Guo Yun: Plays Ye Shunguang, teammate Ye Shiyuan

"Senior sister? Senior sister!"

The sound of a bell came from Ies's speaker, carrying obvious doubt and a hint of barely perceptible tension. Ye Shunguang did not respond when she called out the first time.

She called out a second time, louder than the first, with a slight upward inflection at the end, turning it into a question.

Ye Shunguang finally snapped out of his momentary daze.

What just happened?!

Suddenly realizing that she had just lost focus, the sword box was still carrying them at high speed.

Ye Shunguang has come to understand what it feels like for car owners to be distracted while driving and then snap back to reality.

After confirming that she still had control over the sword case and that Ies was still hanging on her lap, she frowned slightly—why did I get distracted?

She searched her memory, trying to recall what had happened in those few seconds. Then—nothing. Those few seconds were like a piece of film that had been cut, leaving a smooth slit in her consciousness. The edges of the slit were perfectly smooth, offering no clues she could grasp or trace back to.

Damn it. I can't remember at all. And something just doesn't feel right.

Before she could think it through, she sensed an ominous aura ahead.

Ye Shunguang stopped flying. The process of the sword box going from high speed to complete stillness was so fast that there was almost no transition.

The transition from extreme motion to extreme stillness was as smooth as a carefully edited video transition. The etheric mist continued to flow forward a few meters around them before stopping, as if even the mist hadn't realized they had stopped.

She took Ies's small hand—a metallic, mechanical hand much smaller than her own—and gently placed it on the ground.

The movement was very gentle, as if placing a fragile item. When Eis's mechanical foot touched the etheric crystal fragments on the ground, it made a faint sound, like stepping on broken glass.

It's probably time for the boss battle. Thinking this, Ye Shunguang subconsciously glanced at the effects of the items she had purchased. Her gaze fell on the "Infinite Game Version Ultimate Skill," which reduced memory loss by 99.0123456%. It lasted for nine hours. She closed the interface, thinking that should be enough time.

The sword case hovered beside her shoulder, its surface shimmering like mercury. She didn't sit on it. Walking was enough to get to Boling's location. Flying would attract attention… she'd better ambush him if possible.

After walking for a while, from a distance, the general outline of the demon Bolinger could finally be seen.

The silhouette gradually emerged from the purple mist. But it was larger than Ye Shunguang remembered. It was now at least twice as tall. The yellow stripes on its surface were much denser, almost painful to the eye.

The moment Eis saw it, two voices of shock and confusion came from the loudspeaker in unison.

"That hand—!"

Ling and Zhe's voices overlapped, pouring from Ies's loudspeaker and creating a tiny ripple of sound waves in the hollow ethereal mist. Ye Shunguang knew why they were like this—Blinger's current physical state, that huge hand covered with yellow patterns, was almost identical to the enormous hand they had seen in Helios that had snatched their teacher away.

Ye Shunguang knew that the protagonist was connecting Bollinger to his teacher. But compared to admiring the protagonist's reaction, she was more concerned about something else... What was Bollinger doing?

Its right fist—that enormous fist, larger than a normal human torso—was pounding the ground repeatedly. Unlike venting its anger randomly on an empty surface, it was aimed at a very specific, fixed location.

Each punch landed with a dull thud that made one's stomach involuntarily contract. When the fist was raised, it would kick up some sticky substance from the ground, leaving several dark red strands in the air.

There was something on the ground. Ye Shunguang's pupils contracted slightly. Her gaze pierced through the ethereal mist, through the blinding light emanating from the yellow patterns on Bollinger's fist, through the purple crystalline fragments whipped up by the force of his punch, and landed on the spot that had been repeatedly struck.

That silhouette… that silhouette that’s been smashed beyond recognition—Holy crap? Lorenz? ???

What deep-seated hatred and grudge could lead to such a desecration of a corpse?

While one could only say he did a good job—what Lorenz did to Iserd, to "Will-o'-the-Wisp," and to those investigators who were treated as "consumable assets"—it would be too lenient for him to be crushed into mincemeat.

But this scene—it's disgusting. Oh no, the thought of fighting him later makes me even more disgusted.

The tremor spread along the ground, radiating outwards from the point of impact beneath Bollinger's feet, like ripples spreading out of water after a pebble has been thrown in.

