Chapter 495 — The Broken Arm, the Blood Grudge
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 4
His divine abilities were mighty, and cut across the hundred-zhang space with ease; his primordial weapons too were terribly keen, sweeping in all directions and forcing those hidden in the dark to defend themselves.
A great chaos erupted in the chest. Battle cries rang everywhere, primordial weapons and divine abilities blasting wildly in every direction.
After a long while, the maddened wielder stopped, panting hoarsely. No sound remained around him but his own gasping.
"Dead?"
The madman froze for a moment, then, startled and delighted at once, roared with laughter: "You're all dead! All dead! I lived, I'm the only one left alive!"
Pff—
A bamboo staff thrust in through his mouth and out the back of his skull.
The chest opened; its four sides folded down and light spilled in. It was still the hundred-zhang space, but only Shen Mu, a pale-faced Ban Gongcuo, and the Dragon Qilin—crouched shivering in a corner—remained in it.
He had shrunk to a length of just over a zhang and hidden behind a cluster of racks. His hide was thick and his flesh tough, so he had come to little harm, but his body bristled with primordial weapons of every size; several of them were plainly Shen Mu's flying swords. Clearly no few attacks in the chaos had landed on him.
He was big by nature; strive as he might to shrink himself, he could not help taking a good many blows.
The ground was strewn with corpses lying every which way, each dead in a different fashion: some run through with the bamboo staff, some cloven through the skull with a blade, some hung up in paintings with their heads erased, along with a few oxen and sheep; some wielders of divine abilities were stuck as full of weapons as hedgehogs, and some had their bones and sinews crushed by the sword core, or their bodies ground to powder beneath the True Dragon Nest.
But more of them had died at the hands of their own.
The situation then had been too chaotic; to save themselves they had been forced to slaughter one another, and those who died by Shen Mu's hand—or Ban Gongcuo's, or the Dragon Qilin's—were the minority, three tenths at most.
Ban Gongcuo wiped the blood from his face, his heart still pounding with lingering fear.
In that gloom, Shen Mu had run into him more than once; had he not brought out the secret arts of the Golden Palace and been recognized by Shen Mu, he too would surely have been killed.
In the chaos he had taken many wounds and killed no few foes, but the most perilous moment of all was when Shen Mu got in close.
It had nearly cost him his life.
Ban Gongcuo had dodged Shen Mu's killing blow, but the staff had opened a bloody hole in his chest—by a hair's breadth he had kept it from his heart—and the Butcher Knife had nearly cut the artery at his throat; he had twisted his neck to a horrifying angle to escape that stroke.
After that, Shen Mu recognized his arts and struck at him no more, yet he could never shake the suspicion that Shen Mu had known him all along, and had merely wanted to seize the chance to kill him off along with the rest.
Of course he had no proof, and this was hardly the moment to bring it up.
Shen Mu was covered in blood, dragging the corpses out of the chest one by one with a limping gait. He too had taken many wounds; when the chaos broke out his own position had been desperately dangerous, and he had nearly died under the divine abilities and primordial weapons careening in from every direction.
Among them had been several experts of the Heavenly Human realm; their divine abilities were stronger still, and the attacks of their primal spirits were terrifying—a solid hit, and even with his True Dragon Overlord Body roused he would have died beyond question.
Even so, many divine abilities and primordial weapons had struck home; had that otherworldly demon not suddenly gone mad, he would hardly have been the one left smiling at the end.