However strong Ye Tianxie’s abilities were, no one man could take on a thousand head-on. Enough ants can bite an elephant to death, and every one of these Warrior’s Departed Spirits was above him in level besides. An ordinary player who could hold off three monsters of his own level at once was doing well; a thousand was simply an astronomical figure, and insurmountable.

If Ye Tianxie had been alone, all he could have done was run — falling back and picking them off one at a time through whatever gaps opened. Against a number this terrible, heaven knows how long a fight like that would have dragged on.

But with Yaoyao here… he chose to charge them head-on.

The solid black ring of Warrior’s Departed Spirits drew its cordon tighter with Ye Tianxie at the center, exactly as before, and their invisible iron-and-blood anger came down like a mountain falling out of the sky and settling lower and lower overhead. System Quests are difficult by design, and a hidden branch is several times harder again than the quest that spawns it. A thousand-strong encirclement was a situation of pure madness. Setting aside whether it could be won at all, how many people could even stand up under pressure like that?

“Yaoyao… heh. Let’s set these heroes’ departed spirits free together.”

As the ring closed further, the Warrior’s Departed Spirits marching in step began to look more and more crowded, and by the time they were within five meters of Ye Tianxie they were packed eight deep and eight deep again, so tightly that not a drop of water could have got through. And still the formation did not break up. That uniform encircling attack of theirs, and the single-minded advance that never gave ground, made Ye Tianxie’s job of destroying them a good deal easier.

If they had known enough to fall back when threatened, or to attack in dispersed order, Ye Tianxie might have had a headache bad enough to bring up blood.

As they came within reach, the Mystic Spirit Cure he had been holding ready went off quietly — and because the ranks pressing in were so extraordinarily dense, the white light blazing up across them ran together into a circular field paved with radiance…

Cast at exactly the right moment, that Mystic Spirit Cure covered as many Warrior’s Departed Spirits as it possibly could, and with that one cast eighty-odd of them dispersed. Armor and weapons with nothing left to hold them up came down like a rainstorm, striking the ground with a crash of impacts overlapping into one.

The mass deaths of their companions raised no wariness in them and drew no retreat, only a stronger anger and a stronger will to attack. As the enemies behind closed again, Yaoyao’s Mystic Spirit Wall · Vengeance went off in a bloom of crimson light. In its first second it drove every one of the several dozen Warrior’s Departed Spirits that had stepped inside five meters of Ye Tianxie back out, without mercy, and the scarlet damage figures were so densely packed that they ran together into a blood-colored mist drifting upward.

Chh!

Chh!

Chh!

So long as enemies have no blink skill and no charge skill, and cannot cover more than three meters in a second, the Wall of Vengeance is a genuine wall of despair to them — and everyone sheltered inside it is effectively under a state of total defense with an attack property attached. At the attack power Yaoyao’s Wall of Vengeance currently carried, the first expulsion took better than half a Warrior’s Departed Spirit’s health; the second killed it beyond any doubt.

The best choice for the Warrior’s Departed Spirits at that point would have been to keep clear and wait for the Wall of Vengeance to expire. But they simply could not. As though every one of them had resolved on dying, they trod over their companions’ armor and weapons as it kept falling to the ground, and charged Ye Tianxie without a backward step — and what met them was the red brilliance that slammed them away again.

Chh!

Chh!

Chh!

“Ding… You have successfully defeated 600 Warrior’s Departed Spirits.”

Chh!

Chh!

…

…

A five-meter effect radius, plus the Warrior’s Departed Spirits’ unceasing advance and press inward, meant the Wall of Vengeance threw out forty-odd of them every second — which was to say that every two seconds, forty-odd Warrior’s Departed Spirits were released by it.

“Ding… You have successfully defeated 700 Warrior’s Departed Spirits.”

“Ding… Your pet ‘Xiaobei’ has risen to level 8.”

“Ding… You have successfully defeated 800 Warrior’s Departed Spirits.”

Against Warrior’s Departed Spirits possessed of nothing but a consciousness of battle, there may never be a super-weapon stronger than the Wall of Vengeance. Swathe after swathe of them died outside the crimson barrier, and the scattered armor and weapons did not pile into hills — they vanished batch after batch, as though sinking into the ground. When the Wall of Vengeance’s twenty seconds ran out, the prompt in his ear told Ye Tianxie a truly frightening number…

“Ding… You have successfully defeated 900 Warrior’s Departed Spirits.”

Twenty seconds of the Wall of Vengeance had brought about the annihilation of better than four hundred Warrior’s Departed Spirits! Add the mass one-shot from that first Mystic Spirit Cure — and Yaoyao had lain on the horse’s back without moving throughout — and this despair-inducing army of the dead had been cut in half in the space of a blink.

Ye Tianxie had already estimated, beforehand and at the highest end, what Yaoyao’s skills would do to an army of undead like this — and even so, that number startled him considerably in private.

