Chapter 54: Fall of the Insect King

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Intense battle raged through the desolate street.

"Ugh—ah!" Wu Bai took a heavy blow to the spine, letting out a grunt of pain. Having no time to worry about the injury, he whirled his spear around to strike behind him, only to hit empty air.

The King of Insects, indistinguishable as either a mere mirage or the true entity, stood far away, its carapace gleaming as if brand-new, its stamina fully replenished.

Wu Bai, on the other hand, was a picture of exhaustion. His dark iron armor was pockmarked with countless dents, wounds covered his entire body, and he breathed heavily, the very picture of a spent force in desperate straits.

Because he did not know where the King of Insects was, he could not attack.

Because he did not know when the King of Insects would strike, he could not defend.

Because false mirages constantly diverted his attention, he could not tell the real from the illusory.

"In the end, I am still restrained by your Truth, Jiao Hai." Leaning heavily on his spear just to keep standing, his eyes filled with melancholy.

Clenching his fist and beating it against his chest as if making a final, resolute decision, Wu Bai looked toward the distant Zhou Ke and shouted a warning:

"I am going to burn through my remaining strength now! The best-case scenario is that I take the King of Insects down with me, and the worst-case is that I temporarily disable it. Take that chance and run!"

"Alright," Zhou Ke replied very readily, though after a brief pause, he added, "I didn't expect you to be willing to die together rather than ask if I had a countermeasure. That kind of unyielding, self-reliant spirit of a true man—I respect it!"

"Wait, you have a way?" Wu Bai froze completely upon hearing this. "Then why didn't you say so earlier?!"

"You didn't ask," Zhou Ke said, spreading his hands with an innocent expression.

Of course he wasn't just playing games with people.

Mr. Zhou had a careful calculation in mind, and that calculation clearly dictated that just now was not the moment to decide the outcome.

"I!" A curse rushed to the tip of Wu Bai's tongue, but he forced it back down through sheer willpower.

Actually, Wu Bai was being a bit overly restrained. When dealing with someone like Mr. Zhou, one should curse—curse him to high heaven!

Spit the curse out, and your mouth stays clean.

Swallow the curse back, and your heart gets dirty.

"Consider me in your debt, so just spit it out already," Wu Bai muttered resentfully while retreating continuously to prevent a sneak attack from the King of Insects, whose actual body location remained unknown.

"It's very simple." Zhou Ke mentally noted the "debt," opened his arms, and explained:

"A mirage is the refraction and reflection of light. Due to changes in the trajectory of light, the position of the image captured by vision also shifts accordingly."

"No matter how it changes, only the position changes. The mirage still faithfully reflects the movements of the main body."

Zhou Ke explained it in two or three breezy sentences, but to Wu Bai, it felt like his brain was being baked in a microwave.

"Just tell me what to do!" he shouted through a cold sweat.

"Oh," Zhou Ke nodded as if expecting this. "To put it simply, you need to watch its eyes. No matter how it moves, when it attacks, the eyes of the true body will definitely look toward your position. Then you reverse-engineer its location based on the angle of the mirage's eyes."

"The angle of the eyes? Reverse-engineer?"

With a half-understanding look, Wu Bai glanced at the mirage of the King of Insects, focusing intensely on its tiny pupils.

"It's looking to the right, which means the true body is on my left-hand side?"

Hoping against hope, Wu Bai swept his spear with his left hand, executing a technique called "Hiding Flowers Beneath the Leaves."

The red tassels branched out like leaves, and the spearhead blossomed near the ground like a flower. Explicit force contained implicit force; the former shook the air, while the latter swept away the dust.

The moment the spear thrust out, though there was no solid sensation of impact, it proved that Zhou Ke was right.

Because the mirage of the King of Insects did not charge forward again; instead, it halted its steps and darted several meters to the side.

"I hit!" Wu Bai rejoiced.

"I used to be comrades-in-arms with Jiao Hai, yet I never figured out a good way to crack his Truth," he glanced at Zhou Ke involuntarily, feeling a secret shock. "If Jiao Hai could see this scene right now, he'd probably die of anger."

The next second, the King of Insects began to run again.

"This time it's on the right!" Bolstered by his previous success, Wu Bai grew bolder and threw a spear that struck the shoulder of the King of Insects.

Without the hindrance of cotton armor, the shell shattered instantly, and the tyrannical spear momentum bored into a bleeding wound drenched in green fluid.

From this blow, Wu Bai also learned one thing—the King of Insects seemed incapable of using two Truths simultaneously.

Before he could share this intelligence with Zhou Ke, the King of Insects was on the move once more.

As if willing to risk injury just to deny him a single breathing space.

"It's useless! I've already seen through your moves!"

Wu Bai gathered strength in both hands, aiming his silver spear in the opposite direction of the insect king's eyes and unleashing it. The spiraling, intertwined momentum was unstoppable, piercing straight through a distant wall and leaving a collapsed ruin in its wake.

"Not there? Why?" He couldn't help frowning. There was no solid impact from the attack, yet the King of Insects had not stopped running.

"Could it be that it's not looking at me, but at—" A realization struck Wu Bai, and he anxiously shouted to Zhou Ke, "Oh no, it's attacking you this time!"

Zhou Ke, who had remained at a distance the entire time, didn't need the warning. The moment the insect king's gaze locked onto him, he had already noticed and prepared himself.

"Such a good dog. I call you, and you come running, just like a puppy."

Licking his lower lip with a smile, Zhou Ke put away the Grade-E magic crystal he was absorbing, waved the spirit key in his hand, and added the final stroke to the concrete pillar behind him.

Four door frames combined to form a neat quadrilateral.

"Welcome me, Spirit Key."

With a pious whisper, a chunk of the concrete pillar was shaved away out of thin air.

Suddenly, the mixed sound of tumbling rubble rang out, immediately followed by the cracking of wall structures sounding like a snowball rolling down a mountain—growing louder and louder, heavier and heavier!

The shadow above Zhou Ke's head also grew larger until it completely engulfed him.

Looking up, an unfinished construction building was collapsing.

No, it was a building with its load-bearing pillars shaved away, venting its anger and unwillingness.

"Hello, goodbye."

Zhou Ke grinned and waved at the empty air somewhere, then vanished from the spot with a sudden flash.

Boom—!!!

Though the King of Insects swallowed beneath the ruins of the tall building could no longer be seen, the transition of its mirage from panic to utter annihilation played out before their eyes without reservation.

It made Mr. Zhou mentally remark: This Truth can even be used to confirm someone's obituary; the cost-performance ratio is truly high.

"Is—is it just over?" Standing alive beside the dust-filled ruins, Wu Bai felt a nameless emotion.

To call it surviving a catastrophe didn't quite fit.

To call it relaxed and pleasant wasn't quite right either.

To use an analogy, it felt like a story with a passionate, bloody opening, only for the protagonist to wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and accidentally handsome-death himself.

Perfunctory. Yes, entirely perfunctory.

It was hard to imagine what kind of ill-tempered, third-rate author could write such an absurd ending.

"Achoo~." Walking over leisurely, Zhou Ke sneezed, looked around, and muttered, "Who's talking behind my back?"

Seeing Zhou Ke, Wu Bai asked blankly once more, "Is it over?"

"Oh? It seems Examiner Wu is quite reluctant to part with that bug. Could it be that you two developed mutual affections during the match, turning hatred into love—" Zhou Ke narrowed his dead-fish eyes, about to make his habitual sarcastic remark, when he suddenly remembered—

There had been no prompt indicating points had been awarded.