Chapter 352: The Realm Ambusher
“Demon Subduing Slash!”
Meng Chao used his hand as a knife. His entire arm was covered in profound and complicated spirit tattoos. Spirit energy burst out of them and formed a saber glare that was almost four meters long. Then, like a shining pole that subjugated demons, it came swinging down at the Lightning Python.
Boom!
The Lightning Python was only barely able to dodge it, and a deep trench was left behind on the ground.
Meng Chao did not stop to catch his breath. The second saber glare started surging at his fingertips while he chased after the Lightning Python like a shadow.
In an instant, the Lightning Python was surrounded by dozens of saber glares.
The greatest advantage of the Ultimate Style was its insanely great endurance.
Once someone was held back by an Ultimate Style practitioner, as long as no accident occured, monsters of the same level as the practitioner would have a hard time breaking free.
Meng Chao also managed to figure out the Lightning Python’s rhythm when it fired the plasma. It happened in a short time.
There were a few times when he intentionally slowed down and pretended that his strength had run out to lure the Lightning Python into counterattacking.
The moment before it fired the plasma, the saber glare at Meng Chao’s fingertips would instantly become much brighter and go to cut the area seven inches below its head, which forced it to swallow the plasma.
The Lightning Python ended up frying itself to the point that it was dizzy.
Wisps of white smoke came out of the gaps between its scales.
It hissed while flinging its tail, which left intersecting cracks on the cooling tower.
Meng Chao remained as calm as ever. In fact, he did not even need Lu Siya’s help. He flicked a small saber glare forward to cut at the Lightning Python, which made it lose its bearings.
Suddenly, Meng Chao pulled back and jumped backwards lightly to widen the distance between him and the Lightning Python.
The Lightning Python finally had the chance to catch its breath and counterattack. It was ecstatic and opened its mouth to charge up an unprecedented ball of plasma in its throat.
“Careful!”
The superhumans who rushed over cried out in surprise.
But it was too late.
Sizzle! Crackle!
The Lightning Python fired the plasma at Meng Chao’s face.
He ignored it and did not even bother dodging.
Something unbelievable happened.
The moment the plasma left its mouth, it split into hundreds of electrical arcs that surrounded the Lightning Python and electrocuted it to the point that it started foaming at the mouth. Its scales curled up, and its flesh was burnt black. Its eyes turned bloodshot. The tumor that could control minds shriveled up and hung low on its head.
The Lightning Python curled up into a ball while it spasmed. Its flesh was torn, and it stopped moving.
The superhumans rushed forward and quickly bound the Lightning Python. Then, they injected more than ten high-density anesthetics into its body before they gave Meng Chao puzzled looks.
Meng Chao went forward and knelt down on one knee before he carefully extracted four thin silver needles from near the Lightning Python’s head.
He had stabbed those needles when it lost its bearings after Meng Chao attacked it with the Demon Subduing Pole. With them, he cut off some of the connection between its brain and central nervous system.
The Lightning Python not only lost part of its mobility because of it, but was also no longer immune to its plasma attack.
It might seem like a magic trick, but it was built on Meng Chao’s deep knowledge of monsters and a harvesting foundation that was much greater and more in-depth than that of the average person.
This was a skill unique to veteran harvesters.
The factory protection members around them and the operations members from the abnormal beast research department looked at each other at a loss. They could see great shock in each other’s eyes.
In truth, Meng Chao was quite famous. When they met up at the power plant, many people recognized him.
However, in the eyes of the high level engineers and operations members who had been through hundreds of battles and all of whom happened to be in their forties or fifties, no matter how powerful Meng Chao was, he was just a young man in his early twenties. He had not even graduated from university yet. At most, he was only outstanding among his peers.
To them, Meng Chao joining the operation to defend the power plant was really just him widening his horizons and gathering more fighting experience.
They did not expect that Meng Chao would be able to instantly locate the commander of the monsters.
And before the main force arrived, he managed to subjugate the highly-intelligent monster.
Capturing a monster alive was ten times more difficult than killing a monster. All superhumans knew this fact very well.
When they looked at Meng Chao, their gazes filled with admiration and puzzlement.
Meng Chao smiled.
He clenched his fist, which was burning because he had used Demon Subduing Slash too many times. He felt like he was holding a piece of steel that had reached melting point.
When a person became a three-star superhuman, the increase of spirit energy circulation, maximum release value, changes in the organs, and the increase of the basic functions of the body… were secondary.
The most crucial thing was that since 70% of Meng Chao’s body had crystallized and he had learned brand new spirit energy magnetic fields from his tutor and the mysterious elite, he could use a lot of different strategies to fight. He could also use the experiences from fighting in his previous life to execute strategies that were deviant, had a lot of variations, and were far more advanced compared to the current era.
‘We’re both three-star superhumans, but if I compare our fighting strength, my current self should have far surpassed Qin Hu while he was still under Raging Waves, because I’m a three-star superhuman who came from decades later. I should have also surpassed all the three-star superhumans in Dragon City, right?’
As he sensed strength crashing into his muscles, nerves, and bones like endless waves, Meng Chao felt indescribable pleasure. ‘Now that I’ve protected the garbage power plant, the defense system in hundreds of residential areas in the north of the city should encounter no problems. I’ve changed the future again, so that means I contributed quite a lot for Dragon City. I wonder how many contribution points I’ll get.’
