The Long-Armed Ape King

0231 County-Level City was much quieter than usual that day.

The warrior squads that normally hunted monsters in the city were nowhere to be seen.

A Beast General Level two-tailed tiger cat led a pack of ordinary tiger cats swaggering between the high-rises.

They emerged onto a street.

"Rowr!" One tiger cat spotted something and called to its leader.

The two-tailed tiger cat looked in the direction its subordinate indicated and saw a hole.

Below the hole lay a network of pipes stretching in every direction.

It had originally been a sewer entrance, later broken open into a hole.

Beneath it lay the vast sewer system.

"Meow!" The two-tailed tiger cat sniffed, catching an enticing scent.

It slipped down through the hole.

Despite its massive body, it was supple enough to squeeze through.

It continued forward along the sewer.

Closer. Closer still.

That alluring scent was just ahead.

Rounding a corner, it entered a huge chamber.

It saw the source of the scent.

But at that moment, all it felt was terror.

A dense swarm of rats stared at it with tiny eyes.

Cats were the natural enemies of rats, and even after becoming monsters, felines could still dominate rodents. But that certainly did not extend to a Beast General Level monster challenging a Lord Level one.

In fact, the enormous figure standing a full two meters tall at the center of the chamber never even moved. The swarm alone surged forward and tore the pitiful tiger cat to pieces.

Aboveground.

"Did you hear something?" Lu Gang caught a faint hissing sound, seemingly from far away.

"A sound?" Long staff in hand, Guo Ruinian swung and smashed a broken wall out of their path.

"Yes, there is something." Zhong Yang sensed it too.

"No need to listen anymore." Dongguan drew his saber. "They're here."

There truly was no need. A sea of rats surrounded them from every direction, their tiny red eyes gleaming with ferocity.

"Kill!" Dongguan gave the order with a wave, and the four charged out in four different directions.

Of the four squad members, Dongguan was a High-Level War God, Lu Gang and Guo Ruinian were intermediate war gods, and Zhong Yang was a beginner war god.

That was why Dongguan served as their captain.

The four slaughtered the rats like harvesters cutting down stalks of grain.

Before long, the ground was covered in corpses and blood.

Whether Beast Soldier Level or Beast General Level, none could survive a single exchange.

Dongguan killed most efficiently. With his superior strength and speed, a single sweep of his saber cleared an entire swath.

Lu Gang came next. After several days of secluded training, he had grasped a trace of the essence of wind. Now, as he wielded his saber, he seemed to command the wind itself, each slash sending out blades of air.

Against an opponent of equal strength, those wind blades could do little more than obscure their vision, but they greatly improved his efficiency when mowing down weaker foes.

His wind blades could not kill the thick-skinned Beast General Level monsters, though. Those still required a direct slash of his saber.

Zhong Yang ranked third. He wielded a spear and had studied the 《World Destruction》 spear technique.

Though only a Low-Level War God, he killed more efficiently than Guo Ruinian.

As for Guo Ruinian, his staff was less efficient at killing.

So he specifically targeted Beast General Level monsters.

Although his total kill count was the lowest, he killed the highest proportion of Beast General Level monsters.

"This isn't working!" After sweeping away a patch of rats and clearing some space, Zhong Yang shouted, "We'll never finish killing them like this!"

Indeed, in that short time, they had already killed at least several thousand monsters, yet the rat tide remained endless, surging like waves. There were at least a million of them.

"We have to find the monster lord and kill it. Then the rat tide will disperse on its own." Guo Ruinian planted a foot on a beast soldier's head, bursting it like a smashed watermelon.

He surveyed their surroundings from midair, but all he could see was a dense tide of black and gray dotted with scarlet. There was no way to determine the lord-level monster's location.

Lord-level monsters were already no less intelligent than humans.

Their original plan had been to find and kill the lord-level monster, which would naturally end the rat tide.

But the rat lord was no fool. It simply unleashed its swarms to surround them and would not show itself until they had been worn down sufficiently.

"So what? If the lord won't show itself, these ordinary rats pose no threat to us. Every one we kill is one less rat. I could keep this up for three days and nights!" Thrilled by the slaughter, Lu Gang laughed with abandon.

"Kill!" Lu Gang moved like the wind, each swing sending blood spraying. Bathed in foul-smelling rat blood, he nonetheless exuded a peculiar, unrestrained heroism.

Find the lord, huh? Dongguan said nothing and continued killing in silence. In truth, the vertical eye beneath his forehead guard had already opened, and invisible spiritual power spread outward.

The ground, the sky, even the depths underground-nothing escaped its reach.

As he killed, he also led the entire squad through the rat tide.

Their visible assault concealed his true maneuver.

He had already searched most of the city and was gradually pinpointing the lord-level monster's location.

Because the city was so close to the military camp, there were no other lords here.

Once they located it, the four could force their way through the swarm and kill it.

On the sixth floor of an eighteen-story building in the western part of the city, the rat lord watched the overwhelming Rat Tide without the slightest concern for its devastating losses.

