“Guardian unit, fall back! Warrior unit, forward!” Lone Sword Without a Trace got the order out fast. The Guardians’ attacks could not break his defense… This Xietian had a terrifying attack, and now it turned out his defense was terrifying too. What in the world was his defense value…
-89, -74, -91…
It did not go that way for the Warrior unit. Countless Warrior players carrying every kind of weapon came at Ye Tianxie in good order. Ye Tianxie flicked a glance at the damage numbers over his head and let out a small, contemptuous laugh. He leveled the Hour of Fate ahead of him and, pivoting on his own feet, swept the weapon through a clean 360-degree arc…
The Hour of Fate ran two meters long — longer, in fact, than most of the spears Spear Warriors carried. So that one spin caught every Warrior player who had crowded in close enough to reach him. Warriors are the melee class with the second-highest health after Guardians, and even so, not one of them could take that casual swing. A string of screams went up, every player who had just been attacking Ye Tianxie went down, and better than two meters all around him opened into a brief pocket of empty ground.
The Warrior unit had not come out of its shock at the sight before Ye Tianxie drove forward, and wherever the Hour of Fate reached, another small patch of players went down with it. He did not hold his ground. He kept his feet moving fast and pushed on, cutting left and cutting right, and nowhere he went could a single player last one exchange in front of him.
“One-shots! Every single one of them is a one-shot… And that weapon of his has a longer reach than a Spear Warrior’s, and it’s a goddamn area attack on top of that. Our Warriors are dying in swaths before they even get close. We’re just sending them out to die.” Lone Sword Without a Trace was staring, his hands and feet gone numb. “This Xietian… the man isn’t human!”
“Hmph!” Cobra let out a cold snort. He was shocked past measure by the strength of both Ye Tianxie’s attack and his defense, but his own side was Wings That Shroud the Sky after all, with close to five thousand players at hand, and he was never going to believe Ye Tianxie could come out of their grip in one piece. “He won’t be strutting much longer. Does he really think he’s a god?… Archer unit, ready. Every one of you concentrate your shooting on Xietian… One-shot him for me! Mage unit, split off half your strength and focus it there too… You have five seconds. I want this Xietian dead where he stands!!”
Cobra’s mouth was full of contempt, but the order he had given showed exactly how wary of Ye Tianxie he really was… The Archer unit was close to a thousand strong, and he had turned every last one of them onto a single man, with several hundred Mages on top of that.
The Wings force was exceptionally clear about where each unit stood and which way it moved. The moment Cobra’s order came down, the Archer unit that had been shooting at the Red Leaf Pact shifted its aim, closed in without any disorder, and one arrow after another came to bear on Ye Tianxie.
Against an enemy who can one-shot you, any class that has to get in close is nothing but cannon fodder. Every Warrior of the Wings unit got in close, had a pitch-black shadow sweep across his body before he could so much as launch an attack, and lost his health in an instant. The Assassins had the best mobility of anyone; they stalked in behind him under stealth to land a burst — and not one escaped his eye. Every one of them was struck hard the moment he started to show himself… as if he had a pair of eyes that could see straight through stealth.
At a single command, arrows filled the sky and came down like a passing plague of locusts, every one of them aimed at Ye Tianxie. It has to be said that Wings That Shroud the Sky had not become one of the two giants of Huaxia’s virtual gaming world on the strength of the power and money behind them alone. Their gear, their discipline and their order were nothing the small guilds and outfits could match. These arrows had gone off at very nearly the same instant, and in flight they raised a sound of split air like a downpour of rain…
An Archer’s range has its limits, of course, especially for low-level Archer players, so the Wings Archer unit’s thousand-odd men could not all be in a position to hit Ye Tianxie. But the arrows still came to two or three hundred at the least, and if Ye Tianxie was hit, he would be one-shot with no suspense about it.
In Slaying Gods, the game before this one, Ye Tianxie’s own class had been the Archer. He knew exactly what an Archer player was best at, and exactly what an Archer player dreaded most. He did not even need his eyes. His ears alone could judge an arrow’s speed and its landing point, dead accurate, off the sound of it splitting the air… And that, for him, was nothing remarkable. What was remarkable was this — from the faint sound a bowstring made before the arrow left it, he could tell in advance where that arrow was pointed…
So if you had to name the one man alive who was best at dodging arrows, there was nobody else it could be.
The instant the Wings Archer unit’s commander gave the order, in the moment before the strings loosed, Ye Tianxie was already moving… He killed every player on his right with one blow and broke into a run, and off the momentum of the run he dropped into a low slide — a thing almost nobody in a game world could pull off — and covered three meters and more in one go.
Whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh!!
The arrows came down like raindrops and stood in a thick crop in the ground where he had been standing, and not one of them touched Ye Tianxie. The Archer unit’s commander stayed very cool. Shouting at the Warriors and the Guardian unit to block the man’s approach, he raised his right hand, dropped it, and sent another dense wave of arrows straight at Ye Tianxie.
He dodged it perfectly again.
Bang!
A muffled crash — in the moment he was dodging, the players who had closed on him were swept away by a single blow.
