244: Chapter 244 French Parkour Guy Instantly Gives Him a Kill!

Shen Jue's voice hung in mid-air.

The panoramic view cut onto the screen, instantly crushing the pink bubbles in his mind into dust.

Outside the starting line, two figures split left and right, turning a battle royale into a hundred-meter sprint.

On the left was Marcus from Team USA. This humanoid tyrannosaurus had completely abandoned tactics, relying purely on the violence squeezed from his muscle fibers to plow forward. His feet kicked down, causing the sand to cave in, and the stirred-up yellow soil slammed into the faces of those behind him, effectively burying the second echelon following him.

On the right was Li Li.

He kept the swing of his arms to a minimum, his stride frequency creating afterimages, his entire body gliding just above the ground. The people behind couldn't even catch the dust he kicked up.

"The Hibiscus… has bloomed…"

The cheerful Korean nursery rhyme was cut short for the third time.

The giant mechanical doll's head rotated one hundred and eighty degrees.

Li Li pressed down on his ankles, his forefeet grinding into the yellow soil, coming to a dead stop.

Not even a single hair on his head swayed.

Marcus stopped abruptly on the other side of the field, his pectoral muscles heaving, sweat dripping from his chin onto the soil.

The two were ninety meters from the starting line.

Out of the nine hundred and thirty people on the field, the two of them had turned into two sharp knives, stabbing two massive gaps through the crowd.

Jiang Rumu stopped at the eighty-meter mark.

The main force of the second echelon finally reached her.

The main male competitors from several major nations were all squeezed into this section. Japan's Sato Kenji, South Korea's Park Ji-hoon, and North Korea's Kim Chol happened to be stuck on the same horizontal line.

The distance was too close.

Park Ji-hoon, sporting a Korean-style layered haircut, had rushed too hard earlier, and his hair gel couldn't hold his bangs in place. He stood firm on one leg, glancing to the side.

Kim Chol was dressed in simple sportswear, a Red Star medal pinned to his chest, standing ramrod straight. His breathing rhythm was perfectly controlled, and his entire being exuded a stubborn determination to crush the flashy, capitalist posturing.

On the other side, Sato Kenji assumed a classic sword-fighting stance. He had no sword in his hand, but his two fingers were pressed together, ready at any moment to give the two next to him a lesson in seppuku.

The nursery rhyme played again.

"Run!"

Someone in some corner let out a howl.

All three of them exerted force simultaneously.

Park Ji-hoon grabbed for the inner lane, and just as his soles left the ground, Kim Chol slammed into him with a shoulder check.

Shoulders collided.

Park Ji-hoon was nearly sent flying.

"Shit!" Park Ji-hoon reached back to grab Kim Chol's collar.

Kim Chol didn't retreat a single step and instead locked onto Park Ji-hoon's wrist. "The brilliance of the Juche Idea shall not be tarnished!"

The two rolled into a ball right there on the sand.

Sato Kenji, caught in the middle, had intended to slide past them, but his ribs took a blind elbow strike from Park Ji-hoon. His martial arts fanatic DNA activated, and Sato Kenji countered with a hand strike aimed at the back of Park Ji-hoon's neck.

These top-tier competitors from three nations were performing a street brawl, pulling hair and gouging eyes in front of three billion viewers worldwide.

"The Hibiscus… has bloomed…"

The nursery rhyme stopped again.

The mechanical doll's inorganic eyeballs flashed with red light.

To avoid being judged as moving, all three froze in place.

Park Ji-hoon's collar was gripped by Kim Chol, choking him until he rolled his eyes; Kim Chol's Red Star medal was clutched in Park Ji-hoon's hand, his face flushed red; Sato Kenji's hand strike was paused three centimeters above Park Ji-hoon's carotid artery, balancing on one leg and swaying precariously.

[They're fighting! They're fighting! A civil war in the East Asian monster house!]

[Park Ji-hoon's hairstyle is ruined, hahahaha! His idol image is shattered into pieces!]

[Kim Chol's physique is too savage, he's dragging two people forward!]

[How long can Sato Kenji hold that one-legged stance? I'll bet fifty cents he falls immediately!]

The live stream chat was going wild.

The panoramic camera pulled back, revealing a gruesome scene across the entire field.

From the starting line to the fifty-meter mark, a row of people lay on the ground.

Nearly two hundred competitors from smaller nations—those who couldn't stop in time or were tripped—had all been targeted by the automatic tranquilizer guns on the cliffs. Some were face-down in the soil, some were stuck in splits, all sleeping sprawled out.

Li Li didn't even glance at the farce behind him.

He lowered his center of gravity, preparing for his fourth start.

"Rumble—"

At the hundred-meter line ahead, ten meters away from him, the yellow soil cracked open.

A barrier two hundred meters long, spanning the entire field, rose from the ground.