Too vicious… Ye Tianxie thought silently, watching the Warrior’s Departed Spirits closing in again.

Mystic Spirit Cure went off and one-shot close to fifty more of them. And then the silent Yaoyao at last raised its head, facing the open sky… and in that instant a mass of dazzling holy white light blazed up off its body, so that under the Ten Thousand Bone Ruins’ dark sky it looked, from a distance, like a single brilliant star flaring into life.

An enormous half-transparent white dome, ten meters in every direction, formed with Yaoyao’s body at its center. Inside the dome, Yaoyao and Ye Tianxie were both draped in a hazy layer of white light… and that same white light appeared on every Warrior’s Departed Spirit inside the dome, and on every one that stepped into it afterward.

Mystic Spirit Wall · Heaven’s Grace!

“Yaoyao, keep yourself safe!”

The Eye of the Evil Dragon read the present state of the Warrior’s Departed Spirits precisely, and a careless smile hooked the corner of Ye Tianxie’s mouth. He stroked Yaoyao’s small head, leveled the Hour of Fate, and charged; and as he closed, it swept violently across…

-1021, -1022, -1018, -1011!

With that small spread of damage figures, every one of them over a thousand, every Warrior’s Departed Spirit the Hour of Fate touched was killed on the instant.

A Warrior’s Departed Spirit’s health was 950, and Ye Tianxie’s attack strength at this moment was 727. Barring a crit, an ordinary attack of his could not possibly one-shot a Warrior’s Departed Spirit… and yet this perfectly flat swing of his had produced red damage, not yellow crit damage, and had come out far above his true attack power.

Mystic Spirit Wall · Heaven’s Grace! That protective skill, exclusive to Yaoyao, raises its own healing by 50% and reduces all damage taken by every companion it shelters by 50%… and applied to undead creatures, it produces a cruel inversion of that effect…

All damage taken increased by 50%!

That amounted exactly to boosting Ye Tianxie’s attack power by 50%, and let him kill these Warrior’s Departed Spirits in batches without effort.

One strike… another strike… Inside the packed crowd of enemies, every attack Ye Tianxie made destroyed four or five Warrior’s Departed Spirits, or more. Once his attack power had reached the point of killing these enemies in batches, being surrounded meant no pressure on him at all.

-25, -24, -28…

There were too many enemies, and they had sealed off every gap he might have dodged through; add to that the way a mount limits agility, and Ye Tianxie’s talents could not be brought to bear at all in a situation like this. He had no thought of dodging either, because with the Wall of Heaven’s Grace protecting him and his own already enormous defense, the damage these Warrior’s Departed Spirits did to him was frankly pitiful.

On top of which, Warrior’s Departed Spirits were melee monsters, and although they were jammed shoulder to shoulder around Ye Tianxie, the number that could actually get close enough to attack him was no more than seven or eight. The rest could only mill about behind, making up the numbers, and wait until another swathe around Ye Tianxie had died before moving up — to die in their turn.

And the damage that kind of attacking did to Ye Tianxie in five seconds was less than a single Mystic Spirit Cure of Yaoyao’s restored.

In five seconds Ye Tianxie killed twenty-odd Warrior’s Departed Spirits in swathes. Then Mystic Spirit Cure came off cooldown and the white light that meant despair to the undead flashed again: the health Ye Tianxie had lost came back to full, and the Warrior’s Departed Spirits were cleared into another vacuum inside a great spread of red damage figures… another sixty-odd of them killed in an instant.

“Ding… You have successfully defeated 1,000 Warrior’s Departed Spirits.”

“Ding… Because you have killed 1,000 Warrior’s Departed Spirits, you have stirred the anger of the undying guardian consciousness of the War God, Zhan Wugui!”

That prompt stopped Ye Tianxie’s movements dead. And at that same moment something seemed to reach him, and his eyes went sharply to the front.

Up on the Blood-Sweating Steed, the height was enough that the packed ranks of Warrior’s Departed Spirits did not block his line of sight, and he saw it clearly: about a hundred meters ahead of him, a tall figure had appeared.

The distance was too great to make out the whole of him, but though he was only one man, the presence that lonely, proud figure gave off without seeming to try was somehow more soul-shaking than the army of a thousand.

At last he understood why the System had kept announcing the number of Warrior’s Departed Spirits he had killed… because the trigger condition for this quest’s final stage turned out to be destroying a full thousand of them!

“Ding… The War God’s Departed Spirit has appeared. At this moment he is in the midst of his guardian consciousness waking, and cannot act. You must strike him down within twenty seconds and take away his bones. Otherwise, once the War God’s guardian consciousness has woken, he will be invincible.”

Without the slightest hesitation, Ye Tianxie’s Dragon Shadow Slash went off and he drove forward, the Hour of Fate in his hand opening and closing wide, rising and falling hard, sweeping aside the encircling press of the nearly four hundred Warrior’s Departed Spirits that remained as he charged the War God’s Departed Spirit.

(End of Chapter 217)