Chapter 1521: This Old Man Is Two Hundred Years Old
This kind of light beam didn’t look like the marks left by blades or tangent-type items—it was linear, about the thickness of an adult arm. Wherever it passed through buildings or anything else in the city, it instantly left a gap of equal thickness. It was precisely because of these gaps that a large number of structures lost their balance after the impact. In an instant, the A7 Safe Zone began to topple clockwise.
A large number of players soared into the air, dodging both the scorching beams and the massive collapsing buildings nearby. As long as there were no unexpected circumstances, players who could make it to Zone 017 wouldn’t be harmed by a disaster of this level. But those who were sound asleep inside the buildings would forever rest with the cold structures.
“Someone’s coming out!” A faint voice came from the direction of the city center high in the sky. Xu Huo turned his head and saw three figures burst out of the shielded area one after another. It seemed like two were chasing one. The three of them rapidly changed positions among the constantly collapsing buildings, weaving back and forth unpredictably. In the blink of an eye, they had shifted positions several times, making them especially hard to track amid the buildings and dust.
However, they didn’t leave the range of the A7 Safe Zone. The commotion caused by their skirmish was enough to attract the attention of nearby players!
“Awesome! I love watching high-level players fight!” The players gathered around, eager to watch the excitement without any concern for being caught in the crossfire. But they didn’t expect that the three locked in a fierce battle still had the spare energy to deal with them, the spectators:
“Bang!” With a loud noise, a bullet fired from the city center pierced through the head of a C-rank player!
This was just the prelude. Countless bullets then flew toward this direction, precisely covering all the players suspended in the air, including Xu Huo, who was far away!
“Didn’t they say it could only fire twenty-something bullets?!” The bespectacled female player’s triple defense barriers were all breached. Only after the bullet’s power was weakened did a single defense shield barely manage to catch it. But the massive impact still sent her flying into a building dozens of meters away!
In an instant, half of the players in the air were gone. Meanwhile, the three combatants briefly paused their fight, each standing on a toppling building, forming a triangular standoff.
The first to speak was a player who looked young but had completely white and thinning hair. His voice was sickly, hoarse, and low, sounding very strained: “This old man is already two hundred years old. I just want to do a little experiment—can’t you guys even grant me that small wish?”
To his right was a man with his hair tied up in countless small braids. Upon hearing this, he stopped fiddling with the game console in his hand and said with a grin, “You know you’ve lived for two hundred years, and you still haven’t had enough? Isn’t it better to die early? Look at all these people in the city—you’re dragging so many to die with you. Don’t you feel ashamed or uneasy?”
“Young people have no sense of propriety,” the two-hundred-year-old man chuckled, his laugh even more grating than his voice. “Without us pioneers of the game, how could you juniors have progressed so quickly?”
“You seem to be called Lili?” He clearly recognized the braided player, directly naming his identity. “The Eerie Sound Knights have some reputation at the E-level wormhole points, but that’s all it amounts to. I heard you guys stirred up a storm at E27-011 not long ago. Was it for a fallen member? That young man who liked using infectious substances?”
The Eerie Sound Knights’ B-rank member Lili’s face darkened. “You did it.”
The old man neither admitted nor denied it. Instead, he lectured him with a tone of bitter sincerity, “Young people are too arrogant. They might end up dying somewhere. Not just him, but you too, and that young leader of yours. I’ve seen many young people like you before—self-proclaimed geniuses—and they all ended up dead in some unknown place.”
“Haven’t you heard of something called karma in this world? How old are you? You can’t bear the weight of so many lives.”
Lili was provoked, but the old man didn’t give him a chance to act. He turned to the woman in the black trench coat on his left. “And you? Why are you following me? You have good skills, and you’re a Super Evolver, yet you kept a low profile at the E-level wormhole points.”
The woman in the black trench coat remained expressionless. “I want something you have.”
The old man laughed heartily at this and casually pointed toward the city center. “That Super Item?”
The word “Super Item” would make any player’s heart race, but it didn’t stir a single ripple of emotion in the black trench coat woman. She said, “The HX-99 brain heterotoxin you synthesized at the C9 wormhole point.”
The old man finally stopped smiling, his face darkening. “The HX-99 brain heterotoxin has already been destroyed.”
“I know you didn’t. You love developing toxins and would never easily destroy any of your works. I believe you have your reasons for claiming it was destroyed, but if you could tell me the method of creation, I would be very grateful.” The black trench coat woman maintained her politeness, not even seeming like she was here to take advantage of the situation.
The old man stared at her. “It seems this old man has no choice but to die today.”
The wind howling through the city paused for a moment. The next second, bullets flying from the city center rapidly swept across the positions where the black trench coat woman and Lili stood. As their figures vanished, small beam wheels, reduced to the size of a zhang, densely appeared within the spherical blockade barrier, spinning rapidly and compressing the old man’s space trapped inside.
But at that moment, a massive lightning bolt, as if drawn from a simple sketch, pierced through the blockade barrier. It tore through the barrier and scattered all the small beam wheels. Amid the rumbling sounds echoing everywhere, the old man appeared behind Lili—both were moving at high speed, and with their speeds matched, back-to-chest could almost be considered stationary.
The old man seemed not to use any items, merely thrusting his five fingers toward the back of Lili’s head. As he moved, his originally smooth and flat face flashed with a momentary aged look. In that instant, two massive magnetic stones suddenly appeared on either side of him. Under the magnetic force, the space between the converging stones seemed to reveal a visible hourglass-shaped solid magnetic field!
“Slap!” The two magnetic stones closed together with a crisp sound, but they didn’t harm anyone. Lili and the old man separated, one ahead of the other, though the former was slightly flustered while the latter remained composed and unhurried.
Lili’s right arm was struck. The old man’s fingernail had only scratched a bit of skin, but his entire arm began to wither from the wound, as if all moisture had been drained, and it was spreading toward his body!
Lili calmly applied a self-healing agent, but in a high-level player duel, this was clearly a hindrance. The old man seized this opportunity to close in. Bullets from afar broke through the wind, and he himself predicted the opponent’s movements. He was about to move first, but was stopped midway by a force descending from the sky!
(End of Chapter)