Ke Si’s hand, gripping the bone spear, trembled violently, his claws digging deep into his palm, blood mixing with cold sweat and dripping down.
It watched the Zhu Yan Demon Insect spread its wings, preparing for a second dive, the serrated structures on the edge of its wings glinting coldly in the firelight.
At this moment, all the hot blood and yearning turned into icy fear; it turned and ran, pushing aside its kin behind it, frantically fleeing in the opposite direction from the battlefield.
Behind it came the curses of its kin and the roars of the Bug Clan Family, but it heard nothing, only knowing to desperately swing its limbs, escaping this burning Hell.
Its mother’s words, and the grandiose statements of the conscription officer, echoed repeatedly in its mind, now turning into sharp mockery, like a bone spear piercing its heart.
Suddenly, Ke Si’s third pair of appendages got stuck in a grotesque lava fissure; the scorching basalt made its carapace sizzle, and the surface chitin was baked with fine cracks.
It desperately twisted its body, and as its dorsal carapace scraped against the rock wall, it heard the damp crunch of its carapace breaking behind it—a six-tailed Ironblood Bugman was cut in half by the Zhu Yan Demon Insect’s scythe-like foreleg.
Green bodily fluid splattered onto its dorsal carapace like a high-pressure geyser, corroding out winding white smoke.
The Bugman’s twitching antennae swept across Ke Si’s compound eyes in its final moments, a viscous liquid blurring its vision, and the salty, pungent smell choked its throat, the digestive fluid churning in its stomach almost breaking through its oral valve.
The battlefield was like a boiling bronze cauldron.
The sonic booms from the Tenth-Order Zhu Yan Devil Insects’ wing beats were like successive thunderclaps, shaking the ground and causing dust to fall.
Ke Si glimpsed to its left, three hundred meters away, a giant bird ridden by a seven-tailed warrior being split in half by a Flying Thunder Centipede’s lightning, and in the steaming green smoke at the break, there were still undigested remains of younglings floating.
As those limb fragments wrapped in semi-transparent egg fluid fell, they landed on the mountains of corpses.
The splattered black blood mixed with the scorched earth, solidifying into amber-colored hard lumps, refracting distorted light patterns in the setting sun, much like the ancient star maps described by the Elders deep within the Bug Nest.
Ahead, a deep trench lay across the path, its bottom covered with shattered Ironblood Bugman limbs, with battle patterns still carved on the unfallen carapaces at the joints—these were symbols of glory, but now they had become signposts of death.
Green blood, not yet dried, seeped from every carving, winding into tiny rivers on the scorched earth, with half a wing floating on the surface of the river, and unhatched Bug eggs still caught between the wing veins.
Zhou Qi hovered on the observation platform of Hope City’s Bug Nest, his Mental Power covering the entire Iron-Blood World battlefield like a spiderweb.
Since the war erupted seven days and seven nights ago, the Ironblood Bugmen had charged like a black tide, not retreating a single step even when crushed into meat paste. Why was this Bugman an exception?
The moment Ke Si turned and fled, Zhou Qi ordered the surrounding Bug Clan Family to capture it.
“Go bring it here,” the thought, like a poisoned dagger, was transmitted to the nearest Mingling Devil.
A hundred meters away, a Tenth-Order Mingling Devil was being besieged by thirty Ironblood Bugmen.
Its four pairs of wings on its back suddenly unfurled, the vascular patterns on its membrane wings erupting with an eerie glow, and the Power of the Titan erupted like a volcano—with a “boom.”
The air was compressed into a visible shockwave; the surrounding Bugmen were like pottery figures struck by an invisible giant hand, their limb fragments mixing with green fluid and soaring into the sky, solidifying into blood rain in mid-air.
As a piece of carapace-covered debris fell, it landed three paces in front of Ke Si, and the Family crest carved on the carapace—a giant bird with spread wings—
was being shattered by the shockwave, the fragments splattering onto Ke Si’s compound eyes, like a handful of scorching fine sand.
The Mingling Devil didn't even glance at the shattered enemy corpses; it stomped its single foot, and the ground cracked into a spiderweb-like pattern, with an eerie blue energy fluid seeping from the cracks.
Its four pairs of wings on its back flapped simultaneously, sonic booms rising and falling, and its figure streaked across the battlefield like a black meteor, the trailing current it created swirling the scorched earth along its path into small tornadoes.
The wind was mixed with fragments of Ironblood Bugman carapaces and pheromones secreted by the Bug Clan Family, forming a pungent vortex.
Ke Si was scrambling towards a rock crevice when suddenly a huge force gripped its chest armor, its entire body lifted off the ground, its six appendages flailing uselessly, the bone spear clanging to the ground, its tip scraping a trail of sparks on the rock, and the splashing gravel hit its oral parts, making its antennae tremble violently from the pain.
“Let… let go!” Ke Si’s oral parts struggled to open and close due to fear.
Green saliva dripped down its mandibles, creating tiny pits on the Mingling Devil’s metallic limbs; the edges of the pits instantly crystallized into ice, which fell off with the Devil’s movements, clinking crisply as they hit Ke Si’s dorsal carapace.
It had never observed a Bug Clan Family member so closely; the Mingling Devil’s compound eyes were like burning rubies, each reflection showing its own distorted face, and the hexagonal crystalline cones on the surface of its compound eyes contracted violently from fear;
The sharp blades of its arms gleamed coldly, with undried green bloodstains still clinging to the edges of the blades, congealing into eerie ice crystals that swayed gently with the Devil’s steps, refracting a spectrum of light.
What frightened it even more was the aura emanating from this monster, like the ancient pressure it had felt in the deepest part of the Bug Nest in its youth, causing the breathing holes on its abdomen to contract uncontrollably, each inhale carrying a pungent smell of metal mixed with energy, like rusty gears turning in strong acid.
The Mingling Devil lifted Ke Si into the air, each flap of its wings tearing the air, explosions erupting in its ears, making the balance organs in its inner ear hum, and its vision periodically blackening.
The battlefield below was like a fast-forwarded silent film: Flying Thunder Centipede’s lightning chains pierced the Bug Nest’s dome, and shattered rocks burst like fireworks.
One sharp stone with mysterious runes spun and fell, creating a three-meter deep crater in the ground; the soil around the crater was scorched by high temperatures, appearing as glassy, charred black, and emitting wisps of green smoke, within which tiny arcs of electricity could vaguely be seen dancing;
Chronos’s golden pillar of light pierced the ground like a holy sword, and as it penetrated the Bug Nest’s dome, the rising dust obscured the sky.
In the dust, Ironblood Bugmen could be seen fleeing like ants.
A six-tailed Bugman was struck by a falling stone beam; the sound of its carapace shattering, even from a hundred meters away, pierced Ke Si’s auditory organs like a needle, and as the Bugman struggled, unhatched Bug eggs from its abdomen rolled out of the rupture, smashing into green fluid on the scorched earth.
In just a few breaths, the spatial passage’s purplish-blue membrane unfolded ahead, the dark patterns churning on its surface twisting like living things, and small arcs of electricity occasionally burst from the membrane’s edge.
Crackling, it was exactly like the sky during a thunderstorm in the Iron-Blood World.
The group of Mingling Devils guarding outside the passage nodded slightly, their antennae trembling gently—this was a unique Mental Power communication among the Dominator’s subordinates.