Chapter 59 Eradicate Evil Completely

A martial artist leaped high into the air, firing a continuous barrage of shots even before reaching the apex of his jump. The bullets formed a dense, suffocating net descending straight toward Hsiang Shan.

Instead of retreating, Hsiang Shan slid forward, dropping his knees backward to skid across the ground while arching his upper body backward like a willow branch caught in a strong wind. He raised the walkie-talkie to his speaker and continued to sing aloud: "Wake up, get up, get out there! Raise your voice against liars!"

His posture resembled that of a wild, unrestrained scholar from a storybook, raising a cup of fine wine to drink deeply under the open sky. Dozens of bullets grazed past his face, his underarms, his groin, and the top of his head, while simultaneously dodging two incoming high-frequency blades.

The leaping martial artist was one of Galiard's elite guards, whose marksmanship was inherited from Galiard's "Ferocious Tiger Astonishes the Heavens" gun-kata. He was the first to realize that Hsiang Shan was systematically and consciously picking off the gun-path martial artists. Seeing that he could not seize the high ground in the rush of the moment, he had directly jumped into the air to fire.

However, Hsiang Shan had mastered the algorithms of this martial art and stood far superior to this pack of bandits in terms of theoretical depth. Wielding this martial art from such a commanding height, he naturally surpassed Galiard himself.

Coupled with the massive 0.4-second delay inherent in the high cybernetic modification rates of the Z-Organization's warriors, he completely anticipated every possible angle from which the enemy might fire.

Before he had even finished humming the previous line of the song, he had already slid directly beneath the airborne martial artist. Supporting his weight with one hand on the ground, he inverted his body, hooked one of the enemy's arms with one leg, and unleashed the remaining momentum of his other leg to kick the opponent squarely in the neck. The martial artist's head was knocked violently to the side, instantly rendering him combat-ineffective. Hsiang Shan then grabbed the firearm integrated with the martial artist's arm, lifting and firing in one fluid motion, instantly repelling several surrounding warriors.

"He's... a monster! He's not human!"

Finally, amidst that serene singing, a bandit from the greenwoods completely cracked.

"He's not human! He's not a man!"

"Can martial arts really reach this level? This is impossible! Hahaha! This is impossible!"

"This is virtual reality! It has to be virtual reality!"

"Second boss! Stop messing around! Disengage the illusion!"

"Hahaha! This illusion doesn't feel real at all... wait, it feels too real!"

Panic spread rapidly through the crowd like a virus.

Anyone who hums a tune while killing people on a battlefield is definitely no chivalrous hero. That was the final boss of a video game, a scripted execution, an insurmountable obstacle!

"Mommy! I'm not playing anymore!" One greenwood bandit turned and fled first.

Once one broke, others followed. Morale dissolved as quickly as residual snow under boiling water.

Even though a few minor leaders knew that "running away" was a path to certain death and that their only chance of survival lay in gathering the masses for a direct counterattack, some of them tried to execute deserters to rally morale.

Naturally, the moment they made a move, Hsiang Shan snapped their necks.

"The fakers are all sick at heart, their faces hiding their fear..." Hsiang Shan carried a rifle he had just snatched, the rhythm of his humming growing even more leisurely. "They look down on all the rest of us, like they're some special breed."

Yet the more he did this, the less the bandits dared to face him head-on. He seemed like something existing only within the forbidden fantasies of the Father of All Machines, an irresistible embodiment of death. No one dared to engage him anymore. Hsiang Shan simply carried his gun and walked casually in one direction. Occasionally, a greenwood bandit who failed to escape in time and found himself trapped in a desperate situation would fire at him.

Yet their attacks were always effortlessly neutralized by Hsiang Shan, who promptly sent them on their way.

"A mere mob," Hsiang Shan shook his head. Once the melee martial artists had scattered, if the gun-path warriors had managed to set up defensive positions, they could have naturally formed a suppressive wave against him.

But now, the enemy had completely lost the capacity for coordinated combat.

He had hacked the main server and inflicted a digital parasite on the majority of the martial artists.

He had knocked out the primary authority channels used to command subordinates, preventing effective orders from being issued correctly in the first place and stopping the enemy from acting in unison.

He had selectively picked off mid-level personnel capable of frontline command, throwing their order into chaos.

When a crowd lacks order, their techniques interfere with and obstruct one another, denying them the space to dodge, retreat, or maneuver away from the enemy.

In this way, a "one-versus-one-hundred" scenario was successfully dismantled into a hundred individual "one-on-one" fights.

"Hey, why are you all leaving just like that?" After knocking down a martial artist who was trying to mount a desperate counterattack, Hsiang Shan sighed and shouted loudly into the walkie-talkie: "Let me tell you! It's dangerous over there too! Hey... why won't you listen to good advice?"

Suddenly, a massive horde of bandits rushed into the corridor, causing extreme congestion.

And at this very moment, the iron fog inside the corridor had still not dissipated.

Or rather... cyborgs naturally had a very low demand for oxygen and possessed an absurdly high tolerance for hypoxia-induced damage, which meant their requirements for ventilation were minimal.

The iron fog in the corridor looked as though it would linger for quite some time.

Several bandits inside the corridor experienced short circuits due to the iron fog, losing their mobility before being knocked to the ground by companions surging from behind and being heavily trampled upon. The martial artists inside the corridor fell into a predicament where they "could not unleash their martial arts." Yet they felt no sense of humiliation; instead, they experienced a faint sense of relief.

