Chapter 83: She Has Arrived, He Has Come!

Blood was splattered everywhere, heavy breaths rasping through the air—a testament to Joe’s dire predicament.

For a warrior like Joe, one who relied on high mobility to fight, the confined space and the clinging webs were lethally treacherous. Several times already, he’d tried to dodge the enemy’s psychic wind blades, but each brush with the sticky webs slowed him, leading to deep cuts.

Though the T-virus granted him extraordinary regenerative power, the relentless blood loss had sapped his energy to its limits, leaving him dizzy and weak. Meanwhile, the venom spat ceaselessly by Sula and Erik was pooling on the ground, further shrinking Joe’s range of movement.

He had attempted several counterattacks, but the three enemies perched atop the webs were unnervingly agile. Any missed strike left him tangled in the webs, trapped and helpless—a living target.

Joe had intended to call back his bio-weapons to break through the siege, but for reasons unknown, they had all fallen silent. When he saw that the bosses of the three great northern factions had all been transformed into ART-2 variants, he realized the odds were grim. If even the leaders had been altered, there was little hope their subordinates had escaped unscathed.

“This is a complete disaster!” he thought. “If all those prototype bio-weapons are wiped out, the master will surely notice that something’s wrong here! But why hasn’t reinforcements arrived yet? Has something happened above as well?”

Frantically, Joe searched his mind for any way out, but every thought was swept away by wave after wave of icy dread, chilling him to the bone.

Another wind blade shot toward him, unleashed by Daly. Joe mustered all his remaining strength for a desperate backwards leap, barely dodging the attack. But even as relief flickered, a sticky sensation seized him from behind. Cursing under his breath, Joe realized, through the haze clouding his mind, that he had unwittingly drawn close to another web while evading attacks.

This time, leaping with all he had, his upper body became hopelessly ensnared in the web. He struggled with every ounce of strength, but it was already too late.

Sula and Erik lunged at him from both sides, swift as shadows. Two razor-sharp spider legs stabbed toward the back of Joe’s head and his heart. There was no way to dodge. Death loomed. Eyes shut, he braced himself for the end.

A metallic clang rang out.

Screams erupted from Sula and Erik.

Joe’s eyes snapped open to see two severed spider legs lying beside him. Standing before him was a grotesque, monstrous tyrant—nearly two meters tall, its body hunched like a great ape, every inch wrapped in a layer of silvery liquid metal. Its massive tungsten-steel claws glowed with a faint blue fire. Baring a maw full of vicious fangs, it grinned at Joe.

“Well, well—look who it is!”

“Isn’t this little Joe?” the creature cooed. “Such a brave figure—my, you’re making your big sister swoon!” A peal of eerie laughter followed.

Joe’s face fell at the mockery, and he retorted sourly, “Don’t call me ‘little Joe,’ and stop calling yourself my sister. I’m a full ten years older than you. Still, you did show up just in time, so I’ll let you have the upper hand this once.”

With a sly smile, the tyrant plopped herself down on Joe’s chest, reaching out to caress his face. With a delicate prick of her fingertip, she drew a drop of his blood and tasted it, her eyes widening in delight.

“Well, well! Joe, you’ve actually injected the T-virus? And you survived it? This is going to be so much fun…”

Just then, Daly’s wind blade slashed in again. The tyrant’s expression changed; the liquid metal instantly flowed to shield her left arm. With a casual swipe, the wind blades left nothing but shallow scratches on the silvery shell.

In that moment, her entire demeanor transformed—an aura of brutality, chaos, and madness surged from her body, enveloping Joe beneath her. He swallowed hard, inwardly groaning, “She’s about to lose control again!”

As the tyrant slowly lifted her head, her eyes flared a blood-red, locking onto Daly. Her voice rang out—wild, deranged.

“Didn’t your mother ever tell you? Interrupt someone’s flirting, and you’ll be hacked to pieces!”

Joe rolled his eyes. “Who’d flirt with that monstrous face of yours? Disgusting…”

The next second, the weight vanished from Joe’s body. He turned to see the tyrant, now entirely encased in metal, straddling Daly’s spider abdomen. One arm locked around Daly’s neck, blue flames flickering wildly from her fingertips.

“With a body this big, I could cut out a jigsaw puzzle worth tens of thousands of pieces… enough to keep me entertained for three whole days…”

With that, her tungsten-steel claws began slashing from Daly’s head downward. When mere slicing no longer satisfied her, she began to tear at the flesh with her teeth, counting each piece with manic glee. “Six thousand one hundred and thirty-one… seven thousand five hundred sixty-six…”

Sula and Erik launched a frenzied assault, but the tyrant paid no mind, not even flinching as their attacks pierced the metal, tearing her flesh and drawing blood. She only grew more excited, counting with abandon, until Daly was finally carved into ten thousand pieces. With a shudder of pleasure, she turned her gaze upon Sula.

Joe, though no stranger to scenes of madness, still felt his teeth ache with revulsion.

Inwardly, he swore, “I’d rather sleep with a mutant than crawl into bed with that madwoman.” He couldn’t help but check himself, only to find he’d shriveled from the shock.

Corpse Catchers—Second Catcher, the Sleep Tyrant, Zero, had arrived!

While Zero unleashed her orgy of violence, Joe heard another commotion behind him and spun around.

A striking man strode toward him, clad in a black leather trench coat and a black cowboy hat, a thick iron chain slung over his shoulder, panting heavily as he approached. The chain trailed off into the woods, its end hidden from sight, but with every step he took, swathes of forest fell behind him—a clear sign of something immense being dragged along.

At last, as the man drew near, Joe saw what the chain held. He gaped in disbelief, cursing aloud, “That lunatic!”

It was an eighth-stage mutant Leanna had brought back from the Wasteland—a giant centipede over ten meters tall and nearly a hundred meters long. Its legs still twitched, not yet fully dead.

The man dropped the chain at Joe’s side with a heavy sigh and, without a word, began digging in the dirt.

Joe’s eye twitched. “Hey! Liszt, what the hell are you doing?”

The man, eyes drooping and exuding an air of utter gloom, muttered quietly, “Mr. Joe’s about to die… I thought I’d dig a grave in advance, so I can bury you myself. It would be my honor to lay Mr. Joe to rest… so please, don’t interrupt my mourning.”

With that, he ignored Joe’s protests and kept digging.

Joe nearly choked on his own indignation—digging my grave and forbidding me to object? How was that reasonable?

As Joe pleaded with Liszt to stop, the other man just kept shoveling. Suddenly, a swarm of human-faced spiders emerged from the trees.

Liszt put down his work, looking up at the advancing spiders. He sighed, pulled a syringe from his coat pocket, and jabbed it into his own backside.

He murmured to himself in a gentle voice, “Ah… the taste of childhood.”

As the spiders swarmed closer, his face twisted into a feral snarl.

“Interrupting my mourning for Mr. Joe… you all have to die. Every last one of you…”

Corpse Catchers—First Catcher, the Reaper, Liszt, had arrived!