Chapter 455

Broken.

While the Cowboy Spirit's smile was radiant and bright, the faces of the Zhong Lou crowd were solemn.

The 【Estate Guard】 was a consumable skill scroll that had previously appeared during Noah's special mission in the otherworldly Gao Ta, where, in front of other players' action cameras, it whipped the invisible Fetus Demon away with a leather whip.

Thus, even among perfect, epic-quality items, its mystery and priority rank among the highest.

【Heart Piercing Bone Scraping】

【Soul Stripping Technique】

【Soul Severing Soul Tearing】

Various spells—beams, rays, or spectral apparitions—lashed toward the Cowboy Spirit, but every single attack passed straight through its body.

"Yougottomove，Yougottomove~"

Amidst a faint, melodious tune, the Cowboy Spirit marched straight toward a Black Zhong Lou mage.

"Fuck, I knew it!"

The Black mage named 【Richard】 let out a despairing cry inside his mind—he had lived in London since his grandfather's generation,

spoke pure Received Pronunciation, the aristocratic British accent from novels, yet was still the first targeted.

Crack!

The Cowboy Spirit's braided leather whip struck Richard's chest with brutal force.

The soul-shattering agony instantly exceeded human sensory limits—he rolled his eyes back, spat white foam, staggered backward, and collapsed to the ground, screaming incoherently,

"Huh-huh-huh-huh, Ooh-ooh—"

Due to mental distraction and muscle paralysis, a wet, squelching sound—puli-puli—emerged from Richard's pants.

Thus, the Zhong Lou crowd's faces, already solemn, were instantly coated with fear.

If he let out a fart in front of the entire world watching, his arcane career would be over.

Perhaps sensing he was the next target, a mixed-race female Zhong Lou mage of Indian and Black descent, 【Parvati】, opened a teleportation portal and fled hundreds of meters away.

Yet.

The Cowboy Spirit raised an eyebrow, his mouth forming the words "Think you can run?"

His whip instantly elongated to over five hundred meters, piercing through buildings in its path, and with pinpoint precision lashed Parvati's back, flinging her through the air.

Gypsy? Whip!

Jew? Whip!

Eastern European? Whip!

Italian? Whip!

Six-armed Snake Demon? Not human? Doesn't matter—whip anyway!

The Cowboy Spirit, as if treasuring this final appearance, struck six times per second according to some hidden standard, the whip's tip smoking from friction.

Though the whippings inflicted no physical damage, the excruciating pain was enough to disrupt the mages' casting and trigger backlash.

"."

Nicolas, the only one untouched by the whip, beads of cold sweat formed on his forehead—his ancestors were all pure-blooded British nobility, loyalists to Cromwell, true Old Londoners of the Union Jack. He had never mixed blood with Black people.

Even under the strictest "one-drop rule," he was not a person of color, outside the scope of white racial prejudice.

The Cowboy Spirit, with only two seconds left of its summoning duration, seemed to realize this—he stared at Nicolas, his brow furrowing unconsciously.

Just as Nicolas believed he had escaped death—

The Cowboy Spirit pulled out a pair of sunglasses from nowhere and put them on.

He painted all things in the world—including Nicolas—in black. With a final smile before vanishing, he whipped his lash and struck Nicolas square on the chest.

Tap-tap-tap.

Nicolas staggered backward several steps—even with a relic enhancing soul and willpower—he felt his soul about to leave his body.

Worse still—

【Temporal Stasis】, a large-scale spell requiring focused channeling, dissolved into thin air as the mages' concentration shattered.

Li Cheng's vision cleared abruptly—he hurled his Bat Hook, slid along the ground, and narrowly dodged every spell beam now accelerating toward him as the temporal gel vanished.

Simultaneously, a shadowy Black Dragon rose above his head, spewing Black Dragon acid from its breath to corrode and melt the glowing, tangible giant hands—【Bigby's Hand】—flashing in from both sides.

"Cannot let Master Pi Fu escape."

Nicolas's pupils contracted involuntarily—he realized the invisible wall Moebius had cast, trapping the youths outside the nightclub, was actually a spatial anchor, blocking non-allied teleportation and displacement.

If Master Pi Fu broke out, even a single light-speed elbow strike could tear the city apart, causing hundreds of thousands of casualties.

In a way, the fact that he hadn't launched straight into slaughter, but offered a chance for negotiation, was almost kind.

"Sorry…"

Nicolas whispered softly, then without hesitation gripped his staff with both hands, jammed it into his abdomen, and twisted hard—overdrawing his mana massively.

The previous 【Planar Banishment】 had been interrupted by the Cowboy Spirit and was still on cooldown, so the spell he now cast was called 【Gaia's Shackles】.

