Chapter Eighty-Nine: Deep in the Encirclement

“No sign yet that the master has noticed what is happening here?”

“We’re nearly done for...”

Qiao drove his dagger into the skull of a mutated creature and hacked it apart, then gasped for breath.

The moment he faltered, a web swept down over him in an instant.

Just as it was about to fall upon him, Zero appeared behind him like a phantom, her claw slashing hard to tear the web open.

She seized Qiao and hurled herself aside with him in a flying leap.

The next instant, venom and psychic force rained down upon the place where Qiao had stood, blasting a massive crater into the corpse of the human-faced spider and the ground beneath it.

After dragging Qiao clear, Zero said nothing.

Madness and calm seemed to fuse within her, two utterly opposite temperaments made one.

She took a long stride forward, her body flashing as she charged straight at a giant human-faced spider more than twenty meters tall.

These giant human-faced spiders differed from the smaller ones not only in size.

Some bore the fused heads of two humans; others had more than a dozen human heads growing over their bodies.

Like the queen’s guard of ART-3, these giant creatures possessed formidable strength.

Though their flesh was not yet as indestructible as an eighth-stage mutant’s, their psychic power was no less terrifying than Tang Jie’s.

These hundred-odd giant human-faced spiders were the elite guard of the ART-2 spider queen.

Unlike ART-3, whose clan was still in the early stages of development, the might of ART-2 was already horrifying.

And yet, facing Zero’s charging figure, this human-faced spider’s seven hideous heads all revealed fear.

Unlike the spider-men created by fusing humans with ART-2 genes, these beings had begun with themselves as the foundation, absorbing fragments of human genes to awaken intelligence and psychic power.

Only these monsters could truly be called members of the ART-2 clan.

They had not lost the ability to feel pain, and they possessed a degree of emotion as well, including fear.

Zero’s fighting style was too savage, enough to chill even these giant human-faced spiders to the bone.

Such reckless, injury-for-injury combat, protected by her thick metal shell and backed by the T-virus’s monstrous recovery, made Zero into a crazed meat grinder in close combat.

She rampaged onward, crushing the smaller human-faced spiders beneath her feet and leaving a trail of blood and torn flesh behind her.

When she was about fifty meters from the giant spider, all seven heads let out a ghastly shriek.

Then it aimed its swollen abdomen toward Zero.

In an instant, a massive net spurted forth, unfolding rapidly in midair until its diameter stretched beyond a hundred meters.

Seeing the web, Zero’s heart sank slightly.

She had already crossed blades with several giant human-faced spiders.

Each of those beasts possessed a different kind of psychic power.

Those bizarre abilities had made life very difficult for her, and she had suffered badly more than once.

Being struck head-on by psychic force had left her seriously wounded.

Although the T-virus healed well enough, Zero was also contending with massive blood loss and a body whose blood production could not keep pace, leaving her strength plummeting.

What was more, as a woman, her anemia was even worse than Qiao’s.

The spider web that came sweeping over her from all directions was unlike the ones she had seen before.

It had a deep, dark green sheen.

Faint arcs of electricity also flickered across it.

Something like this was clearly not naturally produced by a living body; it almost always carried the properties of psychic power.

So Zero did not dare to charge through it any longer.

She shifted at blinding speed, barely avoiding the web’s strike.

The human-faced spider covered by the web was instantly dissolved into a pool of poisonous liquid.

But that was not the end of it.

After striking the ground, the web suddenly gave off intense heat.

The poison on the ground vaporized at once, rising into a thick green mist.

The moment Zero brushed against it, she felt dizzy and light-headed, along with a violent wave of nausea.

Once the fog touched her body, the Tyrant’s hard outer skin actually began to rot and melt as though corroded by strong acid.

“Damn it, I’ve been burning too much. The T-virus’s activity is dropping, and my recovery can’t keep up anymore!”

“Impossible, I can’t force my way through.”

As Zero retreated, another spider-queen guard crawled swiftly over.

Its abdomen swelled violently, and a gale immediately rose.

The poisonous mist was blown by the wind and surged straight toward Zero.

“Bad news! It’s too fast to dodge...”

Qiao was startled in the rear and was about to rush forward.

No matter what, he could not accept watching Zero dissolve before his eyes.

But the instant he moved, List pressed him down from the side.

“List, what are you doing? Zero can’t hold out in her current state...”

List still looked half-dead, and spoke in that soft, feeble voice of his.

“I know, but if Mr. Qiao rushes in, you’ll only end up melting together with Miss Zero.”

“And then the pit I just dug will have been wasted. That wouldn’t do at all.”

“...”

Qiao’s eye twitched madly at that.

He was just about to shake off List’s grip when a sudden roar thundered from within List’s body.

At the same time, his body swelled at high speed.

His height lengthened abruptly to more than five meters.

His right arm likewise stretched out at terrifying speed, dragging to the ground and swelling to a diameter of two meters...

The handsome man instantly transformed into a grotesque monster.

At a glance, it looked like a sixth-stage mutant zombie.

But with the anti-high-energy reactor within his body, its power reached an unimaginable level.

“What is this? Overload mode!”

“List, are you going all out?”

Amid Qiao’s cry of alarm, List seized the alloy chain binding the giant mutated centipede with one hand and whirled it around.

