FREE USE in Primitive World

Chapter 346: Chapter 346: Veylara’s Counterattack

They had arrived just in time to save their fellow Sovereign.

Veylara clicked her tongue in annoyance. She couldn’t secure the kill without taking a fatal blow herself. She violently yanked her obsidian spear free from the Beetle’s skull, unleashing a fresh torrent of ichor, and flipped backward into the air, gracefully evading the wolf’s bite and the mantis’s scythe.

She landed softly on the mud, fifty feet away, resetting her stance.

All five beasts had gathered again, but even then, the dynamic of the battlefield had irreversibly shifted.

The Rockhorn Beetle was almost out of the fight. It was thrashing violently on the ground, screeching in endless agony, its massive horn gouging aimless trenches into the earth as it blinded, crippled, and leaking its life force into the mud. It was no longer a siege engine, it was just a dying obstacle.

The flawless, synchronized pressure of the five-on-one had been shattered.

With the Beetle incapacitated, the overarching, suffocating weight of the Behemoths’ combined essence lessened drastically, and the suffocating tension broke.

Veylara was obviously aware of this, after all she was the one who had orchestrated it all .

She breathed deeply to level her breathing, the storm-colored intensity in her eyes burned brighter. She was no longer just surviving the onslaught, she had seized the absolute tempo of the battle.

And like with conversation, if you seize the tempo, your opponent can only helplessly follow behind you, so she became far more daring.

She didn’t wait for the remaining four beasts to regroup and reform their perimeter. She went entirely on the offensive.

With a roar that rivaled the beasts, Veylara charged directly at the Silent Fang Mantis

. The insectoid assassin raised its scythes to parry, expecting a heavy, crushing blow. Instead, Veylara dropped low, sliding through the mud beneath its guard. The White Tiger phantom’s claws swept upward, catching the Mantis on its mid-joint, shattering the thick chitin in one brutal attack and throwing the massive beast entirely off balance.

As the Stonehide Ursid rushed in to cover the Mantis, raising its stone-clad fists to crush her, Veylara simply used the shaft of her spear like a pole-vault and launched herself directly into the Ursid’s chest, her boots slamming into the petrified armor like skin with the force of a battering ram, cracking the stone and knocking the breath from the two-story giant.

Even though she may appear light and slim, she was a blur of lethal, unchained martial perfection. After all, she wasn’t layer 4 in vain, layer 4 is the fundamental threshold between a mere mortal and someone reaching the starting point of real powers.

On the other hand, stripped of their armored vanguard, the remaining Behemoths were suddenly forced onto the defensive and Veylara was no longer fighting a war of attrition, she was hunting.

…

The sickening, high-pitched shrieks of the crippled Rockhorn Beetle continued echoing across the scorched clearing, entirely drowning out the chaos in the whole battlefield.

Ursid slammed his fists angrily on chest to crush her, but Veylara smoothly pushed forward and using the moment flew away.

As she landed softly on the blood-soaked ground fifty feet away. As she snapped her obsidian spear down to her side, flicking the Beetle’s brain matter from the bladed tip, the White Tiger phantom hovering over her shoulders stopped its defensive, flickering stance.

The massive, ethereal beast lowered its head, its ghostly muscles coiling tight, its eyes locking onto the remaining prey with pure, lethal intent.

With a roar that rivaled the thunder, Veylara charged again at the towering Stonehide Ursid.

The two-story-tall bear, enraged by her earlier attack, reared up to its full height. It brought both of its massive, stone-clad fists down in a devastating hammer-blow meant to crush her flat. The sheer kinetic mass of the strike warped the air, promising to shatter the bedrock beneath her feet.

Veylara didn’t dodge.

She channeled a massive surge of Layer 4 essence directly into her boots and met the strike head-on. She thrust her obsidian spear upward, the tip glowing with blinding, concentrated white light.

BOOM!

The impact sounded like a mountain cracking in half. The Warchief’s spear met the Ursid’s descending fists. The concentrated, piercing power of her Layer 4 essence drove straight through the beast’s natural, stone-clad armor. The shockwave blew outward in a massive, perfectly clear dome.

The Ursid roared in sudden, blinding pain. The spear had pierced the thick stone plating and buried itself deep into the flesh of its right palm, stopping the multi-ton strike dead in its tracks.

Unlike last time, Veylara didn’t just hold the block, she used the beast’s own immense weight against it. She twisted her spear, tearing a massive, bloody trench through the bear’s palm, and quickly used the leverage to violently vault herself high into the air, flying entirely over the Ursid’s massive head, aiming straight for its eyes.

But While she was mid-air, the ambient light directly behind her subtly refracted.

The Silent Fang Mantis, moving with the absolute perfection of a high-tier assassin, had leaped after her. Its massive scythes cleaved the air in a silent, lethal scissor-strike, aiming to cut her while she had no footing.

But strangely, Veylara didn’t even look back.

Suddenly her White Tiger phantom expanded, acting as her eyes.

As the scythes closed in, Veylara twisted her body with impossible, joint-defying feline grace.

She swung her spear in a brutal, blind backhand arc.

The shaft of the obsidian spear collided violently with the Mantis’s right scythe. The insectoid assassin possessed a microscopic, razor-thin edge capable of cutting obsidian, but it still lacked the raw, concentrated mass of a Layer 4 strike.

The collision sent a horrific, cracking screech through the air.

The result was soon obvious, Veylara’s strike shattered the Mantis’s right scythe entirely. Chunks of razor-sharp chitin exploded outward like shrapnel. The beast shrieked in pain, its perfect balance destroyed and plummeted heavily toward the mud below.

Veylara fell gracefully, her boots touching down softly on the broad, segmented back of the Thousandfang Centipede, which had been slithering underneath her to spray its necrotic acid.