Chapter 52
Chapter 52: The Insect Clan Is Hunting—Hurry and Tell the Cub’s Dad to Hunt
Jiang Tea Tea and Sui Xuan Chu had manipulated a combined force of 167 cadets and instructors—every one of them at least B-rank ability users.
One-on-one, none of them could beat four Legion Commanders and twenty-eight elites.
But 167 people attacking without restraint, surrounding and intercepting, throwing abilities around like they were free? The Legion Commanders had only one option: dodge and scatter.
They still couldn’t fight back.
The battlefield erupted into chaos—roars, screams, the crackle of abilities.
“Don’t let those thirty-two big bosses run! Block them! Farm them! Kill them! Fifty points each—that’s sixteen hundred points! Charge!”
“Left side—block them! Fire, fire! Burn them! If they drop, we farm them and split the points!”
“Ah! One big boss hit me back—he’s dead, he lost! My fifty points are mine!”
While the crowd boiled like a pot, Jiang Tea Tea’s eight-person squad stayed on the outskirts. They spread out, found their angles, and started hunting inside the chaos.
Sui Xuan Chu braced his gun with steady hands. His aim was absurdly precise. Colored shells snapped into targets with near-perfect accuracy.
Ju Que, a feline beastfolk, treated trees as perfect sniper nests. He leaped from trunk to trunk, found the best angle, and shot down—clean and lethal.
Yan Yu, a 2S-rank blink-ability half-beastfolk, flashed from the outskirts to behind the Legion Commanders and struck from the rear.
Cheng Xiao Ting, a wolf-clan beastfolk with a gale ability, used the chaos as cover. He hunted with ambushes so clean some elites didn’t even realize they’d been hit before they dropped.
Cheng Lin Yue and Huang Da Zhuang stayed close to Jiang Tea Tea, blocking escape routes and feeding her openings. Jiang Tea Tea snapped branches off and flicked them like darts, aiming for throats and pressure points.
In less than half an hour, their ambush paid off.
Three Legion Commanders fell.
Twenty-three elites dropped.
And in the confusion, fifty-three instructors—people who had been tricked into “cooperating”—were silently hunted as well.
Jiang Tea Tea didn’t let greed slow them down. The moment they’d taken enough, she ordered a retreat. The squad melted away, leaving the cadets behind.
The cadets, unaware the instructors beside them had already been hunted, thought they’d won.
They cheered like mad.
“We won! We won! We won! Sixteen hundred points split among 167 people—almost ten points each!”
“Ten points puts me at 120! I’m definitely not last! I can definitely hold out until the end!”
“Cooperation! Instructors, great working with you! Come on, shake hands! Next we’ll work together again and find more big bosses to farm!”
As the crowd celebrated, a voice like thunder laced with ice shards exploded overhead.
“Congratulations to the eight members of the Wipe Out the Other Twenty-Nine Military Academies Squad. You successfully incited and tricked 458 cadets and 97 instructors from the Third Legion, the Eighteenth Legion, and the Twelfth Legion into helping you surround and intercept your targets.”
“They assisted you in hunting the First Legion commander, the Twenty-Ninth Legion commander, and the Eighteenth Legion commander, along with twenty-three elites, as well as hunting fifty-three instructors.”
“I hope the cadets present learn from this, absorb the lesson, and improve.”
“And I hope the Legion Commanders, instructor teams, and elites will take the eyes you’re so proud of having on top of your heads, wipe them clean, and stop pretending you can’t see what’s right in front of you.”
A bolt from a clear sky. Hollow joy. A club to the head.
Everyone stood there, stunned.
The first four eliminated Legion Commanders returned to the command flagship wearing smeared face paint and pure humiliation.
They were greeted by the Commander-in-Chief’s latest cruelty: a row of squatting Legion Commanders forced to watch a massive screen replaying their own deaths on loop.
They would rather be drilled until they spat blood and broke bones than sit through that shameful footage again and again.
Staff bustled through the command flagship. They didn’t just stare—they greeted them by surname with eerie accuracy, even through the face paint.
Worse, Chong Ming had given another order: if anyone greeted them, they had to respond.
The face they’d lost today could have filled a cargo bay. They wanted to dig a hole in the ship and bury themselves alive.
