As they advanced, Ye Tianxie avoided monsters wherever he could. He feared none of them himself, but he had to keep the three with him whole. Every natural trap, large or small, was detected without exception by his Eye of the Evil Dragon, and every one of them was circled around.

Ten-odd minutes later, the ground ahead abruptly opened out. The gloom remained, but for a stretch of nearly a hundred meters there were no trees at all. And there, in the middle of that clearing in the Demon Shadow Forest, a cave mouth sat where no cave mouth should have been. At this distance there was no telling whether it had been dug by hands or formed on its own.

And at the cave’s mouth, a lion radiating golden light lay quietly asleep. Look closely and one could clearly see, threaded through that golden glow, an unmistakable cast of gray.

And it was the final target of this quest — the Golden Sword Lion Beast.

Golden Sword Lion Beast: Level 25 Lord-tier boss. HP 31,000. King of the beasts of the Demon Shadow Forest. A purely physical attacker. In recent years, under the influence of demonic energy, its temperament has grown steadily more violent and more aggressive.

Innate — Golden Eye: Detects enemies within fifty meters. Sees through any stealth technique below Immortal Spirit rank.

Skill — Lion’s Pounce: Leaps high and pounces on a single enemy within ten meters, biting; has a certain chance to knock the target flat. Casts very frequently.

Lion’s Charge: Slams violently into the target before it. 70% chance to deal double damage, with a 30% chance to inflict 2–3 seconds of stun. Casts fairly frequently.

Lion’s Roar: Roars at the heavens, cowing its enemies. 70% chance to reduce the attack power of all nearby targets by 10% to 20%. Triggers when its HP falls below 50%. Casts infrequently.

Hidden skill — Roar of Fury: Once its HP falls below 20%, triggers once for every further 5% of HP lost. On activation, it looses a savage roar that shakes heaven and earth, staggering and cowing everything around it — dealing 1,500 points of fixed damage and 3 seconds of forced stun to all enemies within ten meters. Requires three seconds of preparation to cast.

Weakness: Fears fire- and light-type attacks.

The Eye of the Evil Dragon had not only handed Ye Tianxie the entire readout for a level 25 Lord-tier boss — it had laid bare its hidden skill as well. One could well imagine: if you didn’t know in advance about the Roar of Fury the Golden Sword Lion Beast unleashed in its final moments, and were caught wholly unprepared, then once it landed, every class within range apart from a full-health Guardian would meet a very ugly end.

He shared the readout with the other three. Su Feifei was astonished, and Zuo Pojun sucked in a hard breath. “A — a level 25 Lord-tier boss!? Second Brother, the monster this quest wants you to kill is—”

A level 25 Lord-tier boss. A monster no player could possibly withstand or defeat right now. Such was a Lord boss’s strength that even he — with his high HP and high defense — might, with luck, survive one hit. The second would kill him without question. And any other class would simply be one-shot.

“Mm. That lion,” Ye Tianxie answered.

Zuo Pojun’s head retreated into his shoulders, and however much he trusted Ye Tianxie, he ventured, carefully, “Second Brother, is this really… all right?”

“Wait here for me. Don’t come within ten meters of it. Nothing else should wander in nearby.”

The Lion’s Pounce could hit any target within ten meters, and it cast very frequently — a nightmare for mages and archers.

Taking on a monster ten levels above you is no great feat. But soloing a boss ten levels above you — that is genuinely remarkable. And soloing a Lord-tier boss ten levels above you is simply suicide.

Such is a Lord boss’s power that soloing one of your own level is already synonymous with suicide. The number of people who could actually manage it could be counted on one hand.

Over his gaming career, Ye Tianxie had soloed no small number of Lord bosses, winning every time — but all of them had been his own level or below, at most one to three levels above. Ten levels above was a challenge he had never once attempted.

But in those days he had possessed attributes balanced to his level. Now he possessed attributes that shattered that balance outright… Ten levels above — was it really impossible? The Golden Sword Lion Beast was strong, but its attack power could not possibly break a thousand. And with his own two thousand and more HP…

In his world, so long as an enemy could not one-shot him, then however strong it was, there was always a possibility of victory. And the record bore it out: no enemy incapable of one-shotting him had ever failed to fall to him. Players. Powerful demon-beasts. Even NPCs.

“Sister Su, a matchless and gorgeous duel is about to unfold before your eyes, and its protagonist is the man of your fate. Believe me — in ten minutes, ah, no, in five, you will love this man still more. You will love him to madness. For he is God’s own favored child.” Murong Qiushui said it with eyes half-lidded and a languid manner, his voice as soft and lazy as a woman just woken from sleep.

