Fierce Clash

Ratatat...

The machine guns mounted on the armored vehicles opened fire first. Tongues of flame roared from their barrels, sweeping the ground ahead.

Six armored vehicles laid down a dense barrage. Armor-piercing bullets poured toward Great Yuan Imperial Advisor Basiba's Demonized Remains as they rode the Dark Light.

The Wu Ming Ruins held the lower half of Great Yuan Imperial Advisor Basiba's body. Its greatest strength was speed. Riding the Dark Light, it could cover eighty or ninety meters in a second—nearly 300 kilometers per hour.

Driven by instinct, Basiba's Demonized Remains reacted with astonishing speed. With a beast's keen sense for danger, it wove along an unpredictable S-shaped path.

Ratatat...

The machine-gun fire chased close behind it. The occasional bullet that struck its body bounced off the Dark Light.

Far from the battlefield, the onlookers and civilian explorers found the roar of the guns exhilarating. It was their first time experiencing warfare at such close range, an opportunity many people would never have in their lives.

"Sealed away for seven or eight hundred years, and just part of his remains still has this much combat power. How terrifying must Great Yuan Imperial Advisor Basiba have been at his peak...?"

"So this is the ancient Supernatural Power hidden by history. Now I want to know just how powerful Pei Canghai, the Human Immortal Martial Dao Ancestor who sealed Basiba away, was."

"No, the machine guns on the armored vehicles can't pin him down. He's too fast! They need heavy weapons that cover a wide area—Individual Rocket Launchers, Grenade Launchers, mortars, that sort of thing. Machine-gun fire alone can't stop him."

Several onlookers had read the situation and could not help voicing their concerns.

Watching Basiba's Demonized Remains race through the machine-gun barrage, the Colonel commanding the operation did not hesitate. He quickly gave another order.

"Use rocket launchers, Grenade Launchers—anything with a wide blast radius! Slow him down, then use the machine guns to steer him toward the minefield ahead!"

At the order, several soldiers in the government force shouldered Individual Rocket Launchers and fired. Rockets streaked through the air, wavering trails of flame behind them, toward the Dark Light carrying Basiba's Demonized Remains.

Boom, boom, boom...

Rockets slammed down around Basiba's Demonized Remains with deafening blasts. Fire billowed outward, shock waves spread, and dirt and dust flew into the air. The ground shook violently beneath them. This was the power of modern warfare.

When the concentrated bombardment ended, the acrid smell of explosives drifted on the wind. Smoke rose amid clouds of flying dirt and dust, obscuring everything within nearly a hundred meters of the impact zone.

The soldiers of the Special Operations Forces stared at the blast site, eyes wide, desperate to see the result.

Farther away, the onlookers and ruins explorers were just as eager to learn the outcome of this first clash between the supernatural and modern warfare. Which side had won?

"With firepower that intense, even a tank would probably be blown into scrap in seconds, let alone the reanimated Great Yuan Imperial Advisor..."

"Weapons like Individual Rocket Launchers, Grenade Launchers, and mortars don't just have powerful explosions. Their shock waves are even deadlier. They can rupture internal organs and cause massive bleeding."

"Basiba's remains may be powerful, but after a bombardment like that, I wouldn't bet on him."

Standing among the onlookers, Gu Chen heard them and could not help smiling. He had spent hundreds of thousands of Origin Points creating the Wu Ming Ruins and Basiba's Demonized Remains inside them. They were not going down that easily.

In the story he had devised, Basiba had been born of a union between a human and a demon. He possessed strange abilities from birth and was so tenacious that he remained alive after being dismembered and sealed away for seven or eight hundred years.

As the smoke and dust slowly cleared, the battered, uneven ground came into view. Basiba's Demonized Remains were nowhere to be seen.

Had they finished him off?!

Just as the thought crossed everyone's mind, the ground inside the government force's firing position burst open with a bang. Basiba's mangled remains leaped out on a faint Dark Light and slammed into several soldiers carrying Individual Rocket Launchers, sending them flying.

Cries of alarm rose from the crowd. The Colonel's expression changed, and he hurriedly ordered the Special Operations Forces to spread out while the soldiers who had mastered Hidden Strength moved forward.

"Brothers! Charge!"

"He's an old relic who died ages ago! Grab your weapons and take him down!"

"Don't let him get near the other soldiers!"

"..."