High overhead, the Giant Skeleton’s two rows of stark white teeth, bared to the air, clacked open and shut without pause, as though speaking some language belonging to skeletons. As Ye Tianxie closed in on it with reckless disregard for his life, it lifted a leg bone taller than his whole body and brought it stamping down at his head with a cold, oppressive weight.
And in the very instant that foot lifted, Ye Tianxie stopped, then abruptly retreated a small step. Boom. The dull, heavy report attested to the tremendous power behind that blow. An enormous body, enormous strength — but its flaw was equally plain. Looking at that leg bone, now half a meter from his body and showing no sign of lifting again, Ye Tianxie confirmed his judgment at once.
Its mobility… was abnormally slow. From the sluggish way it had advanced earlier, he had all but concluded that its slowness affected not only its stride but its attack speed as well. The Giant Skeleton’s stamp had all but set the entire Bone Road trembling — and then its body stalled for a full three seconds. In those three seconds, Ye Tianxie had already sprinted a long way clear.
The Skeleton Cavern’s third level: crossed in a single rush, without pressure. Before long he couldn’t be bothered to deal with the Giant Skeletons’ attacks at all, and was gone before their feet had even lifted. The enemies he feared most were not those with overwhelming attack power, but those with high mobility. Conversely, an enemy with poor mobility — however strong — he could face with ease. Put another way: facing a single Giant Skeleton more than twenty levels above him, even if nine of every ten attacks missed, he was confident there would eventually come a moment when he could kill it, and take not a scratch himself. Naturally, if several appeared at once, all he could do was run.
The Skeleton Cavern’s fourth level.
The ground beneath his feet was still stark white bone, and the deathly pale glow was, strangely, a little brighter. No sooner had Ye Tianxie appeared than he saw the skeletons roaming in the distance. And the skeletons here didn’t merely press an enormous weight upon him — their appearance was many times more impressive than anything on the previous levels.
Skeleton General — Level 55. ????
A bronze war helm, whole and gleaming, sat on its head; a neat crimson cloak was draped across its back; savage armor cloaking its whole body gave off a faint bronze sheen; solid bronze war boots trod the ground; and in its hand was a silver spear, its point glinting with a cold and sinister light.
The skeleton’s body was hidden by armor and boots. Were it not for the uncovered skull, from a distance this was unmistakably a general in all his martial glory.
The Skeleton Generals’ aggro range was plainly greater than the Sword-and-Shield Skeletons’ (obviously — how could they be generals if they weren’t even better than foot soldiers!). The instant Ye Tianxie appeared, three Skeleton Generals turned toward him at once, and from those hollow eye sockets something like a light of hatred seemed to blaze.
Thud, thud, thud… War boots pounded the ground as all three raised their spears and charged him, their running posture and their strides no different at all from a perfectly ordinary man’s.
Level 55 monsters. A single graze from those spears and he would be dead beyond dead.
Past Level 10, whether killed by a monster, a player, or an NPC, a player lost one level per death, dropped one to three random items from their equipment and inventory (the odds tied to Luck), and lost 1% to 5% of their money (likewise tied to Luck). Everyone who entered the World of Fate felt how brutally hard it was to level in this game, and how cruel the penalty for death — and so they could not help but guard their lives jealously.
Ye Tianxie was certainly not a man unafraid of death. Facing three enemies who could kill him with the greatest ease, his gaze at last turned keen… the sign that he was taking things seriously.
“Frenzied Battle Intent!”
The low words brought a thread of life to that deathly space, and its radiance appeared on him once more… And here is an astonishing fact: from the cavern’s first level to this one, his health had never once risen above 20%. He had not used a single potion to restore it.
What courage, what confidence, what pride!
And what strength must underpin such courage, confidence, and pride.
At the same time, even at full health, both the Giant Skeletons of the third level with their monstrous attack and these Skeleton Generals could kill him in a single blow without question. So keeping his health below 20%, ready to trigger Frenzied Battle Intent at any moment, was the most correct choice he could have made.
In activating it, what he needed was not the 30% attack bonus — even 30% more attack could never break a Level 55 monster’s defense — but the 30% speed.