He blinked for a long time, but he saw no contribution points popping up at the corner of his eyes.
‘Uhm?’
Meng Chao suddenly had a bad feeling.
Usually, when this sort of thing happened, it meant that the quest had not ended yet. The enemy had yet to be completely destroyed, so it was not the time for Kindling to conclude his points.
‘No way…’ Meng Chao thought.
Boom!
Before he could even finish his thought, a loud explosion came from deep within the power plant.
A fireball rose in the air. Under the colorful night sky, it turned into a black cloud that bared its teeth at them.
“It’s in the direction of the power generators!”
Lu Siya levitated in the air and acted as a scout. She was able to see where the explosion came from with just one glance.
“How could this be?!”
Meng Chao and the superhumans looked at each other in shock.
The power generators were the core of the power plant, so the defense over there was, of course, incredibly tight.
Over the past few days, they had searched through the place repeatedly and sealed off the pipes that monsters could use. They had also set up traps and alarms at the dark and cramped corners. They even sent elites to patrol the place to make sure that there were no blind spots.
Regardless of whether it was the Lightning Pythons or Flame Rats, they could only act around the cooling tower. There was no way for them to infiltrate the power generators.
Yet it was clear that it was not a normal explosion caused by a breakdown. So, who caused the explosion?
Meng Chao quickly rushed to the powerful generators with the other superhumans.
The place was covered in smoke. Quite a few steam pipes were damaged. White smoke rose up, making the place look like a bathhouse. The temperature was incredibly high too, which lowered visibility.
Lu Siya made a gesture in the air to say that she could not see inside clearly.
The sounds of gunfire suddenly rose from within the smoke.
Meng Chao took two steps forward and nearly tripped over a corpse.
He looked down to examine it and discovered that it was one of the factory protectors.
His fatal wound was a gunshot that hit his eye.
The eyeball and his brain were pierced through in one hit. The other eyeball was in perfect shape, but it was filled with shock. The man seemed to have been full of disbelief before he died.
“Gunshot wound?” Meng Chao mumbled to himself. ‘Do monsters know how to use guns?’
Meng Chao thought about it before he shuddered and shouted into the communication channel. “Everyone, be careful! The destroyer might be human! I repeat! The destroyer might be human! He has a gun! He might fire at us at any moment! Don’t approach the people who were stationed here!”
“H-human?” The factory protectors shuddered as if they were about to face a major enemy.
“Seal off the steam pipes first! We’ll have the fire trucks fire water from a distance! We’ll start planning once visibility increases!” Meng Chao said quickly.
Four fire trucks started spraying water from the perimeter. The water came pouring at them like the rain and chased away the steam blocking their vision. Then, corpses appeared all over the ground. There were three people standing among them.
Both the people who lay on the floor and the people standing wore the uniforms of the garbage power plant. They were not the engineers of the power plant, but the fighters sent by the power company to provide reinforcements.
When they saw so many of their own lying on the floor, the factory protectors on Meng Chao’s side felt their hearts clench in pain and fill with anxiety.
But they did not rush forward, because they could tell with the night vision goggles that the dead had gunshot wounds.
A number of people had fallen on their faces and sported gunshot wounds on the backs of their heads.
No one could possibly arrive behind them elusively and kill them at a close distance unless they were familiar and trusted companions.
“Captain Fang, what happened?” a factory protector beside Meng Chao asked loudly.
The three people across from them did not seem to have heard it. They just walked around in circles as if they were lost.
Their footsteps were rather stiff. Sometimes, they raised their feet high, and sometimes low. It was as if they had forgotten how to walk, but were looking for something on the floor.
Soon, they found a few corpses to their liking and crouched down slowly. They searched around for a while and brought out Sam Brown Belts covered in grenades.
The pupils of all the people on Meng Chao’s side shrank.
“Captain Fang, what are you doing?! Why is everyone dead?! Who did this?!” The factory protectors sounded even more anxious.
But the other side did not care. They placed three or four Sam Brown Belts on their shoulders and dragged their feet to the power generators.
Bang, bang, bang!
Meng Chao fired three shots right behind Captain Fang and the other protectors’ feet.
Captain Fang finally turned his head around and glared at Meng Chao.
The searchlights from four of the fire trucks shone on Captain and the other two protectors’ faces, revealing them .
“Hiss…”
Everyone sucked in sharp breaths.
Captain Fang and the other two protectors’ faces were numb. Their eyeballs were entirely black. Their scleras were consumed by black fog, and their faces were covered in thick and protruding blood vessels. Something was crawling about in the blood vessels, and they looked even more terrifying than zombies.
“Captain Fang, don’t move, or else we’ll shoot!”
The factory protectors gulped, and more than one hundred guns pointed at their former comrades.
Captain Fang and the other two protectors tilted their heads upward by forty-five degrees. Their black eyes were fixed on the night sky.
After a moment, they let out guttural growls from the backs of their throats. They did not sound human.
The two protectors with the Sam Brown Belts charged in Meng Chao’s direction with strange postures.
Captain Fang shifted the more than ten grenades in his arms and staggered to the power generators.