However, the medium of the ripples is not water, but a hard surface covered with etheric crystals.

Ether crystal fragments bounced on the ground, the friction between the fragments producing a soft, rustling sound, like countless insects crawling.

Bell's Bomb nearly lost his balance. Ies's mechanical legs slid a few centimeters off the ground before regaining their footing. The ground was shaking so intensely that Bomb's stabilization system momentarily lost its balance.

Looking again, Lorenz's remains were no longer there. The word "remains" itself implies the existence of some kind of "remnant"—at least there are identifiable fragments, at least some parts that still retain their original form.

But now all that remains is a pool of dark red paste, mixed with fragments of ether crystals, smashed into a crack in the ground. There isn’t a single piece that can be singled out and said, “This is a part of Lorenz.”

Muscles, bones, skin, and internal organs were all crushed into a semi-fluid state, seeping into the deepest cracks in the ground, mixing so thoroughly with the purple etheric crystal fragments that if someone tried to separate these things from the ground, they would find it impossible. Because they had become part of the ground.

But a muffled groan came from Ies’s speaker, short and soft, like the sound of a tree branch suddenly snapping.

Zhe is not someone who makes a sound easily. Any pain that could make him groan in a state of deep connection must be something that exceeds his tolerance threshold.

"Brother!" Ling's voice followed immediately, not through Ies's speaker, but through the HDD system's internal channel. The tension and heartache in that voice were ten times stronger than when she had called Ye Shunguang "Senior Sister" earlier. "What's wrong? What happened to your eyes? Fairy..."

"It's nothing," Zhe's voice broke in, low and steady. "My eye suddenly hurt for a moment... I'll talk to you later."

"Fairy, can you control Bomb?" Ye Shunguang's voice came from outside. She heard the muffled groan, as well as Ling's tension and Zhe's attempt to cover it up.

Bollinger's existence itself is the final boss of the first season and a major foreshadowing, but now it's not the original timeline, so she can't accurately judge Phaethon's current state.

"Please have Ies stay far away so she doesn't get caught in the crossfire," she said. Her voice remained gentle, with a thin, almost imperceptible layer of concern beneath the surface.

[Fairy: Certainly. About to take control of Assistant 1.]

Ies's mechanical legs started moving. It wasn't Bell controlling them; Fairy had taken over Bomb's movement.

The mechanical legs moved rapidly across the ground, and the round, white body moved to the side and rear at the fastest speed Bomb could achieve. The trajectory was a smooth arc, bypassing all areas on the straight line between Bollinger and Ye Shunguang that could potentially be within the attack's range.

As Ye Shunguang watched Ies begin to run away, his gaze lingered for a moment on the round, white figure.

After confirming that Fairy's chosen hiding place was safe enough—behind a huge aetheric crystal rock wall, thick enough to absorb most of the shockwave, with a naturally formed depression above it just big enough for a babbler to curl up inside—she turned back to Bolinger.

Eis is safe now. Fahrenheit and his sister have also been moved to a safe distance by Fairy. Now it's just her and Bollinger here.

She decided to strike first. Utilizing her unparalleled buff and the new move she had been wanting to try out during her previous ultimate abilities, she decided to take the initiative.

Bollinger's right fist was still hanging in mid-air, having just finished a blow to the remains of Lorenz.

The yellow markings on its fist dimmed slightly after that strike—not because it was running out of energy, but because it was adjusting its breathing, if the beast also breathed. Its attention remained on the dark red, pasty substance, as if confirming something, or perhaps enjoying something.

Right now.

Ye Shunguang raised his right hand. The movement was slow; as his fingers rose from his side, the trail of light from his fingertips left a very faint silver-white mark in the air.

The light trail lingered for a very short time, so short that it would have been impossible to see if there hadn't been no other light source in the void. Her lips parted slightly, and she uttered a sentence. Her voice wasn't loud, but each word clearly fell into the void, as if supported by something, preventing it from being drowned out by the sound of the flowing ethereal mist.

"The enemy forces break through, and ten thousand swords resound in harmony."

The arcs of light curved, extended, and intertwined in the air, forming a huge, constantly rotating array of light above her head.

Then, ten thousand swords were unleashed.

Countless swords were so fast that before a sword that flew out a second ago had even completely left the array, even more swords would surge out from every node, every light pattern, and every character of the array the next second.

