PVE Should Be a Little More Relaxed

Those things that resembled humans gathered into a swarm.

They were covered in black sacrificial runes, limbs intertwined and bodies pressed together, connected by a black sludge concocted from dense swarms of venomous insects and their bodily fluids. Their total number was clearly at least a thousand.

A thousand cultists of the evil entity, converged as one.

A thousand humanoid structures, spliced together into a colossal Flesh Centipede.

An abomination of the evil entity.

That massive body displayed a tenacity and agility entirely disproportionate to the fragile flesh that composed it. Even when its entire head was blown to pieces by a Railgun shot from Si Ming, it continued to move with ease, and the wounded area was instantly repaired by the swarming insects rushing to fill the gaps.

'AEEEEEE--!!' the giant insect shrieked.

A layer of thick black mist surged over the giant creature as it broke free from the shadows. When the second Railgun shot struck, the powerful projectile could no longer blast through the key nodes on the centipede as it had before.

"Truly disgusting."

Si Ming raised his finger.

The giant centipede lunged forward.

The ring-shaped defensive barrier formed by talismans and holy water could only scorch a wisp of boiling white smoke onto its body. It was about to cross the second defensive trench line!

'Boom--!'

A giant fist slammed down.

The Rock Colossus waiting behind the defensive line rose abruptly, swinging its sturdy and massive reinforced concrete limbs to strike the rapidly approaching evil centipede.

The punch was heavy, the force immense. With just one blow, the head of the giant centipede was flattened on the spot. However, such an abomination possessed no vital organs in the conventional biological sense; even as thousands of kilograms of flesh turned to pulp, the remaining torso and tail continued to shriek as they leaped up, coiling upward along the rock structure!

Swift in movement, immense in strength. In an instant, the Rock Colossus's massive frame was shredded by the centipede, sending large chunks of rock and debris falling. Yet the giant did not resist; it simply moved its remaining functional legs and charged fiercely toward the pitch-black darkness covered by shadows in the distance.

One second, two seconds.

Dazzling firelight illuminated the entire firmament.

The Necrotic Aura flowed back to Si Ming's side; the fact that his summons were not undead did not hinder the manifestation of the Evil Explosion Technique. The massive Flesh Centipede was blown to pieces, and before it could struggle to regenerate, another—no, two more Rock Colossi rose from the earth, striding forward under Si Ming's command.

Stable, heavy.

The centipede, rapidly repairing itself within the thick black mist, let out a sharp hiss. The next moment, another slightly smaller centipede crawled out from the darkness, emitting a garbled yet meaningful roar.

[Fortune and misfortune are intertwined, life and death are dictated by fate!]

The sound unsettled ordinary people, but it could not affect Si Ming in the slightest. Even so, the sound waves imbued with the power of the evil entity surged forward, only to be halted entirely by an invisible telekinetic barrier before they could strike the main hall of the temple.

"I knew something like this would happen."

Si Ming shifted his gaze, briefly meeting eyes with Yu Zhiwei in front of the main hall. Looking to the side, there wasn't much movement from Valentina yet. And as for the other side...

Song Tian remained silent, merely swinging his blade.

Fine, that was his freedom.

Si Ming withdrew his gaze, not wasting more than a second. With a shift of his will, the Rock Colossi he had summoned strode forward. The current situation was an ideal and fair two-on-two. So...

'Rumble--' the earth trembled slightly. Thick and cold steel erupted from the ground under Si Ming's will.

The Steel Colossus, the pinnacle of this stage of summons. Standing over ten meters tall, it looked like a small, walking mountain.

Now, the situation had turned in Si Ming's favor.

The next moment, the colossi of stone and iron collided with the centipede of blood and flesh.

Mountains collided, the earth roared.

Boiling shockwaves surged in all directions.

"...Quite the lively fight." Valentina tilted her head, glancing at the grand spectacle of battle not far away. The insect swarm attacking from the outside had run out of steam, and the three Rock and Steel Colossi were driving the two human-flesh centipedes into a retreat. The whole scene looked like a clash between giants and monsters from mythology. Grand and solemn.

Victory was not far from Si Ming, for he appeared quite relaxed—when Valentina looked over, he even had the leisure to turn his head and lock eyes with the Ranger for a fleeting moment.

In the next instant, he raised his hands and fired two shots into the sky. Two humanoid giant insects, hidden in the night by the cover of black mist, were struck by Thermal Orbs, incinerated, and transformed into two burning fireballs that fell to the ground.

There were things like that, too?

Valentina tilted her head, a faint light flashing in her eyes. Her cybernetic eyes immediately cycled through several filters, and as she performed a structural motion analysis, several massive light points with no body heat or infrared signature appeared in her vision.

"Data corrected."

The Wolf Spider turret swiveled sharply, two units maintaining fire suppression on the incoming swarm. The one with the widest field of fire abruptly shifted its muzzle to the correct position. The autocannon, loaded with 40mm explosive shells, began to operate, and a twin stream of metal pierced the seemingly empty, vast night sky.

