When it came to finishing the fight quickly, Du Jing was the first to respond.
"Goddammit, all this penny-pinching over a lousy bit of energy! Holding back in a fight is driving me fucking nuts!"
With that, he put away his battle-axe, scattered a handful of seeds instead, and activated the main skill of his wood-type talent.
[All Things Grow]
"Rise!"
At his low shout, several enormous plants burst out of the ground. They immediately bared their lethal "weapons," then lunged at the nearby Spine Celery, flailing wildly.
But that was only the beginning. His real trump card was his mutated parasite-the Devil Vine.
With several wet popping sounds, black vines shot out of his back one after another, whipping brazenly through the air.
After briefly stretching themselves out, they swiftly separated, attacking in different directions with perfect coordination. Everything within a circle ten meters across was their battlefield.
Any Spine Celery they ensnared instantly shriveled as though its life had been drained away, withering before finally collapsing to the ground.
Mu Yi, still struggling incessantly against the ice bands in the distance, saw it all.
His eyes lit up at once, his combative pheromones rampaging restlessly through his body.
He shouted again, "Zhong Xuezhi!"
Zhong Xuezhi heard him, but still did not respond. He was busy.
At that moment, his rather small pupils had narrowed into vertical slits, and a faint, cold gleam flickered through his eyes.
This was the sign that he was about to unleash his attack.
Suddenly, bitter frost surged from beneath his feet, sweeping outward at lightning speed with overwhelming force.
Almost in the blink of an eye, it engulfed all the remaining Spine Celery, their leader included.
A miniature world of ice and snow abruptly took shape.
Yet it was not over. A succession of cracks rang out, overlapping as the entire frozen world began to fracture.
The cracks spread and widened like a spiderweb, until a series of thunderous crashes erupted.
Crack-!!
In the end, all the Spine Celery collapsed and shattered along with that frozen world, breaking into countless tiny fragments.
Mu Yi, who was desperately struggling free of his restraints, looked up at the noise and immediately started swearing. "Zhong Xuezhi! Fuck you!"
He'd fucking finished everything! What was Mu Yi supposed to play with now?!
Having heard that greeting, Zhong Xuezhi finally decided to respond. He turned around, intending to smile at Mu Yi, only to suddenly sense something that made his expression change sharply.
"Looters are coming! Quick, grab everything and retreat!"
The other teammates' expressions changed as well. They hurriedly bent down and swept up the crystal fragments scattered across the ground.
In Dread Gloom, where the various powers were tangled in a complicated web, there was no shortage of groups who profited from others' battles and swooped in to loot them.
Their energy reserves were depleted, and they could not bear to squander the crystal fragments they had just obtained. Naturally, getting away was their best option.
Unfortunately, no matter how quickly they moved, the other side still caught up with them as they retreated.
Mu Yi glanced back and saw a dense black mass nearby, made up entirely of Giant Ants roughly two meters tall.
Before he could take a closer look, Zhong Xuezhi suddenly appeared beside him, scooped him up, and then shoved him toward the others.
"You go first. I'll cover the retreat."
Du Jing frowned at Zhong Xuezhi's current safety assessment data and suggested, "Captain, let me cover the retreat instead. You've been consuming too much energy lately. Your mutation level is already..."
"No need." Zhong Xuezhi raised a hand to cut him off, then said casually, "I can still handle it. Get moving and stop holding me back."
Once he made up his mind, he rarely changed it. His teammates, who had followed him for years, knew that well, so they said no more and nodded together.
Mu Yi, however, was decidedly unhappy. He craned his neck and caught Zhong Xuezhi's clothes between his teeth, mumbling, "I'm staying. Untie me."
Zhong Xuezhi pressed a hand onto the top of his head and shoved him away hard. "Tch, stop making trouble!"
Mu Yi refused to let go. At the same time, he released a high-voltage current, making everyone around him jolt.
He had already missed out on the Spine Celery. He was not about to miss the Giant Ants too. If they did not untie him now, nobody was leaving.
"All right, all right, I'll untie you...!" Zhong Xuezhi gave in under pressure and hurriedly raised his hand to recall the ice bands.
The others had no time to voice their opinions. They turned and began their race for survival.
The next instant, the army of Giant Ants came bearing down on them.
Only once they drew close did Mu Yi notice that their entire bodies were covered in hard black shells, gleaming brightly in the sunlight.
Nice. They looked like they could take a beating.
Mu Yi nodded in satisfaction, flexed the limbs that had been bound for so long, then gleefully darted into the ant swarm.
As he leaped forward, the electricity on his body crackled, transforming into pure white electric flames in an instant.
After landing, he split the electric flames into several strands and hurled them at the Giant Ants on all sides.
Yet for some reason, when the electric flames touched the Giant Ants, the ants were completely unaffected, and the flames even showed signs of going out.
Mu Yi was taken aback. Their shells were a natural insulating layer, and their fire resistance was excellent too.
When his first strike failed, Mu Yi swiftly dodged aside, avoiding the massive mandibles of several Giant Ants lunging down at him.
As he looked back, he happened to see their mandibles collide after missing him, producing a clang like steel striking steel.
"Holy shit..." Mu Yi murmured.
With weapons like those, wouldn't cutting through anything be a breeze?
While he was marveling at them, Zhong Xuezhi suddenly leaped to his side and sliced several nearby Giant Ants in half with a single sweep of his scythe.
Mu Yi froze. Fuck, he was stealing kills now?
While he was still stunned, he heard Zhong Xuezhi ask with a trace of surprise, "You have two nature-type talents?"
Mu Yi was even more confused. "Huh?"
What the hell were two nature-type talents? Did he mean Mu Yi's pheromones?
His pheromones had an electrical property, and he could freely switch between the two elements of electric current and electric flame. That did qualify as two.
But the people here seemed to have confused his pheromone property with their so-called talents or special abilities.
Mu Yi could not be bothered to explain to a Beta who could not sense pheromone fluctuations. He simply reached out and shoved Zhong Xuezhi.
"Move! Stop stealing my kills!"
Zhong Xuezhi staggered from the shove. Once he steadied himself, he casually slaughtered a Giant Ant approaching them.
When he turned his head again, he found that Mu Yi had already leaped into the distance and begun fighting other Giant Ants. Throughout the fight, the electricity and flames on his body kept switching back and forth, making him look like a humanoid lamp flickering between bright and dim.
Zhong Xuezhi watched the humanoid lamp for several seconds, his thoughts racing.
Whether among aberrant creatures or mutated humans, nature-type talents were the rarest talents to acquire.
According to the mutated humans, even if they added together all the nature-type talent holders across every Safe Base, the total probably would not reach double digits.
Yet now, he had picked someone up at random and actually found one-and a holder of two nature-type talents at that.
Just who was this guy...?
Before you continue