They didn't fly out in formation, one by one. They were like waterfalls, like torrential rain, like a flood bursting its banks, enveloping and pouring down on Bollinger.

A torrent of silvery-white lightsabers drew a blinding river of light through the void, almost burning the retina.

The width of the River of Light covered Bollinger's entire front—from its head to its feet, from its left shoulder to its right shoulder, there was no place outside the River of Light's impact range.

Bollinger's attention was finally drawn away from the dark red paste in that instant.

The yellow stripes on its body suddenly lit up, their brightness instantly escalating from a dim state to a dazzling, fluorescent yellowish-white. It raised its right fist. Not a punch, but an open palm.

The enormous palm opened wide, each joint of the fingers making a dull cracking sound, and yellow light patterns gathered in the palm to form a constantly rotating vortex.

The center of the vortex had an extremely high density, and the light condensed into an almost liquid texture, like a shield made of light.

The first wave of lightsabers collided with the light shield.

The first wave of lightsabers was blocked!

But the river of light did not stop. The second wave, the third wave, the fourth wave—the lightsabers surged out of the array faster than Bollinger absorbed the impact.

The light shield in its palm began to crack under the continuous impact. The cracks spread from the center of the light shield to the edges, and yellow light seeped from the edge of each crack, like glass that had not completely shattered after being hit hard, but had lost its overall structural strength. When the fifth wave of lightsabers struck, the light shield shattered.

It wasn't shattered. It was "submerged." There were so many lightsabers that the light shield couldn't block them all at once—its core blocked the frontal attack, but the swords on the sides and back bypassed the light shield's defensive range.

The torrent of lightsabers did not stop after hitting the light shield. Instead, like a real flood, it bypassed the light shield from the sides, top, and bottom, reconverged behind the light shield, and then all of it pierced into Blinger's body.

Countless swords pierced the same target. Bollinger's chest, abdomen, shoulders, arms, and legs—every part of him was pierced by countless lightsabers in the same instant.

The yellow ether crystal patterns exploded with yellow light at the point where the lightsaber pierced. The silver-white of the lightsaber and the yellow of the patterns clashed violently at the point of impact. The collision of the two energies made it seem as if a layer of flames that constantly changed color had been ignited on the surface of Blinger's body.

The sword pierced its body, emerging from its back, flying out with fragments of yellow light, drawing an arc in the air, returning to the river of light, and piercing it again. It was a cycle—the lightsaber flew out of the array, pierced Boling, emerged from its back, returned to the array, flew out again, and pierced it again.

The cycle was so fast that all Ling could see was a continuous stream of silvery-white light flowing in and out of Blinger's body, with hundreds of swords completing a piercing cycle every second.

Bollinger's yellow veins began to flicker and fade over large areas under the dense piercing. Not one by one, but in patches.

As the energy within the patterns was repeatedly pierced by the lightsaber, it was continuously stripped away, neutralized, and carried away. The patterns themselves changed from a full, bright yellow to a dull, dark brown, resembling the outer sheath of a burnt electrical wire.

Its body surface was covered with countless piercing holes, and silvery-white light spots remained at the edges of each hole. These light spots continuously eroded the aether crystals around the holes, preventing the holes from being repaired by Bollinger's regenerative abilities.

But Bollinger did not fall.

At the same time as it was being attacked, Ye Shunguang noticed something unusual... all the still-lit yellow lines converged on its arm at the same instant.

The patterns resembled living snakes, meandering across its surface and contracting from its limbs, head, and back towards the center of its right palm.

As the texture contracted, the rest of Bollinger's body lost the coverage of the etheric crystals, revealing the tissue beneath that was somewhere between flesh and crystals, a tissue that would cause physical discomfort to those who saw it.

She instantly realized what it was.

Laser cannon!

Bollinger was straining to unleash a laser cannon shot, while all the lightsabers had just completed another round of piercing cycles and were on their way back to the array—

A white beam of light shot out from Bollinger's hand. There was no charging, no warning.

Her left hand began to rise a fraction of a second before the beam of light shot out, with her fingers spread, palm facing forward, and fingertips slightly bent, as if she had grasped something in the void.

"Royal."

All the lightsabers still flying in the air changed direction at the same instant.

It wasn't that they were taken back into the array, but rather that they were all drawn together in front of her by this word.

