105: Chapter 105 Giant Pale Seed

Lin Ye stood behind the crack in the clock face.

The eyelid of his left eye twitched open slightly, then quickly snapped shut.

At the edge of his vision, blinding red outlines crowded the streets and underground crevices.

Medium Pale-Types shuttled between the ruined buildings, trailing intermittent red lines.

In the deeper shadows of the buildings, several crimson outlines, massive to the point of deformity, lay coiled.

They were moving slowly.

Every time they encroached on more space, the densely packed small red dots around them were forcibly dispersed.

Zhao Mengmeng lay prone behind the other side of the clock face, observing the area below with her crossbow.

"Brother Lin, the numbers down there aren't right."

"Mm."

"How much longer can our Clock Tower hold out?"

"Depends on when they decide to come up."

Zhao Mengmeng buried her face into her beast-skin collar, her hand tightening around the crossbow.

Lin Ye said nothing more.

In the streets below, the Red Tide was advancing toward the center of the ruins.

Blood-colored Vines poured in simultaneously from fractured road surfaces, collapsed sewers, and abandoned shops.

After devouring a large amount of flesh and blood, the vanguard of the vines had grown to the thickness of an adult's thigh.

Their speed of advancement did not decrease; it only increased.

Meanwhile, the Pale Species showed no intention of retreating.

Countless grayish-white figures surged from street corners and ground fissures, crashing directly into the Red Tide.

Grayish-white teeth gnawed through the vine bodies.

Bony claws tore through their skins.

Mangled remains and dark red sap filled the streets, turning them into a quagmire.

The bullet chat in the Great Xia Live Stream was refreshing so fast it was dizzying.

[This place isn't ruins anymore; it's a meat grinder.]

[There are too many Pale Species. As soon as one batch is killed, another pops up.]

[The more the vines eat, the stronger they get. This is definitely a death loop!]

[Brother Eye, don't stay there! The Clock Tower looks tall, but if the ground underneath is hollowed out, it'll collapse just the same!]

The overseas livestreams, however, fell into an eerie silence.

The viewers who had just been mocking Lin Ye for running into a dead end all shut their mouths.

To the southeast of the Clock Tower, the sound of rolling gravel suddenly came from the outer wall of a dilapidated hotel.

Zhao Mengmeng immediately turned her crossbow.

Several Challengers from other countries were fleeing in from the periphery of the ruins, not even daring to look back.

Just as they rushed into the collapsed staircase on the hotel's second floor, several Small Pale Ones were attracted by the noise and scrambled up the outer wall using both hands and feet.

Zhao Mengmeng lowered her sights.

"Should I clear out the nearby landing spots first?"

Before Lin Ye could answer, she added another sentence.

"I'm afraid they'll run around blindly and bring the monsters over."

"Don't clear them."

Lin Ye's gaze moved past the crossbow.

"Keep them?"

"They can run, they can scream, and they can make mistakes."

Zhao Mengmeng reacted extremely quickly.

"Mobile noise sources?"

"Mm."

Lin Ye looked toward the hotel. "Just don't let them get close to the Clock Tower."

Zhao Mengmeng leveled her crossbow again, her voice turning cold.

"Understood. I'll make some noise to force them back. Whoever runs this way, I'll shoot them in the leg."

As they spoke, three more Challengers rushed into an office building to the north.

The man in the lead had a gaping, curled-back wound on his shoulder slashed open by a Blood Vine.

Another person's backpack was completely torn open, with only a few strips of tree bark tied around their waist.

No fire, no supplies to keep warm.

The three of them frantically climbed higher along a broken fire escape.

To the west.

A contestant from France tried to flee toward the rooftop of the shopping mall opposite by using a rusted steel beam that spanned across the block.

The wind and snow made the steel beam extremely slippery.

The building structure vibrated violently under the impact of the collisions at the base.

He had just taken two steps when his foot slipped heavily.

His hands tried to claw at the adjacent cement wall panel.

"Crack!"

The wall panel collapsed along with half a window frame.

His body instantly plunged into the empty air.

Carrying large chunks of cement debris, he fell straight from the seventh floor into the entrance of the underground garage below.

Boom!

A massive sound exploded within the city block.

The cement slab smashed through the garage roof, and the air blast spat snow, dust, and shattered glass out of the tunnel entrance.

The Pale Species wandering toward the Clock Tower stopped in their tracks.

