Snatch His Column Sword

Therefore, that old man who seemed hot-tempered and impulsive on the surface, but could exercise greater restraint than anyone else at critical moments—Azure's God of War—would never choose such an exchange... no matter how furious, no matter how aggrieved he felt. The logic was like a group of people playing cards: Ye Jian was brazenly playing single cards, and while his opponent clearly held the Joker and could easily crush him with it, that Joker couldn't be played. Playing it risked bringing the entire game crashing down. But the old monk was different. He also stood at the peak, but all of this man's choices and actions were now completely unpredictable to anyone. Perhaps on some ordinary day, lighthearted and carefree, he would simply decide to fight to the death. Under these circumstances, if Ye Jian took him on head-on, even if he didn't die, it wouldn't be far from it. On Legion Square, the battle had finally turned into a clash between supers. Even in such a situation, people still couldn't help but begin to look forward to it. To witness a battle of supers. However, the anticipated spectacle did not happen right away, because Ye Jian unilaterally chose to evade. Midair, his expression grim, his left arm swept out with explosive force... The twenty-plus Azure battleblades nestled in the crook of his arm flew like a shower of swords toward the figure hurtling through the sky, attempting to obstruct him. At the same time, Ye Jian twisted his recoiling body midair and leapt toward an office building to the side. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh... Facing the rain of blades, the expressionless old monk reached out his left hand in midair. A spinning little axe flew out from the sleeve of his monastic robe and settled into his grip. An axe—one shaped barely any different from an ordinary farmhouse axe, except its handle was a bit shorter and made of iron. If Han Qingyu's parents or the folks back in Fenglong'ao were watching right now, someone would probably recognize that this was the very axe the old monk had used to chop firewood back at the dilapidated temple. The reason they would recognize it was that the old monk had lost it several times, flustered and begging people to help him find it. And almost every time, the axe ended up being found in a corner of the courtyard, in a woodpile, or behind his stove. On two occasions, it had even spent several days inside the firebox, burning along with the firewood. It was this very small axe. The moment Ye Jian saw it, he cried inwardly, *Bad,* and cast an aggrieved glance at Han Qingyu. If the black dead iron coating the surface of this small axe were wiped away, inside lay a special type of dead iron gleaming with golden light. This dead iron also hailed from that large Great Spike spaceship of 1908, but in the entire spaceship, only a single component had been made of this material. Its grade was even higher. *Swish! Clang, clang, clang...* The axe left his hand, tracing an arc that precisely deflected and severed every battleblade Ye Jian had flung his way. Every single battleblade fell to the ground in two pieces. Then, the axe spun back into the old monk's hand. Jiang Longchi caught the axe, snapped the wide sleeve of his right arm, and with an audible sonic boom, pivoted midair to cut off Ye Jian's retreat at a speed seemingly even faster than before. "So it really was all lies," someone on the ground suddenly muttered. "What?" a person beside him asked blankly. "'Do not leap, do not leap, do not leap...' The field manual lied." Before the aggrieved complaint even faded, *Clang!* Two stories up in the air, the first direct clash between two super combat powers finally took place. Unlike the imagined thunder and brimstone, the momentum and clamor of their clash was far less than Han Qingyu and Ye Jian's previous two collisions. "They both condensed all their source energy precisely into the point where their blades met. That's actually the hardest part," a lieutenant general in the crowd explained. In midair, the Azure battleblade in Ye Jian's hand snapped, and his body flew backward. The front half of the broken blade spun and sank into the concrete wall of an adjacent office building... silently, like a red-hot razor melting into butter. "This..." It almost seemed too anticlimactic. Tick, tock. Two seconds later—*Boom!* On the other side of that office building, the lush green crown and half the trunk of a century-old tree suddenly shifted sideways, then crashed down from the air. It had been cleanly sheared through by the broken blade after piercing through several walls. "Master, don't you feel this is unfair?!" Ye Jian hadn't been well-acquainted with Jiang Longchi back when he was in Azure. Dodging unilaterally across the air and ground, his situation turning precarious with every breath, he still found a moment to ask. "A monk cares not for such things." Master Longchi didn't let up in the slightest, answering with placid serenity, "They say having a blade is having no blade, having no blade is having a blade, so long as you have a blade in your heart..." Several thousand people on the square listened in silence. "That sounds really profound, makes a lot of sense." "No crap. Right now General Jiang has an axe and Ye Jian doesn't, so of course it makes sense." "..." Ye Jian gave a bitter smile and fell silent. He could no longer afford to be relaxed. Although he had contingency plans for the old monk's presence, an unexpected variable had arisen: the two blades he had brought with him were gone. The two blades he brought were certainly no match for the old monk's axe, but they weren't ordinary either; they could have at least held out for a bit. Thus, this was an entirely unforeseen development—something he hadn't anticipated in the slightest at the outset. Now, across the square below, large Azure battle formations that would temporarily trap anyone who came close had already assembled. With the old monk present, if Ye Jian fell into one, it would be certain death. And his retreat had been read completely, sealed off by the old monk wielding that little axe. In order to avoid losing positional advantage, the old man wasn't even in a hurry to wound him. *What do I do?* A flash of inspiration struck Ye Jian's mind... A weapon, a high-grade weapon—there was one right here! *Right, I'll find a chance to snatch his column sword.* *Slash!* Risking a gash opened on his shoulder by the axe blade, Ye Jian found an opening, darted a distance away, and like a flash of lightning vaulted into the air, looking toward... Han Qingyu's direction. *Where did he go?!* In Ye Jian's sight, the last glimpse of Han Qingyu's retreating figure was vanishing into the conference hall. Judging by the way he was running, he had the column sword clutched in his arms. Even if he chased him inside, he wouldn't find him, not to mention he couldn't get past or go in at all. "Fuck..." "Can you really be that cunning and slippery?!" Thinking of Wen Jifei and that they were in cahoots, Ye Jian resigned himself to this reality. Yet Han Qingyu's line of thinking was actually completely different from Wen Jifei's. He was just so used to looting and robbing others that recently he suffered from chronic paranoia, constantly feeling that someone was going to steal his column sword. Lately, he was on guard even against Azure's top brass, let alone Ye Jian! Therefore, the moment he noticed the old monk holding the weapon advantage, Han Qingyu ran. Although the column sword was controlled by bone source, he was already injured. What if Ye Jian was morally bankrupt and shameless enough... to erupt with life source energy, killing him to seize the treasure?! Meanwhile, in a direction Ye Jian hadn't paid attention to. Warned by Wen Jifei, Rusty Sister and Wu Xu had also taken their weapons and that small black wooden case—which hadn't actually been spotted—and gone into hiding.