The lightsabers converge faster than they travel when they pierce the Bollinger—because they don't need to fly back to the array and then fly out again; they turn back directly during flight.

Hundreds, even thousands of lightsabers converged on Ye Shunguang simultaneously from around Bollinger's body, from every corner of the void, and from the middle of his flight path. The lightsabers formed three lines of defense in front of her.

Silver-white light patterns flowed across the wall, forming interlocking light locks at the joints between the swords, like mortise and tenon joints, making the swords an inseparable whole in that instant.

The swords are arranged at a 45-degree angle, with their blades overlapping each other to form an inward-curving arc, and all the sword tips pointing outward.

The function of this concave structure is not to block, but to refract – if the first two layers of defense are breached, the third concave structure will guide the remaining impact force to both sides, allowing it to slide past Ye Shunguang's sides instead of hitting her directly.

The collision of energies released extremely high levels of light and heat, and the entire process lasted for a little over three seconds.

Bollinger's laser cannon shot had consumed a lot of its energy, and the brightness of its yellow markings had decreased by one level, changing from a glaring yellowish-white to a normal bright yellow.

Of the three lines of defense in front of Ye Shunguang, the first one had completely disappeared, the second one had been damaged by more than half, and the third one still maintained its basic form.

At the very instant the laser cannon stopped, she made a gesture with her right hand—spreading her five fingers—and then suddenly waving them toward Bollinger.

All the remaining lightsabers—the remaining swords from the three lines of defense, plus the new swords that were still emerging from the array—all stabbed towards Bringer at the same instant.

Driven by Ye Shunguang's will, hundreds of swords pressed their blades against Boling's body surface and then dragged horizontally simultaneously. It wasn't a series of thrusts; rather, all the swords pierced through from different directions, angles, and body parts at the same instant.

In that instant, Bollinger's body was covered by hundreds of cutting lines that appeared simultaneously—from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet, from his left shoulder to the tip of his right finger, from his back to his chest, every inch of his body covered with ether crystals was sliced ​​open by the blade at the same moment.

The yellow lines broke cleanly at the cutting line, the energy flow at the break point was instantly interrupted, and yellow light gushed out from the break like a fountain, leaving brief arcs of light in the empty air.

Hundreds of wounds appeared simultaneously on Bollinger's body, ranging in depth from a few centimeters to half a meter.

The deepest cut was on the side of its torso, where dozens of swords pierced through the same path, completely slicing through the etheric crystal layer and revealing the dark red tissue beneath, somewhere between flesh and crystal.

The roar echoed in the hollow, its frequency chaotic and disordered, like dozens of different sound sources vibrating simultaneously at different frequencies and amplitudes.

Its body swayed slightly amidst the roar, not as if it were about to fall, but as a brief, systemic imbalance caused by the simultaneous interruption of the etheric energy flow that supported its stability by hundreds of cuts.

Ye Shunguang did not give it time to regain its balance.

She moved her feet and her figure flashed in the air.

It wasn't high-speed movement, nor was it teleportation; it was a kind of movement somewhere in between, one that the viewer's visual system couldn't accurately track.

The afterimage she left behind was still clear—long, silvery-white hair flowing behind her, her right hand still in the posture of wielding a sword—while her true form had already appeared behind Bollinger, less than two meters away from its torso.

Ye Shunguang gripped the hilt of the Qingming Sword tightly, pulling her right arm back to its limit. The rotation of her waist caused her shoulders to rotate, and the rotation of her shoulders caused her arm to rotate. In that instant, her center of gravity dropped half a foot, and the etheric crystal ground beneath her feet cracked with a spiderweb-like pattern under the impact of the shift in her center of gravity. Then she slashed horizontally with her sword.

The blade pierced through Bollinger's torso. The etheric crystal layer was sliced ​​open the instant it touched the blade—not by its sharpness, but by the energy carried by the blade.

The ether particles in the crystalline layer are disassembled, peeled off, and vaporized the moment they come into contact with the light film on the sword blade. Before the sword blade can actually make contact with the main body of the crystalline layer, the crystalline layer has already decomposed into inactive powder under the action of the light film.

The high-temperature gas generated by evaporation forms a narrow vacuum zone behind the blade. Due to the pressure difference, the tissues on both sides of the vacuum zone are squeezed, torn, and burst apart towards the middle.

