Chapter 132 - The Power of Technology

After several days, in the Anta Mountains, at Black Rain Manor.

Boom, boom, boom...

The thunder in the sky rumbled like a giant iron ball was rolling across the ceiling. The manor trembled violently as the torrential rain and fierce wind lashed down from the sky. Black rain was falling in a heavier and more violent downpour than usual.

"What’s going on?"

Everyone inside the various buildings of Black Rain Manor, whether they were in the Mission Hall, sect bases, or the shops, raised their heads slightly to gaze up at the sky.

"A marked-one failed to complete their compulsory mission."

"I wonder which unlucky fool it was?

Haha

..."

"Idiot's probably a rookie. Someone must really want to die if he's trying his damndest to not do a compulsory mission."

"You'd have a better chance of surviving if you just force yourself to do the mission. But he's basically signed his own death sentence by running away!"

"Those Decaying Knights around the manor are about to move out..."

"That kid is doomed."

Some mist-enshrouded tall shadows who had been wandering aimlessly around Black Rain Manor suddenly trembled. As one, they turned and stepped forward.

A black carriage was speeding down the road leading into the manor from the outside. A Hellsing, sitting by the window, glanced outside when a series of unfamiliar hoofbeats sounded ahead.

He pulled back the curtain slightly and looked out, spotting a tall warhorse clad in heavy armor galloping forward, carrying a knight with a sword on its back. The ostentatious-looking silver cross-shaped hilt of the sword protruded from behind the knight's shoulder; the end bore a skull emblem and was stained with congealed black-red patches. It oddly resembled a massive cross, giving off a sense of decayed metal.

"The Decaying Knights have been dispatched?!"

Hundreds of miles away, in Nington City at Joachim Manor, a tall figure sat cross-legged in a dim chamber. His towering and robust body looked solid with the surface textured like hardened rock. Sweat dripped from his slightly flushed body with a soft plop, resembling beads falling off a string and hitting the ground. Some of the sweat evaporated into a white mist due to the intense heat emanating from his body.

The originally light black shield emblem on the back of the man's right hand burst into a bright red glow, as intense as a flashlight.

"And so it begins." Cassius felt a sinking feeling in his heart and an inexplicable sense of impending doom. It was as if there were eyes high above watching him, utterly devoid of any human emotion. There was only a cold, merciless logic, tinged with mechanical bloodlust.

Opening his eyes, he looked down at his hot right hand. The shield emblem gradually dimmed, returning to its original brightness. However, the once ordinary medieval-style shield now had a menacing spear, shot from an unknown place, stabbing through it. The center of the shield had been shattered, seemingly killing the person behind it in one blow!

"Is this basically saying I'm a dead man?

Heh

..." Cassius let out a cold chuckle and closed his eyes once again.

***

Two days later, in the outskirts of Nington City, dark clouds obscured the once clear sky as twilight settled in. The occasional lightning flash cut through as rain poured down.

The rain came suddenly, and within seconds, everything was shrouded in a transparent blur. Tall and small trees alike stood staunchly in the fierce storm while large raindrops pounded furiously against the gray walls.

Crash!

Another flash of lightning tore through the sky, followed by thunder that roared like a crack of doom. The loud boom was enough to make one’s scalp tingle and one’s chest feel as if something hard and heavy had smashed into it.

Neighh!

A black carriage stopped on the country road. Moments later, a man holding an umbrella slowly meandered along. He was wearing a large black cloak and held a huge box in his left hand, which seemed to contain a suitcase and clothes. The rain from the sky hit the umbrella's surface and burst into sparkling water droplets.

Cassius, in his waterproof black boots, left a trail of footprints as he walked through the muddy country road toward the manor a few hundred meters away. Slightly tilting the edge of his umbrella, he glanced up at the dark sky and then raised his left hand to check the time.

Click.

The minute hand moved, and the time changed to 6:01 p.m. Cassius whipped around, staring back at the road behind him, the look in his eyes sharp and cutting.

The shadows of the trees were blurry from the rain. There was no one else besides him. A normal villager wouldn't be wandering around in such a downpour.

"..."

Cassius paused for a second, then turned back, and resumed walking. The sound of his shoes squelching in the mud echoed.

After walking less than ten meters, an elongated, thin figure appeared in the hazy rain behind him.

