Chapter 142
Chapter 142: The scarecrow's trump card
With those words, the entire Blade Squad was utterly stunned!
Luo Kun looked around at the ordinary Scarecrows rising to their feet one after another.
And at those 3 clearly enhanced 【Black Shark Scarecrows】that had retained their original Abilities.
"Damn it! The intelligence was wrong! This isn't a standard Extermination Trial!"
"This is a Battle Royale—every participating squad thrown together!"
"Black Shark Squad has been completely wiped out and body-seized!"
"Captain! Our squad didn't bring a single recovery-type support!"
"We only came to this trial to get some practice in!"
"Now we're facing a monster horde with infinite respawns and Abilities from multiple nations—we'll be ground down to nothing!"
Luo Kun turned to Liu Ruyan, his tone decisive. "We have to change tactics immediately!"
"Full squad, tighten formation—Iron Bull holds the rear, Liu Feng scouts ahead. We fight and fall back!"
"We find the other squads and form an alliance!"
"Retreat?!"
Liu Ruyan looked at him as though she'd just heard the most ridiculous joke in the world.
In her dictionary, how could any squad she, Liu Ruyan, led ever be caught fleeing in disgrace?!
And Luo Kun was issuing commands in front of everyone.
This was a blatant challenge to her absolute authority as captain!
"Luo Kun! Know your place! I am Blade Squad's captain!"
Liu Ruyan's white robes stirred without wind. All 108 Frost Flying Swords burst from their case once more, tips leveled at the enemy ahead.
"Retreating before a single blow is landed—what kind of man are you?!"
"I'll say it again!"
"Anyone who dares fall back half a step today—my flying swords will take their head before the Scarecrows even get the chance!"
"You're being completely unreasonable!!!"
Luo Kun trembled with rage, jabbing a finger at the Scarecrow army closing in from every direction.
"This is a life-or-death situation and you're still throwing your ridiculous princess tantrums?!"
"Don't drag the whole squad down with you just because you want to die!"
"Luo Kun! Is that any way to speak to your captain?!"
Iron Bull's honest, broad face flushed red in an instant.
"I think Captain Liu is right! We're Huaxia's No. 1 squad—how can we be deserters?!"
Shadow remained silent as ever, standing in the darkness, watching this farce with cold, indifferent eyes.
Fight? Flee? As far as she was concerned, the moment things went south, she could use Shadow Vanish and walk out of here on her own.
In an instant, the entire Blade Squad dissolved into chaos over the split in command!
And the Scarecrows—
had already detected the infighting and the opening it left in this human squad!
‘Take out the king to take down the army; kill the fastest first!’
Hum!
Without the slightest hesitation, the 4 Scarecrows—transformed from Black Shark Squad—launched a sudden, coordinated assault under the will of the Watchful Scarecrow!
Their concentrated target—Liu Feng, standing at the outer edge of the formation!
"Liu Feng! Watch your back!!!"
Luo Kun caught it from the corner of his eye and immediately shouted a warning!
"Stack... and..."
The Yan Mo Scarecrow slammed both palms to the ground.
An ExplosiveBrand with a 10-meter diameter instantly formed beneath Liu Feng's feet!
In mid-air, the Phantom Scarecrow raised its sniper rifle and fired again!
Only now did everyone see clearly—it wasn't shooting bullets at all!
It was needles woven from straw!
A【Spatial Leap】sealed off the escape route to the left!
And straight ahead, the Rex Scarecrow was already swinging a thunderous fist!
A perfect triple-threat kill combo from 3 elite Abilities—flawlessly coordinated!
Yet faced with Luo Kun's frantic command and warning, Liu Feng only let out a contemptuous sneer.
"Tch. Luo Kun, stop making a scene."
"Don't measure this genius's strength with your mediocre eye."
He paid Luo Kun's words no mind whatsoever. In fact, he was secretly ecstatic.
‘This is heaven-sent!’
‘The perfect chance to look cool in front of Ruyan and prove I'm the man worthy of her!’
"This young master memorized every detail of Black Shark Squad's files long ago!"
Liu Feng tossed his hair back and vanished from where he stood, leaving only afterimages behind.
"Yan Mo's Explosive Brand has a 0.5-second delay between formation and detonation!"
"Phantom's Spatial Leap produces a faint spatial ripple the instant the round leaves the barrel—an early warning!"
"As for Rex's Kinetic Absorption..."
"Just use finesse. Don't give it any chance to build up momentum!"
Swish! Swish! Swish!
Liu Feng split into 7 or 8 cyan afterimages!
Using impossibly precise footwork, he glided along the very edge of the Explosive Brand and slipped free.
Then a single sidestep—not only perfectly dodging the Spatial Leap bullet,
but even borrowing the bullet's wake to appear directly behind the Rex Scarecrow!
Everything flowed like water. It was a visual spectacle.
"Watch closely, Vice-Captain Luo."
Facing the Rex Scarecrow charging toward him with full force, Liu Feng didn't go for the kill. Instead, he...
turned his back to the enemy!
He extended one hand and vainly smoothed his windswept fringe.
