The King Descends from the Heavens

Jiang Ran had no idea how powerful the Dragon-Tiger Fist had become.

He just felt that if he threw a punch with all his strength, he could blow even a spider as large as this Mother Spider to pieces.

That was how he assessed his own strength.

But reality often differed somewhat from what one imagined.

Just like now...

The scene he had expected—blood and flesh flying, carapace shattering—never came.

Instead, a force of recoil surged up his arm, instantly numbing his right arm and making his bones creak.

At the same time, a shrill scream burst from the Mother Spider's twisted human face.

The sound waves carried a foul, fishy wind that nearly blew Jiang Ran's hood off.

Fortunately, Jiang Ran reacted quickly.

The moment he realized the other creature hadn't died from his punch, he activated Eight-Step Cicada Chase as soon as he landed.

He swiftly put distance between himself and the monster.

In the blink of an eye, he had darted more than ten meters away.

Jiang Ran looked up, his brows tightly furrowed.

The carapace on the Mother Spider's abdomen where he had struck was indeed dented, bearing a clear fist-shaped imprint.

The surrounding plates had even developed fine cracks.

But that was all.

There was no penetration, no tearing, let alone a blow that shattered it.

And the arrow he had shot while airborne hadn't even pierced its defenses.

"This is trouble..."

Jiang Ran's heart sank.

Still, the Dragon-Tiger Fist hadn't been entirely ineffective.

The Mother Spider was sprawled across the multicolored web, its eight long legs twitching uneasily. Its whole body trembled slightly, and unmistakable pain and fury showed on its distorted human face.

Seeing this, Jiang Ran acted without hesitation. With a flick of his left hand, he slipped off his compound bow and quiver, while his right hand unfastened the sheathed Tang Dao from his back.

Strike while it's down. Finish it off.

The next moment, the concrete beneath his feet exploded, leaving a small crater.

He drove Eight-Step Cicada Chase to its limit, his blood and qi roaring through the meridians in his legs.

The distance of more than ten meters vanished in an instant.

Jiang Ran lunged at the Mother Spider again.

For almost any creature, the head was likely one of its most vulnerable parts.

Jiang Ran twisted at the waist, his spine rising and falling like a great dragon. His right fist shot out from beneath his ribs, and the roar of dragons and tigers rang across the rooftop for the second time, aimed straight at the strange face that seemed to be both laughing and crying.

However, the Mother Spider's reaction was astonishingly fast.

It seemed to have anticipated his move. It was even possible that most of its compound eyes had been fixed on Jiang Ran from the very beginning.

Just as Jiang Ran's fist was about to touch its human face...

The Mother Spider's body suddenly tilted at an unnatural angle. Its spider legs, curled beneath it, sprang up and closed together.

At the last second, they blocked the area in front of its head.

Clang!!!

Fist and limb shield collided with a thunderous impact.

Golden Bell Shield activated automatically.

The invisible force around Jiang Ran's fist and the hard shell of the spider legs burst outward together, sending out a visible ripple.

The recoil struck, and Jiang Ran and the Mother Spider were both thrown backward.

But after the Mother Spider landed on its web, its many long legs were still moving freely. It had clearly suffered no serious injuries.

Jiang Ran shook his still-numb right fist and watched the Mother Spider rapidly regain its posture, hissing lowly at him. His brow furrowed even more deeply.

He didn't have enough power to kill it.

He had thrown two punches so far. The first had been a sneak attack, landing on its body without killing it.

The second, unleashed with the explosive force of Eight-Step Cicada Chase, had struck its spider leg almost instantly, but still hadn't hurt it.

This monster was far tougher than any of the monsters he had encountered before.

More importantly, it clearly possessed some degree of combat intelligence. It wasn't relying solely on instinct.

And besides...

This fight was supposed to be a lightning strike.

With the little Human-Faced Spiders away from the Mother Spider, he was supposed to deal with it quickly.

If the battle dragged on, even if he managed to kill the Mother Spider, he would still be surrounded by a flood of monsters, trapped in a hopeless situation.

And when his first punch had landed just now...

The scream the Mother Spider let out might well have been a signal summoning the other monsters back.

He had to end this quickly.

