44: Chapter 44 The Tyrant's Wrath

The moment the Tyrant charged over, Lin Yan did not engage.

He stepped back, sidestepped the Tyrant's sweeping bone axe, and then turned sharply, sprinting toward a high-rise building behind him.

The Tyrant's dark red vertical pupils locked onto them. It let out a low roar, causing the surrounding swarm of zombies to become restless.

Its five-meter-tall body took long strides, each step covering three or four meters. The bone axe dragged along the ground, plowing a deep trench and sending rubble spraying to both sides.

Lin Yan rushed into the lobby of the high-rise. The hall was scattered with debris from the collapsed ceiling and broken office furniture; a thick layer of dust covered the floor. He did not stop, charging directly into the stairwell and sprinting up the stairs.

Shen Bing's frost condensed on the stairs, making the steps slippery. The moment the Tyrant stepped onto them, it slipped, its massive body slamming into the stairwell wall and sending concrete chunks clattering to the ground.

"Why lead it up here?" Shen Bing asked, panting.

"There are too many zombies downstairs," Lin Yan said. "Fighting here, there's only one."

The tenth floor, the fifteenth floor, the twentieth floor.

The Tyrant rampaged through the stairwell, shattering several steps with every stride. It swung its bone axe in the narrow space, cleaving fissures into the walls.

Its speed was not slow, but in the winding environment of the stairwell, its size became a disadvantage. Lin Yan and Shen Bing ran faster and faster, leaving the Tyrant several floors behind.

Lin Yan rushed out of the stairwell, pushed open a half-collapsed fire door, and entered a large open space. This had once been an office area in the building; the space of several hundred square meters was as empty as an indoor plaza.

The glass of the floor-to-ceiling windows had long since shattered, leaving only concrete frames. Gray-yellow light leaked in from outside, casting long, thin beams onto the floor.

"Right here." Lin Yan stopped and turned to face the direction of the stairwell.

Shen Bing retreated to a corner, frost condensing into two ice blades in her palms. However, her primary task was not to deal damage, but to seal the stairwell entrance to prevent other zombies from coming up and to keep the Tyrant from leading the battle back downstairs.

The Tyrant crashed out of the stairwell.

The fire door was knocked away entirely, slamming into the opposite wall and shattering into several pieces of scrap metal.

The Tyrant stood in the center of the open space, its five-meter-tall body brushing the ceiling. Its dark red vertical pupils scanned the surroundings before locking onto Lin Yan. It tilted its head, as if confirming why this prey had stopped running.

Then it moved.

The bone axe swept horizontally with a piercing sound of wind resistance. Lin Yan did not retreat; instead, he charged forward to meet the blade. His speed was faster than the Tyrant's—at 350 points, he was significantly faster than the Tyrant's 300.

At the moment the blade arrived, he lowered his body, sliding beneath the axe's path, and slammed his right fist into the side of the Tyrant's knee.

"Bang!"

[Corrosion Effect: 1 stack, Target Dual Defense -20]

The Tyrant's body swayed, its left knee buckling, but it immediately adjusted its center of gravity. Its left arm swept across like an iron pillar. Lin Yan retreated two steps, the Tyrant's arm grazing his chest armor and kicking up a shower of sparks.

The Tyrant's attack speed was not fast; although its movements were ferocious, there was a clear wind-up and recovery time.

The footwork Lin Yan had been repeatedly honed in by Instructor Meng Yuan came in handy here. Every time the Tyrant attacked, he could judge the trajectory half a second in advance, then cut in from the safest angle to throw a punch, retreat, throw another punch, and retreat again.

[Corrosion Effect: 2 stacks]

[Corrosion Effect: 3 stacks]

[Corrosion Effect: 4 stacks]

The Tyrant's HP was slowly dropping. Although its defense was high, Lin Yan's punches were becoming increasingly painful as the Corrosion Effect stacked.

He used Blood Burning Strike once every minute while consuming potions to maintain his HP, maximizing his damage. Each hit could take away over four thousand of the Tyrant's HP.

The Tyrant's axe became increasingly frantic, and the frequency of its slashes increased, but it just couldn't land a hit.

It let out a roar, and dark red sound waves erupted from its mouth—Tyrant's Roar.

Lin Yan did not retreat fast enough and was engulfed by the sound wave. His body felt heavy, and both his attack speed and movement speed decreased.

