System S.E.X. (Seduction, Expansion, eXecution)

Chapter 701: Chapter 701: The Flight of the Skull

The writhing lump beneath Koma’s skin suddenly stopped its rapid ascent near her shoulder blade. A split second later, a sickly, incandescent green glow began to pulsate visibly through her veins, turning her pale flesh into an unnatural, glowing emerald hue.

”Now, that is the precise reaction you should be terrified of,” Ethan remarked. ”When a male Gravedigger Beetle reaches peak chemical excitation, it unloads the entirety of the concentrated corpse energy it has harvested throughout its centuries-of-life baseline. Evolutionary speaking, this energy is intended to forcefully impregnate the blood-red female and sustain the larvae. But inside a living human vessel, the reaction is entirely catastrophic.”

Ethan didn’t even look down as Koma’s body violently seized. ”There is need to explain what will happen to you next.”

The transformation executed itself with a brutal velocity.

Shhhhk.

With a sickening rustle, Koma’s long, silver-streaked hair detached from her scalp, scattering across the slate table like dead straw. Her jaw forced itself wide open as her teeth instantly rotted, turning a foul, decaying yellow before fracturing into dust. The moisture inside her muscular tissue was aggressively sucked dry; her skin rapidly shriveled, turning into a cracked, dark brown parchment that clung tightly to her bones. Her eyes glazed over, dried into hollow, sunken husks, and sank straight into her skull.

She felt the entire agonizing mummification process in perfect, agonizing clarity, her soul trapped inside a rapidly calcifying shell until her vocal cords withered into silence. Within forty seconds, the peak Golden Core expert was reduced to nothing more than a dried, hollow mummy, frozen in a permanent posture of terror.

Pffft!

The withered skin on her chest suddenly ruptured. The obsidian-black Gravedigger Beetle burst outward, its shell now dripping with a viscous green fluid. Driven by its deeply hardwired homing instincts, the insect didn’t hesitate for a single moment, it unfolded its translucent wings and shot forward through the open reinforced doorway like a black streak of lightning.

”Let it flee! Do not obstruct its path under any circumstance!” Ethan roared, his authoritative voice instantly snapping the paralyzed guards out of their stupor.

Ethan violently accelerated, shifting into a high-speed blur as he pursued the buzzing insect down the metallic corridors of the flagship. The Vice Sect Leader, Heidy, and the General shot forward right behind him, their high-tier cultivation bases flaring to life as they burst through the primary boarding ramp and back into the freezing frontier sky.

”All dreadnoughts, execute low-altitude tracking protocols immediately!” the General bellowed into his communication talisman as he soared through the air. ”Follow that insect! Maintain a static distance of fifty meters and lock all thermal arrays onto its trajectory!”

Up in the heavens, the colossal Impenetrable-class heavy flagship and the three Invictus-class dreadnoughts rumbled violently, their massive anti-gravity arrays groaning as they tilted downward, tracking the tiny black speck that was buzzing across the jagged canyon floor.

Right at that exact structural moment, the sky above the northern horizon violently ripped open.

A massive fleet of reinforcements—consisting of the sister Impenetrable-class flagship and twelve additional Invictus-class dreadnoughts—broke through the clouds, their heavy silver hulls gleaming under the sun as they prepared to execute a standard military deployment.

”Attention incoming reinforcement Army!” the General’s voice echoed across the secure tactical network, cutting off the greeting protocols of the arriving commanders. ”Form up on our rear flank and execute immediate tracking maneuvers! Do not deploy vanguard troops! There is a tiny biological entity fleeing directly in front of our primary ironclads—do not strike it, do not touch it, and do not lose its coordinates! It is leading us straight to the target!”.

”Acknowledged! Reinforcement army has successfully locked onto target coordinates!” the tactical channel roared with a barrage of military confirmations.

The arriving commanders didn’t even have time to process the sheer absurdity of the situation. High above the jagged canyon walls, a truly monstrous fleet of two Impenetrable-class heavy flagships and fifteen Invictus-class dreadnoughts formed a massive, overlapping iron wedge in the heavens, their colossal silver hulls blocking out the sun as they slowly pursued a single, microscopic black dot buzzing frantically across the earth.

As the Gravedigger Beetle aggressively accelerated, the barren, rocky terrain of the canyon began to shift, slowly plunging the pursuit party into a dense, heavily shadowed forested perimeter half-buried between the mountain ridges.

Tucked deep within a dense thicket of old-growth trees, a heavily camouflaged military outpost materialized. Flying high above the reinforced watchtowers were the aggressive, crackling banners of the Thunderdragon Sect.

The enemy scouts stationed on the towers looked up at the sky, their faces draining of all color as the massive shadow of a full Heavenly Sword Pavilion armada aggressively drifted over their position. ”Enemy invasion! Sound the spiritual alarms! Activate the defensive barriers immediately!” a guard screamed, frantically striking a massive runic gong.

The regional outpost leader—a powerful Golden Core expert clad in heavy thunder-attribute armor—violently soared into the sky, his voice amplified by spiritual energy as he tried to project an air of military authority. ”Halt! You are aggressively violating the sovereign border treaty recognized by the Soaring Dragon Kingdom! Retreat this exact millisecond or—”

BOOM!

He didn’t even manage to execute the rest of his threat. The primary arc-cannons of the leading Invictus-class dreadnought flashed with blinding white energy, delivering a direct, high-tier strike that instantly pulverized the regional leader in mid-air, transforming his entire physical vessel into a horrific paste of blood and shredded meat before he could even raise his defensive shields.

”Fire at will! Eradicate the perimeter!” the General commanded coldly over the secure network.

Seeing their supreme commander instantly turned into a bloody mist, total panic seized the Thunderdragon Sect personnel below. Abandoning their defensive posts and runic arrays, hundreds of cultivators frantically scattered into the forest, attempting to execute a chaotic retreat into the deep ravines.

However, the twelve newly arrived reinforcement dreadnoughts moved with a terrifying, highly military velocity. They broke their tight formation and fanned out in a perfect sweeping arc, aggressively surrounding the entire forested valley within seconds.

The heavy war vessels hunted the fleeing enemy down one by one, their secondary turrets raining down a relentless barrage of elemental fire that thoroughly incinerated every single escape path, leaving zero survivors in their wake while the black insect continued its frantic flight down into the dark.