Chương 130: Outnumbered

The queen let out a ridiculously angry buzz that vibrated through the clearing as she started gathering power for another attack. Instead of shooting a focused blast this time, she released a widespread wave of void energy that started breaking down everything it managed to touch. The trees around us withered, the leaves crumbled away, and it felt like the air itself was growing thin. I instantly activated Aegis Mark, trusting my barrier to buy me time while I Blink Stepped through all the devastation.

The remaining stage fives decided to press their advantage and started attacking me from a bunch of different angles, while my main focus was stuck on avoiding the queen's power. A stinger ended up scraping across my barrier, draining my energy faster than I expected it to. These things were flying qi vampires, and they were unfortunately good at doing their job.

"Master," Azure's voice came through with this clear note of concern in it, "this prolonged battle is highly inadvisable. The continuous qi drain from their attacks, combined with the energy cost of maintaining multiple runes..."

"I know," I said, ducking under another strike.

"But I need to thin their numbers down before I can properly deal with the queen, their teamwork is making it too difficult to target her." Speaking of those stage fives, they were seriously wearing me down through attrition, and although I could probably outlast them normally, having the queen there made that impossible to do. It was time for me to lure them in. I dropped my leaf barrier, leaving myself looking exposed to them. Like I expected them to, both of the stage fives moved in to attack me.

At the last possible second, I activated Hawk Eye and Titan's Crest at the same time. The world slowed down to a crawl as I pushed off the branch and flew through the air, slipping perfectly between their attacks with only millimeters to spare. Before they could recover, I created a dense cloud of leaves around us that was too thick for anybody to see through. The wasps hesitated for a crucial second as their connection back to the queen was disrupted. And that little moment was all I needed.

I burst up through the leaf cloud, making my leaves condense around my arms to form bladed gauntlets. The first stage five managed to partially deflect my strike because its antennae somehow sensed the attack coming in time for it to twist its body away. My leaf gauntlet still ended up connecting though, and the razor-sharp edges sheared through one of its wings and part of its shoulder carapace.

Black ichor sprayed out from the wound while the wasp tumbled down through the air, with its flight pattern severely compromised now. The second wasp was not as lucky. It ended up flying into my follow-up attack, because it was probably expecting me to be recovering from doing my first strike. The leaf blades wrapping around my left arm condensed into a keen edge that managed to catch it perfectly at the junction sitting between its head and thorax.

There was this tiny moment of resistance when the edge met its armored carapace, but then my enhanced strength pushed through it. The wasp's head cleanly separated from its body, with both parts trailing out these streams of dark fluid while they fell all the way down to the forest floor. Its eyes instantly dimmed when its connection to the hive mind got severed, and its limbs only twitched one time before going still.

The queen's furious buzz managed to reach new heights when another of her elite guards ended up falling. She immediately launched this massive barrage of void energy blasts at me, which forced me to focus on playing defense and evading them. I went ahead and created the densest leaf barrier I could possibly manage, and I layered it up with naturally reinforced leaves pulling from the largest trees I could reach out to.

But even after doing all of that, every blast that connected with it ended up disintegrating dozens of my leaves, which forced me to constantly replenish the barrier. The last remaining stage five, although it had an injured wing now, kept trying to pester me by doing these quick little attacks. It was barely a threat on its own anymore, but its presence forced me to split my attention, which made tracking the queen's movements a lot harder for me. The narrative has been taken without permission.

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"The queen is preparing something large," Azure warned me.

"The void energy she is gathering now... it's beyond anything we've seen so far." I could feel it too; there was this ridiculous heavy pressure building up in the air while all that void energy condensed around the queen's form. Whatever she was planning to do, I seriously did not want to be anywhere near it whenever it finally happened. Unfortunately for me, the injured stage five decided to choose that moment to make its final attack.

It dove at me, with void energy coursing through its body instead of keeping it in its stinger. It was doing a suicide run. I had a split second to make a decision. If I tried dodging it, I would end up being wide open for whatever massive attack the queen was charging up above me. If I decided to block it, the void energy explosion was probably going to drain a fatal amount of qi out of me. So, I ended up going with option three.

