Trickster Hunter.

Chapter 495 A Corrupted Obsession
Eighty steps, fifty steps, twenty steps...

Just as Sun Hang approached within ten steps of the monument, the figures clinging to it finally changed.

These figures suddenly boiled like a liquid, with bulging bubbles constantly surging out from inside them. Their hair and beards danced like raging black flames, and Sun Hang seemed to vaguely hear crackling sounds.

But they didn't move. They remained connected to the monument, whether because they couldn't be separated from it or because they were unable to... But as the figures changed, rustling sounds came from the surrounding graves. The soil sealing the graves began to crack, and small sand and gravel rose "upward" like the seepage from the strange corpse, followed by large chunks of hardened soil.

The upside-down space gave Sun Hang a slight sense of disorientation, but what was even more noticeable was the acrid, sour, and putrid smell of death emanating from the cracks in the tomb.

“Lieutenant Colonel Yan, I have something I want to ask you.” Sun Hang asked without turning around, his eyes fixed on the monument in front of him.

“Speak,” Yan Yu’an replied to Sun Hang with the fewest words possible, while cautiously surveying the cracked graves around them.

"Does the cemetery for the heroes of the Baikal Patriotic War practice burial or cremation?"

"They should all be...cremated, right?" Yan Yu'an replied somewhat uncertainly.

"So do you think what crawls out of the grave now should be a skeleton or ashes?"

"I...how would I know?" The fire control program of the Lancet had been deleted, and the armor's own weapons and ammunition were all exhausted. Yan Yu'an's only remaining long-range weapon was the assault rifle in her hand. Looking at the restless graves around her, her tension rose to its peak.

“But then again, this isn’t the real cemetery for the heroes who defended the country. Even if those heroes were cremated back then, their obsessions, once twisted, shouldn’t make it too difficult for them to rebuild a physical body for themselves…” Sun Hang muttered to himself. Just then, a bone claw still covered in rotting flesh burst out of the grave at his feet and grabbed at his ankle with lightning speed.

The next instant, Sun Hang stomped the bone claw back into the ground at an even faster speed, and then stomped on the grave a few more times to compact the loose soil again.

Sun Hang could feel a force struggling wildly in the soil beneath his feet, but under his suppression, that force was firmly pressed down in the soil and could not break through even a little bit.

But Sun Hang could only hold down one coffin lid. In places he couldn't reach, one corpse after another emerged from the ground. The flesh on these corpses had not yet completely decomposed, and pale bone fragments and maggots whiter than bones were everywhere. The strong stench of corpses almost enveloped the entire cemetery.

"These corpses are so fresh, it's like they were just buried last month," Wang Xiyi complained, as she conjured two balls of ghostly blue dragon flames in her palm.

Without hesitation, the first ghostly corpse transformed into a dark phantom. With two sharp cracking sounds, the necks of the two corpses closest to Zhong Ling were snapped, and the headless body flew out without warning, smashing over several corpses that had just crawled out of the ground and had not yet regained their footing.

The overturned corpses, having lost their footing, plummeted directly into the abyss above them.

"It stinks, it really stinks."

Sun Hang suddenly realized that a certain saying was very true: without comparison, there is no harm. Compared to these corpses crawling out of the ground, the fat, ghostly corpse under Zhong Ling's command suddenly seemed quite handsome...

"Don't you find it difficult to proceed?" Sun Hang glanced at Wang Xiyi. "After all, these corpses were once heroes who fought to the death for human civilization and against the monsters."

“I have absolutely no psychological burden.” Wang Xiyi shook her head. “These corpses are just replicas created by the monsters. Besides, even if those people’s bodies really did turn into monsters, I think their deepest consciousness would definitely want me to help them rest in peace again…”

Before she could finish speaking, Wang Xiyi had already thrown out a dragon's breath fireball. The fireball landed in the area with the densest concentration of corpses, but surprisingly, it did not make a deafening explosion. Instead, it expanded silently and swallowed up more than a dozen resurrected corpses in the blink of an eye.

Yan Yu'an finally pulled the trigger, firing a burst of fire at the two lunging corpses. The large-caliber, full-power rounds ripped the upper bodies of the corpses to shreds.