As days passed, two more Legion Commanders joined the ranks of the eliminated—the commanders of the Fifth Legion and the Seventh Legion.
With two more people, the first four no longer had to squat. They could sit on the floor.
Small mercies.
Now they didn’t just watch their own humiliations. They watched the fifth and seventh commanders’ footage too—then wrote reflections and sent them to the Commander-in-Chief.
Over eleven days, Jiang Tea Tea’s squad repeated the same strategy—incite, trick, ambush, and sweep the leftovers.
They killed twelve Legion Commanders and eighty elites, exceeding the target.
Round One ended early.
A military flyer picked them up from the Primeval Forest. After three hours in the air, they arrived in the far north of the Tropical Primeval Planet.
Jiang Tea Tea stepped off the flyer and froze at the sight of endless white.
Snow fell in thick sheets. The world was a flat, blinding expanse of ice and storm.
She was a green tea tree demon. Cold and blizzards didn’t scare her.
But snow on her head, snow beneath her feet, and under that snow—layers of hard ice, with bitter, briny seawater beneath?
Bringing a tree to a land with nothing but snow, ice, and salty sea… only that Big Loach could dream up something so hateful.
“Sister Tea, Sister Tea!” Huang Da Zhuang called. “The rest point is over there. Why did you pull out the flyer?”
He thought she’d been stunned by the beauty.
Instead, she dragged a flyer out of their spoils, opened the door, and tried to climb in.
Huang Da Zhuang lunged and grabbed her arm. “Sister Tea—what are you doing?”
Jiang Tea Tea clung to the flyer door like her life depended on it. “Huang Big Dog, let go! This place is so barren even birds won’t poop here. There’s nothing to eat. I can’t stay for even a second. I’m going back to the tropical rainforest to hunt aberrant beasts and roast them!”
Huang Da Zhuang blinked, then pointed casually. “Sister Tea, who said there’s nothing to eat? The sea is full of food. If you don’t believe me, ask Sui Xuan Chu and the others.”
Sui Xuan Chu and the rest had just stepped off the flyer. They hurried to back him up.
“Yeah, Sister Tea. We’re standing on a massive ice sheet. Under it is the sea. There’s food down there.”
“Roommate, you pulled out the flyer because you’re afraid of starving. Who are you looking down on?”
“I—I…” Sui Xuan Chu puffed his chest. “I’m dragon clan. Going down to catch fish is just a flick of my tail. I’m not letting you starve. I’ll stuff you until you can’t move!”
Zhang Ting Zhou chimed in too. “And don’t forget me. My beast form is an octopus—deep-sea octopus-kind. Even if I live on land now, my memory of the ocean comes from something deeper than bone.”
“I’ll say it right now. If I go down and can’t bring you seafood, then I’m seafood. I’ll cut off my tentacles and roast them for you.”
Jiang Tea Tea stared at him, then stared at Sui Xuan Chu.
“…Okay,” she said at last.
No soil—but seafood.
And seafood was what?
High-protein, natural fertilizer.
Eat for ten days straight and she might forgive the lack of soil.
Jiang Tea Tea put the flyer away. “Fine. We’ll check the rest point first, then go catch seafood.”
The rest point had houses buried under thick snow. Many eliminated or forfeited cadets had already gathered there. Twenty people per room, constant temperature at 25°C, basic facilities—but food and water had to be handled yourself.
Jiang Tea Tea’s team didn’t need to squeeze in with other squads. They got two rooms: six men in one, two women in one.
After washing off the grime and changing into light combat uniforms and boots suitable for both cold and heat, they stepped outside looking refreshed and sharp.
And immediately got surrounded.
The first batch of eliminated cadets crowded around them, assuming they were just another group that had washed out.
“Hey, hey,” someone called. “Which school are you from? Going out to find food? We came early—we know the area. We can point you the way.”
“But whatever you find, you share some with us. Not much—one third of the total.”
“Yeah. Your squad has dragon clan people. Dragon clan go into the sea like it’s empty land. Catching fish and shrimp, hunting sea aberrant beasts—easy. One third isn’t much.”
Jiang Tea Tea was hungry enough to chew the flyer’s steering wheel. She didn’t even know where the food was, and these beastfolk were already eyeing her share.
