Chapter 749: Blood Mountain Falls!

Chapter 749: Blood Mountain Falls!

"No!!!"

A roar erupted within the blood-reeking cavern, and the beast king, drenched in gore, snapped awake from his fury, also hearing the wails drifting through the crimson mist.

The altar!

Those bastards had reached the altar!

A cold sweat, mingled with blood, slid down his brow. He suddenly realized he had focused on one body for far too long!

Having laid out all his plans, he was too eager to see the expression on that man's face, so he had specially chosen this most perfect vessel from his collection, as his container to walk the mortal world.

Yet it was precisely this arrogance that led to an unforgivable mistake in his scheme.

The negative emotions from the imperfect vessel rebounded against his spirit. He, who should have thought calmly, was instead led by anger, becoming a puppet of his emotions.

And in that momentary lapse of focus, those people had managed to sneak right up to the mother nest.

But now, regret was useless. He could only hope that the two hundred years of "cultivation" of that fellow might still serve some purpose.

"...No, my friend, can you hear me? Answer me!"

Shattering a soldier who opened fire on him with a fierce blow, the beast king forced the others back with a deafening roar.

Seizing a brief pause in the assault of those tenacious foes, he frantically called out to the Plague Lord in his mind, while trying to contact the plague monks in the "altar."

Yet what sank his heart into the abyss was that he could not reach them at all.

They had once cried out to him for help, but their pleas were drowned in the clamor of gunfire and roars.

Just then, a feeble voice drifted into his ears, like the whisper of a dying man beside a sickbed.

"...Farewell, my friend."

"The journey of two hundred years has been pleasant, but... the world ultimately belongs to the young ones. I was, after all, too old."

"Over two centuries, my steps crossed five light-years, yet I could not leave this mountain. That child's words were not without reason. Perhaps my method was wrong from the start."

"But fortunately, you are still young—both by human standards and by ours."

"May you find that ideal paradise."

Those words were like a last testament.

The moment the words fell, the final thread connecting his sea of consciousness was severed completely, plunging along with his breath into the bottomless abyss.

Though it could not affect the "paradise" that had already descended, he had lost the most important card in his hand!

Now he could only rely on the might of the paradise itself and hope that the reinforcements from the Human Emperor were reliable enough.

"Die! All of you, die!"

The beast king let out a furious roar, venting his rage entirely on those who clung to him relentlessly. Yet it was this very fury that caused more and more openings in his attacks.

A second needle was plunged into his right leg, and the Type B strain extract injected into him completely shattered his regenerative limits. Then a white phosphorus bomb slammed into his right side.

The blazing flames carbonized large patches of skin, and the searing pain nearly tore his consciousness from this body.

He staggered backward, stepping on a corpse, and his three-meter-tall frame toppled uncontrollably.

That was the body of [I'll Go First to Die], and indeed, that guy was the first among the hundreds of corpses littering the tunnel to fall.

Seizing that fleeting opportunity, Outlaw took the needle thrown by a teammate, lunged recklessly, and stabbed it into the monster's chest.

The dull resistance of piercing flesh had just reached his right hand when Outlaw felt a massive hand grip his waist, and then he was lifted entirely into the air.

"Ah—! Get off, you vermin!"

The beast king roared in pain, his right hand grabbing the human clinging to his chest, brutally smashing him against the wall, crushing him into a pulp.

Just then, the intelligence-type player [Wake Up and Get Sleepy] piloted a suicide drone straight to his face, triggering the self-destruct switch.

The explosion's flash knocked him, who had just sat up, back down, his upper body crashing heavily to the ground.

In the nick of time, Umbrella at Midnight Without a Knife dashed forward, snatched the shotgun Outlaw had dropped, and smoothly shoved the massive muzzle right under the monster's chin.

"Die—"

He pulled the trigger.

Fragmented pellets burst forth with the jet of flame, and the head shattered like a watermelon, scattering everywhere.

He didn't stop; he lowered the muzzle and fired five more shots, until the magazine was completely empty.

The Plague Champion's body was a mess of blood and flesh, the ground covered in crimson gore.

Amidst that mess, he even spotted that emerald eye...

"Is it... over?" He let out a long breath, collapsing backward to sit on the ground, no longer able to tell if the burning liquid flowing over him was blood or sweat.

His right hand touched a slick puddle; he lifted it to look, saw only blackness, and then smiled bitterly, wiping it on his clothes.

If this game didn't have a censorship system, it would be hard to get a license...