Excitement and frenzy boiled through his heart and mind, and his body turned as light as if borne on the wind. His gaze locked instantly on the spearpoint driving at his chest; his body swayed slightly, tilting right at a near-perfect forty-five degrees, and the spear grazed past. Then his feet bent through several irregular angles, and his body wove like a flickering phantom past all three Skeleton Generals to slip in behind them. He summoned the Blood-Sweating Steed at top speed, mounted, and galloped away.
The Blood-Sweating Steed added a full 60 movement speed — but in granting that speed it also stripped away the extraordinary agility his own body possessed. A player could control a mount freely enough, but never as freely as their own body. So Ye Tianxie never summoned the steed until he was clear of danger.
Frenzied Battle Intent: a skill obtained in the novice village, which for any ordinary player was without question a near-suicidal thing — one they wouldn’t dare use even if they had it, and would regret discarding. Yet Ye Tianxie had taken this throwaway skill, his only combat skill, and pushed its effect to an extreme no other player could ever reach. Or rather… whatever the skill, once it came into his hands, he would push it to its limit.
This too was the strength that belonged to the Undefeated Evil Emperor. His undefeated legend sprang not from any superiority of level, attributes, or gear. Facing an enemy with exactly the same level, attributes, gear, and skills, he could guarantee total victory over ten of them — and would not fear a hundred.
This was the legend that belonged to him.
With no enemies around him for the moment, his base movement speed of 100, plus the steed’s 60, plus Frenzied Battle Intent’s 30% brought him to 208. He had summoned the steed precisely because he was certain that even if a Skeleton General intercepted him, this speed would carry him past its body before it could react and swing.
But suddenly, a thread of danger stabbed at his nerves. He reacted in an instant, flipping backward off the steed without hesitation and landing behind it, staggering once before steadying himself.
BOOM!
A great sheet of lightning — grey and lifeless in color — came crashing down from above and struck the Blood-Sweating Steed squarely. Separated from its master and no longer protected, the steed gave a single scream as the grey lightning emptied its health in an instant, and it collapsed.
Set against the racing heart of a hair’s-breadth escape, what Ye Tianxie felt far more keenly was a deep, aching pain…
The Blood-Sweating Steed… my thirty-thousand-gold Blood-Sweating Steeeeeeed!
And now the shape that had loosed that terrible lightning emerged from the darkness. It was a skeleton in a pitch-black cloak, its entire body concealed beneath it save for half a skull face. Compared with the Skeleton Mages of the second level, this one’s cloak was plainly of a far higher order, patterned with chaotic, disordered markings, and its body was faintly wrapped in a dim grey light.
Undead Curse Skeleton — Level 57. ????
The Skeleton Cavern’s fourth level held two kinds of skeleton.
On first entering, he had seen only Skeleton Generals and had instinctively assumed they were the only kind here. The price of that misjudgment was enormous: he had nearly stepped into the abyss of death, and had lost a Blood-Sweating Steed worth thirty thousand gold.
Mounts are not like pets. A pet, once dead, can be revived — suffering the same level-loss penalty as a player, with a certain chance of defecting besides. A mount, protected from all harm while ridden, generally cannot die at all. But once separated from its master and killed, it is truly dead, and cannot be revived as a player or pet can… Though this, too, applies only to ordinary mounts. Mounts of the fifth rank and above — from the vanishingly rare Immortal Spirit tier to the all but impossible Holy Annihilation tier — possess the ability to revive after death.
His heart bleeding, Ye Tianxie wanted nothing so much as to grind that Undead Curse Skeleton into bone dust. As grey light began to gather around it and it chanted its next spell, he stared at it through gritted teeth, gripped the Hour of Eternal Fate hard, and then decisively chose to… run.
BOOM!
The same explosive report went off behind him. The undead magic loosed by an Undead Curse Skeleton was hardly comparable to that of a lowly Skeleton Mage: after a chant of under three seconds, it unleashed a terrible attack of enormous power covering a five-meter radius. Ye Tianxie evaded it by a hair — and found two Skeleton Generals looming ahead. He didn’t stop; he accelerated, dropped low, and two spears thrust through the air above him. His body slid gorgeously along the ground beneath them in a low, perfect evasion, and he rose swiftly and vanished into the deathly-pale darkness.
(End of Chapter 100)