Chapter 818: Vivian, the Demon God
If you work long enough in the job, you will always meet something new, something beyond your imagination.
He had fought with the First Born, guardian giant, soldiers, and demons of the otherworlds. He had even taken the consciousness of Io head-on, but he never thought he would one day fight a bloated version of Vivian. He did not see it coming; the battle was just too weird. The blood spewing from the organ was making the giant Vivian stronger. This incomprehensible, mysterious existence was what Vivian had mentioned—her “other self.” However, she seemed to be oblivious to how it turned out this way.
The entire space was shaking, and a roar filled the air. The battle had shaken the foundation of the giant creature, and all tentacles had felt the tremor. The giant creature began to convulse uncontrollably as weirder, and more horrible things became to unfold. Countless huge tentacles reached out from all directions to the center of the battlefield, as if they wanted to lend support to the giant living body in the storm, but every movement of the Bloody Giant had caused things went further out of hand.
The huge female figure was merely lashing out her attack indifferently. She only wanted to get rid of the ‘harmful elements’ in her eyes. A bloody storm screamed and condensed around her, and she unleashed it at the intruders. The bloody storm screamed like a human, bringing with it a soul-piercing negative emotion that could be felt from a hundred meters away.
They quickly pulled one kilometer back, keeping a safe distance from the giant figure, giving them space and time to figure out the enemy. Because of the distance, the battle was in a stalemate.
Hao Ren had dodged a wave of attacks as the bloody storm blew past him. He still felt a moment of dizziness and fear despite his shield had protected him from the physical assault.
The enemy’s attack carried an equally damaging mental-attack energy. The mental attack was more challenging to deal with as it had a greater range of attack.
After barely stabilizing himself, Hao Ren quickly raised his gun and launched a counterattack. Plasma flare hit the giant female directly and blew a massive, through-and-through hole in her chest. Every time plasma flare hit the giant female and crystalized part of her body, the crystallized portion would fall off, and new blood would replenish the wound almost immediately.
“Neither her head nor her heart is her weakness,” Hao Ren yelled in desperation. “What is this thing?”
“I’m afraid she has no weakness,” the MDT said. Unlike others, it was immune to mental attacks. It had been studying the giant female figure from the beginning. “She doesn’t have a body. The fluid leaking out from the organ forms her. Unless we blow up the whole planet, she would be invincible!”
Hao Ren knew this. He attacked the connective tissue and the giant female upper body, but the ‘blood’ in the connective tissue seems to repair any wounds constantly. The organ was getting its ‘blood’ supply elsewhere. He looked around; the crisscrossing tentacles in the surroundings must be the pipes that supplied the blood. “Can we blow up those tentacles?”
“No, this would only drive it elsewhere and give it time to respawn; we would have no control over it by then.” Vivian snorted.
Lily had to keep swerving to dodge the bloody storm. Her fighting skill was useless in this circumstance. She could only yell in anger. “Battie! Do you know how to fight this thing?”
Vivian’s mind was working hard, but her eyes were on the connective tissue. “According to the scene I saw in the blood spar, the other ‘I’ had entered into it. So maybe I can also get in…”
The bloody storm suddenly stopped. Hao Ren looked at the huge female figure in the distance. The female figure suddenly raised her hands in the air, her mouth opened as if she were making a roar, but there was no sound. Ripples formed on the sea of blood around her but it was silent too. Hao Ren was stunned. He quickly warned. “Pull back! Guard your mind!”
The next second, the storm came in silence.
The giant, bloody female was screaming silently as invisible, powerful energy swept across the battlefield like a gust of wind. It was a non-physical, psychological attack. For a short moment, Hao Ren felt like his brain was undergoing ischemia before a wave of meaningless information broke into his mind. He saw distortion; the world had become a chaotic whirlpool that swallowed up people alive. For a moment, Hao Ren saw Lily attacking him, and he had wanted to fight back. But everything went away just as fast as it came. He came out from the illusion, mind control, and sensory distortion. Everything came back to normal, but the pain in his head still lingered.
The silent screaming of Vivian MK-II had stopped, but the corrosive blood mist was coming.
“If this mental attack repeats every five minutes, sooner or later one of us would go insane.” Hao Ren shook his head and then pushed away Nangong Sanba. Nangong Sanba took a longer time to recover, but this few seconds delay had almost lost his life as the blood mist almost got to him. “Lily! Take Sanba to join Hessiana. Vivian and I will find a way to go into that ‘mountain’!”
Lily shouted, “Do you want to go there? We just got out of there!”
“I trust Vivian’s intuition,” Hao Ren said as he looked up at the sky above the endless chaos. The mist covered high altitude had a large number of intertwined tentacles, which were twitching with increased intensity. “The fighting has woken up those things; we cannot afford to drag the battle any longer. Otherwise, it will spread to the surface eventually. The lullaby of the ancient souls might not be able to suppress them anymore.”
Lily looked at the huge female figure, who also looked back at her calmly. Lily could not read the emotion from the liquid face of the giant female. It was even hard to gauge if the giant woman had the same feelings and thoughts of a human. Lily knew that when it came to magic and mental realms, she was a sitting duck. She nodded hard and said, “Understood. You guys, be safe!”
Hao Ren nodded back and then lunged out with Vivian. Suddenly, Lily called out from behind again. “Battie!”
Vivian turned and looked over her shoulder. “What’s up?”
“This is your fault!” Lily yelled and waved her claws. “You must tell me what this thing is when you come back!”
Lily brought Nangong Sanba, who was a little in a daze, retreating to an ‘island’ a few kilometers away. The island was one of the few remains of the crust that the First Born had yet heterogenized. It was held in place by the tentacles. Hessiana and her men, who were injured in the battle and Nangong Wuyue were already on the island. As soon as Lily and Nangong Sanba got to the island, Nangong Wuyue would treat them accordingly.
Meanwhile, Hao Ren and Vivian were going in the opposite direction into the center of the battlefield.
The giant female figure had noticed two little ‘flying insects’ coming her way. She leaned her body slightly to pour down more attacks at the two tiny intruders, all done without any emotion on her face.
She acted like a demon god, waving an unspeakably horrific storm in the center of the battlefield. No human could perceive any emotion on her face. Vivian’s mind was in a complicated state. “How is this thing even formed?” she asked.
Hao Ren was shielding Vivian in front with his Steel Membrane Shield. As they came closer, the face of the enemy was filling his entire field of vision. He had a strange feeling. He wanted to say something to ease their nervousness, but he was lost for words. At last, he uttered, “Vivian, your face is big looking from this angle.”
Vivian laughed. “Yeah, thanks for the compliment. That’s funny.”
“I think we should give the fellow a name.” Hao Ren endured the pain in his head as he stared at the gigantic opponent, looking at ease. “Since this enemy is so special, why not we call her Vivian Mk-II?”
“What a lame name!” Vivian retorted.
“What about Vivian, the demon god?” Hao Ren looked ahead. At this distance, the giant Vivian looked even more menacing, almost giving an illusion that he was in a confrontation with a demon god. The ubiquitous bloody storm was now hitting directly on his shield, as he was only a hundred meters away from the connective tissue.
Moving became difficult.
The pain from the stings was all over his body. He noticed that the blood mist was very corrosive. It burned his skin. Flesh and blood under his skin was shimmering with a faint silver glow, which was the regeneration process of his damaged body tissue. Unfortunately, the tissue regeneration could not keep up with the corroding speed of the bloody mist.
His shield was down, but they had managed to break through the last obstacle.