Even so, with only a third of its limb remaining, it did not give up the idea of ​​attacking. Like some kind of arthropod, it used its fingertips to hook the ground and quickly crawled to Yan Yu'an's feet.

Sharp bone claws scratched frantically at the alloy armor, producing a chilling sound like fingernails scraping a blackboard.

Yan Yu'an coldly stomped on the bone claw, crushing the bone fragments into the air... or rather, into the abyss.

"It feels like we can't kill them all." Wang Xiyi looked around. "Those graves where corpses had already crawled out just now, and now there are still corpses crawling out one after another... This isn't a graveyard, it's a barracks churning out troops, isn't it?"

"Isn't the Undead's barracks just a tomb?" Sun Hang joked casually. "Unless the key issue is resolved, I reckon these things will keep popping up endlessly."

"Then you'd better hurry up and deal with it!" Wang Xiyi shouted. "I'll hold off these thugs for you. Try to remove those things from the monument, or you can just smash the whole monument."

“I’ll give it a try.” Sun Hang walked to the monument and observed the boiling black shadows up close. He found that these black shadows seemed to be closer to the category of spirit-like monsters. They did not have a physical entity, or rather, even if they did have a physical entity, it was in a state similar to smoke.

The large hole he shot earlier is nowhere to be found now.

Two corpses suddenly emerged from beside the base of the monument, baring their teeth and claws as they lunged at Sun Hang, who had his back to them. However, before they could even touch Sun Hang's body, hundreds of mycelium had already dragged them aside, quickly dismantling them into a pile of fragments, which were then casually tossed into the abyss.

Sun Hang didn't feel that these resurrected corpses were strong; even the weakest of Zhong Ling's ghost corpses could be easily dealt with... But judging from the intensity of their memes, their power seemed to be greatly suppressed; their original full power could now only be exerted at less than 10%.

"Is it you who is suppressing the power of these corpses?" Sun Hang looked at the monument itself and asked in a murmur.

The monument, of course, did not answer Sun Hang's question. The surging shadows began to move more and more exaggeratedly, their size gradually expanding, seemingly trying to engulf the entire monument. As the area covered by the shadows increased, the strength of these corpses emerging from the tombs also significantly increased. Zhong Ling's undead had already suffered casualties—one undead was accidentally surrounded by more than a dozen corpses, and in the blink of an eye, it was torn to pieces, even its spine broken into more than a dozen pieces.

"Sun Hang! Something's not right!" Wang Xiyi shouted. "These guys seem to be getting stronger! How much longer will it take you to deal with them? If this keeps up, I feel like we might not be able to hold out for much longer!"

"I only have one magazine left!" Yan Yu'an shouted. She had already put down her face mask, so no one could see her expression, but from her tone, it was clear that she was in a state of extreme anxiety.

Once she runs out of ammunition, she will have no choice but to rush in and fight the corpses hand-to-hand. However, as the corpses become stronger, she will find it increasingly difficult to keep up with the performance of her scalpel armor. At this point, she can barely handle two or three corpses at the same time. If the corpses continue to become stronger, she will probably find it very difficult to even fight one corpse alone.

If Sun Hang cannot find a solution to the problem, then they will have no choice but to retreat.

Sun Hang reached out and tried to touch the shadows. He found that his fingers passed right through the shadows. These shadows had no collision volume. Apart from the visual effect, the only evidence of their existence was that when you got close to them, you would feel a chilling coldness.

“If we can’t kill it, then we can only eat it.” Suddenly, a mouth split open in Sun Hang’s palm. With a forceful suck, a dark shadow attached to the monument was sucked into the mouth.

The mouth even chewed a couple of times with relish.

At this moment, Yan Yu'an, who had just emptied her last magazine, rushed to a point less than three meters away from Sun Hang. She swung her fist blade and sliced ​​up a corpse that was chasing after her. When she turned around, she met Sun Hang's gaze as he turned his head.

