Chapter 59 : Chapter 59
Chapter 59: You Do Not Pass! (Two Chapters Combined—4,000 Characters)
【You have entered the Massive Dungeon - Ancient Battlefield!】
【Your current role is: Battlefield Guardian.】
【You are hostile toward all Trial Participants. Defend the glory of the Ancient Battlefield!】
A flash of white light passed, and the scene before Ye Ze changed abruptly.
When he looked up, all he saw was desolation—broken walls and crumbling ruins, wild grass and wasteland, with thick layers of dried blood and dust piled everywhere.
Yellow sand filled the sky, stretching to the horizon without end.
“So I’m a Battlefield Guardian...”
“Then the other special training camp trainees should be the Trial Participants.”
As he spoke, Ye Ze opened the map interface of the Ancient Battlefield.
The map was simply too large.
Ye Ze’s marker on it looked like a single grain of sand in a boundless desert.
There was only himself in the surrounding area. All those with the guardian role—in other words, the Instructors—had been randomly distributed across different regions.
Moreover, the map only showed the locations of the Magical Beast bosses. It did not show the trainees’ positions.
“So the hard part isn’t killing people at all. It’s finding them!”
That would not remain true forever, however.
As time passed, or once the number of remaining people dropped low enough...
the Ancient Battlefield would teleport everyone into another battlefield with a much smaller range.
Ye Ze understood it immediately.
In common terms, it was the circle closing in.
That was also meant to prevent certain teams from hiding in a corner of the map and simply waiting until the other teams fought each other out, allowing them to secure a high rank with ease.
Of course, to prevent exactly that, headquarters had specifically made killing enemies and killing bosses count toward ranking points as well.
At that thought, Ye Ze came up with a plan:
“Rather than spending a huge amount of time looking for people, I might as well go find bosses first.”
“No one ever said guardians couldn’t kill bosses...”
“Bosses give experience and points. I might even run into trainees who’ve come looking for bosses too.”
Having made up his mind, Ye Ze followed his usual routine first:
He summoned the squirrel, sent out dozens of Shadow Clones, and used the simplest, most unadorned method possible to scout ahead.
Then, once one of the Shadow Clones reached a boss, he directly swapped places with it!
...
On a stretch of wasteland within the Ancient Battlefield,
a team of four men and one woman was rapidly exchanging ideas as they finalized their tactics.
“Where are we right now?”
“Upper left corner of the map. According to the map data, there’s a Frontline Fortress not far away.”
“Should we go there? I heard every building in the Ancient Battlefield contains reward chests of varying quality!”
“We’re not here to compete for treasure chests! Even if we’re North China Team Four, with our strength, we should at least make the top ten!”
“Qian Feng, use your tracking ability to search for a nearby Magical Beast boss.”
“Before the full melee begins, let’s kill some bosses and grab some points first!”
The one leading the discussion within the team was the only girl among them.
Although she was neither the captain nor the strongest member of the team, she was a specially recruited student focused on Tactical Specialization—a future Tactician.
In elite teams like these, at the very top of the special training camp, there was often a Tactician.
Observing the enemy and devising tactics,
a team of four Class Users and one Tactician could often achieve more than a team of five pure Class Users.
To put it simply, it was like Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei at the end of the Eastern Han. Before they met Xu Shu and Zhuge Liang, what they could accomplish was ultimately limited.
The principle was much the same.
That was why, in top-tier teams like these, a Tactician’s authority often rivaled that of the captain.
So after hearing her words, the other four moved at once.
They headed toward the location of a Magical Beast boss.
With the help of the teammate who possessed tracking abilities, the team quickly spotted a level-30 Magical Beast boss!
“It’s an Inferno Behemoth, rare quality. Its specialties are Constitution and wide-area fire skills. Spread out immediately!”
the girl acting as Tactician warned them.
After all, it was a level-30 Magical Beast boss. Even though they were all top talents from their respective regions, they still had to handle it carefully.
The Inferno Behemoth was five or six meters tall, shaped like a fire dragon and covered in blazing magma scales. Its presence was extraordinary.
“Captain, use Blink Slash first to evade the Inferno Behemoth’s opening wave of skills and avoid taking damage!”
“Qian Feng, use the chance to slip behind it for crowd control and defense break.”
“Then we’ll—”
The girl spoke quickly as she laid out the plan. Even against a boss they could handle, they still had to minimize losses as much as possible.
The team members listened quietly, nodding from time to time.
Yet in the very next second, the Inferno Behemoth ahead of them suddenly suffered a violent blow, and a thunderous shock rang out across the ground.
The Tactician girl stopped speaking.
The other four members of the team instantly widened their eyes, their faces filled with shock as if a great enemy had appeared.
The fearsome level-30 Inferno Behemoth had been smashed to pieces by a panda that had appeared out of nowhere with a single punch!
Its body was blown apart into chunks of corpse, killed instantly on the spot!
Through the storm raised by the violent blast, a black-robed youth with an imposing bearing stepped forward slowly and waved at them.
“What a coincidence.”
“It seems your opponents now will have to be me instead.”
