86. Strange Captives

Strange Captives

I was faster than a bullet as I dove toward the rear ranks of the skeletal mages, an enhanced demon sword in each hand.

Simply flying through their formation completely disrupted it. Before they could react, two hundred skeletal mages had been cut to pieces.

For the first time in several battles, waves of energy flowed through my veins. My magical power climbed one step, then another.

I left that fact for after the fight and charged into the second line of skeletal mages, killing dozens more.

Slowly, however, they began to react. Many of them were already close to completing their spells.

I had learned that undead did not feel confusion, surprise, or fear. They responded to circumstances quickly and methodically.

The mind directing them, however, could still be surprised.

So after roughly a third of the skeletal mages had been destroyed, one of them triggered a black magical shield. Before I decapitated the caster, the shield swallowed a great deal of my kinetic energy and momentum.

I swerved and rolled under several black beams, which would have produced a similar effect if used offensively.

But against the dozens of gray tentacles stretching out to trap me, they were useless.

More and more tentacles wrapped around my limbs and waist. This time there were dozens, not the nine that had caught me before.

When the enemy believed I was firmly bound, they began pulling me back.

The tentacles instantly dissolved into smoke and failed to slow me at all.

Constant Force lv3: Resist all forms of change except those produced through physical means. Immune to supernatural negative emotions, diseases, and traps.

“That’s right, bastards. How do you like that?”

I completely ignored the tentacle mages whose magic no longer worked on me and continued eliminating any dark mages who exposed themselves.

The blade demons tried to approach me with their irritating ability to teleport into a target’s path, but their own allies blocked them, and they could not teleport into solid objects.

Twice, they managed to find an opening, only to discover too late that anything weighing more than a hundred pounds and moving at Mach five was less a target than a cannon shell.

Burning arrows rained down.

Even moving at my ridiculous speed, even turning six or seven times per second, there were too many skeletal archers around me. Sheer density of fire was enough to hit me.

Most of the burning liquid metal splashed harmlessly across my body. It left a few abrasions only because I ran into it at that speed, not because the enemy weapons were particularly impressive.

My regeneration easily kept up with those small injuries, as it did with the occasional wounds caused by blade demons, so I ignored them and enjoyed the slow but steady growth they gave me.

From my perspective, the monsters gradually organized.

They brought blade demons into my path to slow me, arranged their mages to fire green and black spell bolts whenever an opening appeared in close combat, and generally did everything they could to make my life annoying.

Then, after they had all focused entirely on me and pushed me toward one corner, a beam of destruction cut through their fragile formation.

It was followed by Little Black’s roar. Its disintegration rounds blasted skeletons apart and burned deep gouges into demons.

When the monsters began turning again to deal with the force attacking them from the side, Zhao Mancheng’s bullets came from near-invisible shadow and punched through their eye sockets or other critical points.

Caught between two enemies they could not truly counter, the monsters collapsed like cheap props in five minutes of fighting.

After the previous six levels of exhausting, aggravating combat, it felt wonderful to smash enemies who had not had time to prepare.

“Well… that was too easy,” I said with a grin when the last enemy fell. “Let’s do it again.”

The rotating door blocking the passage to the sixth level was broken open as…