"Don't, don't come over here, gah!"
A pale monster grew infinitely larger in the eyes of a family member. He felt his lower body begin to melt, merging with the monster; his skin peeled away entirely, revealing bright red flesh.
A companion beside him was so terrified he couldn't stand straight. He saw a once-familiar face appear on the monster's slick white chest, a bizarre smile on its deathly pale face as dense clusters of arms reached out toward him:
"Join us..."
"Join us!"
The monster's chest split open into a bloody maw, swallowing his entire head. His headless corpse was dragged along as the monster passed over him, also becoming a part of the Siren King. The Siren King's massive body crawled forward, dragged by a pair of sickly slender arms. The limbs and faces of countless people surged on the surface of its pale, slick skin, leaving a trail of wailing wherever it went.
Angelina and Xu Xiaoyou watched this scene from the second floor. The Siren King was strengthening itself through this method of feeding. Ten minutes ago, it was nearly ten meters long, but now its hunched back was almost touching the ceiling of the double-height atrium. Its pale, greasy body almost filled the entire banquet hall like a solid mountain of flesh.
The Siren King grabbed a fleeing passerby and lifted him, sending the man into its bloody maw amidst eyes filled with infinite horror. With a few crunches, the man was chewed until only bone fragments remained.
Several children, under the cover of a maid, ran toward the fireplace. Above the fireplace was a square cabinet space large enough to hold the children. The Siren King spotted them and crawled rapidly in their direction. Bricks and stones shattered and flew as it passed; banquet tables were crushed into sawdust, and jewel lamps were squeezed until they burst into glass shards, sparks falling in a series of crackles.
"Hide well, hide well."
Before the maid could climb up, her chest was pierced by the Siren King's slender, sharp claws and she was dragged backward.
The children tightly covered their mouths, their small bodies curled up on the shelf, not daring to make a sound. After a few tooth-aching sounds of bones being chewed came from outside, everything went silent. One of the younger children breathed a sigh of relief, but when he opened his eyes, the maid's blood-soaked face appeared before him, her hair disheveled and her eyes wide in death.
"Ah!" The children above the fireplace screamed.
The maid was long dead, her severed neck now attached to a slender arm. The Siren King had found the hiding children. Its mountain-like body crashed directly toward the fireplace, causing the entire manor to tremble violently, on the verge of collapse.
At that moment, a gunshot caught the monster's attention. A bullet sank into its body. It turned its head in a daze and saw the blonde girl behind the second-floor railing. Countless faces on its body opened their mouths, letting out a piercing roar.
The monster's slender arms reached up from below, smashing the railing to pieces. The rose rifle in Xu Xiaoyou's hand spat out blue smoke, its fine golden patterns lighting up as dragon's breath rounds were chambered.
After merging multiple skill cards, the power of the dragon's breath rounds multiplied exponentially. A fan-shaped spray of fire erupted, instantly engulfing the monster's entire arm, yet it failed to hinder the monster's offensive in the slightest. Xu Xiaoyou saw the slender arm tear through the curtain of fire, smashing down toward her head!
She rolled to avoid the monster's sweep, stepped onto the monster's arm, and leaped upward. After landing steadily, she sprinted forward. That long arm rampaged through the corridor behind her, and Angelina's reminder reached her ears: "Watch your front."
Xu Xiaoyou snapped back to her senses just as another long arm swept toward her. She instinctively raised her long whip to block, but the segment of the arm weirdly passed through the whip, sweeping into her without any resistance and sending her flying dozens of meters away.
She managed to stabilize herself in the air with difficulty. The moment she landed, the Siren King's long arms surged toward her from both ends of the corridor, thrusting at her as she nimbly leaped into the air.
Xu Xiaoyou was forced to adjust her posture, swinging her long whip forward with force to cleave open a rift. She happened to fall into the new space. The long arm thrusting after her was cleanly sliced in half the moment the rift closed, and the Siren King's roar of contained fury echoed from a distance.
It seemed she had managed to hurt it?
Before Xu Xiaoyou could relax even slightly, the long arm that had fallen to the ground wriggled twice as if granted life, then thrust through the air toward her!
Just then, Angelina appeared by her side, grabbed her back collar, and threw her into the distance. Simultaneously, countless long arms surged from all directions, instantly occupying her previous position along with Angelina's silhouette.
"Anya!" Xu Xiaoyou barked.
"Stop dazing out." Angelina's slightly weak voice sounded in her ear.
In the blink of an eye, Angelina was back by her side, her hospital gown shredded and soaked red with blood. Four or five slender arms were dragged behind her; the tips of these arms had turned into bloody maws, their sharp teeth biting into the girl's back, shoulders, waist, and abdomen. Xu Xiaoyou swung her whip at the arms biting Angelina, but the sharp bone spurs of the whip sank into the bizarre arms just as before, without any feeling of touching a solid object—it was like hitting a mass of light cotton.
This feeling wasn't because the opponent was using some ability similar to her 【Attack Deflection】 to nullify the strike, but rather that her attacks had never truly landed on the Siren King from the start.
Angelina waved her hand and said:
"Don't waste your effort. I told you, other than Chihong, no one can deal with this guy," Angelina said. "It is the manifestation of a miracle, a projection from above the garden. Your attacks can't take effect on the Siren King's body because you can't touch its essence at all. This monster's twisted form is only what our eyes see; no one knows what it actually looks like."
"You also said you'd leave me behind if something really happened." Xu Xiaoyou glanced at the wounds on Angelina's body.
Angelina grunted but didn't retort.
So that was it. Because Chihong was a grade 5 standard-bearer, she could resonate her consciousness with the "garden," which was why she could contend with the Siren King.
This was a bit like the concept of higher-dimensional beings in the science fiction novels she used to read. They resided in a higher dimension, and what three-dimensional beings saw was merely their three-dimensional projection. They themselves didn't actually exist in three-dimensional space, and human cognitive thinking couldn't understand the true nature of such creatures. Even if you killed the projection, another higher-dimensional being with the same face would appear a few seconds later to greet you.
"I have a way to hit the Siren King's true body in the 'garden'," Xu Xiaoyou said. The monster's roar came from a distance as the Siren King charged frantically toward them.
Angelina raised an eyebrow, while Xu Xiaoyou materialized 【Death's Boundary】. The guaranteed hit effect granted by this art grade skill card, combined with powerful skill cards, gave her the confidence to heavily wound that Siren King in one strike.
【Skill Card: Death's Boundary】
【Quality: art (Gold)】
【Effect: When activated, use in conjunction with the mimicry 'hundred-faced die' to roll. When the roll is greater than 50, the effect is forced to activate regardless of priority, launching an 'absolute hit' attack based on the value of the roll. When the roll is less than 50, the card's durability is permanently reduced by 1, and the user is granted the 'Death's Boundary' effect. Remaining Durability: 3】
"Watch closely, Anya."
The Siren King shrieked as it rushed in front of the two. A confident smile played on Xu Xiaoyou's lips as she gripped her long whip, her windbreaker fluttering in the gale as she calmly rolled the die in the face of danger.
"We'll win."
Angelina looked expressionlessly at the bronze-colored die spinning wildly on the ground, finally stopping at a number—49.
Xu Xiaoyou was whipped away by the Siren King like a spinning top.
Rate on N.U.