This person was, of course, Ye Ze.
At the same time, after killing the level-30 Magical Beast boss, his experience bar rose by quite a bit again.
But on the opposite side, the five trainees all looked extremely grim.
“An Instructor? How can there be an Instructor with this kind of strength?”
“Can you scout his attributes and skills?”
“I can’t. He seems to have some kind of anti-reconnaissance method.”
Their scouting attempt ended in failure, because the Silver Medal Ye Ze wore came with an anti-reconnaissance effect granted by the military.
Unable to scout him, the captain turned to the Tactician girl and asked:
“Can you estimate his strength at all?”
The Tactician girl drew a deep breath...
“The energy fluctuation from that punch just now was enough to kill all five of us together.”
The others all sucked in a sharp breath.
“Good Lord...”
...
Outside the dungeon, in the Monitoring Division,
the lower left corner of the projected screen already showed that one boss had died.
The corresponding screen from the group that had killed that boss was pulled up and enlarged.
“Hm? The first one to kill a boss is actually an Instructor?”
“Isn’t that a bit against the rules? He’s an Instructor, and he’s killing bosses?”
“There’s no rule saying he can’t!”
The last rough retort came, of course, from Wan Feipeng.
And aside from him and Wu Ming, in truth, no one else recognized Ye Ze. They simply assumed he was some soldier from the Demon Suppression Army.
Only Wei Zheng thought he looked vaguely familiar.
Wu Ming dragged Wan Feipeng sharply to one side and lowered his voice:
“You made Ye Ze an Instructor? Have you lost your mind?”
“Are you trying to crush his confidence?”
The geniuses who were the same age and level as Ye Ze were still entering the dungeon in teams of five.
But Ye Ze had been made into an Instructor, turned into a whetstone for others—was that not just beating down his self-confidence?
That was how Wu Ming saw it.
But Wan Feipeng seemed to know far more about Ye Ze’s strength:
“Heh, just keep watching. It’s not certain yet who’ll end up getting crushed!”
Only yesterday, he had received news from the front line:
As the Honorary Regiment Commander of the Demon Suppression Army, he had been among the very first to learn that Ye Ze had been awarded the Silver Medal for killing a Fiend General!
Immediately afterward, he had issued orders to seal the news!
As for the reason...
Wan Feipeng shot Wu Ming a crafty look.
“How about a wager?”
“One flick to the forehead.”
As he spoke, he twisted an arm packed with the dense strength of a sixth-rank Hunter.
Wu Ming adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses and silently took half a step back.
...
Inside the dungeon,
the Tactician girl made her decision after only a moment’s thought:
“That seems to be a strength-type Summoned Beast... If we kite it and drag the fight out, we may still have a chance.”
But seeing Ye Ze standing at the very front, the captain steeled himself, drew a short blade, and flashed forward!
The captain’s figure vanished from where he stood...
Not because he had truly disappeared, but because he moved too fast for the naked eye to follow as he rushed straight at Ye Ze.
“Blink Slash.”
“That really is a decent beheading skill.”
As the person about to be beheaded, Ye Ze calmly offered his evaluation.
Because at that moment, the mantis appeared out of thin air before him and, with only a single arm blade, casually blocked the captain’s full-force strike.
Clang!
Looking at the short blade in his hand that could not advance even half an inch further—and at the terrifying creature before him, which seemed entirely at ease—
the captain immediately turned his head and roared:
“Run!”
But at that moment, not one of them ran. Instead, all of them charged toward Ye Ze at once.
It was a concentrated volley of their strongest skills.
Standing beside Ye Ze, the panda activated Martial Saint Aura.
With a series of crashing impacts, the Martial Saint Aura effortlessly intercepted every one of those skills, and the entire focused assault was neutralized in an instant.
“Not bad. As a captain, you qualify.”
“You immediately sought an opportunity to strike at the leader, and once you realized you couldn’t win, you chose to stay behind and let your teammates escape...”
“You pass.”
Hearing Ye Ze’s words, the captain looked dazed, but also somewhat delighted.
“P-pass?”
Just as he had thought!
How could an Instructor this strong possibly be someone they were meant to defeat?
He had to be here as an examiner!
“Then... then what’s the reward for passing?”
The captain lowered his short blade and asked expectantly.
Ye Ze could not help smiling.
“There is no reward for passing. You’ll still be eliminated all the same.”
“But if you do not pass, there will be an extra punishment.”
In the next instant, the mantis’s slash cut off the captain’s head, and he became the first one in the group to be eliminated from the dungeon.
【Advancement Quest Progress: Warrior 0/1, Assassin 1/1, Mage 0/1, Archer 0/1, Swordsman 0/1.】
This captain who had used Blink Slash was precisely a rare Assassin-type class user.
At the same time, 1,000 experience points came in.
Ye Ze quietly calculated the 400 Military Merit he had just earned.
That was his reward for serving as an Instructor.
“Too bad these people aren’t from East China or Central China. Otherwise I could’ve gotten another 300.”
Ye Ze said it casually.
But the remaining four members of the team were utterly horrified.
