176: Chapter 176 Cave Bat Shadow

Inside the grotto, only the dull sound of the astral winds outside crashing against the windbreak rock remained.

Lin Ye raised his hand and pressed his palm down toward Zhao Mengmeng in the darkness.

Zhao Mengmeng slowly pressed her crossbow tight against her breastplate, preventing the bow's body from scraping against the stone wall.

The ceiling of the cave was covered in Blind Wind Bats hanging from the rock walls.

Their eye sockets were smooth, and their huge eardrums still vibrated slightly as their membranous wings folded.

Lin Ye half-opened his Left Eye.

In his True Vision, the cave ceiling was covered in deep red clusters of light.

The grotto was extremely shallow, leaving absolutely no room to maneuver.

Sweeping his gaze across the stone wall, he spotted a hollow on the right.

It was just deep enough to accommodate two people curling up inside.

Lin Ye looked toward the cave entrance.

Along the edge of the massive windbreak rock wedged into the right side of the entrance, there was a dark green crack.

Lin Ye closed his Left Eye.

Bursts of sharp pain shot through his optic nerve.

He pointed two fingers at his own eyes, then toward the hollow to their front-right.

Zhao Mengmeng nodded slowly.

The two of them moved along the cave wall.

Their combat boots stepped on the stone dust, making an extremely faint scraping sound.

On the ceiling, the eardrums of several wind bats twitched, and their membranous wings partially spread.

Lin Ye stopped.

Zhao Mengmeng froze in place.

A moment later, the wind bats folded their wings back in.

The bullet comments in the Great Xia Live Stream scrolled extremely slowly.

[I've already started holding my breath too.]

[With all these things hanging right overhead, my trypophobia is acting up.]

[The fire went out right after it lit up; Brother Eye must have realized they hunt by sound.]

The Overseas Livestream was uncharacteristically quiet.

No one was posting bullet comments.

They just stared at the screen, waiting for the Great Xia contestants to make a mistake.

The grotto floor was littered with weathered, fragmented bones.

The small bone tubes were hollow and fragile.

Lin Ye used the tip of his horizontal saber to slowly push aside the bone fragments in front of him.

Zhao Mengmeng followed closely behind, her shoulder brushing against the stone wall, stepping exactly into Lin Ye's footprints.

Seven steps left to the hollow.

Six steps.

Five steps.

The howling of the wind outside intensified.

A layer of stone was sliced off the windbreak rock by the wind blades outside, sending gravel rolling into the cave.

Clatter.

Nearly thirty wind bats on the ceiling raised their heads in unison.

Their membranous wings snapped open.

One wind bat released its grip, hanging upside down with half its body dangling.

Its eardrums were aimed directly in their direction.

Zhao Mengmeng held her crossbow tightly pressed against her side.

Her finger tightened around the trigger.

The wind bat listened for a few seconds before crawling back up to the ceiling.

The two continued to move forward.

Three steps.

Two steps.

Just as Lin Ye's palm touched the edge of the hollow.

A tiny snap came from beneath Zhao Mengmeng's boot.

Crack.

A hollow broken bone buried under the gray sand cracked under her weight.

Over a hundred Blind Wind Bats spread their wings at the same time.

High-frequency screeches pierced through the grotto.

Zhao Mengmeng raised her crossbow level.

"We're exposed!"

Swarms of dark shadows plunged from the ceiling.

The Blind Wind Bats had massive wingspans, and they dived down following the source of the sound.

Lin Ye grabbed the collar plate at the back of Zhao Mengmeng's neck and threw her forcefully into the deep hollow.

Zhao Mengmeng rolled with the momentum into the blind spot of the stone crevice.

Lin Ye squeezed in sideways right after her.

The first wave of wind bats grazed past the outer edge of the hollow, their sharp claws scraping showers of sparks off the stone wall.

Zhao Mengmeng raised her crossbow.

Lin Ye pressed down on the body of her bow with one hand.

"Wait for the wind."

"They're coming in!"

"Then we'll let the wind in."

Zhao Mengmeng immediately looked toward the cave entrance.

The massive windbreak rock was bearing the brunt of the violent wind pressure outside.

Lin Ye opened his Left Eye to its limit.

The dark green load-bearing crack at the lower end of the windbreak rock was particularly striking in the red glow of his vision.

He raised his right arm.

The high-frequency gears of the Dark Weaver whirred with static noise.

The traction crystal core grew dim and burning hot.

Zhao Mengmeng grabbed his tactical belt.

"Don't pull yourself out!"

"Then I'll pull it to pieces."

Force fire.

Chhh!

The secondary Nano-wire shot through the swarm of wind bats, latching tightly onto the crack at the bottom of the windbreak rock.

A wind bat crashed into the taut wire, its membranous wing sliced open into a long, bloody gash.

Its shrill cry drew even more wind bats to pounce toward Lin Ye's right arm.

The muscles in Lin Ye's entire right arm bulged as he pressed his back hard against the stone wall.

He maxed out the retrieval engine.

The windbreak rock did not shatter.

This massive rock had been weathered for years and was wedged extremely tightly.

The front row of wind bats was already right in their faces.

Zhao Mengmeng gripped the front end of her crossbow with a backhand, smashing its heavy buttstock down onto the head of the first wind bat.

Bang!

The wind bat's neck snapped.

A second one bit straight toward Lin Ye's shoulder armor.

