85: Chapter 85 Total Collapse!

The silver-white sword radiance collided with the dark purple demonic tide in the center of the canyon.

Then.

It shattered.

It was not an evenly matched collision. The ball of silver-white light was swallowed up for the most part the moment it made contact with the abyss torrent, like a matchstick shoved into the nozzle of a high-pressure water gun. Sword Saint Lu Changsheng was sent flying backward by the recoil, his silver-white armor slamming into the canyon wall, causing a spiderweb-like crack to erupt across the beast-bone shoulder guard.

"Cough—!"

A mouthful of blood sprayed onto the inside of his sword-intent mask. The tactical display was stained dark red.

He looked down at his right hand. The web between his thumb and index finger had split open. His five fingers were still gripping the sword hilt, but the bones of the first three fingers had pierced through the skin, poking out white and ghastly from the silver-white armor.

[Beast God Armament · Torso damage rate: 37%. Right arm conduction circuit interrupted. Left leg neural bridge failed.]

The appraisal skill built into the card face reported a string of data in a mechanical voice. The tone was as calm as if it were reading a menu.

Sword Saint Lu Changsheng stood up, bracing himself with his sword. His left leg was no longer responding. He used his left prosthetic limb to grip the hilt, jammed the blade into the ground to use as a crutch, and forcibly pulled himself out of the indentation in the rock wall.

Three years. He had sat in a wheelchair for three years, and the first time he stood up to fight, he ran into a veteran Demon Lord ranked in the top five of the abyss.

Damn it.

"It's not over yet—"

He reactivated the magic circuit of the silver-white armor. Seven golden rings emerged from the sword blade once more, at least half as dim as before. Demon Lord Xuangu didn't even look at him directly. The thirty-meter-tall bone demon merely tilted its vertically split mouth, as if it were watching a child throwing toys at it.

Then it raised one of its appendages.

The movement was not fast. It could even be called slow.

But when the bone giant blade at the end of that appendage fell, it sliced open space itself. Sword intent, golden rings, the defense matrix of the silver-white armor—everything. Like tearing a piece of paper. The giant blade struck the sword Sword Saint Lu Changsheng held horizontally; the blade snapped in the middle, and the remaining force smashed him into the canyon floor.

Boom.

A human-shaped crater. The edges of the crater were covered in dense, radiating cracks. At the bottom of the crater, fragments of the silver-white armor could be vaguely seen.

"Master—!!"

Chu Yin screamed until her throat was raw in front of the holographic screen.

No one answered her.

Because Demon Lord Xuangu in the live broadcast had just done one thing—it unfolded the pair of giant bone wings that had been tucked behind its back. The wingspan exceeded one hundred meters. At the tip of every bone spur, an abyss rune glowed. The runes were shining, and the light tore a pitch-black rift in the air. A space channel.

The next second, Demon Lord Xuangu's massive thirty-meter-tall body vanished directly from above the canyon. The demonic tide pouring out from the twelve abyss rifts followed closely behind, like twelve dark purple rivers pouring simultaneously into that pitch-black rift.

The canyon of the Canglan Strait was empty.

The outpost's alarm was still blaring, but there were no more monsters to fight. Because all the monsters had gone to the same place.

—Above the city.

The holographic projection tower of the main hall was still looping the promotional video for the Beast God Armament. The dynamic display image of the silver-white armor rotated slowly in the sky, its shoulder guards reflecting light, its mask looking handsome. The countdown in the bottom right corner of the screen still displayed the words [Sold Out on Day One].

Then the sky cracked open. Not metaphorically. It was a literal cracking. A pitch-black rift spanning half the city tore open in the sky; the edges of the rift were jagged, and inside was a realm of absolute darkness that human Mental Power could not penetrate.

Demon Lord Xuangu poked half its body out of the rift.

