Chapter 97: Brother Song must be looking forward to it as well, wouldn’t he?

A fierce battle raged across the battlefield.

With Song Qi now at level 36, Lu Bu had been raised in tandem to level 36 as well.

At level 36, Lu Bu’s basic attributes alone reached 1,849 in every category.

With the fifty percent bonus from the Heroic Spirit set, his all-around attributes soared beyond 2,700.

Even without using any skills, he was more than enough to crush this pack of level 55 lizardmen.

The Terracotta Army summoned by Qin Shi Huang was calculated from basic spiritual power, so only seven could be called forth.

The molten lizardmen shrieked and howled, crying out in a warped and uncanny tongue, their fury boiling over.

But their attribute gap was simply too vast.

For them, not to mention Lu Bu, even the seven terracotta warriors were hard to keep track of.

Eight figures flashed back and forth, rapidly reaping the lives of the lizardmen.

Seeing this, a number of lizardmen opened their mouths wide, gathering extraordinary power within.

Scalding magma was spewed forth, then hurled about in wild, chaotic barrages.

They could only pin their hopes on this senseless method of attack, praying it might catch the enemy off guard.

Yet this assault not only failed to wound its targets.

It instead brought disaster upon their own comrades first.

Heavy blobs of magma, wreathed in fire, flew everywhere; with the slightest mistake, they would smash into nearby allies.

A great deal of friendly fire was inflicted.

Lu Bu and the terracotta warriors were completely unaffected.

Of course, it was not entirely useless.

Their actions only made Song Qi, watching from the sidelines, feel far more pressured and tense.

"Hey, hey, hey, why did this bunch of lizardmen suddenly start killing themselves?"

"Do lizardmen have some tradition of taking their own lives when they cannot win?"

"Come on, if you all kill yourselves, I won’t get any experience."

Fortunately, after a brief period of chaos, the lizardmen realized it had no effect and stopped, causing little internal attrition.

Song Qi also let out a breath of relief.

At that moment, the mentality of the lizardmen changed subtly.

They could not be beaten down in battle.

Their skill attacks were useless.

They might even end up injuring their own kind.

These lizardmen, who had already begun to possess some intelligence, shifted from initial rage to a growing sense of helplessness.

Then, as they looked at one another and watched their kin die one after another, the seed of fear was planted deep in their hearts.

And as the number of deaths kept rising,

a panic as powerless as if they were facing a natural disaster suddenly erupted!

Finally...

A mass panic triggered a complete rout.

Countless lizardmen screamed and fled in all directions.

Some even threw away the weapons in their hands outright, wanting nothing more than to put as much distance as possible between themselves and this land of death.

Even the few remaining lizardmen that seemed to be leaders kept shouting in vain.

At last, even those leaders joined the fleeing crowd.

Yet whether they charged blindly forward or scattered in all directions,

all they met in the end was death.

Experience gained.

Experience gained.

Experience gained.

...

Roughly ten minutes later, every lizardman in the camp had collapsed to the ground.

As expected, a white glow flickered above Song Qi’s head twice in quick succession.

He smoothly advanced to level 38.

"My side is done. I wonder if Li Zong still has any left over?"

Song Qi looked up.

His score had barely broken through twenty thousand.

But when his gaze dropped slightly,

he saw that Li Zong’s score had also reached more than eighteen thousand, close to nineteen thousand.

Each level 55 molten lizardman was worth twenty points.

In other words, the other side had also wiped out nearly five hundred molten lizardmen.

"By rough count, with a thousand monsters in each area, there shouldn’t be any other lizardmen left in this region."

Song Qi could not help feeling a little helpless.

"Wow—no, how is he so fast?"

"Between Lu Bu and Qin Shi Huang combined, our killing speed can only match his?"

At first, he had planned to finish off the lizardmen quickly and then rush over to steal the kills.

But now it seemed he had been far too optimistic.

"As expected of the descendant of the Great Emperor Li Er, a peerless prodigy born with a class of his own..."

"What a monster."

Song Qi sighed and headed toward the demonic flame dwelling he had marked earlier.

The two of them had already slaughtered nearly all the monsters in the settlement, leaving only a few scattered stragglers.

He could not be bothered to waste time searching for them.

...

Meanwhile...

The golden flames gradually died out over the plain.

In the areas touched by that fire, none of the lizardmen’s bodies had any visible damage.

Yet the pupils in their eyes had already gone pale.

They were dead beyond doubt.

Clearly, this golden flame burned not the flesh, but the soul or the spirit body.

"Phew..."

Li Zong wiped the sweat from his brow.

Only then did the golden fire disperse.

After suppressing his strength to level 25, he had managed to annihilate more than five hundred level 50 monsters in a short span of time, which had indeed left him a little drained.

Still, he had not wasted much time.

He then raised his head to glance at the leaderboard.

"Nineteen thousand points, but first place is still... Brother Song?"

After he stopped, Song Qi’s score continued to flicker for several more seconds before finally stabilizing.

Seeing this, he could not help but smile.

"Brother Song really did not disappoint me."

"Even though I pushed myself this hard, I still could not widen the gap at all, and was only just a hair faster than him."

"No... more accurately, I suppose I lost this round."

"Brother Song is a summoner, so he should not have any large-scale attack abilities."

"In other words, he relied on his summoned spirits to cut and strike their way through one by one, yet his speed was still only a few dozen seconds slower than mine?"

A surge of pride rose within Li Zong’s heart.

"So what Master Mu said was true!"

"The more desperate the situation, the more heroes emerge among humankind!"

"Even someone as strong as I am must never grow arrogant and conceited!"

He could feel a feeling stirring within him that he had never known in his eighteen years of life: fighting spirit.

Li Zong, invincible among his peers and invincible at his level since birth, felt his emotions rise to the surface.

He had been hoping for too long, too long to meet an opponent who could stand on equal footing with him.

"Also... was it too dismissive of me to use only level 25 strength?"

"If Brother Song knew about this, would he feel regret?"

"Would he feel disappointed at not having a fair fight with me?"

Li Zong found himself torn.

"Perhaps... I should raise my level and power a little?"

"Bring it up to the same level as his."

"I believe Brother Song must also be looking forward to a clash of evenly matched opponents, right?"