A helicopter?

The pterodactyl shikigami belonging solely to Dhruv Lakdawalla clearly paid no attention to what Lu Yun was saying. Without slowing in the slightest, they charged at him together.

Watching their ferocious approach, Lu Yun couldn't help breaking into a cold sweat.

Can I block this? Maybe I should just call out Lord Kashimo.

Although Lu Yun had grown stronger, his cursed energy reinforcement and control still fell short of Hajime Kashimo's level.

Before Lu Yun could think any further, the pterodactyls were already upon him.

Lu Yun hastily raised his stun baton and flailed it about without any technique whatsoever.

Perhaps luck was on his side. Amid all those wild sweeps and downward strikes, he actually managed to kill a few shikigami.

Every pterodactyl struck by the stun baton suffered fatal injuries. Even a glancing blow inflicted damage severe enough that their frail bodies could no longer sustain flight, sending them plummeting headfirst.

Even so, the pterodactyls showed no sign of stopping their assault.

Having discovered a target they couldn't quickly eliminate, more and more pterodactyl shikigami converged on Lu Yun.

With his clumsy staff work alone, Lu Yun naturally couldn't block every charge.

One pterodactyl dodged the stun baton and slammed into Lu Yun. The impact at that speed made him feel as though he'd been hit by a moving car.

Lu Yun spat out a mouthful of sour bile as the tremendous force hurled him away, knocking him off balance.

Pterodactyl after pterodactyl rammed into him. Whenever Lu Yun started to fall, another one would inevitably shove him higher.

As the ground receded farther and farther from view, Lu Yun suddenly remembered the apple-hitting minigame ads he used to see all the time while scrolling.

The game involved tapping the screen to throw knives, knocking an apple into the air without piercing it until it flew past the finish line.

At that moment, Lu Yun was undoubtedly the apple being knocked upward over and over.

Come to think of it, does the Culling Game's barrier have a height limit?

Lu Yun honestly didn't know whether that was part of its mechanics.

After all, most of the jujutsu sorcerers in the original story couldn't fly. Even the handful who could wouldn't be so bored that they'd test the upper limits of the Culling Game's barriers.

These things aren't trying to knock me straight out of the barrier, are they?

The pterodactyl shikigami couldn't inflict particularly serious damage on Lu Yun, so defeating him by throwing him outside the Culling Game's barrier would be a perfectly viable tactic.

Without a rule allowing players to leave the barriers freely, any player who left without permission would have their cursed technique removed by the Culling Game system. The system accomplished that removal by destroying the player's brain outright, which meant instant death. Unless they possessed a way to nullify cursed techniques, like Angel did, ordinary sorcerers had no way to leave the Culling Game's barriers.

"Kogane, how many points do I have right now?"

At that thought, Lu Yun immediately summoned Kogane to check his current points.

Hearing his call, the white flying insect appeared with a pop, and that distinctive voice sounded again:

"The player's current total is 41 points."

Still not enough, huh?

With Angel's help, Lu Yun hadn't spent much time in the Tokyo No. 2 Colony, nor had he deliberately farmed points. The forty-odd points he had came from casually eliminating a few cursed spirits that blocked his path on the way out. He was still well over halfway short of the 100 points needed to add a rule.

If this continued, Lu Yun might really get knocked out of the barrier and die when the Culling Game removed his cursed technique.

As someone who had transmigrated into this world, Lu Yun himself might not possess a so-called cursed technique. But there was still Hajime Kashimo inside him. Since they shared the same body, Hajime Kashimo's cursed technique was undoubtedly engraved into it, even though neither of them had ever used it.

The Culling Game system wouldn't care whether he'd ever used his cursed technique. As long as he had one, it would be removed outright. Unless he wanted his head blown apart, he had better not test whether the Culling Game's mechanics were airtight.

Knowing this couldn't go on, Lu Yun began doing everything he could to steady himself amid the attacks.

Flailing the stun baton around covers too little ground. I can't protect my body at all. Is there some way to widen my attack range while keeping myself safe?

Ding!

In a flash of inspiration, Lu Yun suddenly hit upon a solution.

When someone mentioned characters who wielded staffs, who was the first to come to mind?

For most people, it would surely be that iconic character from Journey to the West: Great Sage Equal to Heaven Sun Wukong, who stormed the Hall of Divine Mists and struck down demons of every kind with his staff.

Just caught a few demons~ and subdued a few more~

The Monkey King's mastery of the Ruyi Jingu Bang was nothing short of divine. Whenever his signature background music played, the image of him twirling his staff would immediately spring to mind.

At that moment, Lu Yun recalled that very figure who had left such a vivid mark on his childhood.

If I could spin my staff like the Monkey King, blocking these flimsy shikigami would be a breeze.

He might not know how to twirl a staff, but Lu Yun did know the spinning-hands dance!

During the years when spinning-hands videos went viral, Lu Yun, a seasoned internet loafer, had naturally jumped on the bandwagon and learned it himself.

As far as he was concerned, staff twirling and the spinning-hands dance worked on much the same principle. The key to both lay in rotating the wrists.

Acting on that thought, Lu Yun tightened his grip on the stun baton and twisted his wrist. Driven by that movement, the long baton in his hand slowly began to turn.

His movements were awkward at first, and the attacking pterodactyls kept interrupting him. But as he grew more practiced, his hands moved faster and faster. One swing followed another, the baton's blurred trails flowing without interruption.

With cursed energy reinforcing his far-superhuman physical abilities, Lu Yun gradually spun the long baton into an impenetrable circle in front of him.

Unlike his earlier wild flailing, the dense blur of the baton formed a wall of absolute defense before Lu Yun.

Any pterodactyl that tried to ram him was like a chunk of meat tossed into a grinder, pulverized by the rapidly spinning stun baton in his hands. They were helpless against this Wall of Lamentation.

Even when they tried to attack from his blind spots, Lu Yun rotated his body to sweep the baton's blur in every direction, achieving complete, 360-degree defense.

The stun baton spun so fast that it even began generating a faint suction, drawing nearby pterodactyl shikigami from beyond its reach directly into its striking range.

Even so, a few stragglers inevitably slipped through and managed to hit Lu Yun.

But this was already far better than before. Lu Yun finally stopped being knocked ever higher and began descending slowly. Those stragglers even served as cushions, reducing the force of his fall.

"Thup-thup-thup~"

The stun baton sliced through the air, its tremendous speed whipping up violent currents around Lu Yun. Stirred by the baton, the air produced bursts of noise resembling the whir of a helicopter's rotor.

Hearing the noise, the ordinary people inside the barrier looked up in confusion.

In the sky, a dark silhouette with a "rotor" above its head was slowly descending.

"Is that... a helicopter?"