Jiang Ran was rapidly calculating the risks and his chances of winning, wondering whether he should retreat for now and wait for another opportunity...

When the Mother Spider across from him moved first.

Its human face suddenly opened its bloody maw, and its throat convulsed violently.

The next moment...

Dozens of clumps of thick, white liquid shot from its mouth.

The blobs rapidly spread through the air, transforming in the blink of an eye into enormous webs more than three meters across. They swept over everything, nearly covering every possible direction Jiang Ran could dodge.

Jiang Ran had no time to think. His Combat Intuition screamed a warning.

He gave a low shout, and his blood and qi surged through his entire body. The muscles in his legs bulged as he pushed Eight-Step Cicada Chase to its limit.

A faint afterimage remained where he had stood.

His real body had already shot diagonally forward to the left.

Several webs brushed past his clothes and skimmed his back.

However, just as Jiang Ran landed...

The light above his head suddenly dimmed.

Jiang Ran jerked his head up.

The multicolored web covering the entire rooftop was slowly descending.

It wasn't trying to trap Jiang Ran directly. It was trying to shrink the space he could move in and force him into a dead end.

Then, with the advantage of its home ground, it would slowly torture him to death.

Jiang Ran looked at the web less than a few meters above him and knew he couldn't dodge it.

Unless he could fly.

And unless he had been fighting the other creature on top of the web from the very beginning.

But the web was undoubtedly the other creature's main battlefield. Jiang Ran could never have chosen to fight it there from the start.

In other words, once he landed on this rooftop...

Unless he killed the Spider Matriarch quickly, this situation was inevitable.

So before he leaped over, Jiang Ran had already anticipated this.

In that case...

It was time to begin the real fight to the death.

Jiang Ran calmly watched the web descend.

Just before it touched him, he slowly raised his right hand, pressed his index and middle fingers together, and gently touched them to the center of his brow.

His lips parted slightly.

"Vajra..."

"Rise."

Humm!!!

A wave of scorching heat erupted around Jiang Ran.

Crimson clouds of blood and qi suddenly surged from every pore in his body, visible to the naked eye.

Like blazing flames, they enveloped him completely.

The clouds of blood and qi churned and rose, transforming behind him into the blurry, imposing silhouette of a three-meter-tall figure.

The phantom glared furiously, poised to subdue demons.

Jiang Ran's eyes were now stained entirely red, with no whites visible.

Only two boiling pools of blood remained.

The skin exposed outside his clothes turned dark red. Veins bulged beneath it, twisting like coiled dragons.

Buddha's Wrathful Vajra...

Awaken!

The next moment, Jiang Ran bent his knees slightly.

The concrete beneath his feet collapsed with a roar.

His body vanished from the spot, shooting straight into the air and smashing through the web.

In the blink of an eye, he was right in front of the monster, crashing into its embrace...

The Mother Spider seemed stunned for a split second by Jiang Ran's sudden move. A hint of humanlike astonishment flashed in its compound eyes.

That was all the time Jiang Ran needed!

He thrust out his left hand, wrapped in crimson energy, and drove it viciously into the crack in the carapace on the Mother Spider's abdomen—the crack left by the Dragon-Tiger Fist.

At the same time, he drew back his right fist...

All his strength, all his surging blood and qi, and all the fury of the Vajra Phantom behind him gathered there.

Then, from point-blank range, he unleashed the first Dragon-Tiger Fist of his Buddha's Wrathful Vajra state at that grotesque face!

Before the fist even landed, its savage pressure had already flattened the bristles on the Mother Spider's head.

The features on its hideous face were squeezed out of shape.

The Mother Spider let out a shriek of terror unlike any it had made before. Several of its long legs stabbed frantically toward Jiang Ran, who was pressed against its abdomen.

The sharp tips of the spider legs stabbed at his back and side, but the dense crimson energy covering his body held them back, producing a rapid series of explosive cracks.

But these attacks couldn't penetrate the Golden Bell Shield in his Buddha's Wrathful Vajra state.

At most, they left white marks on his skin.

In his Buddha's Wrathful Vajra state, his physical defenses and resistance to pain had both reached astonishing levels.

Jiang Ran paid no attention to the attacks behind him.

His eyes were fixed only on that ugly head.

His fist finally landed.

