103: Chapter 103 Total Annihilation

"Crack!"

The Power Axe sliced directly through the Daemonette's shoulder.

Foul blood sprayed out.

As the battle broke out and the stimulus of sharp pain hit, the other players trapped in the illusion woke up one after another.

When they realized they had just been in heat for a bunch of monsters that looked like seafood platters, everyone simultaneously fell into a state of extreme shame and rage.

"Motherf*cker! You dare mentally pollute me! My innocence is completely ruined!"

Flash pulled up his pants, grabbed his Melta Sword, and charged forward.

Without the dimensional strike of mental control, how could these Daemonettes match The Fourth Calamity in pure physical combat?

"Old Liver, raise your shield and tank the damage in front! Flash, pull aggro from the side! Miracle Walker, snipe their joints!"

Ming Shen skillfully acted as the raid leader,

"Don't get caught by those big pincers! Watch your positioning, kite them!"

The players coordinated with each other, blocking with shields, suppressing with firepower, and slicing with Melta Swords.

After a brief tug-of-war battle of just a few minutes.

These few Daemonettes that had descended from the Warp were ignominiously beaten to death by the players, turning into puddles of foul-smelling pus.

"Pah!" Flash spat at the pus on the ground, his face full of disgust.

Ming Shen glanced at the nobles deep in the hall who had gone completely mad due to the summoning ritual; there wasn't a hint of pity in his eyes.

"Standard procedure: burn it all."

Ming Shen gave the order.

The players immediately threw the numerous cesium fuel drums from their backpacks around the hall.

Several flames leapt up.

Here, high-temperature combustion was the only and most effective physical means of purifying Chaos contamination that this group of players currently possessed.

A raging fire consumed the sixteenth floor, burning all the sin, severed limbs, and desire completely to ash.

In the North City Trading District, at that three-story stone building that had once caused the players so much suffering.

The night outside was dyed red by firelight, and the sound of gunfire echoed through the streets and alleys of Shahe Town.

Yet at the underground entrance of this stone building, it was so deathly silent that it made one's heart race.

ikun True Fan led twenty fully armed elite players, guns at the ready, slowly advancing down the cold concrete steps.

The clamor outside was completely cut off by the heavy blast doors of the basement.

The underground space was so quiet that only the rustle of tactical boots on the concrete floor could be heard.

The passage was unusually spacious.

There were even two parallel light minecart tracks on the ground, clearly an underground logistics passage specially built for transporting goods in bulk.

The beams of the flashlights swept across.

Along both sides of the passage were scattered wood chips from crates, overturned handcarts, and even a few blood-stained white lab coats.

Judging by the messy, overlapping footprints on the ground, the people here had evacuated in a great hurry.

"Maintain formation, watch the blind spots on both sides," ikun whispered, his finger resting on the trigger.

They pushed open the first heavy iron door on the right side of the corridor.

A strong, pungent smell of formalin mixed with industrial preservatives wafted toward them.

Several players walking in front couldn't help but gag.

The flashlight beams illuminated the room.

This wasn't an ordinary warehouse, but a standardized biochemical cold storage room.

Under the cool-toned lights, rows of stainless steel shelves were neatly arranged.

On the shelves sat countless transparent, sterile sealed bags.

Inside the bags were human organs that had already been sliced and categorized.

Kidneys, livers, eyeballs, and even entire sections of specially treated human skin.

They were quietly soaking in pale blue preservative fluid, emitting a chilling industrial aura.

ikun's face was grim as he walked to a desk in the corner.

Scattered on the table were several parchment manifests with ink stamps.

He picked one up.

Although he couldn't understand the complex low gothic on it, he recognized the prominent stamp pattern in the bottom right corner—the Aquila variant emblem of the Coastal City Chamber of Commerce.

"Case closed."

ikun slammed the manifest onto the table, his voice cold.

"This isn't some black market resale at all. This is a large-scale live disassembly processing plant. They treat the low-level poor of Shahe Town as raw materials, break them down into parts, and then crate them up to sell to the high-ranking nobles of Coastal City."

The players behind him felt their scalps tingle with horror.

"No wonder that kid Mudslide got drugged and had his kidneys harvested the very first day he came here to do business," a player cursed through gritted teeth.

ikun stared at the organs soaking in the fluid, his brow furrowed.

"Selling kidneys and hearts for money makes sense. But the problem is, the intel Mudslide sent back said that after he was stripped clean, only his brain was left behind separately."

A deep Flash of doubt crossed ikun's eyes.

"What's the point of keeping a human brain separately? Even if the lords of Coastal City want to swap organs to prolong their lives, they can't swap a brain, can they? They can't really be using human brains as bio-batteries, right?"

With this heavy question, the squad exited the cold storage and continued advancing deeper into the tunnel.

The deeper they went, the subtle shift in the surrounding atmosphere began to occur.

The smooth concrete underfoot turned into rough, slippery rock.

The cool white LED tubes overhead grew fewer, replaced by dim, flickering braziers on both sides of the walls.

The pungent smell of preservatives in the air gradually faded, replaced by a nauseating scent of stale blood mixed with some low-quality incense that began to fill their nostrils.

Strange graffiti began to appear on the walls.

It wasn't painted with ordinary pigments, but smeared directly with blackened blood.

The patterns were chaotic: twisted, multi-angled eyes, spirals pierced by iron nails, and weird runes of overlapping polygons.

Just staring at these symbols for a few seconds caused a physiological, needle-like prickling in the players' optic nerves, with faint static flickering in their vision.

"Boss, something's wrong with this place."

A player scouting ahead swallowed hard and tightened his grip on his gun.

"This style... how did it suddenly shift from a cyberpunk flesh factory to a Cthulhu-esque cult ritual?"

ikun didn't say anything.

