That howl of humiliation and explosive rage was drowned out by the deafening crash of shattering rocks, forced into a muffled grunt through Mo Fan's gritted teeth.
He was forced into a tight crouch, curled into a ball and hiding dead tight in the massive skeletal shadow of Summon No. 004 and beneath a protruding rock wall.
The sky-filling stalactites, mixed with highly corrosive dark green venom, poured down like a violent storm.
Mo Fan's current appearance was like a mud-caked foot soldier pinned in a trench, being mercilessly pounded by enemy artillery fire—wretched to the extreme.
BANG! CRACK!
Another pointed stalactite, taller than a person, smashed down beside him. Splashing stone fragments tore across Mo Fan's arm like shrapnel.
Drops of venom landed on his clothes, emitting a sizzling corrosive sound and raising bursts of nauseating white smoke.
On the edge of his retina, the green health bar representing his HP was dropping at a slow but agonizing speed.
At first, although Mo Fan felt suffocated in his heart, he wasn't truly panicked.
"Playing a war of attrition with me?"
While reinforcing 004's bone shield with [ Bone Armament ], he sneered and calculated inwardly:
"With my super-thick HP bar, my double Mana pool, and this consummate Iron Bone Stage physical body, I'll just play turtle right here!" "I'll wait until you, big bat, dismantle all the rocks on the cave roof, exhaust your stamina, and can't fly anymore. Then we'll see how I pin you to the ground and pull your tendons out!"
Relying on absolute defense and endurance to outlast highly mobile assassins—this was the tactic he had refined to an art form.
And yet.
As time passed, after this seemingly one-sided carpet bombardment had lasted for nearly half an incense stick's time, Mo Fan suddenly detected a trace of something extremely bizarre.
The vibration frequency in the surrounding air... had changed.
That physical roaring of rocks smashing into the ground gradually faded.
Replacing it was a continuous, extremely low-pitched yet highly penetrating buzzing sound.
This sound was inaudible to the ear, but he could clearly feel it penetrating his skin, frantically vibrating his internal organs!
Pfft—
Without any warning, Mo Fan felt a tightness in his chest. A sweet taste rose in his throat, and a thin thread of fresh blood spilled from the corner of his mouth.
"Something's wrong! This is absolutely not pure physical blunt-force damage!"
Alarm bells blared in Mo Fan's head.
Forcing down the nauseating churning in his gut, he snapped his head up and pushed the semi-active [ Death Vision ] to its absolute maximum output!
The grayish-white God's-eye perspective instantly expanded, mapping the flow of energy in the surroundings.
With one look, Mo Fan sucked in a breath of cold air. His scalp exploded instantly, and a deep chill shot from his tailbone straight to the crown of his skull.
"This beast... it's actually laying down a formation?!"
Under the extremely precise energy feedback of Death Vision, Mo Fan was shocked to discover that this peak Tier-1 Bat Lord wasn't throwing rocks randomly to vent its anger at all!
Every single massive stalactite deliberately dropped from over thirty feet high had an extremely particular landing spot.
They were staggered and neatly inserted into the ground around Mo Fan and 004, surprisingly forming a faint circular array that completely surrounded them!
More terrifyingly, the material of the stalactites in this underground karst cave was extremely special, containing massive amounts of metallic minerals.
And the hovering Bat Lord was continuously spitting high-frequency sonic waves from its maw.
Those sonic waves, invisible to the naked eye, didn't dissipate upon hitting these meticulously arranged stalactite pillars.
Instead, like hitting a network of tuning forks, they were continuously reflected, refracted, and amplified!
The sonic energy surged back and forth between the pillar array, constructing an airtight, self-reinforcing [ Sonic Resonance Death Formation ] with increasingly terrifying power!
"It wants to vibrate me into pieces alive inside here!"
Mo Fan instantly saw through this fatal conspiracy, cold sweat soaking his back with a whoosh.
