Chapter 28: The Choir and the Dancer

"Boom—Splash!"

A violent roar echoed through the underground cavern.

Flesh tentacles rained down from above, crashing heavily into the water and exploding columns several meters high.

At the center, the fish-shaped remnant beast writhed, opening and closing its maw as if performing a strange and ominous dance, while using Jiang Jiang's song to command the flesh beside it to attack Senior Cuique.

Senior Cuique hugged the water surface, flying low in circles along the cavern's edge, dodging the flesh tentacles that charged at her intermittently, raising her wand, and tentatively firing several beams of mana at the remnant beast in the center.

Yet when the mana beams struck the remnant beast, they vanished like a fish sinking and a goose flying away, failing to provoke any reaction from the opponent or cause any damage.

From Senior Cuique's perspective, one could see that the mana beams simply disintegrated automatically upon touching the remnant beast's surface, vanishing silently.

"There really is a pupal shell?"

This was the first time she had shown surprise since entering this realm: "Has it already evolved to this stage?"

The pupal shell is a bodily ability extended by pupal-stage remnant beasts as they continue to hoard nutrients and evolve toward higher levels, granting the remnant beast the ability to disintegrate and defend against pure mana attacks within certain limits.

Remnant beasts are originally extremely difficult to inflict physical damage upon, so once they evolve a pupal shell, it means they are virtually without defensive blind spots, making them very hard to injure. Just hearing this is enough to make ordinary people feel powerless.

Fortunately, the name "pupal shell" contains the word "shell," indicating its nature—for magical girls, it can actually be broken.

To bypass the pupal shell and harm the remnant beast, there are usually only two methods: first, use mana exceeding its tolerance limit to attack continuously, breaking through with brute force to shatter the shell; second, use abilities that are neither physical nor pure mana damage.

The first method corresponds to a siege, which is the least demanding approach, requiring only a sufficient number of magical girls, even if they are all seed-stage novices. A group of magical girls swarms forward, each using mana to attack, and the massive volume of mana can directly break through the pupal shell to strike the remnant beast.

Of course, if an extremely powerful magical girl arrives, using individual mana to completely overwhelm and crush a pupal-stage remnant beast is not impossible.

The second method corresponds to more approaches, but the requirements are relatively higher; the most common is mana constructs. The power of mana constructs comes from the magical girl's true form, a product of soul and mana merging, and they naturally possess a certain suppressing effect against the pupal shells of remnant beasts.

Therefore, when numbers are insufficient, all participants in the extermination must be magical girls of the bud-stage or above.

Tilting her head mid-high-speed flight to look at the remnant beast in the center, Senior Cuique calmed her emotions again: although the existence of the pupal shell surprised her, it was not entirely unexpected, because this was precisely the reason she came alone.

To this day, Fang Ting City has only three magical girls, a number certainly insufficient to break the pupal shell. Considering that the other two have not mastered mana constructs, even if they came, they could not inflict effective damage, so Senior Cuique decided not to involve them.

And now, seemingly knowing there is only one enemy, the fish-shaped remnant beast is exceptionally unrestrained; after being counterattacked by Senior Cuique, it dances wildly, summoning more tentacles to reach out toward Senior Cuique from all directions.

Senior Cuique's expression remained calm, her clothes rustling loudly, her hair dancing in the air, her lips slightly parted:

"Mana construct, extract."

She murmured, and the wand in her hand dissolved into scattered mana, with countless mana threads flashing and connecting the entire space of the cavern.

Flesh limbs were blocked, tentacles were severed, and the remnant beast's blood splattered everywhere, yet not a single drop stained the hem of her clothes. She continued flying, and the surroundings instantly became empty, with no trace of any enemy remaining.

But this grand choral symphony performance will by no means end here.

The vast cavern is the stage, the remnant beast at the center of the stage is the conductor of this concert, and also its own choir; the flesh limbs hanging from the cavern are its symphony orchestra members and backup dancers.

As long as its performance has not stopped, the attacks will not end.

As one wave of assault was dismantled and tentacles lay shattered on the ground, its song shifted, the style changing to a mournful elegy completely different from before.

Within the song, as if moved by some call, a series of bubbles suddenly rose from the dim pool below the cavern, and countless objects suddenly floated up from beneath the water surface, soaring high toward the sky.

Senior Cuique had not yet clearly seen what was drilling out from underwater, but her inner alertness made her flight path change abruptly.

"Boom!"

At the very moment she changed course, a cannonball composed of sewage suddenly grazed her original trajectory, crashing straight into the cavern's inner wall with a thunderous roar.

It was a water cannon.

Senior Cuique understood; her mind swirling, she already knew what was in the pool below. Looking down from the air, the dense mass of objects had also revealed their true form: they were all heads of remnant beasts.

—The heads of dissolution-cavity type remnant beasts.

The choral song was mournful and sorrowful, yet the vocal parts gradually rose, the rhythm gradually strengthened, the high notes rose and fell, and the dominant seventh chords lifted the emotion of the piece to its peak, seemingly entering the climax phase.

"Boom, boom, boom!"

Water cannons fired one after another in rhythm, launching from the pool below toward Senior Cuique's position.

"Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!"

Tentacles, sounding like whips striking, swung down from the high sky, carrying a piercing wind sound toward the figure in the air.

Senior Cuique twisted her body mid-flight like a bullet, accelerating once more.

Such dense and dangerous attacks would be difficult for any leaf-stage magical girl to survive unscathed, but not for her.

Senior Cuique was like a solo dancer who had burst into a symphony orchestra pit, darting and weaving between the various sections; her light dance steps and intense movements were unconventional yet not out of place, as if she too had become part of the performance. Constantly dodging attacks and using her mana construct to counterattack, the solo dancer leaped continuously from the edge of the orchestra pit, charging toward the conductor's podium in the center.

The brass section was easily bypassed by her, the woodwind section could not hinder her steps, the violinists were blocked to the side by her threads, and the music could not hold back her leaping figure.

The singer on the conductor's podium felt provoked.

It was the singer and also the conductor; this concert should not escape its control. Outsiders should quietly appreciate from below the stage, not burst in and disturb its performance.

The grand welcome party ends here; what follows is driving away the troublemaking audience.

So, it closed its mouth.

As the central fish-shaped remnant beast shut its giant maw, the originally thunderous song suddenly stopped.

Those strings of flesh flags hanging in the air writhed and swelled; the flesh chunks hanging above cracked open, mouths filled with sharp teeth opened within them, and tongues extended; the egg-stage remnant beasts below retracted their dissolution cavities, stopped their non-stop water cannon bombardment, and opened the mouths that should have been their weakness.

Senior Cuique's pupils contracted slightly.

She suddenly raised her hand and made a less common gesture toward the dense threads in the air.

Immediately, explosive sonic waves from all directions roared up, piercing the cavern's inner walls, blasting away the accumulated pool, and shattering almost all foreign objects in the entire space.