Robbing the Entire Field

Adubu had also lost some men during the initial wave of chaos, but he ran fast enough to quickly break away from the combat zone. Once he confirmed they were safe and took a recount of his personnel, the prince found that he could still assemble a squad to fight. Heading back, they could at least handle one Great Spike. He was in the middle of forming ranks and giving a pep talk when the squad members before him suddenly broke into a scattered retreat. "What is it?!" Adubu hastily looked back. Several hundred meters away, a shuttle craft and two Great Spikes were hurtling in his direction. Two of them, not one—and the situation was utterly bizarre. Adubu had no time to think or look closer. Letting out a terrified cry, he immediately took off running with his men. As they ran, the prince noticed that something was off... They encountered other people along the way, but as long as those people ran a certain distance off to the side, the Great Spikes ignored them. Only his group was pursued. No matter how many times he turned, zigzagging again and again... both Great Spikes chased relentlessly after him. His turban had already flown off. If this went on, Adubu knew he would soon be overtaken. Moreover, a voice seemed to be calling out behind him. "Hey, Adubu! Hello!" *My god, can Great Spikes talk?!* *And it knows me?!* Summoning his courage while sprinting, Adubu glanced back and looked again. Han Qingyu: "Hey, hello." Adubu was dumbfounded. The Huaxian, Han Qingyu, whom he had chased running for his life for days, was back. Leading two Great Spikes, he had come for revenge. What kind of situation was this?! Why were there Great Spikes?! His face instantly collapsed in horror, and Adubu turned back to sprint at full throttle. "Don't come over! Stop chasing!" The other party was faster than him. If caught by the two Great Spikes, they would be dead meat. As Adubu fled, he screamed in English the entire way: "Help!" "What do you want?!" Han Qingyu roughly understood those two phrases. Catching his breath, he pondered for a moment. "Give me! Give me!" His broken English finally managed a phrase. "Give me! Let you go!" This time, Adubu finally understood as well. *Give you? Give you what?!* Hearing the thundering footsteps of the Great Spikes drawing closer, Adubu thought in desperation, *What on earth do you want? Just tell me!* How do you say metal block in English? Han Qingyu didn't know. Besides, he was dragging two Great Spikes along and had no time to think about how to describe it roughly, so all he could say was, "Give me." "W-what... what do you want?!" "Give me." "Help, please!" "Give me." A dialogue like walking in circles. Adubu was on the verge of dying of anxiety. At long last, someone running beside him reminded him that the pursuer might want the metal block. *The metal block?!* It had to be. Adubu hurriedly pulled the metal block from his chest pocket, feeling a wrenching pang of reluctance and hesitation. He looked back. In his line of sight, Han Qingyu nodded with a threatening glare. Seeing that he still hadn't thrown it, Han Qingyu made a feint as if to hurl the shuttle craft straight at him. "Aaaah! Here you are, here you are!" Just as Han Qingyu had expected, Adubu valued his life above all else. The metal block was thrown backward through the air... and veered off course. It landed on the ground in front of Han Qingyu. This made it awkward to pick up. Han Qingyu couldn't bend down that low, and he was wondering whether he should simply ditch the shuttle craft first. "Qingzi!" A voice rang out from the side. Rusty Sister was truly awesome; she had actually caught up. Her speed was normally not enough to match Han Qingyu under the dual-source boost, but she was carrying no extra weight. Han Qingyu was pleasantly surprised. Reaching the spot, he executed a slight kick, sending the metal block flying toward her while shouting, "Catch!" Rusty Sister caught it in bewilderment. Glancing down, she cried out in shock, "A metal block?!" "Yeah. Put it away!" The chase continued. Having run with a blue-sheened Great Spike before, Han Qingyu found that black-armored Great Spikes were far stupider in comparison. They virtually followed wherever he ran, utterly incapable of using the terrain to split up and cut him off. "Then hurry and throw the craft away!" Shen Yixiu shouted anxiously. "Wait a bit," Han Qingyu replied. If Rusty Sister hadn't caught up, this would likely have been the end of it. Han Qingyu would have kept running only to try stabbing it a few more times, and if that failed, he would have ditched it. Now that Rusty Sister was here, things were different. "Hang back a bit, run behind the Great Spikes, and get ready to pick up loot. I don't have the breath to talk to you!" During the brief time Han Qingyu had spent speaking, the two mindless Great Spikes had closed in considerably. He hurriedly accelerated into a sprint. Given his and the Great Spikes' speed, Adubu and his men couldn't have stayed ahead for so long in the first place; Han Qingyu had to cut sharp turns occasionally just to give them time. He was afraid that if he truly overtook them, the Great Spikes would merely pass by, swinging their swords casually a couple of times before remaining focused entirely on him—unless he threw the shuttle craft right at them. Adubu was practically in tears. He had clearly given up the metal block... yet he found Han Qingyu still chasing behind him with the Great Spikes, finding breath to shout: "Give me!" *What else do you want?! Tell me what you want!