Dozens of Mages locked onto him and began their short chants. Ye Tianxie’s expression did not change. The faint cold smile stayed on his face as his feet moved fast and he drove straight ahead, leaving bodies everywhere he passed. He cleared their attack range at exactly the right moment, before the Mages could finish casting, and every one of those spells lost its target and broke off together.
In that short stretch of time he had gone from the front of the Wings force to the middle of it, like a sharp knife punched through.
Wave after wave of concentrated shooting, and Ye Tianxie had dodged all of it. Deep shock finally showed on the Archer commander’s face, and he bellowed, “Ready… Spread your fire!!”
Shff!!
Arrows filled the sky a second time, blotting it out from end to end, and in far greater numbers than before. Ye Tianxie read their positions by sound, and his brows moved a little.
This was blanket fire over a wide area. The attack power was spread thin, but no matter how fast Ye Tianxie moved, he could not get out from under a volley like that, and it fell thick enough that there was no gap in it he could slip through cleanly. His ears twitched, and in the shortest possible time he picked out the direction where the arrows fell thinnest and moved that way.
Bang, bang, bang, bang… Ye Tianxie took five Archer Double Shots in a row, and better than four hundred health went with them. Under the impact of the arrows his body checked, plainly, and the Warrior unit swarmed him at once. Their attacks landed on him from every side, and a barrage that thick dropped Ye Tianxie’s health to about half in the blink of an eye.
Shk!
A sound of tearing, and where the black arc passed, every player who had closed on him lost his health at one stroke and dropped to the grass. The Warrior players behind them poured up to fill the hole that had just opened. Ye Tianxie glanced at his own health, and the corner of his mouth moved. “Time to pick up the pace… Yaoyao, Xiaobei!”
Two spheres of light, snow-white and spotless both, blazed up beside Ye Tianxie. Yaoyao had barely appeared before the Mystic Spirit Wall · Vengeance went off, and every player who had closed in around Ye Tianxie was flung back hard by a force nothing could stand against. At the same time a Mystic Spirit Cure went out, and Ye Tianxie’s emptied health came back up by a wide margin.
Xiaobei was a good deal more direct. With one “meow” its body drew a streak of white light and pounced on its first target, killed it outright with a Meow-Meow Fist, and no sooner had it landed than it pounced on the next. Its single-target attack was far greater than Ye Tianxie’s, and against these players it killed one for every one it saw, with no suspense about it.
“Push!” He called it low to his two companions, and drove into the massed ranks of Wings That Shroud the Sky like a knife with an edge nothing could match. The Hour of Fate in his hand was a black dragon swimming and thirsting for blood, flying left and right, hurling and knocking down the crowd in his way patch by patch, and the shafts of white light drifted up in disorder at a speed to make a man click his tongue.
One Ye Tianxie was terrifying enough to put the fear into the Wings’ people. Now there was a Yaoyao with enormous healing power alongside him, and a Xiaobei that looked harmless to man and beast and killed one for every one it saw.
A good many of them were still watching the two pets Xietian had summoned, astonished and shaken, when the Hour of Fate came at them out of nowhere and took their lives before they knew it.
In a fight with enemies packed this close and attacks coming this thick, blows from every side seal off every direction a man could dodge into. So Ye Tianxie put his instinct for dodging away almost entirely and simply attacked first, without any caution at all — attack as defense, settling the other man before the other man’s attack could reach him. The spread arrows kept coming down, and he kept taking hits of every kind. But Yaoyao was behind him, filling his health back to full the moment it dropped, and that left him nothing at his back to worry about. All he had to do was move, sprint, and cut the Wings force apart without mercy.
Xiaobei’s attack was extreme, and its health and defense were formidable too. It moved faster than any Assassin out there, and between its small body and that unpredictable Meow-Meow Step, in a melee like this one a player would find a target that small harder to hit than Ye Tianxie. To say nothing of Yaoyao, no bigger than a fox cub, with a movement speed of 180, darting freely among the players’ feet and putting out one healing spell after another to protect Ye Tianxie and Xiaobei.
Under Ye Tianxie’s attacks and Xiaobei’s, the Wings players went down in swaths — and Ye Tianxie, Xiaobei and Yaoyao all held nearly full health the entire time.
“Boss… we can’t fight it, we just can’t fight it! The Guardians can’t cut him, sending the Warrior unit in is sending them to die, they’re pure cannon fodder… He… he seems to be able to see it coming, too. The Archer unit’s concentrated fire can’t touch the hem of his coat, and our spread fire doesn’t do as much damage as that fox heals back… And the, the worst part is that this Xietian’s footwork and his judgment are terrifying. The Mage unit’s Mages can’t get an attack on him at all — either the spell can’t touch him, or he’s out of the casting range before they’re halfway through the chant… And that freak cat… that cat is ten times more terrifying than the strongest big BOSS we’ve ever run into! That attack power… it’s higher than Xietian’s, and it kills whoever it catches!! That Xietian isn’t human at all, he’s a monster! …We can’t fight this. We really can’t fight this any more!” Lone Sword Without a Trace had run back to stand in front of Cobra, whose face had begun to twitch, wiping cold sweat away and shouting in a panic.
(End of Chapter 264)