Then with his other hand—he delivered a casual backhand slap!
Smack!
The Rex Scarecrow spun 3 full rotations in mid-air from the impact, then crashed into the wheat field!
"This is what absolute strength looks like."
Liu Feng fixed his fringe and turned to throw Liu Ruyan what he clearly believed was a dazzling look.
"Captain Ruyan, with me here, not a single one of these scraps will touch a hair on your head."
Liu Ruyan took in Liu Feng's flashy performance with visible satisfaction, tilting her chin up.
With a tap of her finger, dozens of ice swords flew out from the Frost Sword Case, shredding the Scarecrows surging toward them to pieces.
"Well done, Liu Feng."
Liu Ruyan cast a cold sideways glance at Luo Kun. "See that, Vice-Captain Luo?"
"These are the soldiers I trained."
"When you lack the ability yourself and run scared, don't stand there making a scene and getting in everyone else's way!"
"Your little survive-and-grovel tactics are a joke compared to absolute strength!"
"You...you people!!!"
Luo Kun's temples bulged with rage.
‘In a life-and-death trial, these two idiots are busy showing off?!’
‘What the hell?—they're gambling the whole squad's lives on this stunt!’
But then!
Just as Liu Ruyan and Liu Feng were still basking in their own brilliance—
and Luo Kun was on the verge of coughing blood from sheer fury at these spectacular teammates—
something changed!!
"Craaawk!!!!"
Across the entire Death Wheat Field—whether it was the Rex Scarecrow Liu Feng had just slapped away,
or the hundreds upon thousands of ordinary Watchful Scarecrows surrounding them—
in this single instant, every stitched-shut straw mouth tore open, ripping all the way to the ears!
Thousands upon thousands of Scarecrows, in perfect unison, tilted their heads back simultaneously!
And cried out toward the night sky!
"Ahhhhhh!!!"
The sound became a psychic attack that rang through the minds of all 5 members of Blade Squad!
Liu Ruyan's face went ashen in an instant.
The 108 Frost Flying Swords hovering in the air—
lost control, clattering to the ground in a scattered heap!
"Look! Up there—what is that thing?!"
Luo Kun suddenly pointed at the night sky!
"Shut it! Luo Kun! Stop making noise and disrupting morale!"
Liu Ruyan snapped at him impatiently.
But when she followed the line of Luo Kun's pointing finger and looked up—
this proud Sword Emperor froze on the spot.
The pitch-black sky that had until now held only the Blood Moon overhead...
had, at some unknown moment, silently split open with a long crack!
A gray-black eyeball, covered in blood vessels, was slowly pressing itself out through that rift.
Gazing down upon every last ant scurrying through this Death Wheat Field below!
Thump... Thump...
The gray-black eyeball pulsed like a heart, beating in mid-air.
Then, it began to descend slowly toward the center of the wheat field...
......
"Achoo!"
Seattle Mercy Hospital. Inside the motorhome.
Guo Shuai, sitting watch in the passenger seat, sneezed and rubbed his nose.
On the bunk bed behind him,
Guan Ming and Quanquan were nestled together, breathing in steady, even snores.
Guo Shuai yawned and glanced out the window, bored.
Not far away on a patch of open ground, his boss—
Jiang Nan—was currently holding a soldier by the leg in each hand,
slamming them repeatedly into the rubble-strewn ground.
Bam! Bam! Bam!
"Boss! Check out the electric chair I built with my Ability—thing works like a dream!"
Wang Meng came huffing over with an electric chair on his back, face flushed with excitement.
"Hook it up to high voltage!"
"I'll have every last detail about why these 2 Cherry Blossom Nation punks showed up on Eerie Island shocked right out of them!"
"Step aside, step aside! Let me handle it!"
Hoshino Hikari came charging up with her own burst of momentum.
Glaring at her 2 dazed countrymen, "Let me personally show these bastards what they've got coming! I'll make them squirm for using me as cannon fodder and a disposable scout!"
"If I don't shock the foam right out of their mouths, my name isn't Hoshino Hikari!"
Watching the Grand Love Alliance's everyday interrogation proceedings from inside the vehicle, Guo Shuai's mouth couldn't stop twitching.
Honestly, the whole thing was kind of hilarious in retrospect.
Just half an hour ago, everyone had been resting comfortably in the motorhome.
Then the vehicle's surveillance system suddenly triggered an alarm!
The feed showed 2 unknown individuals, moving furtively, who'd crept to within 50 meters of the motorhome through the dense forest.
But—absurdly—the instant these 2 caught sight of the motorhome's silhouette,
they'd frozen solid on the spot as though someone had yanked their souls clean out of their bodies, locking up in a rigid stupor!
It was only later that everyone figured out what happened.
It was the S-Grade Magic Hide plated onto the motorhome's exterior.
Its built-in Aura of Fear had flat-out crashed these 2 poor unfortunates the moment they got too close.
After that, Jiang Nan—who'd been stewing in fury with nowhere to put it after the little girl incident—had bolted out of the vehicle.