Rat monsters reproduced rapidly to begin with. Even if ninety percent died, their numbers would recover within a few years.

Kill them. Keep killing.

It had already decided that if no opportunity presented itself, it would leave the city once half the rat tide had been expended.

It looked back at the three human warriors... Three? Why were there only three?

"Found you." An icy voice sounded behind it.

Swish!

Blood spurted.

The rat lord tried to leap from the building, but it never had the chance. Its head parted cleanly from its body.

After the lord died, the scarlet glow gradually faded from the rats' eyes.

Their fear returned, and under the war gods' relentless slaughter, they fled in a frenzy.

The rat tide was over.

On the rooftop of the high-rise where the rat lord had been slain, the four war gods divided the monster materials.

"I'll take these eyes. You can split the rest." Dongguan used his saber to dig out the rat lord's scarlet eyeballs and wrapped them in a small piece of beast hide.

"You contributed the most, Captain Dongguan. Just take whatever you want. If you'd like, you can have the entire corpse." Guo Ruinian smiled.

The other two agreed.

Dongguan alone had found and killed their target. The others had merely helped hold off the rat tide, so his contribution was the greatest.

Of course, under normal warrior squad arrangements, even the greatest contribution would not entitle him to everything.

But this time, the corpse was not the main prize. The military's mission reward was.

War gods might help fend off monsters for free, but when the military issued a mission, it still had to offer something. Not every war god had such a strong sense of responsibility, after all.

"No need. These rat eyes are all I want. Split the rest among yourselves."

Had the eyes not given Dongguan an unusual feeling, he would not have specifically asked for them.

At the edge of the rooftop, Dongguan took out the eyes and examined them carefully in the sunlight, rubbing them a few times with his fingers.

What happened back there?

He could not help recalling that earlier sensation.

While searching for the rat lord with his spiritual power, his intense concentration had caused a change in his vision.

Countless red lines had connected every rat monster to a single point.

Although he did not understand what had happened, that did not stop him from guessing that the point where those red lines converged was the rat lord.

The result had been clear: he was right.

But after killing the rat lord, he had no longer been able to see those strange red lines.

He had asked for the eyes because all those densely packed red lines had converged in the rat lord's eyes.

That state... total concentration. Staring at the rat eyes, Dongguan tried to enter that state again.

He failed.

He kept trying.

During a stray glance at the sky, he spotted a black speck.

A dark red line appeared in the air, connecting him to that distant speck.

"What is that?" Dongguan took a pair of binoculars from his backpack and looked toward the speck.

As a war god-level warrior, his own eyesight was usually sufficient, so he rarely used binoculars.

But they remained in his backpack as standard equipment. They might come in handy someday.

It was an avian monster, an Iron-Feather Goshawk. Judging by its size, it was only Beast General Level.

Then what is this line?

As it approached, the dark red line grew thicker, going from barely perceptible to clearly visible, then as thick as a data cable, and finally as thick as a finger.

The dark red line gave him an ominous feeling, but what could a mere beast general do?

Only when it came within three thousand meters did Dongguan realize that the dark red line was not connected to the Iron-Feather Goshawk itself, but to a gray ball of fur on its back.

"A gray ball of fur?"

Just as Dongguan spotted it, the ball of fur dropped from the Iron-Feather Goshawk's back.

"This is bad!" A sense of danger instantly gripped him.

"Run!" He called to his three resting teammates and was the first to leap off the rooftop.

"What happened?" The three war gods were bewildered, but they followed Dongguan off the eighteen-story rooftop.

Boom!

At the thunderous crash, the four turned in midair. A gigantic gray-furred hand descended from the sky, reducing the eighteen-story building to sixteen stories with a single slap.

The entire building burst apart along with it.

With another slap of that enormous gray-furred hand, the building was shoved aside, and they finally saw the hand's owner.

"An ape monster!"

The massive figure stood nearly a hundred meters tall, bringing to mind the pre-Great Nirvana film King Kong.

But King Kong was a gorilla, while this creature was an ape with a tail.

"Die!"

It spoke human language. This was a king-level monster.

The four war gods sprinted desperately toward the military base.

But as the enormous ape charged after them, one of its arms grew and stretched wildly, its palm dozens of meters wide as it swept through the buildings.

"The Long-Armed Ape King!" Dongguan recognized its species.

Among ape monsters, the records emphasized the Great Strength Demon Ape and the King Kong Ape as the most powerful.

The Long-Armed Demon Ape was a variant of the Great Strength Demon Ape, but its rarity kept it relatively unknown.

In City 004, he had encountered and slain a Lord Level Long-Armed Demon Ape.

Recalling that dark red line, Dongguan wondered whether this one had come to seek revenge on him.

City 004 was quite a distance away.

"Split up!" Dongguan immediately ordered his three teammates.

"Right!" All three acted decisively.

The four fled in four different directions, and sure enough, the Ape King pursued Dongguan.

So it really is. Dongguan quietly mobilized his spiritual power to accelerate himself, dodging another lunging attack from the Ape King.