Once the frequency of this sonic resonance reached a critical threshold, forming a perfect physical closed loop within this narrow formation center...
That instantaneous burst of high-frequency resonance would ignore the hard Iron Bone membrane on the surface of his body.
It would directly vibrate his fragile internal organs into a puddle of mush, causing his body to detonate from the inside out!
HMMMMM——!
As if to verify Mo Fan's deduction, a sharp, piercing pain like ten thousand steel needles stabbing simultaneously suddenly hit his brain.
That was the Bat Lord's high-frequency mental spike woven into the sonic resonance!
It was attempting a two-pronged attack, thoroughly destroying its prey's will to resist from both the physical and mental levels at the same time.
"Want to one-shot me? Keep dreaming!"
Mo Fan gritted his teeth, his eyes forced wide open.
Fortunately, he not only possessed the extra Soul Strength brought by leveling up, but he had also survived the mental shock of a terrifying entity at the border of life and death.
That massive and resilient mental fortitude transformed into an insurmountable Wall of Sighs in his sea of consciousness, steadily and flawlessly blocking this wave of mental ambush from the Bat Lord.
Hiss...
The Bat Lord in midair seemed genuinely surprised that the human below—whose Qi and blood signature clearly suggested nothing beyond Qi Condensation—could actually tank its mental spike.
A trace of anthropomorphic astonishment flashed in its ruby-like eyes.
Down below, Mo Fan had held the line, but his clothes were completely soaked through with cold sweat.
Too terrifying!
If he hadn't reacted in time and used [ Death Vision ] to catch the signs; if he had really foolishly hidden under 004's bone shield wanting to fight a war of attrition...
A moment later, when the resonance formation completely closed, he probably wouldn't even have had a chance to fight back.
He would have been silently, efficiently assassinated by this seemingly barbaric beast!
"So this is what a Level 10 (Peak Tier-1) demonic beast actually looks like."
Mo Fan stared dead at that massive black shadow circling overhead, his teeth grinding together with an audible creak.
"Not only possessing overwhelming raw power and air superiority, but actually able to read the terrain and construct such a precise multiple-kill trap on the fly!"
He couldn't wait any longer.
Sitting and waiting for death was chronic suicide. He had to proactively break the formation!
Under the extreme threat of imminent death, Mo Fan's brain felt as if it had been splashed with a basin of ice water, entering an extremely cold, crystalline state of tactical calculation.
Hiding in the angle between 004's massive skeleton and the rock wall, looking through the gaps in the falling debris, he stared fixedly at the hovering, bombing Bat Lord.
"Every living thing has a weakness. Every trap has a flaw."
Mo Fan's mind rapidly calculated all the variables of the battlefield.
He looked up at the cave ceiling.
"Although this beast has air superiority, this is an underground cave after all; its height has a hard limit. Thirty-something feet—that is its ceiling. It can't fly out into the sky, it has nowhere to retreat!"
Immediately after, Mo Fan replayed the brief exchange from the previous round.
Summon No. 004 was clunky, but its defense was extremely high; whereas Summon No. 003 had merely executed a backstab, yet it tore a terrifying bone-deep wound through the Bat Lord's supposedly proud obsidian scales.
"What does this prove?"
An extremely cold, vicious glint flashed in Mo Fan's eyes.
"This proves that this Bat Lord, in order to pursue maximum flight speed and sustained aerial dominance, has sacrificed physical defense to get there!"
High offense, low defense. An extremely typical Glass Cannon assassin-type beast!
"If I can just touch it..."
Mo Fan's hand moved to the venom-slicked dagger at his waist, and then to his own fists—which had already caved in a demonic beast's skull with nothing but raw force.
His heartbeat accelerated like a war drum.
An extremely crazy counterattack plan—razor-thin margins, almost like walking a tightrope over an abyss—instantly formed in his mind.
"As long as I can get my hands on it, even if it's just once!"
"I'll kill it in a single hit!"