It was three meters high. The bottom two meters were a dead green composite material, and the top meter was completely transparent bulletproof glass.

The path forward was blocked.

Li Li didn't slow down, sprinting straight toward the barrier.

At a distance of two meters, he pushed off the ground hard with his right foot, his body soaring into the air.

He stepped onto the green barrier with his left foot for leverage, propelled his body higher, and gripped the top of the transparent glass with both hands.

With strength in his arms, he pulled himself up and vaulted over.

Squatting on the half-meter-wide top edge of the barrier, Li Li glanced down.

Behind the barrier was a ten-meter-long stretch of black mud. The sludge churned, bubbling up.

A swamp.

Past the swamp, in the section from one hundred and ten to one hundred and sixty meters, the ground was covered in spray nozzles.

The nozzles were spraying a pale yellow mist and white dry ice toward the center of the field.

Li Li stopped moving.

"What is it?"

Jiang Rumu had arrived.

She stopped below the barrier and looked up.

"The Hibiscus… has bloomed…"

The nursery rhyme stopped.

The entire field froze.

Li Li squatted on the edge of the glass, remaining silent.

Fifty meters away to the front left, a figure rushed over.

Leon Dupont from the French team.

One of the founders of parkour, possessing extreme speed. He rushed to the barrier, propped himself up on the green section with one hand, performed a side flip, cleared the transparent glass, and landed behind the barrier.

"Perfect." Leon provided his own narration in French while in mid-air.

"Squelch."

His entire body slammed into the black mud.

The sludge instantly swallowed his knees.

Leon froze.

His custom, limited-edition parkour shoes were ruined.

The mechanical doll's head was scanning.

Leon gritted his teeth, forcing himself to stay still.

But the swamp didn't care about the laws of physics.

The sludge continued to sink due to gravity, dragging Leon's body down with it.

The motion-capture cameras locked onto him.

The lethal tranquilizer guns aimed at him.

"Merde!" Leon cursed in French, flailing his hands in the mud.

"Thwip!"

The tranquilizer dart hit his back.

Leon rolled his eyes back, collapsed into the mud, with only his upper body left exposed, and fell fast asleep.

[Holy crap! The French romantic guy got eliminated?!]

[This swamp is alive! You automatically sink if you fall in!]

[The organizers are too devious! Placing the barrier here to block the view—jumping over it means death!]

Li Li withdrew his gaze.

He bent down and reached out to Jiang Rumu.

Jiang Rumu grabbed his hand.

Li Li pulled up with one arm, hoisting the one-hundred-and-ten-jin Jiang Rumu up.

The two squatted side-by-side on the half-meter-wide barrier.

"What is this thing?" Jiang Rumu asked, looking at the mud and yellow mist below.

Li Li turned back.

Thirty meters away.

Lin Shuyin was holding her tablet, standing in place and gasping for air.

"Lin Shuyin!" Li Li called out. "There's a ten-meter swamp ahead! Past the swamp, there's a fifty-meter stretch of spray nozzles spraying yellow water and dry ice! What could this be?"

All the competitors who understood Chinese pricked up their ears.

Lin Shuyin clutched her ribs, her brain racing.

"High-energy solidifying agent!" Lin Shuyin screamed at the top of her lungs, her voice cracking. "Quick-setting material! In the low-temperature environment of the dry ice, it will react with the mud and solidify rapidly! You absolutely cannot touch the mud! If you cross with mud on your legs and hit the spray, you'll be encased in a concrete pillar in twenty seconds! You won't even be able to walk by then!"

Jump over it? The world long jump record is eight point nine five meters, and there's no run-up area here.

Walk across? Covered in sludge, you'd turn into a statue as soon as you entered the spray zone.

No wonder this game has a twenty-minute time limit; the road is full of obstacles!

Li Li brushed the dust off his hands.

He turned his head to look at Jiang Rumu.

"Stand up."

Jiang Rumu complied, standing straight on the half-meter-wide glass.

Li Li squatted down and tapped his shoulder.

"Step on."

Jiang Rumu looked down at Li Li's broad shoulders.

"This glass is only half a meter wide. If I step on your shoulders, I won't be able to keep my balance at all!"

"Stop talking." Li Li grabbed her lower leg with one hand and lifted her up.

Jiang Rumu was forced to lift her foot and step onto Li Li's right shoulder.

Then her left foot followed.

Li Li's stance was as steady as Mount Tai, his extreme physical capabilities fully unleashed, and he didn't budge an inch.

"Do you think this is a circus?" Jiang Rumu, also squatting on his shoulders, swayed unsteadily, her hands clutching Li Li's hair.

Li Li winced in pain but didn't dodge.

"I'm taking you for a ride."

Li Li looked up, past the ten-meter swamp, and locked his eyes onto the metal base of the first row of spray nozzles.

"Time for a leap of faith for two."

"After we get across, don't worry about me—just keep moving forward."