The shadow cast by its thirty-meter-tall body in mid-air covered the entire Convention Center plaza. That eyeless head, with a vertically split mouth occupying half its face, turned slowly, as if it were choosing which building to eat first.

Behind it, two pitch-black shadows slid silently from the edge of the rift. Shadow One. Shadow Two.

The probability-state bodies of the two shadow demons constantly evaporated and reformed under the noon sun, and thirteen asymmetrically arranged pupils emerged on the surface of the black mist.

[The air quality is not bad.] Shadow One's voice vibrated directly inside everyone's brains.

[Human cities are always more comfortable than the abyss. At least there's no sulfur smell.]

[Stop talking nonsense. The target is in the side entrance utility room.]

Shadow Two reached out that backward-bending hand from the black mist, the blade of the dagger shimmering with law patterns that did not belong to any elemental system.

[That Card Creator. One frame.]

Meanwhile. Above the Canglan Strait.

Li Qingyue used the universal balance to hold up a Shield of Truth, taking the combined attack of three Tier 9 monsters head-on. The golden law-light shield was covered in cracks. The old wound at the corner of her lips, caused by the Judgment of the End during the Monthly Exam, split open again, and blood dripped down her chin onto her deep blue robe.

"Qingyue!!" Qi Yuan's Mental Power transmission exploded directly into her sea of consciousness, "The city—Demon Lord Xuangu—three Tier 9 energy signatures!!"

"I know." Li Qingyue's voice was hoarse.

She had sensed it long ago. The moment Demon Lord Xuangu tore through space, the spatial laws on her side experienced a chain reaction of tremors. That rift was too close to the Convention Center—close enough that, given the attack range of Tier 9 monsters, a single move could vaporize the entire plaza.

But she couldn't get back.

The three Tier 9 monsters were pestering her like madmen. She had just forced herself to activate a forbidden spatial technique to repel them for one round, the cost being a piercing wound torn into her chest. Now, spatial jumping was intermittent, and the distance she could cross with each jump was less than one-third of her peak state.

"Armored Mage Emperor Lu Chen is there." Qi Yuan's voice carried a hope he himself didn't believe in.

"Armored Mage Emperor Lu Chen is alone."

"...I know."

"Three Tier 9s."

"I know!!"

Li Qingyue gritted her teeth. On that porcelain doll-like face of a twelve or thirteen-year-old, her crimson pupils were uncontrollably turning toward the direction of the city. She could sense it. The aura of Demon Lord Xuangu. The auras of the two shadow demons. She could sense the aura of Armored Mage Emperor Lu Chen rushing over at full speed from the direction of the Temple. But those three abyss auras were closer to the crowd.

Close enough that it would only take one strike.

She suddenly remembered the words Su Bai said on stage during the Monthly Exam—"The true quality of this card of mine is SSS-rank."

At the time, she thought the kid was full of himself. Now, she hoped the kid's cheat could be even more outrageous.

Unfortunately, he was in the side entrance utility room. Less than five hundred meters away from Demon Lord Xuangu.

—Main hall of the Convention Center. Four billion online viewers.

The images on the holographic screens were completely out of control. The live broadcast camera cut from the Canglan Strait back to the sky above the city, and everyone saw that pitch-black rift spanning the sky. They saw the thirty-meter-tall bone demon. They saw the overwhelming demonic tide pouring out from behind it.

The host's microphone dropped to the ground. No one picked it up.

The barrage comments appeared with a ten-second gap the second the screen switched. It wasn't because the server crashed—it was because viewers all over the world simultaneously lost the ability to type. Then: [Demon Lord Xuangu!!!!] [It opened a space channel!!!!] [Above the city!!!!] [Three Tier 9s!! Three of them!! How many Tier 9s are in the city?! Only one Armored Mage Emperor Lu Chen!!] [My dad is at the Convention Center!!!!] [Run!! Run quickly!!!!] [You can't run!! That's a Tier 9!! A Tier 9 area-of-effect attack—] [Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!!]