The depth of the slash almost cut Bollinger in half.

The blade entered from its right abdomen, moved horizontally through its body, cutting through all the etheric energy channels, all the crystallized organs, and all the remaining human tissue structures, before emerging from its left abdomen.

A wound appeared on Bollinger's torso, extending from his left waist to his right waist and almost running through his entire abdomen.

The wound was slightly wider than the blade itself—because the high temperature generated by the plasma layer at the moment the blade passed by caused the tissue on both sides of the wound to vaporize further by several centimeters.

No blood or any fluid was visible inside the wound. Everything that could possibly flow out—ether, tissue fluid, any bodily fluids that might exist—evaporated instantly under the high temperature.

The inner wall of the wound was charcoal black, and the surface was covered with a very thin layer of crystallized tissue that had reformed under high temperature, like a fragile black scab that temporarily blocked the wound.

Bollinger's upper body swayed slightly. This was because more than half of the muscle tissue structure and etheric energy conduction channels connecting his upper and lower body had been severed by this sword strike.

If it were a human, this sword strike would have vaporized its entire body.

But now it is a demon. Its physical structure does not rely entirely on physical tissue connections; the channels for conducting etheric energy have largely replaced the function of the spine and muscles.

The yellow lines that were still glowing at the top and bottom of the wound were extending toward the wound at an extremely fast speed, trying to re-establish energy conduction channels at the wound site and maintain the stability of the body.

Ye Shunguang certainly wouldn't let it succeed.

With the sword strike completed, her feet left the ground, and her figure soared upwards.

Her long, silvery-white hair billowed upwards in the rising air currents, fragments of the sword case swirled around her, and she held the Azure Sea Sword in her right hand, its tip pointing diagonally downwards. She hovered about ten meters above Bollinger's head, suspended in mid-air.

Countless lightsabers then emerged from the array.

A cyan halo enveloped the silver-white sword, and its flight path in the air was no longer a simple straight line or arc, but rather presented a more agile, almost self-aware, flying posture.

As they swooped down toward Bollinger, they constantly adjusted their angles, changed their trajectories, and covered for each other, like a group of well-trained hunters rather than a bunch of tools controlled by a unified command.

Bollinger's torso, which had just been cleaved in two, had not yet stabilized. The yellow veins were attempting to rebuild energy channels at the wound when the cyan lightsaber arrived.

Hundreds of swords pierced its body from all directions, at even more treacherous angles than the first time.

Each intersection is a crucial hub for the flow of etheric energy within Bollinger's body. Hundreds of swords simultaneously attack these intersections, attempting to paralyze its energy transmission system as it tries to repair the wounds.

The repair was abruptly interrupted just as it began, and the yellow lines on the wound faded completely after flashing a few times.

Then Ye Shunguang flashed down again.

She twirled the Azure Sea Sword in her hand, its light like a rainbow, and unleashed another horizontal slash.

This time, the horizontal slash wasn't aimed at the torso—the wound that almost severed him at the waist was still there and didn't need repair. The target this time was Bollinger's right arm joint.

The blade of the Azure Sea Sword precisely cut into the densest part of the ether crystal pattern on Bollinger's right shoulder joint. The azure halo on the blade burst into a dazzling azure light the moment it touched the crystal.

The crystalline layer at the joint cracked open with that sword strike, creating a complete fissure that extended from the shoulder joint in both forward and backward directions, dividing the entire crystalline layer of the shoulder joint into two pieces.

Not finished yet.

Ye Shunguang lifted himself up with his sword, and his figure rose into the air once again.

Then she swooped down. Not a natural descent, but a descent with the Azure Sea Sword at its tip, her entire body transforming into a streak of sword light.

She was moving faster than ever before—where she swooped down, the air was compressed not into a plasma layer, but into a shock wave.

A cone-shaped, semi-transparent shockwave, visible to the naked eye, formed in front of her, its edges crackling with a piercing sound. The tip of the Azure Sea Sword drew a thin, compressed trail of white light in front of the shockwave.

Bollinger had just been hit by the second round of lightsabers, and his body was still in a state of chaotic etheric energy flow.

It sensed the threat above its head—all its remaining visual organs flipped upwards, aiming at the swooping Ye Shunguang.

