Chapter 38
Chapter 38: An Outstanding Army Corps Commander Whose Only Goal Is To Steal Little Brat’s Dad
“Three-headed Giant Pythons are social level 6 Aberrant Beasts. Their bodies are between sixty and eighty-nine meters long. Their fangs are highly poisonous, and under their scales there are a huge number of toxic parasites. With the naked eye we can already see countless Three-headed Giant Pythons under the waterfall. There are only more of them where we cannot see.”
“Even if we are lucky enough not to jump right into a Three-headed Giant Python’s mouth, the ones that are not under the waterfall will still feel the heat coming off our bodies. They will gather from all directions, chase us, and swallow us.”
“We are students of the Military Academies. We are the men and women of the Zhenlin Empire, not the Insectoid Race that everyone wants to beat up. Your drill instructor group cannot treat us like the Insectoid Race.”
Ye Ying wore a green combat suit and held a drill instructor’s whip in his hand. His brown combat boots thumped on the floor as he walked into the ship cabin where the students were gathered.
He walked up to the student who had been shouting the loudest, pointed the drill instructor’s whip at him, and spoke in his usual sharp tone: “Little darling, you are the one who is timid and afraid of death. If you are too delicate to jump, then stop stirring up everyone else so they will not jump.”
“I am not forcing you to jump. Each of you has points. Be generous. Just take out ten points, and a drill instructor will pilot a luxury flying device and send you down to the safest place below.”
“Of course, little darlings, you also have the right to withdraw from this Thirty Military Academies Supremacy Tournament. My people will pilot a ship and send you back to the academy so you can keep being your delicate little babies.”
“See, there is more than one choice. There is more than one road ahead. How you choose and how you walk it is up to you, isn’t it?”
The student who had been pointed at with the whip glared in anger. He looked at the other students who had agreed with him and did not want to jump down the waterfall, only to find that none of them met his eyes. They even took a step back.
A bird-kind beastman raised his hand: “Report, Drill Instructor, I have a question!”
Ye Ying shifted his gaze to him: “Ask.”
The bird-kind beastman said: “If we jump down from such a height, are there any rules? For example, are we not allowed to transform directly into beast form, or something like that?”
Ye Ying grinned: “My ship is parked right here. Whether you use human form or beast form, as long as you jump from my ship, it counts.”
“How you do it and what methods you use are your personal freedom and your personal skill. I will not interfere.”
“Of course, personally, I would rather that none of you get even the slightest injury. I hope every one of you forfeits, hands your points to me, and quits the tournament on the spot. That is what I would warmly welcome.”
The bird-kind beastman only listened to the first half of what he said and never heard the rest. He quickly looked to his teammates: “Let’s go. I will turn into beast form and fly you down one by one.”
His teammates were wild with joy: “Good, good, good, great idea. After we get off the ship we can fly farther away, away from the Three-headed Giant Python nesting area.”
Ye Ying stepped aside: “The excellent get to enjoy it first. I wish you success. Go to the hatch, hand in your space knob storage devices, and receive your supply packs.”
Led by the bird-kind beastman, the nine people in that group strode off first in front of everyone. They did not hesitate at all, driven only by the desire for more points.
Other squads that had bird-kind beastmen quickly followed. With wings, forget jumping from one thousand meters up, even two thousand meters did not scare them.
Jiang Tea Tea and her seven companions exchanged a look, then stood up. The furry males transformed into human form and walked out together.
Ye Ying watched them come toward him. These eight little rookies who had slipped through the net had made him lose face in front of the other Army Corps in the first round. Now he watched them with a bit more attention and hope.
The ship opened three hatches at the same time. Wind and hot air rushed in through the open doors. The members of the first and second groups, those bird-kind squads that had already gone to the hatch, took off the space knob storage devices from their wrists one by one and received supply packs.
Jiang Tea Tea’s group of eight was the second to reach the hatch. They took off the space knob storage devices from their wrists and walked over to the supply packs.
Each person could only take one supply pack. Each pack held different things. Some held a month’s worth of nutrient injections. Some held portable healing devices. Some were stuffed with a big bag of snacks. Some held tents. Some held insecticide.
The supply packs held all kinds of strange things. There was nothing the students could imagine that the drill instructor group could not stuff into a pack.
Sui Xuan Chu said to the others: “When you pick a supply pack, try to take useful tools. We do not need nutrient injections. In the tropical rainforest the last thing we will lack is food.”
Cheng Lin Yue grabbed a pack: “I will take a healing pack. There is a portable healing device in here, and all kinds of detox agents.”
Cheng Xiao Ting picked up a pack and opened it: “I will take this melee weapons pack. There are daggers, wrenches, and telescoping iron rods. It will be easier to beat up small animals if I have a weapon that fits my hand.”
Huang Da Zhuang also chose a pack: “I am most afraid of bugs. I will take the insecticide. When we sleep we can spray it around us.”
Yan Yu, Zhang Ting Zhou, and Orange Sparrow also each chose supply packs that would help the team without overlapping, then slung them onto their backs.
Sui Xuan Chu looked at Jiang Tea Tea: “Roommate, you still have not chosen?”
Jiang Tea Tea chose a pack. Inside there was a tent and a coil of rope.
She took out the rope and tossed the pack to Huang Da Zhuang.
Sui Xuan Chu did not understand: “Roommate, why are you not putting the rope back in the pack? Why are you holding it in your hand?”
Jiang Tea Tea did not answer him. She tugged on the rope. It was not even half as thick as her little finger, yet it was very strong. She tugged a bit harder and still could not break it.
Then she walked to the edge of the ship, facing the fierce wind as she looked down. Below was a huge waterfall at the place where several big rivers met.
The waterfall was about a thousand meters tall. Under the falling water, three giant serpents, each thicker than a barrel and with three heads, held their mouths open and flicked their tongues.