At the same time, several streets away.

"Open fire! Cover each other! Fall back to the intersection in the west!"

Xia Xuan roared as his automatic rifle spat flames, riddling a Human-Faced Young Spider that had burst through the window of a shop to their side. Its fluids sprayed everywhere.

But more Young Spiders poured out of the buildings in every direction.

There were so many that it was enough to make anyone despair.

Zou Yue and three other team members, dressed in Special Combat Uniforms and armed with weapons, stood back-to-back in a circle, shielding Zhou Ming in the middle as they fired desperately.

"Captain Xia! There are too many! We'll never clear them all!"

One of the team members emptied a magazine and shouted urgently while reloading.

Xia Xuan knew their situation as well.

They had originally been sent to the High-Tech District to search for and escort a student who had been granted a qualification.

They hadn't expected to get surrounded by these seemingly endless monsters so soon after finding him.

"Hold on..."

Before Xia Xuan could finish, the corner of his eye caught the middle-aged man who had been following Zhou Ming and calling himself another survivor. Uncle Wang suddenly let out a terrified yelp.

"Ah! They're... they're coming from over there! We can't hold them back! You keep them busy! I'll go find a way out!"

Uncle Wang's voice was shrill. Before anyone could react, he abruptly turned and ran toward the south.

"Get back here! Don't run off!" Xia Xuan immediately roared in anger.

But Uncle Wang ignored him completely and disappeared into the darkness of the street in the blink of an eye.

"Again... again, it's happening..."

Protected in the middle, Zhou Ming stared in the direction Uncle Wang had disappeared, his eyes blank and his lips trembling as he murmured, "Why does he get to..."

Zou Yue heard his muttering over the battle. She glanced at him quickly and asked urgently, "What did you say? What do you mean, 'again'?"

As if jolted awake, Zhou Ming stammered out what had happened earlier.

"Bastard!" Zou Yue swore through gritted teeth, anger surging in her eyes.

The other team members looked grim when they heard.

However, less than ten seconds after Uncle Wang ran off...

Something strange happened.

The monsters that had been swarming toward them suddenly halted their attacks in unison.

Then, as if they had received some kind of order, they all abandoned their assault on Xia Xuan's team.

In perfect unison, they charged toward the south, after Uncle Wang.

Within just two or three seconds, the once-impenetrable encirclement had become eerily empty, leaving only heaps of monster corpses and shell casings scattered across the ground.

Xia Xuan and the others stood frozen, guns raised in alert.

For a moment, none of them could understand what had happened.

"What... what's going on?" one of the team members panted, looking around in confusion.

But before anyone could react,

a dense rustling came from the north, behind them.

Xia Xuan whipped around.

More monsters were pouring over the outer walls of the buildings along the northern street.

There were so many that they covered nearly every building surface in sight.

And they were heading south, too.

Xia Xuan's team happened to be right in their path.

"Run!!! South! Hurry!"

Xia Xuan's eyes bulged with alarm. He grabbed Zhou Ming by the arm as he stood there dazed and fled along the route Uncle Wang had taken.

But they hadn't run even two blocks

before everyone sensed something was wrong.

The monsters pouring in from the north weren't attacking them at all.

Every spider, no matter which direction it came from, was now surging frantically toward an office building ahead.

Xia Xuan and the others slowed down without meaning to.

They stared at the utterly bizarre scene, uncertain and alarmed.

"What... are they doing?" Zou Yue panted, tightening her grip on her gun.

"Looks like they're rushing back to help?"

one of the team members said uncertainly.

Just then...

"Up there! Something's happening!" Zou Yue had the sharpest hearing and was the first to look up and point toward the upper floors.

Everyone looked up together.

The sky was at its darkest.

Yet the area around the top floors of the building was intermittently lit by a crimson glow.

And a sound like a tolling bell rang out again and again.

Then...

BOOM!!!!

A deafening crash rang out from the upper floors of the building.

As everyone watched, the glass curtain wall near the top floors burst apart, countless shards raining down.

The next moment, a blazing blood-red streak of light and a mottled, savage shadow, locked together in a fierce struggle, burst out through the hole in the building.

They appeared briefly in the air dozens of stories above the ground, then...

plummeted toward the earth with a thunderous crash!