Su Feifei: “…”

“Ignore him. Though the sight of my Second Brother fighting a boss isn’t something an ordinary person gets to see. And you’ll only need to see it once to be certain… that he was born a monster.” Zuo Pojun said it cheerfully. On Ye Tianxie’s account, he was being very courteous to her.

A sleeping beast still keeps a high degree of vigilance — and the Golden Sword Lion Beast’s detection radius ran to fifty meters. Ye Tianxie kept his steps as light as possible, moving forward in silence. Whether fighting men or beasts, seizing the initiative is always the crucial first step.

Fifty meters… forty… thirty… twenty… fifteen…

At roughly fifteen meters, it finally woke, and a pair of golden eyes locked onto Ye Tianxie in an instant. And in that same moment he saw the whole of it clearly — an enormous lion, golden-maned, golden-eyed, and beneath that gaze an immense pressure came crushing down on him, enough to raise the hair on the neck.

The Golden Sword Lion Beast’s speed was every bit as ferocious as expected. With a dozen-odd meters still between them, it launched itself forward without even rising from its crouch, driving both hind legs into the ground and closing the gap to under ten meters in an instant — then springing again, and with a tremendous roar it leapt high, as though it had grown wings, and hurled itself at him, golden claws sharper than razors throwing back cold golden light in the forest’s thin illumination.

The Lion’s Pounce was no simple leap. It had an enormous ten-meter range, its speed was savage beyond description, and that vast body carried with it, as it came, a pressure that struck at the mind — enough to make a man shudder to the core, enough to make him forget to dodge at all.

To bring down a 3-star elite, five or six ordinary players of the same level in a party will do. To bring down a Lord-tier boss, even elite players need several dozen of assorted classes, in flawless coordination, over a comparatively long stretch of time. Extreme defense, terrifying attack power, skills that chill the blood — one Lord boss is worth ten 3-star elites of the same level. And by the same token, a Lord boss’s strength ensures that the haul from killing one is extraordinarily rich. Add to that how rarely they appear, and the moment one does, every guild and faction descends on it in a scramble — assuming, of course, they aren’t simply feeding themselves to it for nothing.

Soloing a Lord boss, at this stage, was perhaps something only Ye Tianxie could do.

The instant the lion’s body left the ground, Ye Tianxie had already judged where it would land. He didn’t retreat; he advanced — two steps forward and then a sidestep, slipping precisely past the pounce, and swung a Dragon Rend Slash behind him on pure instinct.

-840!

A splitting crack. The lion, barely landed, was hammered back nearly two meters by the knockback carried in the Dragon Rend Slash, and with its footing not yet set beneath it, the blow sent it stumbling and sprawling to the ground.

Dragon Rend Slash’s double-damage effect had produced only 840 points on the beast — and with Ye Tianxie’s base attack at 679, that meant the Golden Sword Lion Beast’s defense was cancelling out more than 250 points of base damage. Against defense like that, it would be extremely difficult to find a player at this stage capable of penetrating it at all, and even a player of the same level would do very limited damage.

With the lion down, Ye Tianxie was hardly going to waste the chance. He closed fast, landing two consecutive Dragon Rend Slashes on it before it could rise, stripping another two thousand from its health — then turned and withdrew, opening the distance before it could roar its way back to its feet.

Back in Godslayer, he had played an Archer. As a ranged class, his HP naturally couldn’t compare to a melee one’s, so when he challenged Lord bosses of his own level, a single touch meant death. And even so, he had never once failed against a same-level Lord boss, always keeping the thing pinned and wishing for death with ghostlike footwork, unthinkable reflexes and awareness, and a single bow. In those days the word defense had never featured in his stat priorities — it was movement speed and attack, and above all, movement speed.

In the World of Fate, his class was unambiguously melee, and what he still pursued was attack, as anyone could tell from every free point going into Strength. Movement speed remained just as important. But what had forged his legend was, of course, none of these in-game numbers. What mattered more was Reaction: the ability to respond to any attack in an instant, and to evade it at maximum speed, by the best method, at the perfect angle. Awareness: the ability to read, from the smallest movement, what an opponent would do next, and so judge it immediately. And Judgment: whose importance requires no argument.

For Ye Tianxie, facing a powerful boss like this, the Archer he’d once played would have been the more comfortable option — while cutting in at close range added a blood-boiling thrill, a sensation he genuinely relished. And though the Golden Sword Lion Beast was stronger than the Amethyst Battle Tiger he’d soloed before, to the Ye Tianxie of today it was far less of a threat.

In fact, one might say… it was hardly a threat at all.

(End of Chapter 148)