Chapter 402: The Attacker?

The dark-green mist lived up to its eye-catching color.

It was toxic indeed, and violently so.

For an ordinary person, mere seconds of exposure would be enough to kill.

Blood would well from mouth and nose as they collapsed, suffocating. They would not even have the chance to cry for help.

Even the support squad, every member Rank-2, would likely find the effects of the Lesser Bulwark potion alone insufficient to protect them.

At best, it would delay the onset.

This poisonous mist was even more potent than the two toxins in the building she had just left.

This, most likely, was why the entire block held not a single human silhouette, not even vagrants, rats, or cockroaches.

They hadn’t left.

They were dead.

Every living thing had been wiped out by this eerie, poisonous fog.

But even such terrible poison did not faze Pandora in the slightest.

As long as she did not inhale large amounts over a prolonged period, this toxin fell entirely within what the Witch’s bloodline in her body could process.

The trace amounts of poison were swiftly devoured and broken down by the Witch’s bloodline, hardly capable of affecting her in any meaningful way.

The dark-green mist lingered inside her body for perhaps the length of half a breath.

But this was clearly not the enemy’s primary means of attack.

It was merely the appetizer.

Then, in the blink of an eye.

A streak of black light suddenly lanced out from deep within the poison mist.

Soundless, without the slightest warning, it aimed straight for the space between Pandora’s brows.

The black light was thin as a fingertip, yet so condensed it was nearly solid, and so fast that an ordinary Rank-3 would have had no time to react.

But Pandora did.

The instant the black light split the mist, her pupils had already locked onto its trajectory.

She merely tilted her head a fraction, and the streak skimmed past her ear without so much as stirring a strand of her hair.

Pandora’s body did not shift half a step. Even the rhythm of her breathing remained unchanged.

The black light struck the building behind her and, in one silent instant, punched clean through it.

A fist-sized hole opened in the thick brick wall.

Its edges were neat and smooth, as though a red-hot iron skewer had been thrust through butter.

The debris never even had time to spray; some force had already ground it to powder.

Pandora registered what had happened behind her.

Her gaze did not change, but her posture made a subtle adjustment.

Her center of gravity sank a fraction; the muscles in her legs tensed, more cautious now, ready to answer the enemy’s next attack at any moment.

Sure enough—

The black light struck again.

This time, it was multiple attacks, launched simultaneously from different directions, at different angles.

Three paths crisscrossed, sealing off the several directions she might dodge toward.

One thrust straight for her throat from the front left; one slashed down at her shoulder blade from the upper right; one drove up beneath her jaw from directly below.

Together, the three streaks of black light formed a spare yet lethal killing trap, each one precisely fixed upon the position where she would find it hardest to evade.

Pandora did not panic.

Her feet shifted slightly, her body turning aside like a willow branch swayed by the wind, and the first streak grazed past her shoulder.

Then she ducked low, and the second whistled over her head.

It passed less than an inch above her crown, close enough that she could feel some cold, alien touch, belonging to no ordinary current of air, sweep across her scalp.

As the third came, she had already slipped half a step back and to the side, narrowly letting that streak of black light smash into the empty space she had occupied half a second before.

“Thump—”

A muffled report came from behind: another wall, pierced.

The whole exchange had lasted no more than a breath.

Her footwork had been clean and crisp, yet Pandora’s brow furrowed, almost imperceptibly.

The enemy had clearly taken her evasion habits into account when it launched this attack.

Compared to the far more leisurely evasion of moments ago, this one had been strained.

There had been almost no gap between the first and second strikes; she had barely cleared the first when the second was already in her face.

And the third had been aimed precisely at the spot she was most likely to choose in dodging the first two.

Clearly, the opponent was observing her and adapting to her.

With every attack, it refined its read on her.

But Pandora had no intention of playing the enemy’s target.

At the very instant the third streak of black light grazed past her, her eyes sharpened.

The spell matrix for Umbral Weaving was already complete in her mind.

The shadows at her side, as though summoned, churned and tangled together, weaving in a flash into three keen-edged blades of shadow.

Their pitch-black bodies were all but indistinguishable within the dark-green mist; only their edges caught and refracted an occasional thread of cold light.

Pandora raised her hand and pointed, and the shadow blades screamed into the depths of the poison fog, slashing toward the direction the black light had come from.

“The attack worked...?”

The moment the shadow blades fell, the enemy indeed stopped attacking.

The black light vanished without a trace. No new murderous menace poured forth from the depths of the mist.

But something felt wrong to Pandora.

Too quiet.

If the shadow blades had truly struck home, she should have felt some resistance, some feedback of flesh being cleaved.

She had felt nothing at all.

The blades had cut into empty air.

She pressed forward, closing the distance to where they had struck.

The walls and ground there were riddled with wounds; the surface of the brick and stone sheared away, rubble and debris scattered across the ground.

Three neat cutting marks stood out clearly.

And yet,

Pandora saw no remains.

No corpse. No fragments. Not even a trace of blood.

What the shadow blades had struck seemed to have been nothing but air.

Her attack had missed.

In the region the blades had swept through, there was only air and churning poison fog; the three neat cuts left on the wall seemed a kind of silent mockery.

Then—

More streaks of black light, like malevolent eyes, lit up one after another in the depths of the poison mist around Pandora.

They surfaced from every side, locking down nearly every direction around her.

Above. Below. Left. Right. Front. Back.

Each streak of black light pointed precisely at a vital point of her body.

The brow. The throat. The heart. The temples. The back of the skull. The spine...

Even with all the strength of the Witch’s bloodline running through her body now, having every vital point struck at once would be absolutely fatal.

However formidable the regeneration of a Rank-3 Witch’s bloodline body, it could not recover from a pierced skull.

Pandora’s gaze turned grave.

This time, the enemy’s attack came sharper than any before it.

This was a true killing blow.

One of the black lights flashed abruptly into being at her side.

She strained to keep it from anything vital, but the streak still grazed her arm.

“Tss—”

A charred burn bloomed instantly on her forearm, the flesh peeling back, its edges an unnatural scorched black.

And that was not all.

The residual power went on disrupting the regeneration of her flesh.

Those charred edges did not close swiftly as an ordinary wound would. Instead, like some stubborn stain, they lodged themselves deep in her flesh, obstructing the reorganization and repair of her cells.