In the next second, all the monsters turned in unison toward the west.

The Pale Species across half the block abandoned their original targets and pounced toward the crash site like mad.

Zhao Mengmeng's finger rested on the trigger.

"That guy died with quite a bang."

The Great Xia Live Stream was in a complete uproar.

[French bro: Using his life to provide tactical cover for the Great Xia contestant!]

[The perfect mobile noise source.]

[That noise cleared out the monsters from half the street!]

[Stop laughing, something even bigger is coming out below!]

A muffled, thunderous vibration echoed from deep within the ruins.

The mechanical gears scattered on the floor of the Clock Tower jumped in response.

Zhao Mengmeng pressed closer to the crack in the clock face.

The ground near the garage to the west was rapidly bulging upward.

Frozen soil and cement were forcibly torn apart by a massive force from below.

The wall of a three-story low-rise building deformed outward, and then the entire wall was pierced through.

Several grayish-white bone spikes pierced through the soil layer, overturning half of a nearby ruined building.

The tremors coming from underground forced a large number of Small Pale Ones to flee in all directions.

The Red Tide was also attracted by this commotion, sending dozens of thick vines coiling into the garage entrance.

Explosive sounds of vine lashing and chewing noises drifted up from below.

A Medium Pale-Type was ensnared by three thick vines around its shoulders and back, its body being rapidly sucked dry.

Its bone blades severed two of the vine strands at the last moment.

Even more Pale Species pounced, stepping over the corpses of their kind, biting down hard on the severed ends of the thick vines and refusing to let go.

The quagmire of flesh and corpses piled higher and higher at the garage entrance.

The road surface of the western block completely exploded.

A ten-meter-class Giant Pale Species burst out from the ground.

Its entire body was covered in layers upon layers of thick, grayish-white exoskeleton.

The bone spikes on its back were as thick as a forest.

The moment its forelimbs hit the ground, the entire cement road surface collapsed with a roar.

It smashed through the side wall of a ruined building, its shoulder crushing through the load-bearing pillars.

Large chunks of rock smashed densely into the vanguard of the Red Tide.

The ten-meter giant trampled directly into the pile of vines.

A dozen thick vines took the opportunity to coil around its limbs and the gaps between its bone spikes, attempting to burrow beneath its carapace, but they were completely blocked.

The Giant Pale Species suddenly exerted its strength.

A large swath of thick vines was ripped apart by brute force.

Highly corrosive dark red sap sprayed onto its carapace, only producing large plumes of white smoke; it couldn't break through its defense at all.

Its forelimbs smashed down again.

Vines were crushed into a pile of mush.

Its thick bone spikes swept across, plowing a vacuum trench through the crimson sea.

Zhao Mengmeng suppressed her breathing.

"If that thing charges at the Clock Tower, there won't even be scraps left of us."

"That's why we can't stay in the Clock Tower anymore."

"Leave?"

"Leave."

Zhao Mengmeng tightened the packaging of the dried meat and checked the rope buckles on her aluminum pot.

Lin Ye walked to the outer edge of the Clock Tower, his gaze quickly scanning the terrain of the ruins.

The chaotic battle was expanding to the west, leaving a passage clear below the Clock Tower.

There was a ruined building to the southeast.

Its top was connected to a row of slanted stone pillars.

It was closer to the dark Dead Zone at the center of the ruins.

Lin Ye raised his right arm.

A miniature mechanism clicked open.

Just as he was about to fire the Dark Weaver anchor, his movements came to a sudden halt.

In the outer streets.

Behind the main force of the Red Tide, an unimaginably massive Main Vine was slowly crawling into the ruins.

Its body was several times thicker than the vanguard.

Its surface was covered in barbs and bulging, dark red nodules.

As it writhed forward, all the surrounding thin vines instinctively retreated to both sides.

It did not lunge toward the center of the battlefield.

Instead, it followed the edge of the collapsed streets, crushing forward with an irresistible weight.

Lin Ye's left eye snapped open.

The viscous, blinding red light almost scorched his retina.

Extremely high pollution erosion backlashed along the visual connection, forcing the veins at the corner of Lin Ye's eyes to bulge.

At the very instant before he was about to close his eyes.

In the center of the death zone where the red light was most dense.

Within a bulging nodule in the middle of that Main Vine, a speck of golden light suddenly flashed.