Crack!

The concrete ground split open violently; bedrock surged upward, clamping Li Cheng's lower body in place.

This wasn't merely physical restraint—it temporarily sealed off light-speed elbow strikes and 【Familiar Swap】 and other teleportation skills.

Li Cheng instantly hurled his electronic pet egg and cast 【Mist Concealment】, summoning thick fog to blanket the street.

But before the mist fully spread, the Six-Armed Snake Demon moved—using its innate quasi-spell ability to teleport directly before Li Cheng.

Its upper body was that of an exceptionally tall, voluptuous woman, her vital areas covered in green snake scales, each of her six arms gripping a blade, wrists and neck adorned with bracelets and jewels.

Its lower body was a colossal, serpentine trunk rivaling a Titan Python.

In raw physical strength alone, it rivaled the White Horse Tombstone.

Shhh!

The Snake Demon's thick, long serpentine body bound Li Cheng's waist in a death grip, squeezing with all its might.

As the fog spread, the last image captured by the street intersection surveillance camera was the Snake Demon swinging six contract demonic blades forged in the Abyss, slashing toward Li Cheng's neck.

Pshhhh, pshhhh—

From within the dense fog came the crisp sounds of flesh being cut and blood spraying, drowning out the rainstorm.

Crimson filthy blood flowed out from the fog, seeping into the sewers. Gradually, no more movement could be heard.

Until—

*Slap. *

.. C〇

A massive Snake Demon head was flung out from the fog, tumbling and crashing into the stone steps by the road, its vacant eyes still holding terror and despair.

"No need to apologize."

Li Cheng's calm voice rang out,

Not just the Snake Demon's head—the second and third human heads, dead with unclosed eyes, were also tossed out from the fog, rolling to Nikola's feet.

Those were the heads of MI6 agents.

Nikola's pupils trembled. Ignoring drug resistance and side effects, he directly shattered the glass bottle of mana-restoring potion and stuffed it into the wound on his abdomen.

Quickly recovering spiritual power, he cast a gale spell and illumination spell to disperse the dense fog. As the fog cleared, they saw Li Cheng, already switched into a three-meter-tall insectoid form, standing in an inhuman posture atop the Snake Demon's remains.

The bloodstains on the mantis-blade bone edges along both sides of his arms were washed clean by the rain. The thin, tough metallized bone blades trembled slightly, emitting a hollow, ethereal sound like a handpan instrument.

Beside Li Cheng stood Huiyu, holding the Skull-Crusher Power Hammer—during the gap when the fog spread, she had burrowed into the ground opened up by 【Gaia's Shackles】, dropped straight down into the subway platform below, and found the MI6 agents hiding with Sarah Tang Pusen.

Perhaps the British authorities had assumed the Special Affairs Bureau operated openly and rarely carried out assassinations,

This group of agents was led by only one player below Lv14, and was suddenly struck by Huiyu with a hammer blow that shattered his spine, using this player's own hand to detonate the fragmentation grenade he carried.

"This is for you."

Huiyu grabbed Sarah Tang Pusen by the hair as she screamed in terror and struggled, broke her four limbs, handed her to Li Cheng, and tossed her into the dimensional warehouse.

As for herself, in front of the surveillance cameras and the Zhong Lou crowd,

She picked up the last surviving MI6 special operative, named Arthur, and with a cheerful smile tore him apart down the middle of his body.

Splatter—

Innards scattered across the ground, and the howling cut off abruptly.

Even though Nikola had already experienced much in scripted missions—could even say he had personally waded through mountains of corpses and seas of blood—at this moment he felt an involuntary trembling coldness throughout his body, a shuddering urge to vomit.

Behind Nikola, the black mage named Richard struggled to get up from the ground and asked in a trembling voice: "Why?"

Arthur was not a player, merely an ordinary special operative following superior orders, unfortunately caught up in the incident.

The question was too naive; Li Cheng couldn't be bothered to answer. He casually flicked his mantis-blade bone edges, shaking off the filthy blood.

From the breathing pores on his neck, scalding hot air blasted out.

Huiyu, however, was quite leisurely. She was currently loaded with a large number of CPU chips, at her peak intelligence,

She said to the Zhong Lou mages with a cheerful smile: "Why? First, the moment this man picked up a gun, he had to be prepared to be killed by someone else.

Second, this is a question the Black slaves transported across the ocean by Britain in the 17th century also wanted to ask.

The Native Americans systematically massacred in the 18th century also wanted to ask.

The Australian Aboriginals culturally exterminated in the 19th century, the Indians and Irish who starved to death in famines, the Chinese invaded and colonized, also wanted to ask.

Since your answer all along has been that whoever is stronger is right, whoever is stronger represents civilization, then my answer now is the same."