The Tyrant seized the opportunity to pounce, the bone axe cleaving down toward his head.

Lin Yan dodged to the side. The blade smashed into the ground, blasting a large crater out of the concrete and sending rubble clattering against his Licker armor.

The cooldown for Blood Burning Strike ended, and he landed a punch right in the center of the Tyrant's chest.

The Tyrant's HP dropped below 30%.

Its body suddenly expanded, and beneath its gray-white skin, its muscles bulged as if inflated. Veins bulged, and blood vessels squirmed across the surface of its skin like earthworms. Dark red light seeped from the cracks all over its body, dyeing the entire open space a dark red.

[Tyrants Body Activated]

The Tyrant's speed changed, instantly skyrocketing from 300 to 450. The axe swings were no longer fierce, wide arcs, but blurs. The trajectories of the blade slicing through the air were so numerous that even Lin Yan's dynamic vision couldn't keep up.

The first axe swing—Lin Yan barely dodged it, and the blade grazed his shoulder, cleaving into the concrete pillar behind him. The pillar snapped under the immense force, and half of it crashed to the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust.

The second swing followed immediately. Lin Yan didn't have time to dodge and could only raise his left arm to block it head-on.

"Clang!" A shower of sparks exploded from the Wind Scale Bracers. Lin Yan's body was sent flying, crashing into another pillar. His left arm went numb, and a gash split the web of his hand, beads of blood dripping down his fingers.

The Tyrant gave him no time to catch his breath; the third axe was already coming down.

Lin Yan rolled violently to the right. The blade cleaved into the pillar he had just been leaning against, and it snapped instantly. Half of the concrete plummeted from the twentieth-story height, smashing a large crater into the ground below. The load-bearing structure of the open space began to loosen.

Lin Yan crawled up from the rubble and opened his attribute panel. Agility: 20. Free attribute points: 57. He added twenty points. [Speed: 350 → 630] (40% bonus)

As he rushed out through the hole, the Tyrant was just charging in this direction with its axe raised. Both of their speeds were pushed to the limit; 630 against 450—Lin Yan was faster.

He sidestepped the Tyrant's axe and drove his right fist upward into the Tyrant's jaw. The Tyrant's head snapped back violently, and its entire body stumbled backward three or four steps, its back slamming into a load-bearing pillar and cracking it.

Lin Yan gave it no chance to catch its breath, following up with a second and third punch, each one landing precisely on the Tyrant's chest, abdomen, and ribs.

Lin Yan's speed advantage was too obvious. Like an agile leopard, he moved rapidly around the Tyrant, every punch cutting in from the angle the Tyrant found hardest to defend. No matter how fast the Tyrant swung its axe, it couldn't hit him.

But the Tyrant began to change.

It stopped pursuing Lin Yan. Its dark red vertical pupils shifted away from him, turning toward Shen Bing, who was in the corner using frost to seal the stairwell entrance.

That gray-white face twisted, and it let out a roar. Lin Yan's movements were affected, and then it turned sharply, its five-meter-tall body charging toward Shen Bing.

Lin Yan's pupils constricted sharply.

Shen Bing was putting all her effort into maintaining the ice wall and hadn't noticed the Tyrant turning at all. All her frost was being used to seal the stairwell; she couldn't even condense a complete ice blade in her palms. The Tyrant was less than ten meters away from her, its bone axe already raised high, and the dark red light on the blade was gathering.

"Shen Bing! Move!" Lin Yan shouted, launching himself forward like a projectile.

Shen Bing looked up and saw the Tyrant's twisted face already before her. Her pale face was reflected in its dark red vertical pupils, and the edge of the bone axe rapidly magnified in her eyes.

Her mind went blank, her body frozen in place. She wanted to run, but her legs wouldn't obey.

I'm going to die. That was the only thought in her mind. Am I going to die?

Lin Yan's speed had been pushed to the limit, but due to the influence of the Tyrant's Roar, his speed had dropped significantly in the short term.

Furthermore, he was too far from Shen Bing. He was on the other side of the open space, and the Tyrant had slowly drawn the battlefield closer to Shen Bing during the fight.

It was too late; it was definitely too late.

His fists couldn't reach the Tyrant, and his body couldn't block that axe. What could he possibly do to save her from such a distance?