The entire tunnel was strewn with corpses—players from the Death Corps, plague monks, and goblins. And in front of him, that thing, the talking Plague Champion, was probably the final boss.

At the same time, the crimson mist permeating the tunnel began to change.

The stench of decay seemed to vanish, replaced by a familiar scent.

Every player knew what that was.

"Xiao Yu must have won."

Laplace looked up, glanced around, then at Umbrella, who was slumped on the ground. "What now? Keep going? Or go back and plant the flag on the summit?"

Their mission was to capture the mother nest.

Capturing the mother nest essentially meant taking the entire Blood Mountain.

Once Xiao Yu fully controlled the mother nest in the mountain, he could quickly synthesize new sub-entities to search every filthy corner of the mountain, finding the hiding mutants and the human survivors they had captured.

If any were left.

"Definitely keep going and take a look."

Umbrella at Midnight Without a Knife sprang up nimbly, reloaded the shotgun, his weary expression vanishing as he perked up again.

"...I'll go see what treasures the mutants hid in the palace. Since we're here, it'd be a waste not to take a look."

Laplace's expression turned a bit odd, his gaze drifting aside.

"I think the chance of mental contamination is higher..."

No new things will ever crawl out from the pus-filled sores covering his body.

He lowered his head, like a two-hundred-ton child, muttering at the heap of belly sagging on the ground.

"Why..."

A sigh drifted from the gradually clearing pale red mist.

He lifted his head, staring blankly into the mist, trying to find the source of the voice.

"...You, just what form must you evolve into to be satisfied?"

"To devour everything!" Sodo answered without hesitation, not even a second of thought.

The voice drifting from the mist let out a long, lingering sigh.

"...That kind of thing doesn't exist. Even a black hole has things it cannot swallow."

What is a black hole?

Sodo stared blankly ahead, not understanding the meaning of those words, but he caught the negation in them.

In an instant, his hideous face twisted into a knot, growing even uglier.

"You... you're lying! The great Plague Lord told us its mother could swallow an entire planet! As long as we keep evolving, one day we too can—"

"Perhaps."

As if unwilling to listen to his ramblings, the voice lightly cut him off.

"...But if that day ever comes, it will surely be a catastrophe for the entire universe."

The voice vanished.

As if it had never been there.

Sodo looked around uneasily, a flicker of fear stirring at the sudden silence enveloping him.

Just then, a burst of light footsteps and clamor shattered the stillness of the palace.

The footsteps stopped at the palace entrance.

"Holy crap!"

"What a giant toad! Wait... can this thing even count as a toad?"

"Good thing we came to check—almost missed the real boss."

"Brothers, time to start the raid!"

"Ooh-rah!"

Though he didn't understand what they were saying, Sodo could sense it was nothing good.

Facing those green-eyed bastards alone, this time Sodo was truly panicked...

The battle of Blood Mountain had drawn to a close, but the fierce fighting on the Guard Mansion Wasteland was just reaching its climax.

With fire support from the *Steel Heart* and the *Loyalty* airships, the Skeleton Corps' armored column carved a bloody path through a swarm of sub-entities.

37mm rapid-fire cannons poured out relentless firepower, alongside the machine guns mounted on the No. 2 tanks.

Whether they were the infected corroded by Nago or the dead awakened by Nago, they all turned to dust under the iron rain, then were crushed into the tracks' tread marks.

Yet even so, the puppets controlled by the mycelium never stopped—either gathering toward the armored column invading the wasteland or surging toward the Guard Mansion military base.

Those killed would sink into the soil, only to grow back after a long while.

Like weeds after the spring wind.

As long as that gray-green haze did not disperse, as long as the mycelium rooted in this soil did not perish—

They were endless!

Above the Guard Mansion military base.

Fierce exchanges continued. Twenty Cloud Dragonfly ornithopters weaved through the gray mist, unleashing cannon fire and rocket pods.

But the sheer number of bat-winged men filling the sky was overwhelming. Even with ground anti-air positions providing support, the three attack formations of just twenty ornithopters could barely hold the line.

Four "Thunder" fighters parked at the base scrambled urgently, their 20mm cannons roaring, leaving glaring tracer trails across the sky.

Beyond that, a hundred propeller planes took off from the *Steel Heart*.

Yet still, the numerical gap remained vast—nowhere near the same order of magnitude.

Especially since the bat-winged men didn't swarm in blindly to die; they scattered across the vast night sky.

Not only that.

Their unique mobility made their flight paths unpredictable. Even though their speed and climb rate were far inferior to the Alliance's old propeller planes, hitting them was no small challenge.