A tremendous crash interrupted the conversation. Mobius and the Mechanical Swarm plummeted from high altitude simultaneously, slamming into the street like meteorites.

BOOM!!

The ground caved in, the cement road cracking like a spider web.

Mobius's face was pale, the Hukou of his right palm had burst open, and his left shoulder was gone.

The Mechanical Swarm was in no better shape—covered in wounds all over its body, with diesel and blood filth continuously spraying from the injuries.

【Mobius peed in the London water plant】

【Mobius secretly used up Hohenheim's Sugar Core vlog free viewing quota】

【Mobius downloaded Sina Weibo and dragged Kun Kun and TNT (Teens in Times) in the super topic】

Even at this point, the Mechanical Swarm's prosthetic eyes were still dutifully projecting AI-synthesized absurd, outrageous videos.

Mobius had already become numb to this. He glanced at Li Cheng and said in a low, hoarse voice: "You really are willing to put in the capital."

In his line of sight, several glimmers of light were simultaneously lit inside the Mechanical Swarm's body.

Each glimmer represented a high-quality consumable skill scroll—over the past four days, Li Cheng had taken a large sum of transferred funds from Binary Tree, Blood Lion Roar, and others, added all the savings and customer order prepayments from Zhu Xing Zhen Tai, and even borrowed heavily from numerous small loans, going all-in to purchase scrolls,

Especially scrolls targeting the Zhong Lou guild's spellcasting abilities.

【Area-Type Spell Suppression Movement Barrier】, 【Shield】, 【Counterspell】, 【Greater Magic Protection】, 【Black King's Staff】, 【Mage's Bane】, 【Universal Control Negation】.

All effects stacked on the Mechanical Swarm regardless of cost, so that even though Mobius held the home-ground advantage of timing and terrain, and still had high-grade equipment from the Zhong Lou, he still couldn't take it down after a long assault—the spell suppression barrier was too disgusting, weakening not just him but also Nikola and the others below.

Hmm!

The engine inside the Mechanical Swarm roared. The chimney-shaped vector nozzles on its back spewed fierce flames, propelling it to burst forward.

Mobius swung his sword behind him, cutting open a teleportation gate, dove into it, and appeared three kilometers away to the due south, across the Taiwushihe River, at the London Eye Ferris wheel.

A distance of three kilometers, for a supernatural being of this level, was covered in an instant.

The Mechanical Swarm, fitted with hovering engines, changed direction nimbly, pursuing again with trailing flames.

And Mobius stood atop the London Eye, taking a deep breath of the cold, humid air.

In the city of London, besides the Zhong Lou, there were dozens of other native guilds, big and small.

Yet all these guilds were now hiding, unwilling to join the battle—even the Hellfire Superpower Club, which had the strongest overall strength and was backed by a Lv35 powerhouse—

This guy club's headquarters was right beneath the fabric nightclub. MI6 deliberately placed Sarah Tang Pusen's detention site in a hotel adjacent to the fabric nightclub,

It wasn't without the thought of leading disaster eastward and letting everyone share the burden.

But the Hellfire Superpower Club didn't buy it at all, decisively staying out of it, preferring to sit and watch the battle's aftershocks from the mechanical swarm reach their headquarters.

"Sure enough, relying on anyone is worse than relying on yourself."

Mobius muttered to himself, a wry smile surfacing on his face.

At this very moment, the players watching the battle scenes in London through surveillance cameras and near-Earth orbit satellites had no way of knowing that Master Pi Fu had spared no cost in frantically piling on materials, stacking together a war beast with magic resistance maxed out,

nor did they know that the Zhong Lou was wary of collateral damage, constantly guarding against Master Pi Fu's light-speed elbow strikes.

Those players would only see that the Zhong Lou, a堂堂 large guild, had actually been beaten into London by a mere Lv21, slapped in the face publicly.

With Hornheim absent, Mobius was the first person responsible for maintaining the Zhong Lou.

He took a deep breath, no longer hesitating, and directly thrust the thin sword in his hand into the London Eye below.

This Ferris wheel was not only a landmark building of London, but also a node of the Zhong Lou's defensive formation.

Zzzt—

A dazzling pillar of light shot out from the Zhong Lou headquarters at the Greenwich Observatory seven kilometers away, piercing into the London Eye.

Mobius's hair stirred without wind, his whole body floated up lightly, and his only remaining right arm slowly drew a longsword composed purely of light from the London Eye.

Its name was 【Britannia】.

Light blazed in Mobius's eyes, his skin peeled off piece by piece, and he swung his sword, pointing sharply northward at the swarm charging in, casting a spell without incantation—

Dragon! Slash! Cleave!

(End of this chapter)