Zhao Mengmeng dug out a bronze arrowhead with her left hand and stabbed it directly into its gaping maw.

Foul-smelling black blood sprayed across half her face.

"Keep screeching!"

Lin Ye didn't look back.

He forced the hilt of his horizontal saber into a crevice in the hollow.

Hooking his left arm around the hilt for leverage, he pulled back with all his might with his right arm.

The crack in the windbreak rock was forced wider.

Crack!

The load-bearing crack ruptured.

Large chunks of stone peeled off from the cave entrance.

An external wind blade sliced in through the gap, cutting the two blocking wind bats in half mid-air.

A rain of blood splattered.

But the main rock body still did not collapse.

Over a dozen wind bats, stimulated by the scent of blood, squeezed frantically toward the blind spot of the hollow.

Zhao Mengmeng knelt to block the entrance.

Her crossbow and pure copper arrowheads smashed down one after another.

A wind bat's sharp claw hooked onto her shoulder armor, tearing through her windproof animal hide.

She raised her knee to knock the wind bat over, driving her arrowhead straight through its eardrum.

"They're squeezing in!"

The five fingers of Lin Ye's right hand tightly gripped the base shell of his bracer.

A distorted metallic screech echoed from the main axle of the Dark Weaver.

The light of the traction crystal core was completely drained.

The Nano-wire sliced deep into the rock.

The green crack ruptured on the spot.

Boom!

The massive windbreak rock shattered into pieces.

The violent wind pressure that had been building up outside for so long finally found an outlet.

wind blades howled as they poured backward into the grotto.

The leading swarm of wind bats disintegrated on the spot.

Membranous wings, bone spurs, and internal organs were reduced to debris within the wind blades.

The second wave of wind bats couldn't turn around in time and was swept backward by the gale, slamming into the rock walls.

Unable to fold their massive wingspans, they were plastered directly against the rock walls by the howling wind.

Flesh and blood flew everywhere in the front half of the grotto.

The Great Xia Live Stream was filled with a screen full of exclamation marks.

[Tear down the wall to unleash a natural disaster! This is what you call killing with a borrowed knife!]

[The Wind: Slicing rocks earlier, slicing bats now—very experienced in this line of work.]

[Without wasting a single arrow, he wiped out both the wall and the monsters together!]

Only a few exasperated bullet comments remained in the Overseas Livestream.

[What is this? He just got lucky using the environment!]

[Being able to survive is a skill. If you don't get it, shut up.]

Inside the hollow.

The two of them were pressed tightly into the depths of the stone crevice by the terrifying wind pressure.

Zhao Mengmeng's animal hide mask was blown furiously against her cheeks.

She held her crossbow horizontally to block the severed wings and mangled corpses swept in by the wind.

A wind bat that had lost half its wing was flung onto the outer edge of the hollow, struggling to crawl inside.

Lin Ye drew his saber with a backhand.

The blade sliced diagonally, cleanly severing the wind bat's neck bone.

In an instant, the corpse was sucked backward and swept into the storm.

Under the howling of the gale, the screeches rapidly faded.

Having lost their bearings, the wind bats flapped their wings wildly, crashing into the wind blades one after another.

The black blood splattered on the cave walls was blown directly into a bloody mist by the strong winds.

Zhao Mengmeng gasped for breath, pressed against the stone wall.

"Not even leaving a whole corpse..."

Lin Ye didn't reply.

He was observing the frequency of the wind blades pouring into the cave entrance.

After losing the windbreak rock, the airflow was no longer stable.

However, the wind blades and the wind gaps still alternated in a pattern of three breaths and one breath.

The wind pressure began to ease.

The wind bats were nearly all dead.

Lin Ye half-opened his Left Eye, observing the trajectory of the red airflow lines contracting inward.

"Get ready."

He held up three fingers and pressed them down one by one.

The wind gap reappeared.

"Go."

The two of them scrambled out of the hollow.

The ground was covered in shattered remains.

Mangled wings had been sliced into countless segments by the wind, and foul black blood coated the rocky ground.

Zhao Mengmeng stepped on it, her boot soles making a sticky, squelching sound.

Lin Ye walked forward, stepping over the chunks of corpses.

His Left Eye scanned the red and green feedback on the ground.

Soon, he spotted a few pieces of translucent cartilage glowing with a faint green light.

[blind wind bat ear bone]

He picked out three pieces with the fewest gray spots and stuffed them directly into his side pocket.

"What are you picking those things up for?"

"This kind of auditory structure is suitable for making warning mechanisms."

The two waded through the piled-up corpse fragments and walked toward the weathered gap at the deepest part of the grotto.

It led to a suspended area deeper in the canyon.

Outside the gap, the wind howled incessantly.

Lin Ye stood just inside the exit.

He opened his Left Eye.

In an instant, sheets of intersecting red light flooded into his vision.

There were no stalagmites ahead to step on.

No iron chains to latch onto.

There was only a suspended rock ridge that had been shaved extremely thin by billions of years of astral winds.

Its widest part was no more than half a foot, and its narrowest was just a thin line.

On both sides lay wind abysses that swallowed everything.

And in the air above that rock ridge, countless stray rocks were frantically colliding and shattering in the wild wind.

Lin Ye closed his Left Eye.

Zhao Mengmeng looked in the direction he was staring.

"Don't tell me this is the second half of the path."

Lin Ye rested the tip of his saber on the ground.

"This is called a more hopeless road condition."