Chapter 796: Qingque's Battle 4

Qingque acted again.

This time her moves were completely different from before; previously she used nimble evasion and hit‑and‑run guerrilla tactics.

This time she charged straight at the core monster head‑on.

Thousands of jade‑like plates lined up beside her in three forward‑and‑back rows, like three flowing defensive lines, each plate constantly adjusting its position in real time.

Her body became a blurred gray‑white afterimage during the high‑speed charge, trailing a long cyan‑blue light tail.

The monster's vertical mouth opened.

Hundreds of teeth in that mouth opened simultaneously, each a tiny blade; hundreds of blades shot out, drawing hundreds of golden trajectories that streamed toward Qingque's face from different angles.

Qingque's first row of jade plates met them.

Dozens of plates lit up at once, forming a rotating shield wall before Qingque.

The teeth struck the shield wall, exploding into sprays of golden sparks; the impacts were deflected, but the jade plates were knocked back several inches.

Qingque did not slow down, pressing the shield wall forward; the second row of jade plates slipped around the sides of the wall and attacked the monster's leg joints from the flanks.

The monster did not dodge; those attacks were like mosquito bites to it.

But Qingque never expected those attacks to cause damage.

Her true intention lay in the third row of jade plates.

Those plates did not join the attack; they quietly slipped along the lowest part of the flesh wall, evading all the silk‑thread sensors, and crawled through the cuts cut by the light net toward the fissure.

One, two, three, four, five.

Five jade plates, each bearing a fish that held its breath, emitting no light.

They lurked in the folds of the flesh wall, waiting until the monster's full attention was drawn to Qingque's frontal charge, then silently slid toward the crack.

The monster seemed to sense something; a vertical pupil at its shoulder joint suddenly turned right, focusing on a direction.

But before it could lock onto the positions of those jade plates, Qingque surged to its front.

She gathered all the jade plates, clasped her hands at her chest, then opened them, and a fist‑sized cyan‑blue light sphere condensed between her palms.

Though small, the sphere's surface glowed so densely it was almost liquid.

She launched the sphere from her fingertips; it traced a cyan‑blue arc through the air toward the exact center of the monster's vertical mouth.

The monster instinctively closed its mouth, but the sphere pierced in before its lips could meet.

The next instant, the sphere detonated inside its mouth!

It was not a shockwave that burst, but dozens of cyan‑blue swimming fish!

Each fish was a manifestation of light, rushing out from the monster's mouth, piercing its teeth, passing through its throat, bursting out the side of its gill‑flap, and spewing from its ear holes.

The fish swarmed wildly around its head, drowning its entire face in cyan‑blue radiance.

The monster let out a muffled sound, its first Rage‑like utterance since the battle began.

Its two hands rose together, and dozens of branches thrust out from behind, skewering all the swimming fish.

The blossoms at the tips of the branches snapped open rapidly, shredding each pierced fish into fragments.

The shredded light fragments scattered in the air like tiny fireworks fading away.

But Qingque had already vanished from in front of it.

At the moment the sphere exploded, cyan‑blue light burst from her feet, and she rode that thrust, launching upward at a steep, extreme angle.

The target was not the monster; she slammed straight into the uppermost defense wall woven from silk threads and branches.

The first branch swung down from above.

Qingque sidestepped, pressed her right hand against the branch's surface, and used its force to flip upward.

The second branch swept in from the left‑front; her body performed a 180‑degree spin in midair, her skirt fluttering, her left leg kicked the side of the branch, and she shot out of the original ascent path.

The third branch was a spiraling spear; the branch itself spun at high speed, its wooden fibers twisted into a helix by the vortex, thrusting straight toward her abdomen.

Qingque did not dodge.

At the instant the spiral was about to contact her abdomen, she crossed her ten fingers into a fist and smashed down; the fist struck the tip of the spiral, deflecting the whole branch by half its width, just enough for her body to slip through the side gap, the edge grazing her garment and shaving off a small piece of cloth.

She passed the first layer of defense.

More silk threads draped down from above, woven denser than a spider's web.

Qingque placed her fingertips to her mouth and whistled briefly; the five jade plates hidden in the flesh wall's folds erupted with their full light at once.

They no longer hid!

The five plates detonated simultaneously beneath the crack, cyan‑blue light spewing from five points, forming five Light Pillar.

The Light Pillar pierced the layers of silk, burning five interconnected holes through the defense wall.

Combined, those holes were exactly one person's width.

Qingque's body twisted in the air like a fish swimming upstream, slipping through the hole.

At the exact moment she passed the hole, she reached for the last thing she had left there—a jade plate she had deliberately lodged at the edge of the crack when she broke through.

That plate was hidden deep, wrapped in the flesh wall's folds, undetected even by the core monster's senses.

The fish on its surface opened its eyes.

Qingque pried the plate from the flesh folds, gave the surface a light flick with her finger.

The plate emitted a crisp ringing sound.

The Bubbles outside the crack heard the signal.

At that moment, billions of Bubbles simultaneously surged into the crack, like a dam opened, gushing in!

Transparent, cyan‑blue, large, small, strung together, solitary Bubbles rushed into Shuhuo's body at lightning speed!

Their influx was so fast it even produced a deep, muffled Boom—, and the whole space shuddered violently from that Boom—.

A sea of Bubbles was flooding the trunk of this giant tree!

Bubbles poured down from above, met the silk threads, and the threads were swallowed.

When it encounters a branch, the branch is wrapped, its surface swiftly assimilated by Bubbles, the golden wooden fibers become a transparent bubble wall, then explode into a harmless mist of water.

When it encounters a flesh wall, the eyes on the flesh wall are covered by Bubbles; the eyelids frantically open and close trying to shake off the Bubbles, but the more they shake, the tighter the Bubbles cling, until the entire eye socket is filled with Bubbles, the eyeball is assimilated and turns into a turquoise transparent bead set in the socket.

The advance of Bubbles is unstoppable.

Whether above or below, left or right, front or back, Bubbles devours everything that stands before it.

The monster let out the loudest screech it has ever made, its gaping mouth opening so wide it seemed to tear the whole head in half down the middle.