PVE Should Be a Little More Relaxed

They looked almost human, gathered in clusters.

Their bodies were covered in black sacrificial runes. Their hands and feet were linked, their bodies pressed together, and the gaps between them were filled with swarms of venomous insects and black sludge made from their bodily fluids. There were clearly at least a thousand of them.

More than a thousand evil cultists gathered together.

More than a thousand humanoid bodies pieced together to form a gigantic Flesh Centipede.

A creation of evil.

Its massive body displayed strength and agility wholly at odds with its fragile constituent parts. Even after Si Ming blew its entire head to pieces with a single shot from his Railgun, it still moved with ease. In the blink of an eye, flying insects swarmed over its wounds and filled them in.

"AEEEEEE—!!" The giant insect shrieked.

A thick black mist immediately rose from the giant creature, which had emerged from the shadows. When the second Railgun shot came, the powerful projectile could no longer blast apart a vital point on the centipede as it had before.

"How disgusting."

Si Ming raised a finger.

The giant centipede lunged forward.

The ring of talismans and holy water around the defenses could only sear its body, raising a wisp of boiling white smoke. It was about to cross the second trench!

"Bang—!"

A giant fist slammed down.

The Rock Colossus waiting behind the defenses surged to its feet. Swinging its massive, solid frame of reinforced concrete, it smashed into the rapidly approaching creature.

The blow landed with tremendous weight and force. A single strike crushed the giant centipede's head flat. But this creation of evil had no vital organs like an ordinary living creature. Even as a thousand kilograms of flesh collapsed into mush, the remaining torso and tail still shrieked and sprang up, coiling around the rocky structure!

It moved with incredible speed and immense strength. In an instant, the centipede had torn away great chunks of stone and rubble from the Rock Giant's massive body. But the giant didn't fight back. It simply strode forward on its still-functioning legs and charged into the darkness in the distance.

One second, two seconds.

A blinding flash of fire lit up the entire sky.

Necrotic Aura flowed back to Si Ming's side. The fact that his summoned creatures weren't undead didn't prevent him from using Evil Explosion Technique again. The enormous centipede was blown to pieces, and before it could struggle back together, another Rock Colossus—no, two of them—rose from the earth and strode forward under Si Ming's command.

Steady, ponderous.

The centipede, frantically repairing itself inside the thick black mist, let out a piercing hiss. The next moment, another, slightly smaller centipede crawled out of the darkness and roared loudly, its words garbled but meaningful.

[Fortune and misfortune go hand in hand; life and death are decided by a name!]

The sound unsettled ordinary people, but it had no effect on Si Ming. Even so, the wave of evil power rolled forward, only to stop short at an invisible psychic barrier before it reached the temple's main hall.

"I knew something like this would happen."

Si Ming glanced aside and briefly met Yu Zhiwei's eyes in front of the main hall. He looked to the other side. Valentina's position was quiet for the moment. As for the other side...

Song Tian said nothing, simply continuing to swing his blade.

Well, that was his choice.

Si Ming looked away. He hadn't wasted even a second. At a thought, the Rock Giant he had summoned strode forward. The situation was now a fairly ideal, even two-on-two fight. So...

"Rumble—" The earth trembled slightly. At Si Ming's command, heavy, cold steel burst through the ground.

The Steel Colossus, the pinnacle of summons at this stage. More than ten meters tall, it looked like a small mountain walking on two legs.

Now the odds were more in Si Ming's favor.

The stone and steel colossi collided with the centipedes of blood and flesh.

Mountains clashed, and the earth roared.

Scorching shock waves surged in every direction.

"...What a lively fight." Valentina turned her head to look at the battle raging nearby. The swarms attacking from the outer perimeter had already begun to run out of steam, while three colossal beings of stone and iron were driving the two human-bodied centipedes back step by step. The whole scene looked like a battle between giants and monsters from mythology. Grand and solemn.

Victory wasn't far off for Si Ming. He looked perfectly relaxed—when Valentina glanced over, he even had time to turn his head and meet her eyes for a moment.

In the next instant, he raised his hand and fired twice at the sky. Two humanoid giant insects, concealed by black mist and invisible against the night, were struck by Thermal Orbs. They burned away, turning into two flaming balls that dropped to the ground.

There were things like that, too?

Valentina tilted her head. A faint glimmer shone in her eyes. Several filters flicked across the lenses of her prosthetic eyes, and as they scanned for movement, several huge heatless, infrared-invisible shapes appeared in her sight.

"Data corrected."