It was covered from head to toe in metal armor, with iron plates riveted like fish scales, and a conical iron helmet on its head. In its jointed metal gauntlets was a Tufa Slashing Sword. The cold rain fell on the brutal-looking joints of the armor, running down with a slight reddish tint—it was unclear if it was rust or some dark red substance dissolving from the armor's crevices.

Beneath the knight's helmet, a pair of wooden eyes opened. In the next second, an unprecedented bloodlust burst through, scattering the previously blank expression.

The slashing sword knight, driven by cruel sadism, took its first step. "Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill... kill..."

Bang!

The sound of wood shattering suddenly came from ahead.

At some point, Cassius had turned around. He was still holding an umbrella in his left hand, but in the other, he had a massive heavy machine gun called "Silver Rain," named for being able to fire off a storm of silver bullets as fierce as a deluge on a battlefield. It had a caliber of 11.43 mm, weighed 27.2 kilograms, and could theoretically fire 600 rounds per minute, or 10 rounds per second.

Click. Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat

...

The machine gun bullets wildly cut an arc through the rain with its powerful silver barrage.

The recoil struck Cassius's firm body, with the only tremor being the umbrella above his head. His expression remained unchanged. Raindrops splashed off the surface of the black umbrella, scattering onto Cassius's shoes, coat, and face.

Directly opposite of him, the slashing sword knight was about to charge forward but the sheer force of the bullets forced it to come to an abrupt halt. Golden sparks erupted on its arms, legs, groin, chest armor, and helmet. In a single second, ten machine gun bullets struck the knight, the violent force of it pinning it in place.

Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding

...

Metal thuds rang crisply out without pause. The knight's armor seemed to be coated with a dull gray substance, which absorbed the bullets' fierce onslaught.

"

Roar

!!!" The knight staggered back unwillingly before pushing forward with an angry roar, trying to rush at Cassius as it slashed down.

However, the heavy machine gun's firepower easily forced it back. After a continuous flurry of bullets, the knight's armor began to show signs of damage. Some protective force started to dissipate as the dull gray substance on its surface faded.

In the distance, the exhausted knight raised its arms to shield its face. Sparks flew all over its body as the bullets struck.

"You fool! You'd have a better chance at flying than coming at me right now. You really underestimate the power of human technology...

heh

..." Cassius continued to fire mercilessly. The despair that had consumed him when he claimed that his death was imminent was gone.

Guess firearms aren't as inconvenient as I thought.

Even with his body nearing the third-level blood flow acceleration and training in hardening Qigong, he still had a hard time withstanding the ruthless onslaught of a heavy machine gun. The fact that the Decaying Knight lasted this long was a miracle in and of itself.

Supernatural beings certainly had their own bizarre strengths, but one couldn't underestimate the rapidly evolving and relentless advancements of human technology. Unless it was something like a Shadow Demon where physical attacks just passed through their bodies, anything still bound by the laws of the material world had to bow to the laws of physics!

Bullets, grenades, missiles, even nuclear bombs... Temperatures of tens of millions or even billions of degrees Celsius where a single explosion could vaporize everything in an instant... Regardless of how nonsensical things were, everything had its limits. Nothing could have withstanded such an unparalleled destructive force.

Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding

...

The slashing sword knight staggered back, then lunged to the left to dodge the bullets. However, the bullets pursued it relentlessly, striking the ground, and spraying up mud.

The knight was shot down to the ground and desperately tried to get back up, but the bullets forced it to stay down and prevented any kind of movement.

Clang!

A fist-sized, oval-shaped object was thrown through the air. It smacked the knight's metal helmet before landing with a splat in the nearby mud, creating a small crater. As the knight's pitch-black gaze landed on it, a grenade exploded!

Boom!

The explosion's force covered a blast zone of several meters.

Clang!

A broken slashing sword arced through the air before finally lodging itself into the muddy ground.

This Decaying Knight is kind of dumb... It seems to be driven by some kind of emotion. All it seems to know is how to attack.

Cassius pondered briefly, then threw another grenade.

Boom!

Clang!

A shattered helmet was blasted off. It looked like Cassius had bested the Decaying Knight from Black Rain Manor, and who could really blame it? After all, the rusted medieval knights had never seen, never mind fought against, modern weapons.