He'd grabbed these 2 conveniently delivered Cherry Blossom Nation special forces soldiers and used them as stress-relief objects.
Which led to the scene now playing out before them.
"What's the deal with those 2?"
"Why did they shut down from so far away?"
Albert suddenly asked.
"......"
Guo Shuai rolled his eyes.
"You don't know?"
"Did you not realize that the layer coating the outside of this car... is your skin?"
"Come again?!"
Albert slapped his knee hard.
"My skin?! You're calling that thing my skin?!"
"Wait, you've been clueless about this the whole time?!"
Guo Shuai was stunned now too. "It's been plated on there for how long now!"
"How do you think I got my hands on you in the first place?"
"Back then, if my boss hadn't burned the Watchful Scarecrow you'd become—along with that whole wheat field—to ash,"
"would you have ended up in my possession?"
Hearing this, Albert paused—then burst out laughing.
"Hahaha! Who became a Scarecrow? Are you joking?"
"I am the great God of Magic!"
"How could I have turned myself into something as lowly as a straw-stuffed Scarecrow?!"
"Huh?"
Now it was Guo Shuai's turn to be thrown off.
"But your diary clearly stated—in black and white—that you wanted to reforge yourself into the most terrifying monster in existence, didn't it?"
"That's right, I did say that."
Albert gave an imperious huff. "But I never once said I turned myself into a Scarecrow!"
"That thing was merely one of my creations from back in the day."
"Remember the old man mentioned in the diary?"
"What you're calling a Scarecrow was probably made using him."
"Though that thing—at its absolute peak—was barely Grade B. Not particularly impressive."
The two of them—one human, one ghost—carried on their cross-server conversation right there in the spiritual mindscape.
"Holy..."
Guo Shuai finally grasped just how catastrophically costly a gap in communication could be.
"So you, you dense idiot, had absolutely no idea that the Scarecrow my boss incinerated in 1 hit..."
"had long since evolved into a Grade S mega-Boss, didn't you?!"
So Guo Shuai rattled off—at breakneck speed—the full account of how the Watchful Scarecrow had expanded its Death Wheat Field domain...
how it had infinitely respawned...
how it had body-seized...
delivering the entire briefing to Albert from start to finish.
Listening to Guo Shuai's account, Albert fell into a long, long silence inside the mindscape.
It took a full several seconds before the sound of his sharp intake of breath came through.
"Ssssss—"
"The abilities you just described—taken together, they sound..."
"Actually kind of similar to mine, now that I think about it."
Albert reflected on this for a moment, then heaved a long sigh.
"Forget it, forget it. Since things have come to this, I may as well tell you some of the truth."
He paused, his tone turning deep and distant.
"Kid. Do you remember what my current host body is called?"
"Of course—the Eye of Calamity."
Guo Shuai replied without missing a beat. "You've been living inside this eye this whole time, haven't you?"
"Wait..."
The words had barely left his mouth when Guo Shuai seemed to realize something.
"Watchful... eye... Eye of Calamity..."
Guo Shuai swallowed hard.
"Don't tell me—the Eye of Calamity only has one eye because..."
"The other eye became a monster?!"
"No! To be precise—your original body became the monster!"
"Ha! Correct!"
Albert let out a wretched laugh.
"The Eye of Calamity was only a single, insane beginning!"
"Back then, in my pursuit of true power,"
"I began to strip away my own body parts—one by one, while still living—"
"and forge them into cursed instruments bearing human forms!"
"Each one stronger than the last. But the price was..."
"They developed their own consciousness!"
"They slipped beyond my control. They even colluded and struck back to seize me!"
"With no way out, I was forced to take shelter inside this first, and safest, of all the cursed instruments."
"And the Watchful Scarecrow you just described—"
"it's very likely my right eye, forged into a cursed instrument, fused with that Scarecrow corpse—"
"and gave birth to an ultimate being!"
"Its true name is 【Watcher's Eye】!"
"Its Ability isn't merely creating domains—what's far more terrifying is..."
"It inherits the same foundational logic as the Eye of Calamity: Learn and Apply!"
"Regrettably, after your boss burned the Scarecrow to ash..."
"the Watcher's Eye should have been destroyed along with it."
"Hold on!"
Guo Shuai latched onto the key phrase.
"Learn and Apply?!"
"You mean..."
"That mutated Grade S Scarecrow could also pirate Abilities?!"
"Correct!"
Albert answered. "Based on my research into the fusion of cursed creatures and high-grade cursed instruments,"
"its Abilities would have undergone a qualitative leap."
"If I'm right..."
"The Watchful Scarecrow's true trump card was never shown to your boss..."
"Or rather—before it had the chance to reveal it, your boss had already incinerated it with those utterly unreasonable black flames."
"Its true trump card..."
"what was it exactly?"
Guo Shuai's voice trembled with urgency.
Albert enunciated each word deliberately.
"【Simulation】"
"Same nature as Learn and Apply."
"But far more advanced piracy!"
"It could even replicate—in perfect fidelity—the appearance and Abilities of the most powerful being it had ever directly witnessed in this world..."
Tuzhu