The spider turrets swung around. Two continued suppressing the incoming swarms, while the one with the widest field of fire abruptly trained its barrel on the right spot. Its 40mm automatic cannon loaded with explosive rounds roared into action, and a twin stream of metal tore into the seemingly empty expanse of night sky.

A spray of blood burst open, and several humanoid silhouettes were shredded before falling from the sky. Most were scorched to pieces in midair by the holy aura given off by the protective perimeter. A rare few retained most of their human shape and could still move after hitting the ground.

They really didn't look much like people.

They were simply heaps of insects clinging to bodies covered in cursed writing. Together with their sheer numbers and the black mist of curses, they formed a pair of wings that defied both human anatomy and aerodynamics. As Valentina looked at them, centipedes, longhorn beetles, and leeches crawled in and out of the spherical structure that had once been a head, letting out shrill, quivering cries from every dark hole.

"I haven't seen anything this disgusting in a long time."

She silently breathed out—not that she intended to breathe any of it in. A faint reddish glow spread from the Willow Leaf White Garden clenched in her hand. A fire-element Dust Crystal slid into place, activated, and stood ready to unleash its power.

Forward.

Gene Lock: engaged.

The Ranger vanished in an instant. Last time, she'd been a phantom; this time, she was a swiftly moving cloud of fire. She pounced on one of the evil parasitic creatures and burned it to ashes, then immediately lunged toward another.

Slaughter, annihilation, without pause. She didn't have the ability to wipe out groups like the others did. But against individual enemies, she had her own way of killing them.

Well, she still fell a little short compared to Miss Yu Zhiwei, who could kill anyone she looked at. So let's correct that: she was especially good at handling multiple elite targets.

That was a little discouraging.

But a sense of danger still welled up inside her.

The distant sky blazed with five-colored light. Valentina had just killed every parasite that had fallen, yet she felt a sharp pain rise between her brows.

--Turrets turning.

--Gene Lock, second stage.

--Sandevistan, full power.

The two spider turrets that had been maintaining their antiaircraft fire abruptly turned around. This time, they didn't activate their twin 40mm cannons. Instead, they used the Missile Pods mounted above them. Sixteen small destruction missiles shot out in rapid succession, covering the direction Valentina had anticipated, while her own body tore through the air at extreme speed, leaving a chain of explosive sonic booms behind her!

The world slowed in her eyes.

Her high-performance Mechanical Prosthetic Eye rapidly processed every detail in the surrounding area. In a fraction of a second, her body shot nearly fifty meters to the side. The next instant, a mass of black cursed clouds silently smashed through the outermost holy-water-and-talisman perimeter and slammed into the spot where she had been standing.

There was no explosion. The cursed clouds simply spread at tremendous speed.

A roughly blessed patch of land forty meters across was corroded into a mass of writhing mud. Countless maggots kept forming in the black sludge and crawling everywhere. If anyone had been standing there, they would surely have had a unique experience.

"Whoosh—" It wasn't a breath.

It was the missiles striking in the distance, their shock waves bursting outward as their whistling cries stretched through her slowed perception of time.

The area hit by the destruction missiles revealed several strange creatures shaped like scorpions, each two stories tall and assembled from more than a hundred evil cultists. They had just launched the joint curse attack.

That was close.

One of them had already been blown to pieces by the missile barrage.

Three in total, two remaining.

The next instant, amid a shrill wind, Valentina pierced through the outer perimeter. The Flame Dust Crystal loaded into the Willow Leaf White Garden shifted to its holy aspect, and in that same moment she impaled the central node of the second scorpion-shaped amalgamation!

Hundreds of evil cultists screamed as one. Black mist poured from the cursed runes on their bodies, but pure white holy light surged from their eyes, ears, mouths, and noses. A silent explosion erupted inside their shells. In an instant, the power within the Holy Dust Crystal burned them down to a scattered heap of bones. Half a second later, the other scorpion-shaped amalgamation met the same fate.

When it came to single-target kills, Valentina was more than a little stronger than the cumbersome large summons.

She even made a small loop around the area, wiping out a string of insect-transformed evil cultists guarding the scorpion-shaped amalgamations—probably hoping to try out some sort of combined-arms tactic. The position she was responsible for defending was cleared in no time, and the two spider turrets that had turned their barrels around also swung back, once again securing the airspace.

It had gone much more smoothly than expected.

Too bad there still wasn't any score announcement. Clearly, this fight was being treated as a group side quest.

Then...

--Surely no one could stay relaxed from start to finish during a group side quest.

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