Chapter 6: Desperate Straits!
Xia Wan was the first to sense the enemy closing in from behind.
Her eyes suddenly narrowed, blazing with the rich green light of Life. Her left hand flipped out an emerald longbow, her right hand pinched an arrow from thin air, and she spun and loosed. An arrow blazing with jade radiance screamed skyward.
"Boom!"
The arrow detonated midair, blooming into a sky full of spores.
The Fear Demon army charged straight through the dense cloud of spores without the slightest hesitation.
But the instant the spores touched flesh, they transformed into countless dodder-like filaments, ensnaring every Fear Demon that had blundered into the zone, binding them into one "silkworm cocoon" after another.
Stripped of their beating wings, the Fear Demons plummeted, smashing hard into the ground.
The ground, in turn, was carpeted with Genesis Seeds. Upon contact, the demons' bellies swelled at a terrifying rate. Within a few breaths, something inside them began frantically clawing its way out.
The Hunter's trap combo was silky smooth, and the dual-layer crowd control was highly effective. The Fear Demon vanguard failed to reach the group in the first wave.
But even with Xia Wan firing volleys thick as rain, she could only block so many.
The enemy's numbers were simply overwhelming. The locust-like swarm of shadows exhausted the airborne spores in short order and surged back toward the group.
"No time! Assassin, watch your own back! Everyone else, get behind me!"
Chen Chong roared, tossed Cao Sansui from his back to Nangong, then drew his great shield, reversed it, and slammed the shield tip viciously into the rubble before him.
He bellowed with bulging eyes: "Order Endures!"
The already-glowing great shield erupted with blazing radiance. Dazzling holy light surged skyward like a waterfall flowing in reverse, arced at its peak in a perfect curve, then cascaded downward, racing outward along both flanks of the group.
The trail of light formed the shape of an immense city wall, sealing Cheng Shi and the others securely within.
"Yaa, saa…"
"Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!"
The sky-darkening Fear Demon army dive-bombed in waves, crashing against the light-screen barrier formed by the great shield with thunderous impacts. But the light screen held firm, and everyone inside remained as steady as a mountain.
Chen Chong's expression was grim, the veins in his arms bulging as he pressed down on the shield, not daring to move an inch.
"There are too many Fear Demons! The Holy Light Wall can only hold for five minutes. With dual-Priest support, we can stretch it to fifteen at most. Think of something fast, or forget about twenty-four hours; in fifteen minutes, we're all dead here!"
You could hear the urgency in Chen Chong's voice, but panic was useless now. The enemy was simply too numerous.
Nangong was beside them, restoring Cao Sansui's mental reserves. Her healing was effective; Cao Sansui had already shaken off his lethargy.
"The Offspring Priest has high healing output. If you manage the 'newborns' on your body properly, we should be able to hold out a bit longer."
Though Cao Sansui was cheering the team on, his heart had turned to ice.
He never expected the combat tempo in this trial to be this fast, the enemy this ferocious. Not even the 2000-point trials he'd been matched into before had been this intense.
The highest-rated player in this trial was himself, at a mere 1900.
The lowest was even below 1400. What had he done to deserve attracting a Fear Demon army of this magnitude?
Anyone who didn't know better would think this was a damn 2100 lobby.
Everyone wore grim expressions. With the shelter of the Holy Light Wall, Xia Wan had ceased firing and was conserving her energy, recovering.
Nangong, whose face had gone pale, noticed something and frowned. Another healing spell landed on Xia Wan.
Xia Wan looked mildly surprised and nodded at Nangong in acknowledgment. Feeling the abundant restorative power flooding her body, she materialized a few more spore arrows.
The other Priest, Cheng Shi, by contrast, simply sat on the ground staring around blankly, looking every bit the freeloader.
Truth be told, Cheng Shi had a bit of a headache too. It wasn't that he hadn't seen situations like this before, but he'd never experienced one with such low-rated teammates.
He was racking his brain, trying to figure out how to use the cards in his hand to escape this predicament.
In high-rated lobbies, every player's combat power was formidable. When they hit a crisis, the creative tricks they pulled out were endless, and they could always devise some way to break free.
Aside from their rich combat experience, the most important factor was that they had the confidence and ability!
This was also why the [Path to Godhood] (Ladder) score was considered so important.
Because at the end of every month, the [Path to Godhood] conducted an additional settlement. Players in different ranking tiers would receive different rewards.
These rewards covered everything imaginable, from supplies to equipment, from talents to skills, nothing was excluded.
And the higher your tier, the greater the probability of high-rank rewards appearing.
Since base skills within the same class had virtually no variation, the only thing that distinguished one player's build from another was the selection of talent skills, equipment, and items they chose when constructing their combat power.
Chen Chong's Shield-Sword, a weapon that excelled at both offense and defense and granted special bonuses to light-screen defensive skills, came from a Grade-A Ladder reward.
Gripping his shield, Chen Chong saw that the Fear Demons outside had nearly sealed off every direction of the light screen, blacking out the entire shielded space. His face grew ever more anxious.
The others also knitted their brows, silently steeling themselves for the worst.
At this point, they had fallen into a desperate strait.
And the trial had been underway for less than an hour.
"Are we… going to die?" Nangong's small hands clenched white-knuckled.
No one answered her. Even Chen Chong simply poured everything into maintaining the Holy Light Wall, buying the group a little more time to think of a way out.
Yet these few minutes felt more like the final flicker of their lives.
The atmosphere hit rock bottom.
Everyone was racking their brains, but no solution emerged. The space inside the shield fell silent.
But just then, Cheng Shi suddenly spoke up:
"Song Yawen, is he still alive?"
Song Yawen had Shadow Concealment and didn't need the shield's protection, but Shadow Concealment wasn't unlimited either. The slightest movement would eject him from the shadow plane and reveal him to the world.
But truth be told, a mature Assassin could sustain it for quite a while, certainly longer than five minutes.
Song Yawen didn't respond, not because he didn't want to, but because he didn't dare.
He was currently crouched beneath a broken wall outside the Holy Light Wall. That same wall was packed with bloodthirsty Fear Demons, at least seventeen or eighteen of them.
"Probably not dead…"
Cheng Shi wasn't actually concerned about him; he was strategizing.
He knew that the exclusive skill of a Death Assassin was Death's Requiem. If Song Yawen was still alive, they might still have a chance to escape.
Just as Holy Light Wall was the exclusive skill of an Order Knight, Death's Requiem was the exclusive skill granted to Assassins who worshipped [Death].
The skill's effect was to summon a massive death scythe within a Death Domain, executing a guaranteed-hit death strike against all targets within the domain.
However, constructing the Death Domain was extremely demanding. It required gathering a large amount of freshly-deceased death aura within a limited space, so very few Death Assassins ever used this skill.
To pull it off, they couldn't operate like other Assassins, striking and retreating. They had to remain hidden in the shadows and continuously rack up kills.
Then finish with one decisive blow.
This kind of close-range sustained killing pattern was highly disadvantageous for an Assassin, and the risk was enormous.
But the payoff was equally enormous.
Because Death's Requiem was a guaranteed hit.
This was why Death Assassins were called Death Weavers, and the name was well deserved.
Yet facing such a terrifyingly massive Fear Demon army, Song Yawen's Death's Requiem had zero chance of being deployed.
The moment he showed himself, the first to die wouldn't be the Fear Demons. It would absolutely be him.
So Song Yawen remained hidden in the shadows, not daring to make the slightest move.
But just because he didn't dare didn't mean Cheng Shi didn't.
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