But its body couldn't react in time. Its right arm was still hanging down—its shoulder joint had been severed in half, making it unable to exert force normally.

The near-half-cut wound on its torso was still there. Although the flow of etheric energy was slowly recovering, it was not enough to support it in making any large-scale evasive maneuvers. It could only raise its left arm, open its left palm, and spread the yellow light shield above its head.

This time, the light shield was much weaker than the first one. It shattered the moment it hit the ground.

The tip of the Azure Sea Sword pierced through the light shield the moment it touched its surface. The structure of the light shield collapsed the instant the sword tip pierced through, and yellow light exploded in all directions, leaving a diffused halo in the hollow air.

The plunging sword light did not pause even for a moment, continuing its downward trajectory.

The Azure Nether Sword pierced Bollinger's left shoulder. This was its only arm that was still functioning properly.

The sword tip pierced through the etheric crystal layer, tissue layer, and energy channel of the shoulder from above the left shoulder, and emerged from under the armpit.

With a flick of his wrist, Ye Shunguang rotated the sword ninety degrees inside Blinger's shoulder joint, widening the wound from a small hole into a penetrating cut with a diameter of more than half a meter.

Then she drew her sword, and as she did so, she kicked off Bollinger's chest, using the momentum to flip and leap into the air, drawing an arc in the air before landing back on the ground a dozen meters in front of Bollinger.

She landed lightly, her knees slightly bent to absorb the impact. The Azure Nether Sword was pointed diagonally at the ground to her right, the tip still bearing traces of the yellow etheric energy from Bollinger's body. The energy emitted a few soft crackling sounds before dissipating.

Bollinger's two arms are both useless.

The right shoulder joint was cleaved open by a horizontal slash, and the left shoulder joint was pierced by a diving sword and then expanded laterally.

His two arms hung limply at his sides, the yellow lines on them still glowing, but the energy flow was extremely weak, only able to maintain the most basic connection and unable to support any attack.

The wounds on its torso were still there—a horizontal slash that nearly severed it at the waist, cuts left by hundreds of sword thrusts, and impact damage from the diving sword piercing its left shoulder. It looked to be on the verge of collapse, its body so mangled that it was almost unbelievable that it could still stand.

But it is still standing.

Moreover, the cuts inflicted by the lightsaber were still slowly healing... Aetheric energy seeped from the patterns, filling the gaps in the wounds...

The pierced holes, the cuts, and the broken crystal layers were all gradually recovering their shape under the replenishment of etheric energy.

The recovery is slow—each wound takes several seconds to heal—but it is indeed a visible process.

Although the wound is healing, the total amount of etheric energy in its body is continuously decreasing, proving that this healing process does indeed consume a large amount of energy reserves.

This also proves that my attack was effective. As long as I exhaust its energy, I can grind Bollinger down to death...

Now that I have unlimited ultimate moves and inexhaustible energy... after confirming that my attacks are effective, the best approach is to engage in a protracted battle!

Therefore, we cannot give Bollinger time to recover, we cannot allow those wounds to fully heal, and we cannot allow its etheric energy to return to a stable state!

She now needs to continue suppressing it, disrupting its healing rhythm, and further weakening its energy reserves.

Ye Shunguang took a deep breath.

"Unlimited Power... You can't run away!" she whispered, a tiny, subtle smile playing on her lips.

Then she moved.

From that moment on, Bollinger had no chance to make any further attacks.

It wasn't that it didn't want to attack—its right arm was recovering, the wound on its left arm had just been filled with a third of etheric energy, and the parts of its body capable of attacking were still healing. It needed time to complete these repairs, even if it was just a few seconds.

But Ye Shunguang didn't give it those few seconds.

Ye Shunguang flashed to the front of Bollinger, and the Qingming Sword slashed upwards from below.

The blade cut into the near-half-cut wound on Bollinger's abdomen, slicing upwards along the wound and cutting through the etheric energy filling that had just been inserted and was not yet fully solidified.

The filling collapsed under the blade, and fragments of yellow light splattered from the wound.

Landing, crouching, slashing! Taking advantage of the moment when it lost its balance, Ye Shunguang flashed to its front and thrust his sword in.

Her wrist remained as steady as if it were welded to the hilt of a sword, without budging an inch. The sword tip continued to advance about ten centimeters, shattering all the etheric energy that had been injected into it.