Jiang Tea Tea went back with the rope in her hand and looked at Ye Ying as she asked: “Drill Instructor, I have a question.”
Ye Ying was also curious what she wanted to ask while holding a rope: “Ask.”
Jiang Tea Tea said: “Can the points of Supremacy Tournament students be transferred between each other?”
Ye Ying’s heart surged, but his face stayed calm: “You mean you help other students reach the ground safely, and they pay you with their points?”
Jiang Tea Tea gave him a bright smile: “Yes.”
Ye Ying had never run into something like this before. Before he could speak, a voice came through the channel in his earpiece. It was his own Commander in Chief: “Tell her, yes.”
Ye Ying spoke out loud: “As long as both sides agree, they can.”
“Thank you, Drill Instructor!” Jiang Tea Tea thanked Ye Ying, then came back to Sui Xuan Chu and the others and asked: “Do you want to earn some base points?”
Points were the key to the championship. The higher your points, the lower your chance of elimination, and the closer you were to the title.
Only a fool would not earn points.
All seven of them looked at her, eyes burning, like hungry wolves staring at meat: “Earn. As long as you can help us earn points, however you arrange it, we will do it.”
“Right, with points everything is good. From now on, you are our temporary captain. You can command the seven of us in battle.”
Jiang Tea Tea raised the rope in her hand: “This rope is about two thousand five hundred meters long. The ship is a thousand meters above the waterfall, but there is jungle not far from the falls.”
“We will toss the rope into the jungle to create a buffer. Other students can use the rope to go down, and we will earn points from that.”
Huang Da Zhuang raised a doubt: “But Sister Tea, none of us have wings. How are we supposed to go down with it and land right in the jungle?”
Cheng Xiao Ting and the others all swung their gazes to Sui Xuan Chu. He was from the Dragon Clan. When he transformed into beast form he had cloud-riding flight. He was the overlord of the sky.
Jiang Tea Tea settled it in one sentence: “I will go.”
Huang Da Zhuang and the other seven said: “You will go? There is more than one level 6 mutated Three-headed Giant Python down there. Are you sure you can handle it?”
“We will only know if we try.” Jiang Tea Tea smiled at them, then handed the other end of the rope to Sui Xuan Chu.
He was the strongest of the seven, with the greatest physical strength. It was safer to have him hold the other end of the rope.
Sui Xuan Chu tied the rope straight around his waist and followed Jiang Tea Tea to the hatch, watching as she held the other end.
Before Jiang Tea Tea jumped, she turned back to Sui Xuan Chu: “I will go down first and choose a landing point. We will charge five points per person.”
Sui Xuan Chu nodded: “Okay. Be careful…”
Before he could finish, Jiang Tea Tea took a few steps back, ran forward, and jumped off the high-hanging ship.
Jiang Tea Tea had spiritual power. After she jumped, she pretended to borrow the rope’s force. In midair she made a big turn, stepped on the rope, and used it to jump to a tree branch in the distance.
The more than two thousand meters of rope, with one end on the ship and the other trailing below, swung and swayed in the air. It was an amazing sight.
Jiang Tea Tea wrapped the rope around the tree behind her, pulled it tight and knotted it, then patted the trunk: “Thank you for the hard work.”
No one knew if the tree really understood her or if it was just a coincidence that a west wind blew by. The leaves rustled, as if answering Jiang Tea Tea.
At the same time, the other twenty-nine ships were all dropping students in different dangerous landing zones on the primitive tropical planet.
The commanders of the twenty-nine Army Corps sat in their own command rooms. Not only could they see the real-time surveillance of the students they were training, they could also see the real-time surveillance of the students under the other Army Corps.
Among all these live feeds, they each, without planning it, tapped open the feed of Jiang Tea Tea jumping off the waterfall.
She was a pure human female with no supernatural abilities at all. She weighed less than a hundred jin, looked pale, soft, and frail, the kind of girl who looked like if someone punched her into a wall, you would not even be able to pull her back out.
She wore the Pacification Division’s school uniform and held a rope. She was even bolder and more decisive than those Level S2 and Level S3 beastman and half-beastman students. It was a treat for their eyes and completely reset what they thought they knew.
Before this they had not understood why, as soon as the Supremacy Tournament began, that man surnamed Ye had gone to ask the Commander in Chief for a person. Now they understood. They also wanted to ask the Commander in Chief for this girl, to lock this pure human female down and fold her into their own Army Corps.
So the twenty-nine Army Corps commanders, acting on their years of instinct in fighting over good seedlings, all at once called their own Commander in Chief.
Chong Ming was sitting on a super invisibility warship, hanging high in the center of the primitive tropical planet. The giant holo projection screens in front of him were clearer and more numerous than the ones in front of the other Army Corps commanders.
When the twenty-nine Army Corps commanders all tried to video call him at the same time, he casually tapped to accept, and all twenty-nine figures appeared together in front of him on the projection giant screen: “You are all calling me at once. What trouble have you run into?”
The twenty-nine commanders had not expected that when they called the Commander in Chief to ask for a person, they would bump into the other twenty-eight fools doing the same thing.
To make sure they could get her, they all started talking at once the instant the connection opened, each of them trying to be the first to speak:
“Report, Commander in Chief. From the Royal Military Imperial Academies’ Pacification Division, the pure human female student Jiang Tea Tea, our First Army Corps is willing to admit her with absolute priority and no conditions. Please approve it, Commander in Chief!”
“Report, Commander in Chief. Our Second Army Corps is also willing to admit schoolmate Jiang Tea Tea with absolute priority and no conditions. After we recruit her, we will draw up the most detailed training plan aimed at her physical limits and train her into the most outstanding pure human female with no supernatural abilities!”