The second the stage five wasp reached me; I triggered Blink Step and Titan's Crest at the same time. But instead of dodging out of the way, I met its charge head-on while making my leaves condense into a makeshift spear around my arm. We ended up striking each other at the same moment, its stinger managed to strike my shoulder while my leaf-spear punched through its thorax. The massive void energy explosion caught me point-blank, and it started draining my qi at this truly alarming rate.

But I already expected that to happen. What I hadn't expected was how bad it was going to hurt. It felt like somebody decided to replace all my blood with freezing ice water. My muscles seized up on me, and for this one terrifying second, I couldn't feel my cultivation base inside me at all. Then all the sensation rushed back in this huge wave of pins and needles, which came along with Azure's urgent voice.

"You suffered a thirty percent qi loss from that exchange. The queen is about to release her attack!" I forced my numb body to start moving while I scanned around looking for options. The queen was hovering up above me, with void energy swirling around her body to form a dense sphere. The air itself looked like it was actively breaking down around her, which created this expanding zone of pure emptiness that kept growing larger by the second.

When I looked at the devastation she managed to cause earlier with her smaller attacks, I really didn't want to stick around to see what this charged-up version was going to do, but considering my current condition, I wasn't sure if I could dodge far enough away to escape its range.

"Do you have any bright ideas?" I asked Azure. My shoulder was still throbbing from taking that stage five's final attack, and I could feel my red sun energy reserves steadily dropping down, but before Azure could respond, the queen went ahead and released her big attack. The massive void sphere collapsed in on itself for a brief second, compressing down into this tiny point of darkness that was no larger than my fist. And then it exploded outward in this giant wave of pure annihilation.

The forest around us ceased to exist wherever the wave managed to touch it. Massive trees, rocks, and even the dirt on the ground was reduced into fine grey dust that looked like it aged centuries in seconds. The devastation kept spreading out in a perfect circle, creating this steadily expanding zone of death that would definitely kill me if it made contact.

I instantly activated Blink Step, but it wasn't going to be enough, the wave's radius was expanding faster than I could hope to escape, and I definitely didn't have enough energy left in me to do multiple blinks. But going up... going up gave me some options. Just when the void wave approached me, I tapped into the orbital resonance coming from my inner world's twin suns. My momentum managed to carry me higher as the massive wave of destruction passed harmlessly beneath my feet.

I ended up hanging suspended there in the air, making sure I kept my posture looking natural, so it seemed like I jumped high instead of flying. There was no need for me to advertise abilities that would raise some awkward questions if anybody happened to be watching this battle. And since this was a cultivation world, there probably was someone watching. When the wave finally dissipated, it left behind a perfect circle of devastation that was nearly a hundred meters across.

Every trace of life inside it got scoured away, leaving nothing behind except grey dust. The queen hovered in the center of it all, using her many eyes to actively scan around looking for any signs of my survival. I couldn't stop myself from letting out a small smile. She managed to expend an enormous amount of her energy on that attack, and she still had no idea where I was hiding. It was finally time to make that mistake cost her.

Three glowing vines shot out from my sleeve, and they wrapped themselves tightly around the queen's thorax and her wings before she could react, the unexpected angle of my attack had managed to catch her off guard. I dropped down from the sky like a meteor, channeling Titan's Crest into my right hand while I was falling. The queen's compound eyes went wide when she finally saw me falling, but it was too late for her now.

My enhanced strike ended up catching her directly between her wing joints, where her armor was naturally at its thinnest. The impact sent massive shockwaves rippling through her huge body. All her hard chitin cracked and splintered apart beneath my fist, while void energy violently exploded outward from our point of contact. The queen let out this horrific screech of pain that was almost drowned out by the loud sound of her carapace physically breaking apart.

She managed to wrench herself free from my vines using a desperate burst of strength, with dark ichor spraying out everywhere as her formerly pristine-looking carapace was a mess of cracks and leaking wounds now. Her right wings hung down at this awkward angle, and void energy kept leaking out of her injuries forming these wisps of darkness that dissipated into the air. As for me, I landed on a tree branch that looked like it was going to give out at any second.

The battle was nearing its end, but I couldn't afford to lower my guard down yet, because if there was one thing I managed to learn about spirit beasts so far, it was that they were always the most dangerous whenever they were cornered. And that is when Azure said something that made me freeze.

"Master, you're... you're almost out of red sun energy."