Though the centipede had already been hollowed out from within by nanoworms, the shell remaining on its body still weighed over ten tons.

Yet List spun it overhead with such force that it became a giant windmill with blades nearly a hundred meters across.

A violent hurricane rose from beneath List.

With a slight adjustment of angle, this terrifying fan whipped up a mighty storm and blew toward the poisonous mist.

The force of the wind far surpassed the gale summoned by the giant human-faced spider’s psychic power.

In an instant, it blew the green poison that had enveloped Zero back the other way.

It drifted on for several hundred meters... and every small human-faced spider in its path dissolved completely.

Qiao took advantage of the opening to flash quickly to Zero’s side.

He scooped her up in his arms.

Then he retreated rapidly toward the rear.

At the same time, List launched his assault, using the corpse of the mutated centipede as a weapon and charging into the densest part of the spider swarm.

Anyone touched by the “big fan” was instantly ground into a heap of minced flesh.

However, because the mutated centipede’s corpse had been damaged by the nanoworms, it was riddled with countless cracks.

After sweeping away a wide swath of forest, it collided violently with the human-faced spiders.

Added to that, many psychic attacks landed on the broad surface of the corpse.

At last, the centipede’s shell could take no more and burst apart with a deafening explosion.

Yet List’s attack did not weaken in the slightest, even with its covered area reduced.

After tossing aside the remaining centipede shell, the iron chain in List’s hand underwent an astonishing transformation.

It fused with his arm in an instant.

Large masses of muscle tissue coiled and spread along the chain...

Very quickly, the chain became List’s third arm, more than twenty meters long.

At the palm of that elongated arm, a great mouth emerged.

It opened slightly.

A mass of nanoworms poured out.

Unlike the earlier nanoworms, these were terrifying flying insects.

As a black cloud of them burst forth, they immediately buried a nearby small human-faced spider.

After these bioengineered flying insects used their alloy mouthparts to devour the spider’s flesh bite by bite...

black worms about ten centimeters long were rapidly bred within them.

These black worms were covered from head to toe with countless tiny mouths...

And those mouths were lined with ferocious fangs.

As soon as they were born, stimulated by the scent of blood, they went mad and burrowed into the human-faced spider’s body to devour it from within.

After the little worms consumed enough flesh tainted with zombie virus, they split and multiplied at a rapid pace.

In this self-propagating, snowballing state, within only a few dozen seconds, the human-faced spiders within a hundred-meter radius had been devoured clean.

Not even a single giant human-faced spider escaped the fate of being eaten down to the last scrap.

Watching List display such terrifying prowess, Qiao grumbled indignantly:

“This move... was inspired by my blood-bound virus...”

“That bastard actually developed it for real...”

“I’m going to demand royalties from that bastard List, or I’ll sue him for plagiarism!”

“No... it’s useless even if I sue him. The old man wouldn’t care about such things!”

“No, no... this move has to be named by Lord Qiao himself, with my own mark stamped on it!”

“Blood-Bound Worm Swarm?”

“Not bad at all!”

Nearby, Zero was sitting on the ground, having already withdrawn completely from her Tyrant state.

She shot Qiao a disdainful look and said weakly, “It’s called the Death Locust Plague...”

“List already named it. Your wish has gone up in smoke again.”

“What about your blood-bound virus?”

“Why not release even one? Isn’t that thing made for exactly this kind of situation?”

“Even if it can’t take down the big ones, aren’t these little creatures all over the mountains and fields the perfect means of spread?”

At Zero’s question, Qiao instantly wilted.

“I used it up when I went with the master to the land of radiation. The new batch... is still in the petri dish...”

Zero immediately gave a soft laugh.

“Tsk, tsk... when can you stand tall for once, you spineless fool?”

Qiao instantly glared back and said viciously, “Crazy woman, you don’t know how big Lord Qiao’s seed is at all...”

Zero chuckled, straightened her chest with some effort, and said with three parts disdain and seven parts allure, “Come on then! Let your sister take a good look!”

“...”

List suddenly felt a jolt of unease, his body growing inexplicably heavy.

Without a shred of hesitation, he tore off his third arm at once.

Then he charged frantically toward Qiao and Zero.

“What’s wrong?”

Qiao was the first to notice something amiss, and Zero looked up as well.

The next instant, a scene of hair-raising terror unfolded before them.

An invisible field crushed the place where List had stood.

Whether rock or tree, List’s nanoworms, or the ART-2 human-faced spiders within a hundred-meter radius, all of it was ground into powder.

Sensing danger, List had rushed back at the first possible moment, but in the end both his legs were left behind in that sudden field.

Qiao appeared beside List in an instant.

He grabbed him and hauled him back, then asked in horror, “What happened? Your leg bones were replaced with alloy, weren’t they...”

List still looked half-dead as he replied:

“Gravity... the place where I was standing just now suffered a gravitational collapse...”

“Good news, then. To bury me, you only need half a pit.”

Before Qiao could say another word, the human-faced spiders all over the mountains and fields surged once more toward the three of them, who had now largely lost their ability to fight.

...

Only one chapter today. I have to go on flood-control duty tonight... all night!

I need to hurry and sleep for a while. I’ll make up the missing chapter this weekend for sure.