Chapter 360: Trials (2)
Chapter 358
The statues all wasted no time in bolting toward each member of the cohort.
Kai grunted, straining against the stone guardian, and forcefully pushed the statue in front of him to send it half a step back.
But the next second, before he could even process the movement, the statue lunged at him with a vicious slash aimed directly at his neck.
The boy bound backward immediately, creating distance, and sent a dozen sharp crystal spikes shooting toward the monument.
However, the statue’s hands blurred through the air, its weapon colliding perfectly with each of the spikes and sending them clattering harmlessly to the ground.
It was incredibly skilled.
Within the twinkle of an eye, it closed the distance and was already in front of the boy, executing a fluid, lethal thrust toward his abdomen.
...
WAM!
Felix lifted his arms and crossed them in front of his face, absorbing the crushing impact of a stone mace swung by another statue.
The ground cracked beneath his boots as he held his own against the guardian, which was pushing down on him with all its mechanical might.
The werewolf firmly placed himself directly in front of Nebula, who was visibly shivering in fright at the lethal threats that had suddenly activated throughout the chamber.
Pushing his hands upward, Felix sent the statue sliding backward for a moment.
He then swung his claws through the air, unleashing jagged slashes of dark obsidian energy that hurtled toward the target.
Swinging its mace with fluid agility, the statue deflected each of the energy slashes all too easily.
Felix pressed his feet into the ground and, with an explosive bang, shot toward the statue.
Just as the guardian deflected the final slash, the werewolf appeared directly in front of it, his fist driving forward in a powerful punch.
The statue stared at the attack with an expressionless look on its stony face.
It didn’t flinch as it watched the fist approach.
Suddenly, Felix’s ears perked up at a sound from his blind spot.
He tried to spin around, but it was too late.
He was forcefully whacked in the face by a massive stone shield from a second guardian, sending his body flying through the air and ricocheting across the hard ground.
.....
Caster ducked quickly under a sweeping sword swing aimed at his head before pulling out his twin short swords.
He pounced toward the statue in front of him with uncanny agility.
Within a second, he utilized his footwork to slide directly behind the statue and slashed with his weapon, but the blade simply bounced off the dense stone armor completely harmlessly.
The stone creature spun around with inhuman agility, its heavy sword descending from above with brutal speed.
Caster bound backward just in time as the blade smashed into the floor with destructive force, shattering the tile and sending chunks of rock kicking into the air.
Refusing to back down, the boy lunged forward again, his speed akin to pure teleportation.
His physical swords were proving useless against the material, but that didn’t mean he was going to give up now.
....
Trisha and Ray were immediately surrounded by a cluster of four statues wielding heavy broadswords and war hammers.
The Tribrid was fully healed now, the white light fading as he clenched his jaws tightly and pounced toward the incoming line.
Two massive hammers descended toward him with brutal velocity, but he managed to slip cleanly between the trajectories with feline speed.
Reaching into his inventory space, he pulled out his own massive hammer and hauled it with maximum momentum toward the face of the nearest statue.
However, it was as if the guardian fully anticipated the trajectory, quickly snapping its stone hands into place to intercept the blow.
BANG!
The ground shook violently beneath their feet as Ray’s bone hammer began to visibly crack and splinter by the passing second, unable to withstand the absolute density of the stone guardian’s defense.
Before he could even attempt to salvage the weapon, a second massive war hammer from the flanking statue came rushing at him from his blind spot with terrifying velocity.
Reacting entirely on pure instinct, Ray kicked the air beneath him, activating his spatial agility to vault high into the air.
The hammer crashed into the exact pocket of space he had occupied a millisecond prior, unleashing a loud boom that rippled the air.
Landing heavily atop the head of one of the stone giants, a bright light began to coalesce around his hands as he prepared a skill.
But before the energy could fully form, a hammer bashed directly into his face with the crushing momentum of a speeding train.
[-20 HP]
[HP: 70/90]
The brutal impact immediately lifted the boy off his feet.
He was about to go flying across the hall, but he forced his hands forward, summoning a golden lasso that whipped through the air and wrapped tightly around the stone arms of the opposing statue.
’Shrink!’
The lasso instantly constricted and reduced its length, acting like a high-tension cable that sent Ray shooting forward with blinding, tethered speed.
BAM!
Using the massive momentum, he drove both of his feet directly into the statue’s face with every ounce of his physical strength.
Alas! It did absolutely nothing.
The immense impact didn’t even tilt the statue’s head back an inch.
Ray froze mid-air, his eyes blinking in sheer disbelief at the total lack of feedback.
Then, before he could recover his posture—
WAM!
He was brutally clobbered across the midsection by the second hammer.
The force of the strike sent his entire body plowing straight down into the flawless floor with devastating power, cracking the surface beneath him.
[-30 HP]
....
A short distance away, Trisha was completely preoccupied and barely keeping herself alive.
Not only were these guardians unnaturally fast and agile for a bunch of animated stones, but their mechanical precision with their respective weapons left absolutely no room for error.
Rolling frantically under a horizontal swing, she shot to her feet immediately, raising a newly condensed ice blade to deflect an incoming sword strike.
CRACK!
In a flash, her ice weapon completely shattered into a useless rain of frozen shards against the heavy stone blade.
Before she could process the loss, a heavy stone boot came launching toward her face.
She hurriedly commanded a slick sheet of ice to stretch out beneath her boots, skidding away just in time as the kick tore through the air with a loud, compressed boom.
She hadn’t even fully regained her footing or balance when the second guardian materialized right in front of her, its heavy blade executing a descending vertical swing from above.
She immediately dove to the dirt, the rushing wind from the descending blade whipping past her cheek as the weapon hammered into the ground with destructive force.
The residual ice encasing the floor instantly shattered into the air.
The first statue was already upon her position, pivoting seamlessly with a low slash ready to tear right through her body.
With no time left to dodge, ice rapidly crept around her hands and forearms.
She shot her arms upward into a cross-block, quickly intercepting the stone sword hurtling down at her.
Booom—!
The air shuddered and the ground groaned from the sheer kinetic transfer.
Trisha’s bones trembled violently down to her spine from the brutal force of the blow.
Her teeth ground together as her internal meta-force began rapidly draining, burning through her reserves just to keep her ice gauntlets from fracturing under the immense weight.
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