Novel Full Chapter 858 - 462: Holy Hall
The rest of the Red Tide Legion was still outside the Holy City, clearing out the remaining monsters and spore organisms, and the pace of advance was deliberately slowed down.
Louis, however, led a hundred Red Tide elites, clad in red standard armor, to be the first to step through the gates of the Holy City.
There were no streets inside the city; underfoot was a layer of soft, slippery pink tissue. With each step, the soles of their boots encountered a sticky pull, making an almost inaudible yet discomforting sound.
The air was heavy and murky, filled with a pungent fragrance meant to mask the continuous seeping stench of corpses and rotting flesh below.
The crimson armor of the Red Tide knights stood out conspicuously in this alien space. Nearly a hundred Extraordinary Knights advanced at standard intervals, with the muzzles and long-handled weapons always aimed forward and to the sides. Their steps were deliberately subdued, creating a dangerous mismatch with the pulsating fleshy floor.
Meanwhile, the filters beneath the visors of the Red Tide knights operated simultaneously.
The Frost Leaf Type-III gas masks emitted a slight but steady hissing sound, with a faint blue glow illuminating the dim, fleshy corridors; without them, they would have gone insane by now.
Suddenly, the corridor ahead trembled, and the fleshy wall at the end was forcibly torn open.
A torrent of gold-green gushed forth—it was the stitched monster cavalry, and they were obviously stronger than those outside the Holy City.
They trampled the soft ground, splashing pink mucus with each step. The roars echoed repeatedly in the corridor, as if approaching from all directions simultaneously.
The Red Tide formation did not retreat; red shields were raised simultaneously, with heavy tower shields interlocking to form a tightly-knit wall.
The shield faces were lowered, rifle stocks braced against shoulders, and long-handled weapons thrust through the gaps, blades aimed at the approaching grotesque figures.
Weir stood at the forefront, drawing out his heavy sword and stabbing it backhand into the slippery pink fleshy surface beneath his feet.
As the blade sank in, the ground twitched slightly, like pierced entrails.
"Form up."
The next second, the Fighting Energy circuits within him lit up simultaneously.
Crimson light spread out from his chest like a compressed heatwave suddenly released, forming a semi-transparent, hemispherical shield around him.
The first wave of stitched monsters crashed in.
"Boom!!!"
A dull, thunderous noise echoed through the corridors, ripples visible to the naked eye spreading across the shield’s surface.
The massive impact traveled through the ground, causing even the knights in the rear to feel a tremor beneath their feet.
However, Weir did not take a step back, his feet seemingly welded to the ground, the Fighting Energy shield absorbing all the frontal kinetic energy.
Conversely, the few stitched monsters that hit first lost their balance from the recoil, their bones cracking with a clear, breaking sound, like flies smashed head-on, sliding down the outside of the shield.
Weir’s gaze remained calm: "Thrust."
From behind the shield, the Red Tide knights stepped forward in unison, thrusting their long lances forward.
The Demon-breaking spear tips accurately pierced the most uncoordinated parts of the monster’s bodies.
As the spear tips penetrated flesh, the struck stitched monsters convulsed and fell, their limbs losing control. The intent to regenerate was abruptly interrupted by the Demon-breaking attribute, then instantly consumed by flames spewed from the flamethrowers.
The battle line advanced steadily. Suddenly, a deep blue figure sprang from the side of the shield.
Sacco wielded a greatsword, the deep blue Fighting Energy coiled around the blade like a beast, with an irregular vibration trajectory.
An eight-armed stitched monster attempted to close its arms and crush Sacco in its grasp.
The thick fat and muscle were tough enough to withstand heavy machine gun fire.
Yet, Sacco stepped inside before it could close, getting so close they were nearly touching.
"Sizzle—"
The sweeping blade directly severed the two supporting legs at the monster’s lowest point, causing its enormous body to lose balance and topple forward.
Sacco took the opportunity to step back and turn, bringing his blade down. The erratically stitched head split open, like an overripe melon, as blood and mucus splattered, only to be instantly vaporized by the Fighting Energy.
Surrounding Red Tide knights quickly followed suit. They couldn’t manage to kill monsters as effortlessly as Sacco.
They didn’t seek individual kills, strictly adhering to a three-man battle array.
One blocked upfront, stabilizing the monster’s center of gravity, another severed the lower limbs, crippling mobility, and the last dealt the final blow, beheading or destroying core nodes.
Before long, the battle array centered around Weir had effectively become a meat grinder.
The corpses of monsters piled layer upon layer on the ground.
Broken limbs, sliced torsos, and still-twitching fragments mixed together, trampled repeatedly by the Red Tide knights, squeezing out turbid and viscous fluids.
However, even with this, the number of monsters did not decrease at all; they still kept coming, endlessly, as the fleshy walls on either side bulged and then burst under internal pressure.
New stitched monsters were squeezed directly out of the building structure, with blood vessels and fascia that hadn’t completely separated, continuously charging forward, attempting to tear open gaps through chaos.
"Hold the formation!" Weir’s voice cut through the battlefield’s clamor, "Don’t spread out!"
The crimson Fighting Energy shield remained stably unfolded, repeatedly blocking frontal assaults.
Although there were no casualties among the Red Tide knights, the advance speed had noticeably slowed.
They were forced to repeatedly clear the ground, like moving upstream in a narrow river constantly inundated with silt.
Every step forward required an exponentially increasing time to clear the area.
The monsters of this living city seemed endless, with stitched monsters crawling out from every crack like cockroaches.
"Damn..." Weir gritted his teeth, the sword hilt making a slight friction sound in his palm, "Sacco! Clear the right side! Don’t let them get close to the commander!"