Mu Yi had meant to frustrate someone else, only to end up fuming as he was carried the whole way.
When they reached their destination, he gritted his teeth and squirmed twice. "Let go!"
"Sure. Steady on your feet." Zhong Xuezhi suppressed a laugh and quit while he was ahead, finding a relatively safe spot to set him down.
Then Zhong Xuezhi huddled with his teammates, quietly studying the colony of spine celery a short distance ahead.
Mu Yi craned his neck to look too, peering through the weeds in front of him.
After a couple of glances, he suddenly understood why this type of plant mutant had been named "spine celery."
Their trunks had no branches or leaves. They were completely bare and looked remarkably like curved spinal columns.
The spine celery were enormous, averaging nearly three meters tall. At the very top of each stood a huge, densely layered flower with petals as red as fire. They hardly looked like gentle creatures.
What happened next proved that beyond a doubt.
The largest spine celery suddenly opened its flower to its fullest extent, exposing the enormous mouthparts wrapped within layers of petals.
Then it bit into a slightly smaller spine celery on its left, uprooted it, and tilted its head back to swallow it whole.
Impressive, Mu Yi thought. They certainly didn't hesitate to eat their own kind.
After watching for a little longer, he heard Zhong Xuezhi whisper beside him, "Go."
At the command to attack, all five sprang out together.
The moment they appeared, the spine celery ahead opened their petals in unison, revealing their weapons as quickly as possible.
Quite a few Spine Celery even pulled themselves out of the soil and hopped forward to meet the attack.
Both sides charged in with plenty of momentum, swiftly clashing and beginning their fight.
Ice Scythe in hand, Zhong Xuezhi faced the colony's leader, fighting from the southern half of the battlefield to the northern half and leaving spine celery corpses everywhere he went.
The others fought the lesser monsters while collecting the spine celery corpses behind Zhong Xuezhi.
Watching from a distance, Mu Yi found that odd. He wondered what use those corpses could possibly have.
A moment later, he saw them dissect each corpse they collected, extract something from its trunk, and casually toss the remains aside.
As they harvested more and more of those things from the spine celery, the battle began taking an increasingly surreal turn.
"Qiu Cai!" Zhong Xuezhi suddenly shouted. "Fire attack!"
"On it!"
After answering loudly, Qiu Cai raised a hand and swept it over his entirely blue submachine gun.
Immediately, the parts his hand had passed over began rapidly melting, swelling, and warping.
In the blink of an eye, the submachine gun was gone, replaced by an enormous blue Flame Gun.
Mu Yi had the privilege of watching the entire transformation. His eyes widened. "Well, damn!"
Under his slightly stunned gaze, Qiu Cai hefted his transformed weapon and shouted, "Babies, let me send you off to paradise-"
Huge torrents of blue flame roared from the Flame Gun, reducing every low-level Spine Celery his teammates had herded together to ash.
After the roar of the flames came a dense succession of clattering sounds.
It sounded as though something hard and brittle was hitting the ground again and again.
Mu Yi narrowed his eyes to focus. In the distance, the scorched ground was littered with translucent crystals.
Those had to be what they had been extracting from the spine celery earlier.
The sight made Mu Yi itch to get involved. He hadn't come just to watch.
His electric flame, long since impatient, flared to life, targeting the straps binding him.
Unexpectedly, even after burning for quite some time, the electric flame failed to ignite them at all. Instead, wisps of cold seeped out, bringing a prickling chill.
"Fuck!" Mu Yi grew anxious. There were very few things his electric flame couldn't burn through. "What kind of damn material is this tough?!"
These were no ordinary straps. He could faintly sense an invisible insulating barrier, as though they were some special item with extremely high defensive power.
Mu Yi struggled for a while without success, then simply gave up and shouted, "Zhong Xuezhi! Fucking untie me!"
Unfortunately, Zhong Xuezhi had no time for him now. The spine celery's attack had entered its next phase.
"Wenren Jin, put up a shield!"
At his captain's command, Wenren Jin immediately raised a shield large enough to cover all his teammates.
