"Roar!" The muscular monster slammed its massive axe into the ground, sending a web of jagged cracks spreading toward the dark-red-haired girl not far away.
Akabane leaped lightly, like a dragonfly skimming the water, her toes dabbing onto the back of the axe as she sprinted upward, her twin daggers flashing in two quick upward slashes. Blood erupted from the monster's neck, a spray of crimson scattering across the girl's field of vision.
"HP -184. You have dealt a slashing wound to the 'executioner'. This damage has triggered the passive skill 'Throat Cut', adding a bleeding effect!"
This wasn't the end. Akabane leaned forward slightly and vaulted into the air, sharp blades springing from the tips of her boots as she executed a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree spin. She traced a half-moon arc in the air with movements as graceful as a gymnast's, dancing with death.
"HP -210. You have dealt a slashing wound to the 'executioner'. This damage has triggered the passive skill 'Crippling Strike', applying slow, silence, and weakness effects!"
In the blink of an eye, cross-shaped bloodstains exploded across the monster's chest and neck simultaneously. The executioner roared in a frenzy, wildly swinging its heavy axe in a horizontal sweep!
Beneath the falling rain of blood, Akabane's dance remained fluid as she leaned her body back. The rusted wind of bloody energy whistled past, a strand of her hair snapping in two against the axe's edge. The girl savored the killing intent that brushed past her vital points, a confident smile spreading across her face.
She backflipped several times to land beside Xu Xiaoyou. Emulating a gymnast who had just completed a performance, Akabane spread her arms wide and looked at Xu Xiaoyou with a smug expression.
Realizing that Xu Xiaoyou's attention hadn't been on her at all, Akabane's face fell, and a messy tangle of lines appeared over her head as an emote. She took a step back to dodge a descending heavy axe, hooked her hands behind her back, and began humming a nursery rhyme as she nimbly walked along the back of the axe.
"Sigh," Xu Xiaoyou let out a soft sigh.
Akabane sat on the shoulder of the frenzied executioner, her long, slender legs dangling. "What's wrong? Why the long face?"
"No, it's nothing," Xu Xiaoyou shook her head. "Careful, the executioner is berserk now. Don't play yourself into a corner."
"What's the rush?"
Akabane's legs locked around the executioner's neck, maintaining perfect balance no matter how much the beast thrashed its body. At the most thrilling moment, the back of her head nearly scraped the ground, her dark-red hair flaring out like a camellia in full bloom.
"The time in the Tower of Eternity isn't enough for us to climb another floor anyway."
As Akabane spoke, she suddenly stood up and hugged the executioner's head, her waist bending with unimaginable flexibility. Her dark-red pupils seemed to want to engrave the executioner's hateful face within them as she broke into a grin.
"Let me have a bit more fun!"
She slammed the two daggers she held high into the executioner's eye sockets, gripping the handles with both hands to steer the rampaging bull as it charged wildly about.
"Roar—"
Xu Xiaoyou turned away, pressing a hand to her forehead and shaking her head as the girl's joyful laughter echoed from behind her.
After entering Oasis, this little family head had completely unleashed her true nature. She seemed to thoroughly enjoy the sensation of licking blood off a blade, often deliberately putting herself in danger during combat for that very reason, even though the penalty for death was a forced logout from Oasis and a drop in level.
They were currently in the Tower of Eternity, a permanent challenge map for every season in Oasis, commonly known as 'climbing the tower'.
Like many daily tower-climbing modes in games, there were three challenge attempts per day. Rewards were issued upon passing a certain number of floors, including honor points, season points, items, and currencies for different districts.
The monsters within the tower were endless, and every floor was different. It was said that almost every entity recorded in human information databases had been recreated one-to-one inside this tower, ranging from common rabbit-men, fox-men, and pig-men to world-class and even apocalypse-class urban legends, even touching upon the 'mysterious' domain of the distant heavens.
The Tower of Eternity was located at the very center of the Oasis continent, and its prototype was rumored to be the Light-Chaser Tower, the headquarters of the Fixer Association. Looking up from below, the tower pierced into the clouds, its top invisible to the naked eye.
In fact, this tower truly had no top.
At least so far, no player had ever reached the summit of the Tower of Eternity. The highest record ever set was by Queen's Arms at 3604 floors. It was said that the monsters they faced then were so overwhelmingly powerful that Queen's Arms never attempted to challenge the higher floors again.
The guild with the highest floor count this season was Silent Sequence, reaching floor 1150 before being stuck at the 'Weeping Starry Singer'. It was said that in just one encounter, the entire vanguard team of Silent Sequence was crushed into blood mist by an irresistible pressure.
