strength.
Irene yelled, skipping her usual snark at his spacing out: “How about we retreat! We only just cranked out this handful of mass-produced units, and there is no way we can outlast an entire forest!”
A hollow hum droned in his ears. The impressions glimpsed through the blood link wriggled in his mind like living things, as if striving to spread some pollution. Yu Sheng found the noise only irritating. He shook his head hard, cleared his thoughts, and spoke fast: “No. We need a way to hold this thing here.”
Irene blinked, not understanding: “Hold what? What is trying to leave?”
Yu Sheng answered in a rush: “This ‘forest’ is trying to transmit a signal to Sentinel Silence, but something else is suppressing the process. It will not hold for long. We must find a way to stop the transmission, or Sentinel Silence is in for a disaster.”
On the verge of tears, Irene protested: “That is easy to say, but how do we fight this thing? I do not think it has even shown a health bar yet.”
Yu Sheng thought hard, then spoke: “These crystal clusters are not structurally strong. We tested that. Even the largest structures can be smashed by brute force. The problem is the forest’s scope is too wide. When we break one part, the rest immediately regenerates the damaged section. I have established a degree of contact with it now. I can feel its regeneration is limited. If we can destroy most of its surface structures in a short burst, its regeneration will not keep up. It is already in a weakened state. If regeneration lags, its internal cycle will collapse on its own.”
A sweeping howl of crystal branches came from the sky. The mass-produced dolls coordinated another interception with a Fox Fire barrage to swat down a wave of “bombardment,” and as their numbers dropped again, Irene’s tone grew more frantic: “That is no better than saying nothing. It takes everything we have just to break one Yun Qing Zi, and you want to blow up an entire forest in one go? With what?”
Yu Sheng glanced toward the forest’s center. His brow knotted up, and after a moment’s thought he gritted his teeth: “The Other-Dimensional Hotel.”
Irene stared: “I thought the weapon systems on that thing are offline.”
Yu Sheng winced as he answered: “I will smash down the stack of systems on top of it. They are useless right now anyway.”
Irene was stunned: “You wastrel.”
Yu Sheng could only give a pained, helpless sigh.
Before he could decide which subsystems of the Other-Dimensional Hotel to pry off first, something furry brushed the small of his back.
He looked up to see a gigantic nine-tailed silver fox lowering her head to him.
Surrounded by dim Fox Fire, Foxy’s golden-red eyes gleamed with an uncanny light in the flames as she said: “Benefactor, how about I try?”
Yu Sheng was taken aback and asked: “You will try? How? Ten-thousand Tails Return to One, saturate-bomb the whole forest at once? Even that might not be enough.” Foxy tilted her head and said: “I have one more move that my mother taught me, but I have never had the chance to use it. I can only use it once when my belly is very full, and only in an open place with sky.”
Yu Sheng listened, dumbfounded. Foxy could not describe clearly what the move actually was. Yet looking at the earnest way the nine-tailed demon fox said it, he decided to trust the young lady’s judgment.
He asked at once: “Then try it. What do we need to watch for? What do you need us to do?” Foxy nodded and said: “After I use it I will be very hungry and I will not be able to move for a while. I might need help getting unstuck. Before that, you should run far away. The farther the better.”
Yu Sheng met Irene’s and Luna’s eyes on instinct, then said: “All right.”
Almost as his words fell, the flames around Foxy roared up. They were fiercer than ever, more violent than at any time before. In a blink, the massive nine-tailed silver fox was engulfed by Fox Fire until she seemed forged entirely of flame. She dipped her head to Yu Sheng, then took a few slow steps back and suddenly leapt into the sky.
The demon fox began to race upward, an inverted meteor, spiraling as Fox Fire flared fiercer and fiercer. In the atmosphere of Garrison-3 she carved a bright sword-slash of a contrail.
Irene stared up in shock and muttered: “What is this silly fox’s move supposed to be? I do not understand this at all.”
Before she could finish, Yu Sheng grabbed her, opened a door, and tossed her through.
On the other side lay the rim of the impact crater, the very place where they had landed on Garrison-3.
At once he reverse Summoned the remaining mass-produced dolls back to the Valley.
He looked to Luna and said, stepping back through the door: “We are pulling out as well.”
Only when they reached the crater’s rim did Yu Sheng grasp the true expanse of the “crystal jungle.”
At first, the crystal growths had covered only the small “plain” at the crater’s center. Yet in such a short time, crystal bodies burrowing up from below had spread to cover almost every inch of ground within the crater’s rim. The entire battlefield relic was now swallowed by a crystal forest of pallor streaked with gray-black. Everywhere the eye fell, there were only “them.”
It was eerie and malicious, unsettling to behold, and yet it radiated a certain indefinable power and beauty.
Yu Sheng looked up. The bright streak in the sky was still climbing. Foxy ran free in the heavens, pierced the clouds in a blink, and kept rising, accelerating until the naked eye could no longer see her.
The crystal forest within the crater seemed to sense something.
A lethal threat from the sky.
Chaotic resonance crashed through Yu Sheng’s head. He felt the crystal jungle lurch and tremble, as if every individual trunk writhed frantically to tear free. Then he “saw” something deep beneath the forest swelling and contracting, straining to wrench itself from the layers of binding coiled around that “crystal heart.” The next instant his sight was pulled skyward. From the forest’s own perspective, he suddenly saw Foxy.
The vast silver-white demon fox had reached low orbit.
Her body had grown many times over. The demon fox, shaped wholly from Fox Fire, unfurled like a fire lotus blooming in space, nine tails stretching wide. Intricate runes glimmered at the tip of each tail, and uncountable flames, alive and flowing, coiled and climbed in the void around her.
Then the nine-tailed sky fox slowly adjusted her posture.
The tails drew in. Fox Fire condensed into an energy shell, an eerie radiance fixed on the planetary surface.
Reentry began.
Of a thousand immortal arts, this one is orbital. Of the myriad laws of the sky fox, this is the grand method of heaven-based bombardment.
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