Large sprays of blood erupted; several humanoid silhouettes were shredded on the spot and fell from the sky. Most of them were scorched to pieces by the holy aura emitted from the protective rings while still in the air. Yet, a very small number maintained their general humanoid shape, and even after falling to the ground, they retained their mobility.

They really didn't look much like humans.

It was a dense mass of insects clinging to a shell covered in cursed text, using their sheer numbers and the cursed black mist to construct wings that defied all ergonomics and aerodynamics. As Valentina looked at them, many centipedes, longhorn beetles, and leeches crawled in and out of the spherical structure that once looked like a head, emitting sharp, trembling chirps from every dark, hollow orifice.

"It's been a long time since I've seen something this disgusting."

She exhaled silently—she had no intention of breathing that in. The Willow Leaf White Garden gripped in her hand diffused a faint reddish glow. Fire-attribute dust crystals were inserted, activated, and about to take effect.

Forward.

Gene Lock, activate.

The Ranger's figure vanished in an instant; where the last time had been a mere afterimage, this time it was a streak of rapidly moving fire-cloud. She lunged fiercely at one of the evil parasitic entities, burning it to ash, and in the very next heartbeat, she pounced upon another.

Slaughter, annihilation, without a moment's respite. She did not possess the area-of-effect annihilation capabilities that others might have, but when it came to individual hostile targets, she wielded a unique and peerless capacity for destruction.

Well, perhaps she was still a notch below that Miss Yu Zhiwei, who could kill anyone she merely glared at. Let us correct the statement then: she was exceptionally adept at dealing with multiple elite-tier individuals.

A hint of frustration welled up.

Yet, a sense of crisis surged within her heart.

The distant sky was illuminated by five-colored radiance. Valentina, who had just finished slaughtering every falling parasite in a single instant, felt a sharp, stinging sensation bloom between her brows.

--Turrets, rotate.

--Open Gene Lock, second stage.

--Sandevistan, full power.

The two Wolf-Spider turrets that had been maintaining anti-air fire swung violently. This time, they did not activate their 40mm twin-linked cannons, but rather the missile pods that had long been kept in a mounted state above. A total of sixteen small destruction missiles streaked out in a rapid barrage toward the direction Valentina desired, while her own figure tore through a series of sonic booms amidst her extreme high-speed movement!

The world, in her eyes, slowed to a crawl.

Her high-intensity Mechanical Prosthetic Eye operated at high speed, scanning every detail of the surrounding environment. Her body shifted nearly fifty meters in a fraction of a second, and the next moment, a pitch-black cloud of Incantation silently shattered the outermost layer of the holy water-talisman defensive belt, slamming into the area where she had stood just moments before.

There was no explosion; the cloud of Incantation simply dispersed at an incredible speed.

The forty-meter radius of land, which had been crudely consecrated, was corroded by the cloud into a mass of writhing sludge—countless maggots birthed from the pitch-black mud, crawling wantonly. Had anyone been standing there, they surely would have enjoyed a most unique encounter.

Hoo— It was not the sound of exhaling.

It was the trembling hum of the missile bombardment in the distance, the sound of air waves bursting forth as it passed through her elongated sense of time.

The area struck by the destruction missiles revealed several grotesque entities that looked like scorpions, standing two stories tall and stitched together from hundreds of evil cultists. It was they who had jointly launched the Incantation bombardment just moments ago.

That was close.

One of them had already been blasted into fragments by the previous missile strike.

Three in total, two remaining.

The next moment, Valentina pierced through the outer ring amidst a shrill whistling of wind. The Flame Dust Crystal loaded in the Willow Leaf White Garden switched its attribute to holy, and in that same instant, she pierced through the central node of the second scorpion-shaped aggregate!

Hundreds of evil cultists screamed in unison. The Incantation runes on their bodies erupted with black mist, yet pure white holy light surged forth from their eyes, ears, mouths, and noses all at once. A silent explosion erupted from within their shells. In a mere instant, they were scorched by the power of the Holy Dust Crystal into a pile of scattered skeletons, and half a second later, the final scorpion-shaped aggregate met the same fate.

In single-target slaughter, Valentina was indeed more than a little stronger than those cumbersome, large-scale summoned creatures.

She took a small detour, using her feet to finish off a string of insectoid evil cultists lurking near these scorpion aggregates, who had likely been attempting a bit of infantry-tank coordination. The defensive sector she was responsible for was cleared in an instant, and the two Wolf-Spider automated turrets, having temporarily shifted their aim, rotated back to resume guarding the aerial perimeter.

It was much easier than she had anticipated.

It was a pity there was no score notification yet; clearly, this engagement was being treated as a group side-quest.

Then...

--Surely no one could possibly spend an entire group side-quest just idling from start to finish.

Her gaze swept toward the Ritual Main Hall at the center of the temple.