Chapter 157: Battle and Modeling
"Shooting games will never compare to the visceral thrill of fist-to-flesh combat! It's a pity no one before now was worth throwing a punch at. You're the first, hahaha!" Black Raven cackled, charging towards the Sandstone Giant as if the five-story tall behemoth before him were merely a pebble he could kick aside.
The dust stirred up by their previous collision hadn't fully settled, and Black Raven's sprint carved a long white streak behind him. He shot forward like a cannonball, while the giant facing him resembled a medieval castle attempting to resist artillery fire.
The speed he unleashed in an instant was already close to subsonic, clearly indicating another breakthrough he'd achieved during his many previous battles.
"Arrogant! You actually think you can move stone with your bare fists?" Although the opponent's punch was astonishingly fast and he was larger than ordinary men, compared to the fifteen-meter-tall giant, their size difference was like that between an infant and an adult.
Facing the fierce incoming punch, the giant rapidly drew sand from the ground to enlarge its base, simultaneously constructing two hind legs, transforming into a centaur-like creature to better deal with the tiny insect that barely reached its knees.
"Die!" The Sandstone Centaur spun sharply, using the centrifugal force of its massive bulk to meet Black Raven's punch with its right hind leg.
"Boom...!"
The sound, while not as deafening as the plasma cannon's earlier collision with stone, still shook the entire arena. The centaur was left with three legs, and Black Raven's fist was stained red with blood.
"So what if you have four legs! All it does is make it more satisfying to tear you apart!" Black Raven shook his bleeding fist, continuing to wreak havoc on the stone centaur's lower abdomen with immense brute force. In his berserker mode, his mind contained only one thought: if you're not convinced, fight me.
The battle, for a time, fell into a stalemate. The Sandstone Octopus's long-range attacks were largely negligible for Black Raven; any one of the three built-in laser cannons in his mouth and hands could easily defend against them. However, the extremely thick, regenerating egg-shaped shell proved quite troublesome for him.
As the battle dragged on, Black Raven's last shred of patience burned away.
"Aaaaaah! Take this!" He once again conjured a plasma sphere of astonishing destructive power, pushing it forward directly with his left hand, looking as if he intended to die together with his opponent.
"Lunatic!" Horwitz realized he no longer had time to transform and evade, so he intended to meet the attack head-on, just as he had before.
In the brief moment Black Raven charged, he did his utmost to thicken the side of his body that would absorb the impact.
"Boom...!" Another tremendous roar, and the broadcasting helicopter hovering above the arena was even buffeted slightly by the surging airflow from the collision below.
"The decisive round between these two seems to have concluded, it's time to determine the victor!" The announcer in the helicopter, now accustomed to the daily shocks, steadied himself and immediately resumed his professional duties.
"Finally caught you!" Black Raven held Horwitz, who had taken a punch to the chest and sustained numerous laser-penetration wounds, already half-dead. Horwitz had reached the Spirit Animation Stage, fifth tier, and had just condensed his Life Field.
"To force me to this extent, with just the fifth layer of the Spirit Animation Stage and having just condensed your Life Field, you're the first." Black Raven looked at his left hand, which was a bloody mess, with five fingers missing and numerous metal wires exposed. His originally handsome slicked-back hair had completely fallen loose during the intense battle, making him look entirely like a golden-maned lion king.
"The final victor of this brutal battle is—Black Raven!" The announcer roared into the microphone with all his might, igniting the emotions of the entire audience. Masses of Black Raven's fans rose to their feet, cheering for the blood-soaked man standing tall in the arena.
"Let's take a look at the slow motion replay to dissect exactly what happened in the final moments of the showdown." The announcer began to answer the audience's questions after everyone had calmed down and the contestants had been sent to their respective medical pods.
"From the slow motion, we can see that in the final impact, contestant Black Raven sacrificed his left hand to propel the extremely destructive plasma ball, shattering contestant Horwitz's defense."
"The subsequent portion is affected by a large amount of stirred-up dust, so we'll switch to the thermal imaging camera footage. While the outer shell's defense hadn't yet recovered, contestant Black Raven swiftly extended his right hand into the breached defense, firing multiple lasers in quick succession, thoroughly piercing Horwitz's body."
...
"That concludes all content for this match. We now hand over to our colleagues for the live broadcast of the next match."
"The original dosage might not be enough for these two anymore." After entrusting his Spirit Hub plans to his avatar, Bai Mo himself returned to the medical zone on the match day. He looked at the two individuals slowly repairing within their pods, silently adding an extra unit of restorative agent and a unit of specially formulated anesthetic.
During this period, to meet the ever-increasing demand, the area for raising the Blood Clan in the underground secret chamber of the research institute was continuously expanding.
Every human cultivating Blood Clan methods was a major consumer of blood. After increasing the number of vampires in captivity, naturally more blood supply was needed. Under the overt and covert hints of certain individuals, various advertisements advocating blood donation gradually proliferated on the internet, television, and in newspapers.
A series of internal and external articles, such as "Detailed Rules for Cracking Down on Illegal Blood Selling" and "Advocating for the Construction of a Mutual-Aid Society—Beginning with Blood Donation," began to circulate widely, influencing public opinion in subtle, imperceptible ways.
However, none of these matters had much to do with Bai Mo now. He never cared about the source of the experimental materials provided by others, nor did he concern himself with the means by which they were acquired. What he cared about now was how to study the two ability users before him, who had completely fallen unconscious after the enhanced dosage.
"Mechanical weapons capable of rudimentary Spirit Energy application. I hadn't expected America to have reached practical application yet; Huaxia's Spirit Energy Research Institute is just beginning in this area, only establishing the corresponding theoretical models. Truly worthy of being the long-standing leader in scientific research." Bai Mo gently cut open Black Raven's palm with a specially made surgical knife, struggling to extend his divine sense into the damaged opening of the Life Field.
"Black Raven himself is an expert at the Unmelting Realm level; his bones and muscles have also merged into his Life Field. The burst of power he displayed later in the battle should be an ability derived from that Unmelting Realm integration."
Through his divine sense's microscopic, cellular-level observation, combined with his increasingly terrifying brain memory, half an hour later, he had memorized every detail of the several Spirit Energy-infused mechanical components within Black Raven's body. Then, using pre-prepared hot plastic liquid, he began to meticulously sculpt with his telekinesis a model one hundred times larger than the original mechanism.
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