“Hold on tight, Elder.” Aoi didn’t hesitate, deciding to take off. Qiqi Zhu had wanted to make a sarcastic comment, but the words died on her lips.
She had just been talking casually, never expecting the other to actually take it seriously. Now she was in a bind and couldn’t back down without losing face. With Aoi calling her “Elder” left and right, she couldn’t bring herself to refuse.
She wasn’t like Samimi. She had never thought about doing anything grand, let alone saving the world. She had just been walking along, pushed into this position step by step.
Now, among the entire Human Race, she was the only one who could perfectly counter the Insect Tribe’s Poison Arrows. So, she had no choice but to grit her teeth and charge to the front.
“Alright then, let’s do it.” Qiqi Zhu poured her surging magic power into the Radiant Knight.
The mech, which originally emitted a pure blue light, was instantly stained with deep green Chaos Poison Magic. It looked like it had transformed from a righteous mech directly into an evil one, its power seeming to skyrocket after this “darkening.”
The Radiant Knight’s jetpack operated at full power. The six-meter-tall, heavy frame slowly lifted off the ground—a true case of “brute force making bricks fly.”
Since the flight function wasn’t fully debugged yet, the jetpack could currently only provide stable capabilities for dashing and jumping. Flight in this world was an extremely rare ability to begin with; to this day, only a handful of Wind Magic users could achieve stable flight.
That’s why Qiqi Zhu had questioned it: taking off wasn’t the hard part; landing was.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The Radiant Knight didn’t hesitate any longer, shooting straight up into the sky. The Insect Swarm on the ground lunged at empty air.
Standing on the mech’s shoulder, Qiqi Zhu felt the violent shaking and had to crouch down to stabilize her center of gravity. Even so, her performance was already incredibly abnormal; an ordinary person would have been flung off long ago.
She drew her bow mid-air. Chaos Poison Magic power frantically gathered, almost instantly draining her internal reserves.
This was one of the characteristics of her ability—extremely efficient compression and explosive release of magic power. In contrast, while Samimi had abundant magic reserves, she lacked a truly explosive finishing move, a point that had gradually become apparent in multiple battles.
Ahem, I’m getting sidetracked.
Right now, it was the moment of glory for the Dark Hero and the Radiant Knight.
The Radiant Knight shot up a hundred meters into the sky in one go, heading straight for the Giant Centipede.
Faced with the approaching powerful enemy, the Giant Centipede instinctively chose to retreat, shrinking back into the depths of the Leaf Layer.
“Not high enough,” Qiqi Zhu said coldly.
“Again!” Aoi gritted her teeth and initiated a second-stage acceleration. The jetpack erupted with even more powerful thrust, pushing the mech further upward.
The Giant Centipede was about to shrink back into the Leaf Layer. Qiqi Zhu began to aim. She wasn’t skilled at precision shooting, yet she felt uncharacteristically tense now. Success or failure hinged on this one arrow.
TWANG!
The bowstring vibrated, and a Chaos Poison Arrow shot through the air. Space itself seemed to warp from the toxin, the arrow’s flight path becoming bizarre and unpredictable. Leaves along its trajectory instantly withered and corroded.
However, at the last moment, the Giant Centipede retracted into the Leaf Layer, seemingly dodging the attack.
“Missed?” Aoi’s heart sank.
Qiqi Zhu didn’t speak. She had already predicted the enemy’s retreat path. This arrow was aimed at the entrance it was shrinking back into. The Poison Arrow followed right behind the centipede’s tail, shooting deep into the Leaf Layer together.
The next moment, the sky changed. Large swathes of leaves rapidly withered, and thick branches corroded and cracked.
High in the air, the Giant Centipede thrashed violently, its body covered in deep green toxin, billowing corrosive smoke. Its hard exoskeleton was corroded into countless holes, and dozens of its legs were directly severed by the poison.
But that was all. It wasn’t killed on the spot, clearly possessing extremely strong poison resistance.
However, it was heavily wounded. Falling from the high altitude, it could no longer hide within its invincible Leaf Layer.
“Tch.” Qiqi Zhu clicked her tongue softly. She knew very well this attack could at most inflict heavy damage, not finish the opponent.
And the more troublesome thing was—
The Radiant Knight’s jetpack began to sputter and die, its magic power exhausted. The mech instantly lost power and began to plummet at high speed.
The cockpit was plunged into darkness. Aoi lost control.
“AAAAAHHHHH!” she screamed in terror, frantically pressing the hatch release button, but the mech didn’t even have the magic power left to open the hatch.
At this moment, the Radiant Knight seemed to have turned into a real iron coffin. Darkness, shaking, weightlessness—claustrophobia instantly peaked.
Yet, after a while, the violent shaking gradually subsided. The feeling of weightlessness disappeared.
Hummm—
The mech restarted. New magic power poured into its frame, a familiar force returning.
“Miss Shalum, is that you?” Aoi cried out joyfully.
She regained control, her consciousness reconnecting with the mech’s skeleton, scanning the surroundings. It turned out they had fallen into a patch of elastic Thicket of Thorns, which was why they hadn’t been smashed to pieces.
And these thorns…
She was all too familiar with them.
The Radiant Knight looked down. Sure enough—
Shalum stood on a tree root not far away, the Twin Goddess Statue towering behind her. It was she who had manipulated the thorns to save the two and had reinfused the mech with magic power.
“Perfect timing,” Samimi’s voice rang out.
“The Protagonist Group always has to make a dramatic entrance.”