From a distant rock crevice, Ling watched all this through Eis's optical sensors; what she saw was no longer a duel.

What she witnessed was a one-sided suppression. Under Ye Shunguang's continuous attacks, Bollinger's body was like a broken drum being struck repeatedly, each strike arriving before it could recover from the vibrations of the previous blow.

Ye Shunguang's attack rhythm began to accelerate. At this frequency, her movements had become blurry afterimages—not just one person's afterimage, but several. She appeared simultaneously in two or three positions around Boling's body, each afterimage corresponding to a sword move being unleashed.

The sword move in the previous position has not yet finished, and the sword move in the next position has already begun.

She didn't strike Bollinger's vital point.

Her intention from the beginning was not to finish off the target—it was to "hard control." In the game, this means using a continuous stream of control skills to lock the target in place, preventing them from moving, attacking, or using skills, leaving them only able to passively take damage... until they lose their balance.

Ye Shunguang's ultimate move in the game is incredibly powerful in terms of interruption. Although his subsequent moves are only effective against small to medium-sized monsters, Ye Shunguang's genius in using an automated array to replace the initial sword rain that interrupts large monsters.

And that's what she's doing right now.

Each move targets the joints where Bollinger is trying to exert force, the intersections of the energy channels he is trying to conduct, and the organs he is trying to accumulate energy.

Slashing these spots won't cause much actual damage, but it can buy time for the automated sword rain, allowing the ultimate skill's strong interruption to continue.

Using the momentum above Bollinger's head, she leaped up, flipped in mid-air, and thrust her sword downwards while upside down. The tip of the sword pierced Bollinger's chest, and she used all her strength to tear it apart.

In that instant, Bollinger instinctively tried to launch a counterattack. It forcibly mobilized all available energy, attempting to release a full-range etheric energy shockwave on its body surface to push Ye Shunguang away.

But just as the patterns on its body surface lit up, the tip of the Azure Sea Sword touched the very center of the circular blank space on its chest.

With an extremely light touch, the moment the sword tip touched the circular blank space, an extremely compressed ether energy was transmitted from the sword tip into that blank area.

The energy was small—not enough to cause any harm—but it was like a pebble thrown into water, creating ripples of energy in that circular void.

The ripples spread out and interfered with the energy shockwave that Bollinger was mobilizing on the surface of his body—the waveform of the energy shockwave was disturbed by the ripples, the peaks and troughs canceled each other out, and the shockwave dissipated on its own before it could be released.

This was an extremely precise interruption. It wasn't about brute force pushing the shockwave back, but about interfering with its energy waveform with minimal force just before it was released, causing it to cancel itself out.

Bollinger's attempt to retaliate vanished without a trace. The etheric energy shockwave, having dissipated within his body, had nowhere to go but wandered aimlessly through his energy channels, further disrupting the turbulence of his internal energy flow.

The energy flow within Bollinger's body had reached a critical point of disorder... It seemed to be constantly absorbing ether from the environment to replenish its energy, but it couldn't retain it for long, resulting in a certain amount of erosion of itself.

Horizontal slash, vertical chop, diagonal sweep, spinning slash, and continuous thrust.

The Azure Sea Sword whirled in her hand like the wind, leaving one new wound after another on Blinger's body.

Bollinger's crystalline layer had gone from being partially damaged to a complete mess—it was almost impossible to find a single intact etheric crystalline layer that still retained its original form.

...The battle continued in this way. After all, no matter what Ye Shunguang was doing, his current status panel was only 0+1. Even if the numbers were strong, the flaws in the mechanism were still significant.

Although she now has a super invincible wheelchair with unlimited ultimate moves, without the support of her original mechanics, these mechanics are difficult to deal effective damage to high-value enemies, and she can only engage in a protracted battle.

It's roughly equivalent to having a new Void with an Aether Intensity of 12, and a Voidhunter only managing to reduce its health by less than 1/20 after 20 seconds of attacks, while Hugo's skill is ready, and he uses "Dancing at the Boundary Between Order and Madness," dealing a percentage-based damage that instantly amounts to 99999999. If you don't bring Hugo and don't use that mechanic, you're stuck in a prolonged battle; there's no other choice.

...So, after about 5 minutes of the several hundred chapters of the perceived time, Bollinger's body suddenly froze.