He made a gesture, signaling everyone to turn off the tactical flashlights on their firearms.

At the end of the passage ahead, a dim purplish-red light filtered through.

They lightened their steps, hugging the rock wall, and quietly crept to the exit at the end of the passage.

Peering out, the sight before them caused these twenty members of The Fourth Calamity, who considered themselves well-traveled, to gasp in unison.

This was a massive, hollowed-out underground space.

The space was large enough to fit an entire standard football field.

On the level floor of the subterranean palace, a massive and complex array, dozens of meters in diameter, was drawn with a dark red unknown liquid.

At every node of the array sat a circle of pale human skulls.

The most terrifying part was the arrangement around the perimeter of the array.

Thousands of man-sized transparent glass cylinders were densely packed around the cavern.

Inside every glass vat was a fresh, even slightly pulsating, human brain.

Mudslide's missing brain was likely among them.

These brains were riddled with complex metal wires. The wires flickered with faint electrical sparks, interlacing in the air like a spiderweb, eventually all converging on a black stone altar in the very center of the palace.

This wasn't some bio-battery.

This was a wetware supercomputer array, forcibly stacked together using thousands of living human brains!

In the center of the altar stood a withered old man wearing a greyish-white robe, his white beard reaching down to his chest.

The old man held a crystal jar in both hands.

Inside the jar was also a brain.

But that brain was translucent and crystalline throughout, with a faint silver metallic luster flowing over its surface; it clearly didn't belong to an ordinary human.

The old man had his eyes closed, rapidly chanting something.

The sound wasn't syllables of any human language, but a series of ear-piercing, highly penetrating high-frequency noises.

"It's a cultist."

A player whispered, racking his bolt to prepare his aim.

"Wait!" ikun reached out to press down his companion's gun barrel, his mind racing.

The exorbitant taxes of Shahe Town's upper class, the despair and riots of the lower class, the suddenly intensified bloody class conflicts, and the full-scale civil war that had just broken out...

Behind all of this were massive and intense emotional fluctuations: despair, anger, greed, and slaughter.

And now, this old cultist was standing at the subterranean center of the entire town.

Those thousands of brains in the glass vats were like high-powered receiving antennas.

They were greedily absorbing the massive negative emotions erupting from the tens of thousands of people on the surface.

These emotions were converted into physical psychic fluctuations, flowing continuously along the wires to the center of the altar.

"He's performing the final ritual."

ikun felt his scalp tingle and gasped.

"This old lunatic is using the emotional riots of tens of thousands in Shahe Town to provide massive psychic computing power. His goal is to forcibly crack the knowledge inside that metal brain in his hands!"

Case closed.

Whether it was the nobles in the towers indulging in pleasure and constantly exploiting the lower class, or the commoners in the streets fighting for half a mouthful of water.

Everyone was merely fuel for this cultist's massive sacrificial ritual!

This group of heretics hidden in the abyss had manipulated the fate of the entire town just to obtain whatever was inside that so-called holy relic.

It seemed he sensed the killing intent coming from the passage entrance.

The white-bearded old man on the altar stopped his chanting.

He slowly opened his eyes.

They were terrifying eyes with no pupils, only two spheres of cloudy white film.

The old man turned his head, his hollow gaze accurately locking onto the players hidden in the shadows.

There wasn't a hint of surprise on his face, nor any panic at having his secret discovered; instead, he showed a trace of lofty displeasure.

"You have come at a most inopportune time."

The old man's voice didn't travel through the air, but boomed directly within the depths of the twenty players' minds.

The voice carried an indescribable echo, making their heads spin.

"We're exposed! Fire!"

Casting aside all caution, ikun roared and lunged out from behind the rock cover, raising his assault rifle and pulling the trigger hard.

Twenty automatic weapons roared simultaneously.

A dense curtain of metal bullets tore through the air, trailing orange-red lines of fire as they poured toward the old man on the altar like a rainstorm.

However.

A bizarre scene unfolded.

Three meters away from the old man's body, visible translucent ripples suddenly shimmered in the air.

The moment the brass bullets touched those ripples, it was as if they had hit a tough, invisible wall of air.

The bullets lost all kinetic energy, hanging in mid-air before falling limply onto the stone slabs of the altar with a series of clinks and clangs.

This was a psychic shield.

ikun's pupils contracted sharply.

The strength and coverage of this shield were beyond anything the half-baked cultists they'd encountered in Shelter's mines could match!

This old man's psychic level was absurdly high!

"Scatter! Use high-explosive rounds! Get the RPGs ready!" ikun shouted his orders.

But it was too late.

The old man didn't chant, nor did he use any staff or weapon.

He merely gave a disdainful snort and slowly raised a right hand as withered as a twig.

From his cloudy white eyes, two bursts of blinding purple light suddenly erupted.

In an instant.

The air in the subterranean palace seemed to be sucked dry instantly.

A terrifying psychic force that defied all physical logic slammed down like a falling mountain, instantly covering the entire area of the cave entrance.

There were no blinding flashes of fire, no deafening explosions.

Only a pure, all-crushing wave of impact.

ikun didn't even have time to finish the motion of aiming his gun.

He felt as if a high-explosive bomb had been shoved inside his body, and his optic nerves were instantly swallowed by pure purple light.

"Thump."

The twenty members of The Fourth Calamity, lacking any psychic defense, were like machines that had their power suddenly cut.

Their bodies stiffened instantly, black blood flowed from their seven orifices, and then they all slumped onto the cold rock floor in unison.

The entire process took less than two seconds.

Against this group of super-mortal warriors, the powerful psychic cultist demonstrated an indisputable dimensional strike.

One strike, total wipeout.