At a moment like this, someone had to step forward and steady the troops.
The Silver-Masked Man's personal Black Knight Two was the commander of the tower shield and dragon spear formation. After his initial panic at that earth-shattering axe strike, he quickly recovered his senses.
Seeing the formation fall into disarray, Black Knight Two drew the two-handed broadsword at his waist with a clang to prevent a complete rout. His gaze turned cold, and his sword flashed again and again. Five or six black-clad armored soldiers who had turned to flee had no time to react before their heads flew into the air. Their headless bodies ran a few more steps before collapsing, blood spraying like fountains...
"Hold the formation! Set up a second defense! Anyone who dares retreat will be killed on the spot!"
Two's sword dripped blood as he channeled Dou Qi and shouted.
Under the threat of death, the black-clad soldiers finally came to their senses. They slowly regrouped and steadied their ranks. After doing his utmost to hold the formation together, Black Knight Two regained his composure and immediately issued a string of orders to redeploy the defense.
With an officer directing them, the black-clad soldiers finally showed their considerable combat skills. After decisively abandoning the routed soldiers at the front, those in the rear withdrew a short distance, clearing two or three meters of space. In the blink of an eye, rows of fine iron tower shields and countless sharp dragon spears were raised again, rapidly forming a new steel defensive line.
Clang-!
The tower shield and dragon spear formation was steady once more.
Behind the formation, Black Knight Two stared fixedly at the twenty armored beasts advancing toward them, sneering inwardly.
The two sides had closed the distance now, and that beastlike fellow could no longer use the momentum of a running charge to smash through this row of tower shields. As long as the black-clad soldiers held their formation, if those fully armored fellows dared charge again, the outward-pointing dragon spears could easily pierce and skewer them.
Black Knight Two's gaze was icy as he watched the battle outside through the tiny gaps where the tower shields met.
During this emergency change of formation, he had ruthlessly abandoned more than thirty soldiers outside the disordered ranks. Now, those fully armored beasts were "sweeping up" the unfortunate black-clad soldiers like a fierce wind scattering fallen leaves. Waves of blood surged across the narrow bridge, and severed limbs and shattered weapons flew everywhere...
Black Knight Two had to admit that every one of the attackers was a superhuman god of slaughter with boundless strength. The weapons in their hands were so enormous that even he, a One-Star Warrior, felt a slight chill in his heart at the sight of them. On a narrow stone bridge with terrain like this, any army that encountered such a group of fully armed beasts would suffer a nightmare it would never forget.
The fellow charging at the very front, in particular, sent a chill through Black Knight Two's entire body.
That fellow was certainly the shortest and slightest of all the people in metal armor, yet, inexplicably, his killing and destructive power was unquestionably the most terrifying of them all.
Black Knight Two remembered it clearly. In the very first second of the battle, that fellow had hurled an earth-shattering axe strike while running, effortlessly smashing open the once impregnable tower shield and dragon spear formation like a demon god descending upon the world. That terrifying power had been like the wrath of a deity... Even now, recalling the scene left Black Knight Two shaken, though he had witnessed countless slaughters.
Now, through the gaps in the tower shields, Two could clearly see that the fellow had found an even more exaggerated giant axe somewhere. He swung it with a mighty rush of wind. Its head was like a great door panel, with fierce-looking spikes and startlingly white barbs along both sides of the blade. Blood flowed through its three grooves. The pitch-black haft was made of some unknown material and covered in intricate spiraling patterns. In an ordinary person's hands, the axe could have served as a super-sized broadsword. It weighed at least a hundred-odd jin, and would probably have taken two or three soldiers to lift together. Yet in that fellow's hands, it was as light as a stalk of straw. A casual swing unleashed a storm of blades, and each chop flashed with a dazzling cold light like lightning. Black-clad soldiers fell in an instant like wheat before a farmer's sickle, weapons and men alike cut in two. No one could evade that sharp blade, and no one could withstand that whirlwind strike.
That fellow was simply a killing machine born for battle.
More than thirty well-trained elite black-clad soldiers had failed to last even twenty seconds against this group of armored metal men. In the blink of an eye, they had all become wronged souls. Their corpses were a ghastly sight, either chopped into pieces or smashed completely out of shape. Severed limbs lay everywhere, and swords and spears were broken and twisted...
Wherever these gods of slaughter passed, nothing but the stone bridge retained its original shape.
By now, the black-clad soldiers' line had been pushed back more than fifty meters along the stone bridge.
And the entire process had taken only a little over forty seconds.
"God of war above-!"
Even in the melee, Sun Fei did not forget to show off.