It wasn't the stiffness that came after she pierced its core; it was a different kind of stiffness, one she had never seen before. Its body remained motionless in the position where she had pierced its core, even the flickering yellow patterns had stopped flickering and were frozen in a state of half-light and half-darkness.

Then its body began to glow.

From the circular blank space she had pierced, a dark red, almost black light surged from the depths of the core.

The dark red light spread along its remaining yellow lines throughout its body, and wherever it went, the yellow lines were swallowed up, covered, and dyed the same dark red.

It wasn't an energy replenishment—where the dark red light passed, the etheric crystals weren't being repaired, but rather disintegrating.

Under the illumination of dark red light, dense cracks appeared in the crystalline layer, and the light seeping out from the cracks was also dark red.

Ye Shunguang leaped back more than ten meters and landed at a safe distance.

Her red pupils were fixed on Blinger, who was undergoing an unknown transformation, and all the lightsabers were arranged in a defensive array in front of her.

After Bollinger's dark red light had spread throughout its entire body, a strange distortion began to appear around it—not the distortion of its own body, but the distortion of the space around it.

About two meters to its left, the space began to soften, deform, and collapse, like a piece of glass being heated from the inside.

At the center of the collapse, a tiny black dot appeared, which rapidly expanded to the size of a fist, a head, and a washbasin. The edge of the dot was a ring of rotating, dark red spatial folds that constantly expanded and contracted, like the breathing of some living thing.

Then, the crack tore open from that black spot.

A spatial rift...?!

Something is opening a spatial rift! Is that thing trying to save Bollinger?!

Just then, Ye Shunguang saw a blue-black afterimage running over – it was Hoshimi Miyabi!

Hoshimi Miyabi rushed towards Blinger, and a flash of blue light appeared, causing frost to form on Blinger's body.

She tried to freeze Boling, but things didn't go as planned. By the time Ya arrived, Boling had already been caught by the suction of the spatial rift, with one foot already inside. There was no way to save him.

The rift closed completely, and the space returned to its original state as if nothing had happened. The etheric mist in the void slowly flowed back to the location where the rift disappeared. The mist flowed slightly faster than before, as if the high-concentration area around the rift was replenishing the low-concentration area after too much mist had been absorbed by the rift.

The void fell silent. Only the sound of flowing ethereal mist, the crystalline fragments scattered across the ground by the fierce battle, and the faint scraping sounds of Ies approaching from the side.

Hoshimi Miyabi sheathed her sword. The movement of the blade sliding into the scabbard was as fast as its drawing, and a soft, crisp "click" sounded as the hilt touched the scabbard opening. Her red pupils looked at Ye Shunguang in the empty, dim light.

Ye Shunguang still held the Qingming Sword at his side, the light on its tip no longer so bright. His red pupils also looked back at Xing Jianya.

"The rope craftsman informed me," Hoshimi Miyabi unexpectedly spoke up before the atmosphere became awkward. "The battle seemed intense, but ultimately we couldn't capture that enemy."

"Huh?" Ye Shunguang was about to speak when he heard this, and he was stunned. He subconsciously asked, "The bell?"

"It's Tetsuya," Hoshimi Miyabi corrected.

"Oh... wait, you know Zhe?" Ye Shunguang's interest was piqued by this unexpected answer. After all, she really wanted to know the timeline where Fahrenheit wasn't. Knowing what happened before... would definitely be very helpful in assessing Fahrenheit's current state.

"When we had the accident at HIA, that homeless man helped us. Later, we gave him a substantial reward, enough for him to settle down and live anywhere except the city center for a while," Hoshimi Miya revealed truthfully. After all, according to Liu's investigation, that man had already cooperated with the powerful figure in front of him. Ye Shunguang obviously seemed unaware of what had happened before, so it wasn't a bad idea to talk about it now.

...During the Virtual Killer arc, Zhe was wandering around the Light and Shadow Plaza, and then, by a twist of fate, he helped Ya in HIA. Was this some kind of worldline correction?! I've learned something new!

"Oh..." Ye Shunguang nodded. "The one I fought had a strong recovery ability. In a short time, I could only control and wear him down. It would probably take a long time to kill him."

"Understood, I will tell them."

"So, what about now?"

"Let's go and support Master Yixuan."

"Yi... Master is fighting too?!"