"Yuzu..."
A faint voice drifted over on the wind. Xu Xiaoyou turned her head in confusion, her mouth twitching slightly at the sight.
Akabane had been smashed into a wall at some point, a giant axe embedded in her abdomen, and her health bar was nearly empty.
"Haha... That hurts..."
"I think I messed up..."
Xu Xiaoyou felt helpless. "I told you to be careful not to play yourself into a corner."
Using the Hand of Silence, she emptied the executioner's health bar. The final clear record stopped at floor 113.
Upon leaving the Tower of Eternity and teleporting back to Oasis City, magnificent buildings rose up from the ground all around them.
"That really hurt." Akabane winced and clutched her rear, feeling a lingering fear as she recalled the sensation of nearing death.
"Fortunately, a player's status is reset after a challenge ends; otherwise, I would've been forced to log out," Akabane thought to herself.
A prompt box popped up in front of Xu Xiaoyou. She had obtained a large amount of season points and Federal Shields, the currency of the New Federation, one of the major powers in the Oasis game lore.
However, those were minor details. More importantly, her personal honor had reached level five, meaning she could finally go to the guild hall to create a guild!
At the normal rate of obtaining honor points, creating a guild before the league started would have been nearly impossible. This was largely thanks to Anya.
This whole thing started when she was intensely searching for her own name on the world forums and learned that players who continuously killed others in Oasis would earn the favor of the Sin Jury, allowing them to plunder honor points from others.
As long as one killed other players in the wilderness until they reached a 'wanted' status—commonly known as a 'red name'—they could plunder items and honor points from their victims. Honor points were shared across the entire squad.
This was why she had used the word 'refined' to describe Angelina's entry into the red name state.
A red-named player's location would be made public on the map. Before the red name was cleared, they were prohibited from teleporting, prohibited from returning to major cities, and viewed as hostile by all friendly NPCs. Anyone who killed them could claim bounties and honor points from the Order Court.
She didn't believe anyone on a grade 1 map had the capability to kill Angelina.
Three days ago, she had endured the most agonizing night of her life as that crazy woman, Deep Blue Tide, wandered through Asgard for nearly the entire night. Fortunately, she had gambled and won; the other woman didn't suspect the Dawn Society and chose to leave.
At the same time, Deep Blue Tide had refreshed her understanding of luminous prism grade fixers, forcing her to re-evaluate the phrase 'possessing the ability to destroy a hive city single-handedly'.
That was a Fenrir titan, a war machine that Universal Heavy Industries took great pride in, equipped with autocannons of the same specification as the point-defense cannons on aerospace carriers.
Any single Fenrir titan from the Northern Bank possessed enough frontal firepower to turn any grade 4 fixer or below into mincemeat.
Even with a divine endowment active, the steel storm poured out by two rotating autocannons could easily tear them apart. With electromagnetic acceleration up to 3000m/s, fist-thick tungsten armor-piercing rounds from a Wind Demon didn't care about carbon-based lifeforms.
Yet, Deep Blue Tide had not only destroyed all of Northern Bank's security forces head-on, but she had even caused Asgard's anti-air system to mistakenly believe the city was about to suffer a saturated destructive strike from ballistic missiles, triggering an evacuation alarm for all citizens.
The news had caused a sensation across the world overnight. The negative economic impact on Northern Heavy Industries and the entire Universal was too extensive to list.
But she had also gained a blessing in disguise. Thinking of this, the corners of Xu Xiaoyou's mouth curled up involuntarily.
She had used this incident to earn a massive favor from Anya. She still vividly remembered the other girl's unwilling, teeth-gritting look of resignation when she woke up.
Anya eventually agreed to play in this season's league with her, serving as the team's attacker.
Angelina was currently still in a heavily injured state, her physical body in reality unable to heal, so she could only move within Oasis.
Unfortunately, the girl was still a bit repulsed by her and unwilling to act together, preferring to be a lone wolf.
Xu Xiaoyou could hardly hold back her laughter.
Anya was still too naive.
She had just pretended to mention it casually, saying, "You must never kill other players; that would give me a bad reputation."
After hearing that, Angelina had wiped Peach Blossom Village on the 12th server clean that very day, sparing no one except NPCs, which caused quite a stir on the forums. The news of the Abyssal White Flower entering Oasis spread everywhere, and players began calling her the 'Pale Witherer'.
Without Anya carrying the heavy load, the matter of the honor rank would surely have been quite troublesome, right?
Her train of thought came to a halt. Xu Xiaoyou looked up to see the Oasis City guild building standing right before her.
Without another thought, she stepped inside.
Rate on N.U.
