Chapter 298

Chapter 298: It Attacked Again

Yu Sheng couldn’t help thinking harder after hearing Xuan Che’s report. He had a few new guesses about Holy Revere Hermitage’s activity in Borderland.

Then a faint sound rose in the fog and sliced his thoughts apart.

Pat.

Like a foot stepping into shallow water.

Yu Sheng snapped his head toward the sound, but only saw milky fog slowly rising and falling in the distance.

There was nothing but dry ground around them. No standing water. No puddles. Nothing anyone could step into.

Which meant that sound didn’t belong here.

If an abnormal sound appeared in a visible environment, it could only mean something unreasonable was approaching.

“It’s getting darker,” Foxy murmured beside him.

With her warning, Yu Sheng finally noticed the sky.

When they left, it had still been broad daylight in the real Boundary City. Mistbound City always “corresponded” to the real one, so it should have been daytime here too. Even with the thick fog, the sky had been bright enough to see.

But now it was dimming fast, as if heavy storm clouds were gathering above the mist.

Yu Sheng frowned.

Pat.

The wet footstep sounded again—closer.

And almost the instant it did, more followed.

Pat, pat.

Then more, spreading out.

The footsteps became dense, coming from multiple directions, near and far, like something closing in.

A strange instinct tightened Yu Sheng’s chest. He whipped his head toward a patch of fog only a few meters away—and another footstep sounded almost from that exact spot.

This time, he saw a trace.

In the fog, a splash burst up—nearly transparent water, as if something in another dimension had stepped through invisible shallows, and the spray had momentarily wet the mist in this world.

The moment Yu Sheng caught that flicker, a faint tearing sound cut the air.

Something lunged.

He only caught a warped, nearly transparent silhouette in the fog. Instinct took over. Yu Sheng raised the tetanus staff and swung sideways, twisting his body to dodge as he did. Relying on nothing but that faint afterimage, he drove a kick into empty air.

Metal rang.

Sparks burst.

The recoil numbed his palm, but he’d stopped the charge—and his kick landed squarely.

Yu Sheng felt like he’d kicked a steel wall.

The attacker slammed out of its “invisible” state. A knight wrapped in heavy bronze armor materialized midair, flew sideways, and hit the ground with a boom—then shattered into scattered armor pieces.

Yu Sheng stared. “Holy crap! What is that?!”

What came next was worse.

The armor pieces lay still for a few seconds. Then a large amount of black, sticky, swamp-mud-like sludge oozed out from inside, foul-smelling and alive. Lumps of it writhed like soft-bodied creatures. They gathered rapidly, wobbling up into a hunched humanoid shape—

And then a giant fox-radish fireball—Foxy’s extra-huge foxfire—screamed in and burned it into ash.

“What the hell is that?!” Little Doll shrieked from Yu Sheng’s shoulder. “Something disgusting flowed out of that shell!”

“How would I know?!” Yu Sheng shouted back, eyes locked on the shattered armor and the ash where the sludge had been. His stance stayed tight, ready to move. “If I’d known, I would’ve brought Little Red Riding Hood. She knows a lot!”

“She’s in class right now!” Irene snapped back. “She’s a senior in high school!”

Yu Sheng opened his mouth to retort—then the murderous, wet footsteps all around them drowned him out.

The air tore again and again.

It seemed the first attacker’s death had enraged the others. They’d been tightening their encirclement. Now they launched a dense assault.

Phantom splashes burst in the fog. Nearly transparent figures lunged in from every direction.

“Careful!” Yu Sheng shouted—and then he had no choice but to swing the staff and meet the first wave head-on.

In the same instant, black silk threads erupted from his side like a net.

The spider silk expanded soundlessly through the mist, sweeping indiscriminately across every spot where Yu Sheng sensed movement or presence. Even invisible enemies were still bodies—still something the silk could touch.

And the moment it touched, the “bronze knights” stumbled.

Some froze mid-charge. Some tripped. Some stuttered in place as if their limbs had forgotten the next step.

Their concealment weakened with it. One after another, half-transparent figures surfaced in the air, like glass statues filmed with water.

Yu Sheng didn’t waste the opening. He swung the tetanus staff and smashed an enemy that had stalled in front of him.

The heavy bronze armor blew apart midair. Black sludge burst out like mud squeezed from a container, splattering across the street.

Foxy tore into another knight that had appeared. She kicked it away first, then lunged, grabbed its arm, and ripped—then the helmet, then the breastplate, then the legs. In a blink, she shredded the whole shell with brute strength.

Foxfire roared behind her, and the sludge around her went up in flames, turning to ash.

Then a cold, sharp aura cut through the battlefield, followed by a clear ring of steel.

Yu Sheng glanced over and saw Xuan Che step forward, a sword of pale-blue frost in his hand. The blade swept through the air, and even the surrounding fog instantly froze, breaking into countless tiny ice crystals that drifted to the ground.

Frost spread outward from him. The temperature dropped like a stone.

Yu Sheng’s eyes widened despite himself.

No wonder he’s cultivation. Look at those effects.

Xuan Che flicked his wrist. The sword left his hand—but instead of flying at an enemy, it floated behind him, hovering as if alive.

Then he raised a hand and formed a seal, rapidly drawing golden talisman marks in the air. With the other hand, he produced over a dozen pills from nowhere and tossed them into his mouth one after another like he was snacking.

Yu Sheng’s brain stalled. “…?”

Light flared around Xuan Che in layers. Every time an elixir went down, the aura around him thickened. He produced strips of talisman paper, scattered them casually, and they burned in midair, turning into streaks of light that circled his body.

Before the talismans even finished burning, he dumped more pills into his mouth like they were free.

After several rounds in a breath, he stopped.

He walked up to a bronze knight suspended in midair by spider silk, settled his stance, drew a breath—

And threw a plain, unadorned straight punch.

Yu Sheng heard a dull pff, like someone blowing dust away, followed by a low, vibrating hum.

The thick fog covering the street vanished in an instant.

A light breeze brushed past. The seven or eight bronze knights in front of Xuan Che—along with a building farther back—were erased into nothing.

For a moment Yu Sheng even thought the distant space twisted; he could swear he saw blurred, crack-like patterns ripple through the air.

But he didn’t have time to marvel at that insane punch.

Because the instant the fog vanished and the remaining bronze knights were forced into full visibility, Yu Sheng felt it.

A presence.

A trace of blood he’d left behind earlier.

The artificial saintess.

It rushed toward them at a terrifying speed, almost like teleportation. Yu Sheng barely managed to turn his head before, ten meters away, a dark shadow bloomed in the air.

The familiar tall, slender steel doll stepped out of it like a dancer. Light as a feather. Fast as lightning.

She lunged straight for Xuan Che’s back—he hadn’t even drawn his fist back yet.

In the blink of an eye, Xuan Che’s body blurred. He turned into a flash of lightning and reappeared more than ten meters away.

Almost at the same moment, several dazzling, scorching beams tore past Yu Sheng’s cheek, sweeping viciously toward the ambushing artificial saintess.

Irene (Pro version) had held back until now. The bronze knights were disgusting and strange, but not beyond Yu Sheng and Foxy—and Xuan Che had proven more than capable. Yu Sheng had warned that the artificial saintess might be lurking nearby, and Irene knew the energy in this body was limited.

So she waited.

Now she fired.

The artificial saintess reacted instantly, joints twisting to near-impossible angles as she dodged most of the beams.

But one still struck her in the side.

The armor shell that could take foxfire with nothing but a scorch mark—an alloy that shrugged off small and medium-caliber firepower and resisted most spells—was pierced clean through by an “Irene beam.”