He let out an explosive roar and swung his axe several times, chopping the last black-clad soldier before him into three pieces. When he looked up, he discovered that the soldiers, who had been in utter panic moments ago, had quietly pulled back more than two meters and steadied themselves, organizing a second defensive tower shield and dragon spear formation.
Sun Fei was slightly startled.
The enemy's speed in reacting and regrouping had exceeded his expectations.
It looked like the difficulty of pushing forward would inevitably double.
But once an arrow was loosed, there was no turning it back.
Sun Fei knew perfectly well that he had to lead the strongmen in breaking through the tower shield formation as quickly as possible, then charge across and destroy the siege ladders and boulder throwers in the distance at the earliest opportunity.
At a time like this, time was life.
They could not stop charging. They had to finish everything before the enemy's mysterious commander could react. Otherwise, once they became bogged down in battle and the enemy's experts arrived to support them, Sun Fei might be able to escape, but his twenty-odd men were not warriors and did not possess Dou Qi. Escaping would be exceedingly difficult for them; they would hardly be enough to fill the enemy's teeth.
"Form a wedge around me and regroup quickly! Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry!!"
At Sun Fei's shout, the twenty-odd strongmen, whose formation had scattered slightly during the fighting, quickly re-formed their ranks. The long-haired giant Drogba and the white-haired powerhouse Pierce took up positions behind Sun Fei, one on each side. Both were covered in enemy blood, and bloody froth and stark white bone fragments still ran down their weapons. They looked like demons that had emerged from hell.
The other powerhouses behind them were much the same, as if they had walked through a rain of blood. Blood dripped from their armor, and their bodies were crimson.
During the fighting just now, Sun Fei, that superhuman meat grinder, had charged at the front and cleared the way, killing any threatening experts at once. As a result, the others had encountered no real difficulties. At most, the enemy had left a few shallow marks on their armor, and so far none had been wounded or lost.
"Everyone, quickly open your blue waterskins and drink to recover your strength! Charge as soon as I give the order!"
Sun Fei shouted the command to the strongmen behind him, then suddenly charged forward alone.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh-!
Charging at full speed, he kicked several corpses off the stone bridge and sent them flying over the three-meter-tall tower shields, into the crowd of black-clad soldiers hiding behind them. Several startled cries rang out at once, but the tower shield and dragon spear formation did not fall into the slightest disorder.
In fact, Sun Fei had not expected a few corpses to throw the enemy's ranks into confusion.
Charging at full speed with the speed of a level-12 barbarian, Sun Fei needed only a second to cover two or three meters. But during that time, he did something else-
He switched power modes.
With a thought, he swiftly switched from Barbarian Mode to Necromancer Mode.
In an instant, the giant axe in his hand flashed white and vanished. At the same time, the barbarian's formidable physical strength disappeared, and a sinister white aura of death quickly spread over him like river mist.
At the same time, he swiftly activated a necromancer skill.
Corpse Explosion!!!
Streams of barely visible white death energy shot from Sun Fei's hand, passing through the gaps in the fine iron tower shields like lightning and entering the corpses he had just kicked behind the formation.
Explode, explode, explode, explode, explode, explode, explode, explode, explode, explode-!
As he chanted wildly in his mind, a furious series of explosions suddenly erupted behind the three-meter-tall tower shield formation, which stood in the path of his charge like a steel wall. Screams rang out everywhere, and blood sprayed like rain.
The Corpse Explosion skill had activated without a sound.
The black-clad soldiers waiting in formation behind the tower shields had scorned Sun Fei for throwing corpses at them. What kind of soldiers would they be if a few corpses threw them into confusion? But they had never dreamed that the corpses thrown over would suddenly explode without warning, or that the explosions would be so violent. A dense spray of shredded flesh and blood pierced straight through their soft magical beast-hide armor, while flying bone fragments tore through iron armor as easily as heavy armor-piercing arrows...
Caught completely off guard, the black-clad soldiers suffered heavy casualties.
More than twenty black-clad soldiers died instantly without even having time to grunt. Quite a few other unfortunate men had their arms or legs blown off but did not die immediately, instead rolling on the ground and howling in agony. Several even unluckier fellows had been unhurt, only to be pushed off the bridge by their comrades in the chaos. Screaming, they plunged into the roaring, surging Zuli River, surfaced a few times in its rushing waters, and were swallowed up, vanishing from sight...
Today's third update. I'm posting extra chapters, so please add this to your favorites and send red tickets.
If the red tickets pass two thousand tomorrow, I'll keep the extra chapters coming. Give me some motivation, brothers.