The audacity was breathtaking.
She pointed at the speaker’s head. “You. With those two horns—you’re dragon clan too, aren’t you? Why don’t you go fish instead of drooling at us?”
Then she pointed at another person’s neck. “And you. Your scales are already showing. You’re snake beastfolk. Afraid you’ll drown? And you stand here talking about guiding us while demanding one third of our food?”
The crowd exploded.
“You little girl—watch your mouth!”
“We’re eliminated. If you can stay here, you’re eliminated too. What are you proud of?”
“If it weren’t for your snowfield flyer, who would bother coming to help you?”
“Exactly! Without locals guiding you, finding the sea entrance is harder than climbing to the sky!”
That Big Loach really knew how to play.
These eliminated cadets looked relaxed, but in truth, aside from a warm room and basic facilities, they had nothing.
No tools.
Food and water were their own problem.
Disguised survival training.
Jiang Tea Tea smiled sweetly. “I’m not attacking you. You’re just too sensitive.”
“Move aside. We’re going to find food. When we come back, we’ll slap you in the face with it.”
“You—”
“Move, move, move,” Sui Xuan Chu said, waving people back. “Don’t block the way.”
The crowd had no choice but to retreat.
Jiang Tea Tea’s squad climbed into the snowfield flyer and shot off in a blur.
Behind them, the eliminated cadets stared after the disappearing vehicle, baffled. They were all eliminated or forfeited. Why did those eight get two rooms and a ten-seat flyer while they had to cram into twenty-person rooms and walk on their own legs?
Did they have backing?
But whose backing could be bigger than Chong Ming’s?
A thought sparked.
The Crown Prince?
Could the dragon clan man among them be the Crown Prince in disguise?
Once that idea appeared, it spread like wildfire through the rest point.
Before Jiang Tea Tea’s squad even found the sea entrance, the eliminated cadets were already imagining how to get close to the Crown Prince, how to behave properly, how to leave a good impression.
The snowfield flyer could seat ten, hit speeds up to 500 kilometers per hour, and had a navigation system with the sea entrance coordinates.
Following the coordinates across the endless ice sheet, they found it.
A circular hole, five meters across, covered by ice and snow so completely that without the coordinate marker, the flyer could have driven over it without noticing anything.
Sui Xuan Chu and Zhang Ting Zhou cleared the ice and snow away until deep blue seawater showed beneath.
“You six wait up here,” Sui Xuan Chu said. “We’ll go catch seafood.”
Jiang Tea Tea’s stomach growled loudly enough to count as a threat. “Good. Hurry. Bring up lots of seafood with plenty of meat and few bones.”
Zhang Ting Zhou shifted into octopus form and dropped into the hole first, vanishing without even a splash.
Sui Xuan Chu jumped in right after him.
Jiang Tea Tea watched the dark water swallow them and frowned. “Why didn’t Sui Xuan Chu transform into his beast form first?”
Cheng Xiao Ting and the others blinked. “No idea. Besides the two black horns on his head, none of us have ever seen his dragon form.”
“Maybe he likes his human form,” someone offered, “and thinks he can still catch the freshest fish to feed us.”
Jiang Tea Tea swallowed hard, already drooling. “You’re right. We’ll wait here for fish.”
Snow kept falling. Their combat suits adjusted temperature automatically, keeping them warm even in the far north’s brutal cold.
But an hour passed.
The sea hole started forming a thin layer of ice again.
There was still no sign of Sui Xuan Chu or Zhang Ting Zhou.
Cheng Lin Yue’s face tightened with worry. “Sister Tea… why aren’t they back? Did they run into sea aberrant beasts?”
Jiang Tea Tea blinked. “Are sea aberrant beasts big?”
“Huge,” Cheng Lin Yue said quickly. “Very vicious. Extremely sensitive to blood—once they smell it, they chase without stopping…”
She didn’t get to finish.
Water exploded upward with a violent splash.
Zhang Ting Zhou burst out of the hole in human form, drenched in blood. His octopus tentacles had been severed. He staggered, shaking, eyes wild.
“Sister Tea,” he gasped, “it’s bad. The insect clan showed up under the sea. They’re hunting Sui Xuan Chu—hurry and notify Chong Ming, Commander-in-Chief!”