* *Wait... could he even be robbing our source energy blocks?!* The answer was yes; he had guessed right. When an attendant beside him experimentally threw back a spare source energy block, a call echoed from behind: "YES!" What reason was there to hesitate, then? Throw them! Finally, once Adubu and the dozen or so remaining men had tossed away all the spare source energy blocks on them, Rusty Sister trailed behind in the distance, scooping them up and bundling them into a sack made from the tarp she always carried. Han Qingyu finally let Adubu go and changed direction. He had spotted another squad whose uniforms lacked the Azure insignia... the Self-Preservation Faction. "Hey, give me!" Han Qingyu shouted as he charged toward the group with the Great Spikes in tow. *** Shen Yixiu now had one metal block plus more than forty source energy blocks on her. She had no idea how things had escalated to this point; she simply followed along behind and gathered the spoils. On two occasions, the targets were so clueless that she had to sprint up to help explain what the two of them, hauling the Great Spikes behind them, were actually robbing them of. "Qingzi, we have plenty already. Throw it away!" "Watch out, you're going to run out of source energy blocks!" "I can't keep up with your speed anymore, Qingzi!" Shen Yixiu urged him loudly, her tone even tinged with pleading. Han Qingyu also felt it was about enough. The robbing process had gone quickly, but the consumption of source energy blocks and liquid source energy was enormous. If he hadn't absorbed enough before entering, he wouldn't have dared to pull this off. Furthermore, because of the robbing spree, he hadn't managed to continue punching through the hull along the way. Thinking about it, it was probably too late anyway. He prepared to give up and find a cliff to heave the shuttle craft off. Han Qingyu looked up and surveyed his surroundings. Where was this?! It turned out the combat zone wasn't far from the edge of the trial grounds at all! Within Han Qingyu's sight, rows of Alphonse family buildings suddenly came into view, accompanied by several high platforms where Alphonse family members stood watch on guard duty. "I'll leave it to you, then." With an attitude of giving it a shot, Han Qingyu veered off, leading the two Great Spikes toward the estate. *** At the edge of the trial area, nearly twenty guards rapidly assembled on the watchtowers. They had just received word from the sentries that two Great Spikes were charging straight toward the perimeter line. What should they do? Ignore them and let them breach the estate?! That was utterly out of the question. In the several decades of the Alphonse family's history, such an occurrence had never once happened. If it happened under their watch, their guilt would be immense. Moreover, there were many unarmored people inside the estate: their own children, other people's children, as well as cooks and gardeners... Thus, the warriors decisively charged out from within the estate. They swiftly engaged the two Great Spikes and began systematically whittling them down. Han Qingyu tossed the shuttle craft aside, threw himself into a nearby dirt depression, opened his war box to complete a source energy block swap, and took a block in hand to start absorbing. "Experts indeed... Thank you." In less than twenty minutes, both Great Spikes were driven to the brink of death. Then, just as in past occurrences, the craft's self-destruction mechanism was triggered, and it began shattering apart. Han Qingyu knew where the metal block was located—inside that pyramid-like structure. Therefore, stirring his three-dimensional apparatus and liquid source energy while parrying with twin blades, he stood his ground against the flying shrapnel, staying beside the craft to observe. The instant a breach opened in the pyramid, Han Qingyu reached in, grabbed the metal block, and clenched it in his fist. *Holy crap, this piece is huge.* Suppressing his body from absorbing it, Han Qingyu immediately stayed low and sprinted away. There was still another craft back there, which meant another block. Not that he was claiming that one was his, too, but he had worked his tail off dragging away two Great Spikes and creating an opportunity for everyone—he surely deserved a share, didn't he? Well, he certainly wasn't going to mention that he had already pocketed one.