This didn't surprise the Alliance—many players had learned this lesson in the Battle of Jinhe City, even developing a "bird-hunting tactic" specifically for these creatures: fire a burst, then turn and flee.

Though propeller planes couldn't match the agility of those winged things, the creatures could hardly catch a propeller plane fleeing at full speed.

But the Torch seemed aware of this too, and never bothered tangling with Alliance aircraft in the sky. Instead, they dove straight for the ground base—especially the airfield!

If they took the airfield, Alliance planes would have no resupply, forced either back to the *Steel Heart* or to land somewhere on the wasteland.

The entire wasteland was crawling with sub-entities awakened alongside the "Kingdom."

Individually weak, but even a Deathclaw couldn't withstand their sheer numbers.

The aerial line soon broke, and the battle's focus shifted from sky to ground.

Facing monsters raining from above, the Guard Mansion base's anti-air positions were forced to cease fire.

Soldiers had to grab rifles and engage in close-quarters combat with those fanged, winged, clawed beasts.

For targets too close to allied units, the circling aircraft couldn't support freely, forced to focus on those still descending.

As the flames of war raged on, not only the anti-air positions and airfield were affected—even the machine-gun nests at the base's edge were drawn in.

Sitting in the cockpit of a Thunder fighter, Luoyu felt a bead of sweat trickle down his forehead.

Four TV-guided ground missiles were spent; the cannon had 300 rounds left.

Even though nearly a hundred bat-winged men had died by his hand, it barely dented the current battle.

Unless—

He took out all those wearing biological power armor!

He clearly remembered the official data: these bat-winged men were bred from mutant children, their rapid growth leaving them without complete minds, like the "goblins."

They were even more chaotic than goblins, requiring psychic interference modules to command.

The Alliance's biology institute had tried to crack the psychic interference signals controlling them, but failed.

This technology was a singularity for both the Torch and the Alliance; its use and ethical boundaries were still being explored.

Since the Torch had fewer scruples in applying and experimenting with this tech, and had delved into the field for over a decade, it was hard to say whose technical prowess was superior.

But one thing was certain: if the biological power armor serving as "communication nodes" was destroyed, these winged monsters would instantly lose their backbone, like headless flies, degenerating from organized cannon fodder into undisciplined beasts.

Beasts were nothing to fear—like the common mutants of the wasteland, no matter how numerous, they were just mobile experience packs.

At least, that was how it seemed to the players.

But then Luoyu found himself in a bind.

The fog was everywhere around; merely shooting down those bat-winged men was difficult enough, let alone picking out the ones clad in biological power armor from among them.

Those people were clever; they hadn't thrown all their cannon fodder at the military base, but left a considerable number to continue tangling with the coalition's aircraft, thereby shielding themselves hidden among them.

What was worse, unlike last time, there might not be just one biological power armor mixed in.

Just then, a voice that had been silent for a long time suddenly came through the communication channel.

"Ee-oo! (I'm ready!)"

Luoyu was startled at the sound, then exclaimed with delight.

"You got it done over there? Great! How do you feel?"

"Ee-oo..."

Xiaoyu seemed to be in a complicated mood, and Luoyu couldn't quite understand what it was saying.

This situation wasn't exactly rare.

In a sense, its voice was an expression of emotion, and when it itself couldn't describe that feeling, others naturally couldn't understand either.

Even he was no exception.

"Did you eat something bad?"

"Ee-oo. (No, but it's a pity... those people, they were actually quite interesting.)"

Those people?

Did she mean those guys wearing gas masks?

Luoyu remembered that Xiaoyu had complained to him before about how boring those guys were, and now she had suddenly changed her opinion of them.

Vaguely guessing what had happened, his Adam's apple moved slightly.

Just as he was thinking about how to comfort Xiaoyu, the little one suddenly perked up.

"Ee-oo... hmm? (The battle isn't over. I won't let their sacrifice be in vain... Is there anything I can help with?)"

This was not the time for idle chat.

Hearing the determination in that voice, Luoyu did not hesitate and immediately spoke.

"Can you sense those spores around you? The spores secreted by the Nago mycelium!"

"Ee-oo! (Yes!)"

Joy surged in Luoyu's heart, and he quickly asked further.

"Then... can you find where their hive is? Or the core that governs them, or something similar?"

His description was abstract, but he believed Xiaoyu could understand, after all, sound was merely a carrier of information; on the surface they communicated with language, but in reality they exchanged thoughts.