Because when they tried to run at that moment, they discovered that none of them could move at all!
The squirrel’s Shadow Bind had already locked onto them firmly.
“That focused volley you launched just now wasted your captain’s sacrifice.”
“The courage is commendable, but there was no rationality in it at all—especially when this isn’t a real battlefield, but a dungeon where team ranking is being calculated.”
“None of you pass.”
As he spoke, Ye Ze finally looked at one trembling boy.
“And one more thing. When all of you focused your fire just now, why didn’t you attack me?”
The boy’s voice shook.
“Because I felt... if I got close, I’d be killed instantly...”
In truth, that feeling was normal for ordinary people when facing a Void Hunter head-on.
Especially for Assassin-type classes, that oppressive pressure was instinctive.
But Ye Ze asked curiously, “Then why didn’t you run?”
The boy answered honestly, “Because I couldn’t flee in the middle of battle...”
“Genius!”
Ye Ze could not even help applauding.
...
“Hahaha! That logic is remarkably clear!”
Wan Feipeng was the first to burst into hearty laughter.
By that line of reasoning, the boy had neither fought nor run, and had simply frozen in place. Could someone with that level of mental fortitude really be called a talent?
Several of the other regional heads either smiled faintly or looked helpless.
Only the North China regional head looked especially awkward.
“This child has spent most of his time since changing classes grinding dungeons. He hasn’t encountered many true strong enemies.”
“His performance inside dungeons has actually been pretty good, but the moment he faces a truly strong opponent, he tends to lose his composure...”
“I’ll arrange targeted instruction for him later.”
The North China regional head reflected on it himself.
In truth, allowing someone like that into the training camp really did count as his mistake.
But Wei Zheng did not dwell on that point. Instead, he looked at Ye Ze with approval and said:
“This Instructor isn’t bad at all.”
“Although this is a confrontation-type dungeon, he is simultaneously judging whether the trainees’ conduct is reasonable or not. That aligns perfectly with my own assessment!”
“If there’s a chance in the future, he could be transferred over to serve as a permanent Instructor in the Demon Suppression Army.”
A permanent Instructor in the Demon Suppression Army held a rank comparable to a camp commander. For an ordinary soldier of the Demon Suppression Army, that would count as a major promotion.
But hearing Wei Zheng’s evaluation,
the other regional heads all nodded in agreement as well, with no objections at all.
Wan Feipeng, meanwhile, was grinning more broadly than ever.
“Well, Old Wei? That Instructor was sent by me!”
“He’s inherited my true style perfectly!”
Wu Ming merely glanced at him and said nothing.
Wei Zheng looked at Wan Feipeng in surprise.
“You sent him? He really doesn’t resemble you in the slightest...”
But at that moment, someone suddenly cried out while staring at the projected screen:
“What is he doing?”
“He’s stealing the trainees’ equipment!!”
On the projection screen, the four remaining team members were full of shock, yet unable to resist at all.
And the squirrel beside Ye Ze was taking one piece of equipment from each of them!
“How is he doing that? He can take equipment without the owner’s consent!”
“What a bizarre skill!”
“This is going too far, isn’t it? Using his superior strength to rob trainees of their equipment?”
Not only the North China regional head, but even several members of headquarters began speaking up in criticism.
Wu Ming raised a brow and looked at Wan Feipeng teasingly.
“Now I really do believe he’s inherited your true style.”
Everyone could not help looking at Wan Feipeng.
Then, all at once, they nodded solemnly.
“He was definitely egged on by you.”
Wan Feipeng’s eyes widened in fury.
Why was it that whenever something good happened, no one remembered him, but whenever there was blame to be thrown around, the bucket landed squarely on his head?
Still, he raised his voice in protest:
“So what if he snatched a little equipment?”
“When I was at special training camp back then, anyone who couldn’t beat me had to hand over resources!”
“It’s only now that people are so gentle with these students!”
Everyone stared at Wan Feipeng, then nodded gravely once more:
“As expected. He really was egged on by you.”
Wan Feipeng found himself unable to explain, so he simply stopped trying.
The various regional heads all looked toward Wei Zheng, waiting for his decision.
Yet Wei Zheng merely smiled faintly.
“He has already found himself a reason. What more can we say?”
“A reason?” the North China regional head asked in confusion.
“That’s right. The Instructor Handbook clearly states that while instructors are on duty, they are qualified to impose punishments on unqualified trainees. He hasn’t violated the rules.”
“This...”
Everyone looked at one another, never having expected that angle.
The main issue was that every trainee in the special training camp came from wealth or power and had an extraordinary background. What Instructor would ever dare punish them?
Someone else tentatively asked:
“But if those families come asking, we can’t simply ignore them, can we?”
Wei Zheng looked at Ye Ze on the projection screen and revealed a smile full of deeper meaning.
“Then tell those families this.”
“Once this Instructor is defeated and eliminated by another team... then he will no longer be an Instructor.”
“At that point, reclaiming the equipment will happen naturally.”
Hearing that, everyone nodded in approval.
“A wise plan, Wei-ge!”