Rend · Light of Havoc: One of Xiaobei’s two berserk skills. On use, it burns its own life as the price of rousing its heart of frenzy, driving its movement speed and attack speed to their limits… On activation, movement speed +400%, attack speed +100%, duration 20 seconds, cooldown 60 seconds. Activation costs 5% of health, and 1% of health drops away every second the skill runs.

Xiaobei’s new skill surfaced in Ye Tianxie’s mind. Even here, on a battlefield with danger on every side, where absolute calm was the only option, the shock of it went through him. A 400% bonus to movement speed. A 100% bonus to attack speed. Was there really such an obscene support skill anywhere in the world, with a bonus on that scale? An ordinary support skill gives you a few percent, and even Frenzied Battle Intent, which adds 30% to attack, will not switch on until health drops below 20%… Xiaobei’s skill gave its bonuses in multiples. Five times the movement, twice the attack rate — and on that short a cooldown. Even the drawback was nothing more than the health cost every one of Xiaobei’s skills carried anyway.

A second later, Ye Tianxie learned what “the Light of Havoc” meant…

Xiaobei’s base movement speed was 150. Under the Light of Havoc it shot up to 750. And what does a movement speed of 750 amount to? In real-world terms, it comes to nearly half the speed of sound.

Xiaobei’s body moved. It shot away, a streak of white lightning flashing across everyone’s field of vision, too fast to react to, too fast to follow.

“Shff shff shff shff…”

The white shape ran quick as flowing light, and its movement raised a hard shrieking sound, like air being split open.

A Guardian saw a white blur cross his vision, and before he could make out what it was, the blur was gone. He was still standing there dazed, and Xiaobei’s claws were already landing on another target, when four bright red damage numbers finally floated up off his own body.

That berserk streak of light moved through the Guardian unit fast and with no pattern to it at all, too fast for anyone to make out what it was. And little by little, what showed in their eyes was not one white shape but a field of them — sheet after sheet of snow-white light tearing back and forth through the ranks, raising sheet after sheet of red damage numbers.

Xiaobei’s attack speed had been 150 to start with. With the Light of Havoc on it, that came to a full 300 — three strikes a second. Put that together with a movement speed gone terrifyingly high, and three men a second took a Meow-Meow Fist… Once it locked onto a target, not one of them got away, and of the men it settled that way, not one saw what had hit him. Well over half of them did not even know why they had died.

Xiaobei’s base attack was 780, and under Meow-Meow Fist’s four-hit combo, even Ye Tianxie lost better than half his health when it landed on him once. Across Huaxia there was essentially no player it could not one-shot.

Xiaobei moved so fast that although there was plainly only one of it, it dragged a small field of interlacing white trails behind it, with string after string of red damage numbers threaded through them. In the blink of an eye, the Guardians who had penned Xiaobei in were down in swaths.

Faced with a Xiaobei like this, the Guardians could only stare, tongue-tied. White light flashed past their eyes without a break, dazzling them, and a little longer of it left them dizzy and sick. They could not fix Xiaobei’s position at all, so they could not attack at all… and then a single white streak crossed a man’s vision and four damage numbers had emptied his health.

Ye Tianxie watched Xiaobei go fully berserk, putting enemies down one after another the way a knife goes through bean curd, and his brain crashed for five full seconds… This was not one Xiaobei. It was a whole crowd of Xiaobeis attacking at a speed that made the eyes swim. Looking at those damage numbers floating up in sheets rather than one at a time, who could believe this was the work of a single freak cat?

“Yaoyao, protect Xiaobei!!”

It was the sight of Xiaobei’s health dropping fast that brought Ye Tianxie back to himself, and he called it low to Yaoyao.

Xiaobei’s health was not dropping because it was being hit. At the speed it was moving, hitting it was next to impossible, and anyone who did land a blow could only have done it blind. Every point of health it lost came from itself. One Meow-Meow Fist costs 3% of its health. Three a second is 9%. Add the 1% a second that drains away while the Light of Havoc runs, and this Xiaobei, powerful as it was, was losing 10% of its health every second. In under ten seconds it would die right there without a single enemy blow landing on it.

Ye Tianxie’s voice had barely fallen before Yaoyao’s Mystic Spirit Cure went out and put Xiaobei’s health back to full at a stroke. Xiaobei was strong, but the flaw in it was obvious too — every one of its skills had to be paid for in its own life. With Yaoyao there, that flaw was hardly a flaw at all, and Xiaobei could attack as hard and as often as it liked, without a care in the world…

Xiaobei and Yaoyao. Attack at its highest and healing at its highest — a perfect match.

“What… what in the world is going on here? Why is Xietian helping us? He… the man is just a monster. And that fox, and that cat…” The Red Leaf Pact’s second-in-command stood there with a blank look on his face, swallowing hard. More than ten minutes on, he still had not come out of the shock Xietian had brought with him.

