As the expandable baton swung downward, Chen Chuan lowered his gaze. His torso remained still as his left foot whipped up in an instant, colliding squarely with the incoming baton.
With a sharp crack, the baton shattered. Chen Chuan's kick, however, appeared utterly unaffected, hurtling toward the man behind it with undiminished momentum.
The man's pupils constricted sharply. He swiftly crossed both hands in front of him to block. When the kick struck, its force was monstrously immense, driving his arms back hard against his face. With a dull boom, his forward charge from afar was brought to an abrupt halt, and a visible ring of shockwaves burst open at the point of contact.
A moment later, with a roaring blast, the man flew backward like a cannonball expelled from a barrel, crashing into a building along the street behind him.
Despite absorbing the brutal impact, the man possessed remarkable tenacity. While still midair, he thrust out a hand and plunged his five fingers into the adjacent concrete wall, gouging out five deep furrows with a harsh screeching tear to forcefully arrest his momentum, then dropped to the ground from above with a thud.
He exhaled a breath, straightened his posture, and slowly raised his head, glaring ferociously at Chen Chuan in the distance. At the same time, he jerked both shoulders; a tremor ran down his burly, powerful arms, and a cloud of dust instantly exploded outward from his flexing muscles, presenting an imposing display.
He had trained a specialized form of jin in both arms, which was why he appeared completely unscathed on the surface after blocking that kick.
Yet just as the mutated tissue inside his body gathered force and he took a step forward, preparing to launch another assault on Chen Chuan, his expression shifted slightly. His footing lost all power. As if stepping into empty air, he stumbled forward a few paces and pitched over, bracing an arm against the ground before violently spewing a mouthful of blood onto the pavement.
Although his arms had appeared unharmed due to the dense concentration of mutated tissue, the moment contact was made with Chen Chuan, a current of soft jin had already penetrated deep into his body.
This Mind Jin, carrying the characteristics of String-Void Jin, had instantly wrecked the majority of the mutated tissue within him. He looked fine on the outside, but his insides were reduced to a pulverized mess. Because the jin was so covert and delayed in its release, he hadn't even realized it at first.
Chen Chuan did not look at him again. This man had not even cultivated Mind Jin. When Chen Chuan had unleashed the mental shockwave earlier, the man had likely been carrying some protective item and had been standing rather far away, thus avoiding its effects. Still, to dare charge him head-on with nothing more than that—one had to admit the man possessed extraordinary confidence.
The fallen fighter still refused to concede defeat. Uttering a strained cry, he forced himself to stand. But throughout the effort, his frame shook and trembled incessantly, his bones grinding with creaks and groans that made it nearly impossible for him to stand upright. Yet he stubbornly pushed himself upward. After three such attempts, crisp popping sounds snapped beneath his flesh, and fissures tore open across his skin, spurting bursts of fresh blood.
At that, a shudder ran through his entire frame. As if all strength had deserted him, he collapsed facedown against the earth with a thud, kicking up a plume of dust. His eyes rolled back, thoroughly devoid of consciousness, while crimson blood seeped out from under his skin, quickly forming a sizable pool.
Chen Chuan walked forward a few steps and looked outward. He could see several figures stationed in positions to both his left and right. First, he glanced to the left, where a man stood clad in a sleeveless protective suit. The man's skin was grayish-brown and his hair curly. Clutched in one hand were five dangling soft cords, while the winding, coiled muscles of his exposed arms radiated raw savagery.
Just as Chen Chuan took measure of him, he sensed something and sidestepped. With a loud blast, a massive crater blew open in the corner of the street. Deeply embedded within was a metal pellet, packing a punch no less devastating than a cannon shell—a startling sight.
Glancing in the other direction, Chen Chuan spotted a young man standing atop a high vantage point less than two kilometers away. Wearing wind goggles, the youth had half-man-high piles of metal pellets stacked beside him. At that moment, he raised his chin and shot Chen Chuan a provocative look.
In front of this young man stood a stout, burly fellow wearing earrings and a headscarf, who appeared to be assigned as his protector. In his hands, the stout man held a pitch-black shield that looked exceptionally sturdy.
The young man reached out, grabbed another metal pellet from his supply, weighed it in his hand twice, then spun in place on both feet. Driving his arm forward with the rotation, he slung it toward Chen Chuan's position once more.
With a piercing shriek tearing through the air, the projectile enlarged rapidly before Chen Chuan's eyes.
Chen Chuan merely tilted his head, letting the pellet streak past the side of his skull. Behind him, the sound of tearing masonry immediately resounded as a cloud of smoke and dust burst into the air.
Speaking calmly into his boundary credential, he said, "Andun, verify the identities of these people."
"Andun acknowledges...
...Searching records."