As they were only recently developed by the Hongli Federation, the machine guns and grenades had not even been battle-tested yet. In the past few decades, the Federation had seen rapid advances in war technology—new gunpowder, automatic rifles, bombs from planes, and more. The pace at which technology in the current period was progressing was beyond imagination. Who would have thought that within just a few decades, humans would go from clumsy propeller planes to landing on the moon?

Rat-tat-tat

...

Another burst of machine gun fire rang out in the distance. Cassius looked at the shattered armor from far away, thinking the Decaying Knight inside should have been eliminated. But when he glanced at the top right corner, he noticed that the progress bar hadn’t moved.

It’s still alive?! Could it maybe...resurrect?

As Cassius pondered this, he heard the sound of hoofbeats get increasingly closer in the misty rain. Without hesitation, he turned and sprinted toward the manor. Each heavy footstep he took left a small crater in the muddy road.

Behind him, a knight on horseback charged, a massive metal cross-shaped sword in its hand. The two, one fleeing and the other in hot pursuit, approached the manor gate.

While running, Cassius had used a combination of bullets and grenades to significantly obstruct the knight, allowing him to be the first to rush into the manor’s entrance. His eyes flashed as he vaulted over the wall with one hand.

Behind him, the knight spurred its seemingly cumbersome warhorse over the wall, horse and rider tracing a graceful arc through the air. Its hooves touched the ground—and with a splat, it fell into a pit that had been dug in advance.

Thud!

The knight and its horse crashed to the bottom, where thick, arm-width iron spikes awaited. The armor collided so hard with the spikes, it folded inward. The armored warhorse let out a wail, apparently from suffering significant injuries. One of its hooves was clearly twisted and broken, and black fluid leaked from its belly, impaled by a spike.

Cassius coldly observed from the open space next to the pit. He wasn’t trying to be ruthless on purpose, but he couldn’t just let the traps he had set go to waste.

"

Roar

!" A deafening roar echoed from the pit as a massive figure, about 1.9 meters tall, leaped out. A mere three-meter pit couldn’t hold it and, with a single jump, it emerged once again.

It immediately locked onto Cassius as it jumped, a sharp cross sword propped on its shoulder. Its body hunched slightly in preparation to roll and launch a surprise attack the moment it landed.

But as soon as the knight touched the ground, it plummeted into another pit with a splat; this time, it was a much deeper one!

There was a loud crash as the knight collided with something in the pit. In the dim light, it could see a pile of wood heaped together there. Several transparent bottles containing a thick, dark green liquid were clustered in a corner. One of the bottles had already been broken, releasing a foul odor, the liquid spilling out and mixing with the water in the pit.

The knight regained its footing and looked up at the thin sliver of sky. Just as it was about to roar, a round object was tossed in.

Boom!

As soon as the grenade hit the ground, it exploded, shattering several bottles instantly, and igniting the viscous Sticky Oil. The fire, impossible to extinguish even with rain, raged. Its intensity caught the stack of wood in the corner and set it on fire. The firewood seemed to have been specially coated with the Sticky Oil to be rain-resistant. In no time, the flames roared, rising up to two to three meters high.

As if in defiance of the rain, the fire surged out of the pit, fierce and unyielding, while helpless roars and pitiful wails echoed. The highly conductive armor sizzled, emitting a scent reminiscent of roasting fat.

Clang!

A towering knight struck the iron gate with its battle axe, instantly cleaving the bars in two. Standing over two meters tall, it was fully encased in a massive, cumbersome suit of metal armor, which seemed ancient and unbreakable.

The battle axe knight gripped a double-edged axe, with each head nearly as wide as a grown man’s torso. It looked incredibly heavy and formidable. It stood in the rain like a fortress, the muscles of its gray arms knotted like tree roots.

On the stone-paved path, the battle axe knight’s bloodthirsty eyes stared at Cassius, exuding an intense aura of oppression and bloodlust. A harsh growl escaped from beneath its helmet as it walked, its thick leg stepping onto a stone slab ahead. Another step and...

Boom!

A landmine hidden beneath the floor exploded instantly, blowing off a leg that was as thick as a human torso. The battle axe knight lost its balance and crashed to the ground on its left side. It retreated backward a little.

Boom! Boom!

Two more carefully placed landmines nearby exploded in quick succession. As the sounds faded, a smoking piece of metal armor rolled on the ground.