Since Xietian arrived, the Wings assault force had not advanced a single step. Their formation had been orderly once. A few passes back and forth had left it in scattered pieces. Those sheets of damage, those swaths of falling men, had his eyes all but coming out of his head.

Wings That Shroud the Sky had even stopped paying any attention to the Red Leaf Pact and thrown everything they had at one man. This siege had changed its nature completely the moment Xietian joined it. It had become his personal demonstration.

“How the hell should I know! I’ve met this Xietian several times now — and the first time, we were the ones who set out to finish him off… I must have had my head slammed in a door that day… Damn it, what are you all standing around for? Charge, now, while we have the chance! This is a gift from heaven — every one of you get in there and drive Wings That Shroud the Sky out of here!!”

“Raaah!!”

The Red Leaf Pact, routed and running only moments before, blazed up with a fierce momentum, and every man of them threw himself like a wild beast at the people who had been beating them into the ground. All that humiliation and all that unwillingness turned into a wild appetite to strike back… And on the other side, under the mad cutting of Ye Tianxie and Xiaobei, two scythes in Death’s own hands, the Wings players went down in sheets. Their bodies shook, and their hearts shook with them.

Several thousand men could not settle one man, and that one man was raging through them like a gale. A gap that wide tears a man’s nerve apart without effort, and it ate away what little momentum they had left.

The Red Leaf Pact stopped backing up and pressed forward across the whole line with their momentum arching over them like a rainbow, driving into the Wings ranks, every blow harder than the last, fighting in their excitement with almost no care for their own lives. Wings That Shroud the Sky were far better equipped than the Red Leaf Pact… but Xietian’s black blade and the white shape of that freak cat beside him left them feeling, all through the fight, that two of Death’s scythes — one black, one white — were closing on them and might land the killing blow at any moment. Against the Red Leaf Pact they fought with their hands and heads pulled in, timid, looking over their shoulders again and again… and the Red Leaf Pact pushed them back step by step.

A battle that had been entirely one-sided began, with Ye Tianxie’s arrival, to tip slowly the other way.

The Light of Havoc ran out, and Xiaobei finally stopped attacking and dropped to the ground. Around it, the bodies of players of every class lay heaped in layers in a wide ring. It licked its paw, not nearly done with itself. It had stopped, but the shadow those twenty seconds had cast over the Wings players was such that not one of them dared step up and attack it.

Too fast to see, let alone to run from or to hit, and a strike that killed every time. Who would be willing to face an enemy like that?

Having left the Wings Archer unit in complete disorder, Ye Tianxie drove into the Mage unit. How were the fragile Mage players supposed to stand up to attacks that one-shot Warriors with ease? Unwilling to sit still and wait for death, they fell back one after another, and the Mage unit turned to chaos as well. Ye Tianxie took his speed and his footwork to their limit and left string after string of attacks behind him, the Hour of Fate cutting without mercy as he moved…

His force was in disarray and starting to show signs of a rout under the Red Leaf Pact’s counterattack, and from the rear Cobra bellowed one furious order after another. “Useless mouths… a pack of useless mouths!! What do you eat all day?! Don’t fall apart! He is one man… only one man!! Take him down first! Archers, every one of you aim at him and shoot… Mages, nobody is allowed to pull back! Cast for everything you have, and even if his attack lands on your face, you do not break the cast. Blast him dead for me, blast him dead!!”

Cobra’s control over himself was plainly gone… and nobody, under a shock like this one, could have stayed calm.

Xiaobei had not followed Ye Tianxie and Yaoyao into the Mage unit. Those eyes, dark green as gemstones, turned toward the back of the enemy force, and then its body shot away, driving at its next target…

“Shff shff shff shff!”

Wherever Xiaobei went, damage numbers drifted up like snowflakes, and by the time the players nearby had reacted enough to attack it, Xiaobei was long gone. Not much later, still running without a pause, it went whoosh straight through the Wings ranks and drove for the rear… for the general commander of the Wings assault force, Cobra.

Seeing that freak cat, which had been killing whoever it caught, come at them of its own accord, Lone Sword Without a Trace turned and ran without thinking. Cobra’s eyes darkened. He charged to meet Xiaobei and stabbed down hard with the silver blade in his hand.

What he stabbed was Xiaobei’s afterimage.

Xiaobei appeared behind him with Meow-Meow Step, and its paw came down — four straight hits of Meow-Meow Fist to Cobra’s back.

-735, -741, -732, -733!

An Assassin is a class built on high agility, high speed and high attack with low health and low defense. One of those hits at random would have killed him; four in a row was another matter. Cobra had not yet recovered from the momentum of his own thrust when the prompt reached his ear: You have died.

(End of Chapter 266)