Because this condition of "being unable to perform" applied to Hsiang Shan just as much.

Unless Hsiang Shan's prosthetic output was exaggerated enough to flatten a cyborg into a thin sheet with his bare hands, he would likewise be unable to utilize his extraordinary martial arts within the confines of the corridor.

In this tightly packed environment where people were crushing against one another, the gap between Hsiang Shan and the bandits was at its absolute narrowest.

Meanwhile, the bandits at the rear finally regained their composure, raising their firearms to establish a blockade of firepower.

However, Hsiang Shan ignored them entirely, pressing forward into the deeper sections without looking back.

There were still a few targets within who were not controlled by the parasite and required targeted eradication.

The greenwood bandits trapped in the corridor finally breathed a sigh of relief.

But right at that moment, a commotion erupted from within the tunnel.

Then, the crowd began to converge in a single direction.

This large stronghold originally had several exits, but now, most of them had been sealed shut. Heavy iron blast doors weighing dozens of tons cut off the inside from the outside.

Hsiang Shan had long since used Galiard's administrative privileges to seal off most of the exits.

The very last exit was the motorcycle parking garage. The blast door there was slowly closing.

Countless greenwood bandits shoved and crowded against each other as they rushed inside.

Yet at that instant, explosions erupted once more.

The motorcycles detonated in a chain reaction. The entire parking garage plunged into a sea of fire. At that moment, the martial artist closest to the exit had only run half the distance. The blast wave shoved him backward. The intense heat severely burned many of the bandits with lower modification rates.

Only then did Hsiang Shan's voice echo through the speakers: "My fellow martial arts brothers, I warned you all that it was dangerous over there, why wouldn't you listen..."

Accompanied by this voice was a muffled groan of agony.

Judging by the voice print, it seemed to belong to one of the elite fighters from the assault squad.

"Don't worry, there's enough for everyone."

……………………………………………………………………

——I have to escape.

This was the only thing running through Little Poison Bug's mind right now.

There was simply no way to win this. The chivalrous warrior on the opposite side was clearly experienced and knew precisely how to fracture an enemy's formation.

And in a one-on-one situation, this stronghold could not produce a single martial artist capable of fighting him.

After all...

Both Leif and Galiard had fallen.

Furthermore, judging by the signs, most of the experts in the mountain stronghold had been infected by the parasite.

Little Poison Bug did not dare attempt to cleanse the parasite at all. According to the intelligence sent back just before Leif's death, explosive quaking was utterly useless against the opponent's internal energy. Little Poison Bug was only marginally stronger than the explosive quaker, and going up against him would probably result in being instantly killed.

The second boss possessed zero courage to resist. He was terrified that the singing god of death would come looking for him. Therefore, the moment his subordinates began to rout, he made up his mind to flee.

He quickly stood up from the broadcast console in his room, then dashed back to the joint training hall he shared with the primary boss—this was where they had studied the martial arts of the Demonic Cult.

He grabbed the hard drive he had been examining earlier, hoisted the backup of the stronghold's collective memories onto his back, and sprinted toward the depths of the base.

Every leader had a dedicated passage linking directly to their private chambers—it was a privilege of rank.

There was a mechanical combination lock here, ensuring no worries about electronic intrusion. Little Poison Bug quickly unlocked the mechanism and pressed a standalone circuit switch. The massive blast door slowly began to rise.

Little Poison Bug prepared to leave before the door had even fully opened. But at that exact moment, a sharp whistling sound suddenly materialized behind him. He was familiar with this sound. It was the disturbance caused by sub-sonic movement.

Left with no choice, Little Poison Bug spun around to meet the incoming strike. His double fists collided head-on with the enemy's piercing punch. Pouring all his strength into the blow, Little Poison Bug hoped the momentum would hurl him safely into the passageway. But his opponent reacted even faster, instantly altering the trajectory of his fist from a piercing thrust to a downward press, driving Little Poison Bug—whose feet had just left the ground—flat onto the floor, before kicking him away from the direction of the blast door.

Having done all this, the man tossed something he held in his other hand straight through the open doorway. Little Poison Bug was uninfected and possessed a discerning eye—he saw it clearly. It was one of the elite fighters from the assault squad. This gun-path martial artist had a penchant for explosives and carried a string of remote-detonated landmines on his person. And now, this martial artist had his head ripped off, bound together with a string of mines, and thrown by Hsiang Shan directly into the corridor.

Hsiang Shan turned to face Little Poison Bug, while simultaneously backhanding the button for the blast door.

The heavy door slowly slid shut.

Humming a soothing tune, Hsiang Shan spread his arms wide and beckoned Little Poison Bug with a gesture, inviting him to attack.

A muffled explosion echoed from behind the thick iron door. The steel-constructed blast door actually warped and distorted visibly. The vibration shook a few wisps of dust down from the ceiling, which drifted between the two men.

Little Poison Bug fell into despair. The opponent had clearly used the neural chip of that greenwood bandit as a countdown trigger to detonate the mines and collapse the tunnel. Trapped in a dead end, the internal-style martial artist assumed a fundamental boxing stance and launched a flying kick.

Hsiang Shan sidestepped the kick effortlessly, then slammed his shoulder into Little Poison Bug, sending him crashing ten meters away: "You dare leave the ground without vector thrusters? Do you even know martial arts?"