She discovered that Sun Hang's eyes were filled with desire, and that burning gaze seemed to be able to melt away her armor and the clothes underneath. For a moment, Yan Yu'an wondered if she was completely naked in Sun Hang's eyes, and that every detail of her body was clearly visible to him.

Her movements slowed down a beat, and a corpse seized the opportunity, closing in and stabbing its sharp bone claws toward the joint of the armor on her neck!
A dozen or so strands of Tai Sui mycelium, coated with liquid metal, wrapped around the pair of bone claws. With a series of cracking sounds, the bone claws were pulverized.

The owner of the bone claws also could not escape the fate of being dismantled—bound, dismantled, and falling into the abyss.

Yan Yu'an's heart pounded wildly. She gasped for breath and looked at Sun Hang again—Sun Hang's eyes had cleared up, as if the burning gaze she had just seen was just a fleeting illusion.

“It wasn’t an illusion.” Sun Hang seemed to read Yan Yu’an’s mind. “If I had to name the black shadow that we just swallowed, I would name it ‘Lust’.”

"Lust? Lust, one of the seven deadly sins?" Yan Yu'an asked, having steadied her breathing slightly.

“The Seven Deadly Sins are something from religious doctrines; to put it bluntly, they are the product of the condensation and purification of negative human emotions,” Sun Hang said. “Now I understand why so many strange and bizarre creatures appeared on the remains of Baikal.”

"Why?" Wang Xiyi and Yan Yu'an asked almost in unison.

"When the city of Baikal was destroyed by the Death Aurora, in addition to the obsessions of Masayuki Yamaguchi and those heroes, the negative emotions of the vast number of victims within the city also mingled in... Logically speaking, those obsessions should have been able to suppress these negative emotions, but..."

"But what?" Wang Xiyi asked, throwing a fireball as she spoke. "Stop beating around the bush! Just tell me!"

“There’s a saying, ‘No one is perfect.’ Even heroes have flaws, negative emotions, and a dark side… While they were alive, these things weren’t important, but now that they’re dead, their obsessions have transformed into monsters, and these things become their fatal weaknesses. The accumulated negative emotions take advantage of this vulnerability and merge with their inner darkness… You can think of it as all the negative emotions of everyone in Baikal City becoming their negative emotions,” Sun Hang said.

"Hiss..." Yan Yu'an couldn't help but gasp.

As the commander of the Tian Shu Tower's directly subordinate armed forces, she was already very close to the core of power, and she had access to far more information than the average person. She was acutely aware of the dangers of negative human emotions—the negative emotions of an entire city's residents… if these negative emotions were distributed among millions of people, they might not pose much of a threat, but if concentrated on a few…

Thinking about it this way, the appearance of Baikal's remains seems to be a matter of course.

"Can you get rid of these negative emotions?" Yan Yu'an asked immediately.

“The professionals who clear away negative emotions didn’t come in with us,” Sun Hang said. This job was originally a good fit for Anna or Xue Yue, but one of them was having a disagreement with him, and the other was left outside the Baikal Remains for safety reasons. “I can only clear them away by devouring the monsters, the only drawback is that it’s a bit slow.”

"How slow is 'slow'?" Seeing that Sun Hang had a way to deal with them, Yan Yu'an, who was already somewhat exhausted, suddenly felt a surge of new energy welling up from the depths of her body.

She tapped a hidden button on the inside of her arm, and two needles emerged from the armor, piercing directly into her muscles and injecting two drugs that could relieve fatigue and strengthen muscles into her body.

This is her last remaining stock.

"As long as I can buy time for Sun Hang, it would be worth it even if I die here," Yan Yu'an thought to herself.

She was prepared to die.

“I don’t think I’ll have to die.” Sun Hang said while reading minds. “It takes about half a minute to digest one of the shadows, and purifying the entire monument shouldn’t take more than half an hour at most. Moreover, as these shadows decrease, the self-awareness of the Baikal’s remains, which is gradually becoming ‘clean,’ should regain control.”

"You can read my mind?" Yan Yu'an suddenly realized and asked in surprise.

"No, it's just a guess," Sun Hang casually denied. "Your readiness to die a heroic death is practically overflowing from the seams of your armor."

(End of this chapter)