Chapter 145: The Parasites II

Chapter 146: The Parasites II

"Not easily replicated."

The family heads looked at him.

The golden aura surrounding Roan’s colossal frame had dimmed by a visible margin. The skin around his temples was pale, his breathing strained.

"The technique is too expensive," Vaelric realized, his jaw tightening.

Roan nodded grimly, wiping a bead of cold sweat from his jaw. "The parasite does not simply sit on the surface; it anchors itself to the host’s vitality. To extract it cleanly requires me to coat every microscopic barb in my own refined Metal Qi to prevent internal tearing."

He looked across the barricade.

Behind them, eight more soldiers were already thrashing in the mud, their skin darkening, their jaws clicking as the black vapor they had inhaled began taking root.

"I cannot purge them all," Roan said bluntly.

Estelle’s eyes narrowed into slits. "How many can you manage?"

"Three. Perhaps four, if I burn through my core’s foundational reserves," Roan replied, his golden eyes unblinking. "Some hosts have weaker foundations—the parasite integrates twice as fast. Others would require five times the energy to extract without turning their dantians into pulverized dust."

Vaelric’s expression darkened into an abyss.

The mathematics of the battlefield were brutal and absolute. If Roan exhausted his Qi saving four conscripts, the sky-anchor greatsword would fall. And if the sky-anchor fell, the outer barrier would collapse, leaving all two hundred survivors to be swallowed by the miasma.

"Then we cannot rely on individual purges," Vaelric stated, his tactical mind shifting gears.

Lemo’s silver lightning sparked across his breastplate. "We need a catalyst. Something that severs the parasite’s anchor from the inside, or an elemental frequency that forces them to detach before Roan expends his energy."

"Precisely," Roan agreed. "Until then, any more extractions will leave us defenseless."

ROOOOAAAR!

Before they could formulate a counter-array, a chorus of feral shrieks erupted from the trench!

The remaining infected soldiers had completely transformed.

Their human anatomy had collapsed. Their shoulders were hunched, their spines jutting out in jagged black ridges. Thick sheets of obsidian scales covered their throats and ribs, while their hands had fused into curved, foot-long talons of calcified bone.

They were no longer men struggling against an infection.

They were fully matured vanguard constructs—hungry, lethal, and completely devoid of human memory.

Vaelric thrust his gauntlet forward without hesitation:

[Kinetic Command: Suppressive Bind!]

WHOOM!

White kinetic threads lashed out like weighted chains, wrapping around the limbs of the five charging constructs.

"DO NOT STRIKE TO KILL!" Vaelric’s command thundered across the line. "Pin their joints! Drive their knees into the dirt! If you sever their flesh, the parasites will seek the nearest host!"

The surviving soldiers moved with clockwork discipline. Tower shields slammed forward, bracing against the monstrous impact of their former comrades.

BOOM! BOOM!

Lemo’s silver lightning cleaved through the mud, precisely striking the kneecaps of two charging husks, shattering their leg bones to immobilize them without stopping their hearts.

Estelle’s gales whipped into localized vortexes, suspending three more thrashing beasts in mid-air, starving their lungs of the miasma.

Roan stood behind the line, his chest heaving, his eyes burning as he analyzed the writhing husks, desperately searching for a structural flaw in the parasite’s biology.

We need an answer, Roan thought grimly. And we need it before—

"My My, what a remarkably delicate little performance."

A woman’s voice drifted lazily across the howling gale.

The entire valley seemed to stop breathing.

The temperature didn’t drop; it turned suffocatingly warm, heavy with the sweet, sickening aroma of night-blooming jasmine and ancient, concentrated venom.

Roan slowly turned his head.

Standing fifty paces beyond the golden perimeter, right in the center of the rotting beast carcasses, was a lone figure.

She wore sweeping, high-collared robes of deep emerald silk, embroidered with winding serpent motifs of liquid silver. Her long, ink-black hair was pinned with a jade hairpin shaped like a coiled viper.

She held no weapon. She assumed no martial stance.

She simply stood atop a pile of rotting dire-wolf corpses, her hands tucked loosely into her wide sleeves, looking down at the desperate human formation with an expression of quiet, detached amusement.

Her eyes were not the eyes of a mortal. They were deep, hypnotic pools of translucent emerald green, with slitted, golden pupils that seemed to see straight through flesh, bone, and soul.

Roan’s Metal Qi surged instinctively, his posture locking into an iron guard. "Who are you?"

The woman blinked slowly.

Her gaze drifted lazily away from Roan, sweeping across the sea of five thousand mangled corpses, then toward the thrashing, scale-covered soldiers trapped in Vaelric’s kinetic chains.

"Hmm..."

She tilted her head, a pout of mild disappointment touching her painted lips.

"The flora in this desolate frontier is dreadfully uninspired."

Lemo’s lightning crackled violently against the ground. "What did you say, woman?"

She ignored him entirely, as if the lightning patriarch were nothing more than a buzzing fly.

Her emerald gaze returned to Roan. More specifically, her eyes drifted upward, fixing onto the massive, sheathed greatsword hovering in the center of the celestial formation.

For several seconds, she studied the weapon with an unblinking, predatory intensity.

A slow, dazzling smile curved across her face.

"By the way..." she whispered, her voice carrying an acoustic resonance that bypassed their physical ears and vibrated directly within their souls:

"...that sword."

Her smile widened, revealing teeth that were unnervingly pristine.

"Where did an ant from this broken world acquire the Aegis of the Unbroken?"

Roan’s blood turned to liquid ice. His knuckles whitened until the bones threatened to burst through his skin.

She recognizes the weapon.

Estelle took half a step back, her wind barriers shivering.

Lemo’s silver lightning hissed violently, expanding into a three-meter halo of pure destructive energy.

Vaelric stepped forward until he stood level with Roan, his white hair whipping in the toxic draft, his iron gauntlets raised. "Identify yourself! Before which sect do you stand?!"

The woman finally shifted her gaze to Vaelric.

Her golden slit pupils narrowed with mocking, theatrical pity.

"How painfully provincial," she sighed softly.

She withdrew one slender, pale hand from her wide emerald sleeve, pressing her manicured fingers delicately against her collarbone.

"I suppose when speaking to livestock, one must observe the formalities."

Her smile thinned into a razor’s edge:

"I am Lady Jade Serpent."

A suffocating, primeval silence smothered the valley.

The name meant nothing to the two hundred surviving soldiers. They were modern men from an apocalypse that was only thirty days old.

Yet, every instinct honed by the Four Family Heads over a lifetime of survival screamed the exact same truth:

Run.

Lady Jade Serpent glanced once more at Roan’s hovering greatsword, then at the trembling, exhausted patriarch himself.

Her emerald eyes sparkled with cruel, sparkling delight.

"Now, little master of iron..." she purred, taking a single, soundless step across the field of corpses:

"Tell me... how many more of those pathetic worms can you pull out before your little core runs completely dry?"​