Xiaoyu: "Ee-oo... (I can't sense its existence.)"

Hearing this, Luoyu suddenly remembered that the fourth-stage Paradise seemed able to exist without a hive, and this was also the final stage declared irreversible by the Torch.

But just then, another thought suddenly arose in his mind, and he had a brainstorm.

"If we use the hive on Blood Mountain to produce some fruiting bodies, and use those fruiting bodies as seedbeds to cultivate Type B Nago strains, can it be done?"

Although the hive on Blood Mountain had no experience in synthesizing fruiting bodies, the hive in Clearspring City had a vast reserve of fruiting body "blueprints."

Even mutants, being a different species, could serve as seedbeds for producing spores; there was no reason why the spore-shedding Devourers, which naturally emitted spores, couldn't be seedbeds.

They just needed to find a way to insert the gene segments of the Type B Nago strain into the Devourers' bodies.

And the ability to "produce spores by proxy" was stored within the hive named Alpha on Blood Mountain.

That creature had spent nearly a century honing this skill, even able to transform mutants into all sorts of shapes without repeating itself.

Luoyu clenched his fists, praying inwardly.

Xiaoyu was silent for a while, as if seriously pondering the feasibility of this, or as if making some attempt.

After a moment, it gave an affirmative answer.

"Ee-oo! (I just tried, and it can be done.)"

Hearing that voice like celestial music, Luoyu's face instantly lit up with joy; he almost wished he could pick the little one up and kiss it... but unfortunately he was on the plane.

Type B strain had an inhibitory effect on the growth activity of the Torch's modified Type J strain, and the spores produced by the former had the same effect on the latter.

In other words, Devourers carrying the Type B strain would be the most direct nemesis of the puppets controlled by the Type J Nago strain!

Those creatures would destroy the Paradise of Weifu Wasteland at its root!

Let those filthy things that kept emerging lie back down for good!

"Quick! Produce more!" Without a moment's hesitation, he shouted into the communication channel.

And from the other end of the channel came a reply full of vigor.

"Ee-oo! (Roger!)"

...

At the same time, at the altar deep within Blood Mountain, a dense red mist rose from the bottomless abyss.

Standing beside the deep pit, Debt-Eyes stared blankly at the red mist.

The other players nearby were the same, including the Roller Shampoo Machine whose head he had been pressing earlier; they all stared blankly at that spot.

"I might as well have gone down myself..." Debt-Eyes muttered, a trace of regret in his eyes.

If only he had brought more.

Not twenty, but a hundred and twenty; maybe those people wouldn't have had to sacrifice themselves...

Although he had grown attached to those fruiting bodies, he knew in his heart that they were just Xiaoyu's dandruff, lacking self-awareness, and had never regarded him as a father or anything; they just ate and drank from him.

But those guys were living beings... even if they were AIs running on a server.

Edge-Paddling placed a hand on his shoulder and gave it a squeeze.

"We should go... at least, we need to bring their things back and give them to their families."

To capture this position, the entire thousand-strong battalion was nearly wiped out.

Including them, who had come as reinforcements, they left behind over a thousand corpses, the remains nearly filling the entire passage.

This victory could be described as quite brutal...

Debt-Eyes nodded, took one last look at the deep pit, and was about to leave.

But just then, the deep red mist suddenly stirred, and something crawled out from the pit.

Slightly startled, a glimmer of joy suddenly arose in his heart.

Could it be...

However, before that faint, hopeful joy could reach his face, the moment his eyes met that thing, his mood sank into the abyss along with the ensuing disappointment.

No miracle had occurred.

What climbed up were a group of "Crawlers."

Some carried several "Gnawers" or other types of fruiting bodies on their backs.

Yet not a single one of those faces was familiar to him.

"Only we are immortal... it's been like that since the server opened." Standing beside him, Edge Paddling spoke slowly.

Though he had only known her for a short time, he admitted she was a brave one.

"...I've known that for ages. I didn't just get my helmet, no need for your reminders." Big-Eyed Debt muttered.

Edge Paddling nodded in understanding, didn't continue the heavy topic, and patted her good buddy on the shoulder.

"...Time to go."

Big-Eyed Debt said nothing, only nodded silently, then followed behind him.

The battle outside was not over; Brother Spring and the others were probably in the thick of a fierce fight with Torch right now.

There was still a mountain of things to do.

They had to leave some people to consolidate the position here, while also diverting some hands to reinforce the allies at the Weifu military base.

If the Administrator needed it...