Less than half a second later, countless fiery-red petals leaped into the air, then rained down like arrows.
There were so many petals that they sliced through the air with an unbroken chorus of whistles.
Wenren Jin held both hands high, maintaining the shield and blocking every last one.
When the first rain of arrows ended, Wenren Jin let out a soft sigh. "Ah, that felt good."
Zhong Xuezhi slapped the back of his head. "Cut the crap and counterattack!"
Wenren Jin glanced back at him and feigned bashfulness. "Oh, stop it. I've got a switch hidden back there. Don't go hitting it."
"Fuck me." Zhong Xuezhi immediately looked as though he had a toothache, then disgustedly wiped the hand he'd slapped him with on Du Jing's clothes.
Du Jing: "?"
After that brief bit of nonsense, Wenren Jin finally grew a little more serious and activated one of his special-type innate skills.
[Copy Skill]
This innate ability could copy most skills he successfully defended against, allowing him to choose between releasing them immediately or storing them.
However, the Copy Skill had only half the original's power or effectiveness and could only be used once.
There was also a time limit on storage. If unused within twenty-four hours, the skill would automatically expire.
Under the circumstances, of course, Wenren Jin chose to release the Copy Skill immediately.
Hundreds upon thousands of blood-red arrows appeared again, flying straight toward the creatures that had launched them.
After a dense volley of whistles, the spine celery tasted being pierced by their own arrows for the first time, and the colony's numbers plummeted.
Zhong Xuezhi couldn't help whistling. "Beautiful!"
Then he added, "Put a coating on me. I'm going another round with their leader."
"You got it~" Wenren Jin raised a hand and snapped his fingers. A pale-blue, oval shield appeared around Zhong Xuezhi, looking remarkably like a translucent eggshell.
Wearing his eggshell, Zhong Xuezhi darted in front of the Grade B Spine Celery. But the moment he landed, it began thrashing wildly from side to side.
Zhong Xuezhi watched warily for a few seconds. Then his expression abruptly changed, and he shouted, "Spread out! Stay out of the downwind area!"
He had barely finished speaking when a vast cloud of red powder drifted from the Grade B Spine Celery's flower. The wind caught it and scattered it everywhere.
"Heh, shields coming right up~"
Wenren Jin immediately gave each teammate an eggshell. Unfortunately, by the time he put one on himself, he had been hit.
He froze at first, then burst into laughter without warning.
"Hahahahahahaha!!"
"Fuck! Hahahaha!" Wenren Jin couldn't stop laughing, as though someone had hit a pressure point that triggered it.
Between laughs, he struggled to explain, "Th-this stuff, hahahaha! It's-it's a fucking emotional stimulant! Hahahaha..."
Halfway through laughing, he suddenly began sobbing instead, crying uncontrollably.
"Aaargh-!"
"Goddammit... boohoohoo... hic..."
The contrast between one moment and the next was nothing short of an emotional roller coaster.
"Jin!" An Beize immediately rushed over. As he checked Wenren Jin's condition, he swept his arm forcefully upward, and a dense, localized shower came pouring down.
The merciless rain knocked all the drifting pollen out of the air and drove it to the ground.
The Grade B Spine Celery's flower was soaked too, leaving it unable to scatter any more pollen into the air.
That didn't stop it from attacking, however. It seamlessly switched to its Petal Projection skill.
Seeing this, the other low-level spine celery launched their own petals as well.
Not daring to take the attacks head-on, the team quickly ducked behind a huge boulder.
Wenren Jin was brought over too. Even now, he alternated between sobbing and laughing, his emotions swinging so violently that he looked liable to pass out at any moment.
Zhong Xuezhi studied him for a few seconds, then decisively announced, "Everyone, use your ultimates! End this fast!"
Their Hunting Team had spent nearly a week in Dread Gloom Forest, where mutants ran rampant, and their combat supplies were almost exhausted. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been in such a sorry state.
With the situation turning against them, they had to finish the fight as quickly as possible.
[Friendly reminder: the little madman is about to be set free. Let the fun begin.]
Before you continue