In moments, a succession of text and data materialized on his boundary credential, accompanied by several video clips and images.
He gave it a glance. These individuals all belonged to a mercenary group known as Karna, a well-known, large-scale mercenary outfit within the Chiluojiaduo Confederation.
Rather than an ordinary mercenary band, this organization operated more like a mercenary platform without a fixed headcount. However, its core always consisted of four figures. The recordings showed three men and one woman, each rugged and imposing, each with distinctive traits. None of the four had made an appearance tonight.
Virtually all the figures he saw before him were hired recruits. Perhaps because they had never operated in Great Shun or appeared on public information platforms, their precise identities were not displayed. A basic analysis indicated they were likely local mercenaries and fighters hailing from Chiluojiaduo.
Only one person among them was an exception: the youth hurling the metal pellets. He bore an uncanny resemblance to Radoximi, one of the four core figures, who was renowned for his exceptional throwing arts. Radoximi's name was derived from a local folk hero said to have used a sling to exterminate seven kinds of monsters on Mount Kanbana.
According to the intelligence, Radoximi had a highly gifted brother. If so, this youth was very likely the core figure among the arrivals tonight.
Chen Chuan's gaze shifted directly toward him.
The young man seemed to sense Chen Chuan's gaze as well, but assumed his taunts had provoked him. He ostentatiously puffed out his chest and spun around in place with outstretched arms, flaunting the muscles across his back and arms.
Fixing his eyes ahead, Chen Chuan took a step forward. In the next instant, an explosive boom tore through the air as his silhouette bolted toward that vantage point. Billboards and windowpanes lining the entire street rattled and buzzed with intense vibrations before shattering one after another, while billows of smoke and dust surged along his wake.
Seeing this, the burly man tasked with protection let out a roaring battle cry, charged forward, and raised his heavy shield to intercept Chen Chuan head-on.
The scenery around Chen Chuan streaked backward in a blur. Almost instantly, he arrived before the burly man and drove a fist into the shield.
The man's eyes bugged out, veins bulging as he let out a frantic bellow and braced behind the shield. With a heavy thud, both men came to a sudden halt. The pavement beneath their feet exploded outward in a wide circle, showering fine gravel against the adjacent buildings like bullets, pockmarking the facades with tiny craters.
The burly man's arm muscles bunched tight, threatening to burst the seams of his protective suit, while his headband flew off amid the violent clash of forces. Thick veins throbbed across his forehead and his earrings shook violently, yet he remained frozen in his stance, looking as though he had successfully held his ground.
Chen Chuan pulled back his fist, straightened up, stepped around the man, and continued walking forward.
The burly man remained motionless. But moments later, a crisp snap rang out as the shield fractured into pieces and fell away. His body began to tremble as if a surge of blood was rushing upward, his face flushing bright crimson. A moment later, with a loud pop, his head burst open. The headless corpse swayed twice before toppling sideways.
Seeing this, the youth's pupils constricted for a split second, yet he showed no sign of retreating. Instead, he began to rapidly mobilize the metal pellets around him.
Not only did he use his hands, but he also swept with his feet, his body spinning incessantly in a blur of rapid motion. Pellets flew out like a driving rainstorm, while the waist-high piles beside him dwindled at startling speed. The air was filled with a relentless, whistling din.
Watching the trajectories of the projectiles, Chen Chuan casually swatted them aside with a single hand.
In trading accuracy for speed, the youth failed to land several pellets on target. Instead, they slammed into the surrounding buildings, unleashing destructive force akin to genuine artillery shells. Corners crumbled from structures on both sides, while entire walls collapsed into rubble.
Realizing this could not stop Chen Chuan, the young man halted his rapid barrage. Taking a moment to adjust his breathing, he tilted his head back, drew a deep breath of air, and picked up a single pellet. Crossing his legs, he leaned forward, holding the pellet with an arm extended backward, while his other hand remained in front, fingers pointed upward toward his face.
He assumed a posture as graceful as a dance, ripples of muscle undulating through his frame like flowing water. A moment later, he unleashed all his power, spinning in place with blinding speed—seeming to execute dozens of rotations in an instant—before coming to a sudden halt and slinging the pellet forward!
At that moment, channelled through layer upon layer of muscle, his entire strength converged upon that single projectile. Finally, the mutated tissue at his extremities joined in delivering force. His fingertips pushed forward with supple grace, his body leaning into an angle of flawless mechanical aesthetic, even his hair and sweat trailing forward in that instant.
This single throw far exceeded his past limits, as though drawing upon a surge of spirit that fused into the pellet, rocketing across the distance in a flash.
Yet in the very next instant, a hand reached out. Five fingers clamped down with a snap, seizing the metal pellet out of the air—and only then did the roaring thunder of its passing catch up, booming across the street.
...
...
Chapter 668