Cave Refuge

Therefore, seeing how Dong Tianyu had just deliberately feigned being shot, Ye Liuyun suspected that Dong Tianyu had probably set a trap, as everyone was aware of the current situation in the camp. At this time, any outsider entering the camp would definitely receive a warm welcome from those little black snakes.

As Ye Liuyun had anticipated, the people outside the city watched Dong Tianyu's 'shot' and his subsequent fall from the sky. Although their expressions remained stoic, they quickened their climbing.

After all, according to their rich experience, the sound of a gunshot and encountering a survivor camp fashioned after many rounds of natural disasters, it typically wouldn't descend into a chaotic explosion. They knew that these camps would be capable of gathering and responding in a short amount of time.

However, their experience had taught them that although no camp immediately descended into panic at their sudden attacks, the time it took for each camp to rally its forces varied.

What they needed now was to enter the camp in the shortest time possible, to suppress all the survivors within and leave them no time to gather and respond.

For these raiders with rich experience in strategic plundering, the entire process had become second nature to them all.

So when they reached the top of the wall and noticed the absence of any patrolling personnel, they immediately prepared to scale the wall and enter the camp. Once inside, their next steps would be to ruthlessly disrupt the construction within the camp and to sow chaos.

As long as they could block the assembly of the camp's main combatants and drag them into street fighting, even if they didn't understand the layout of the buildings within the camp, they could still rely on their rich experience in street combat to achieve ultimate victory.

After all, their aim in attacking the camp wasn't to occupy it, but to plunder its resources. Therefore, the combatants among them only needed to ensure that the camp remained in a state of chaos while they had professionals responsible for locating resources.

While Storage Items had become increasingly common, which might have added a bit of difficulty to the average thief, for these raiders it not only didn't increase the difficulty, it actually made their job much easier.

After all, compared to the troublesome task of carrying away a large amount of goods in the past, now they only needed to take the owners of the Storage Items, thus easily taking away most of the valuable resources in the camp.

Just as they were indulging in dreams of their post-raid celebrations, they had overlooked the somewhat soft feeling under their feet after climbing atop the wall.

Perhaps because the raiders did not linger long on the city wall, they swiftly crossed it upon climbing up from outside the camp, not taking more than three or four steps before flipping over to enter the interior of the camp.

However, as they jumped down from the wall in their usual time-saving manner, it was only then that they noticed the camp looked as if it was covered in black ink. Whether it was the buildings or the ground inside the camp, everything was cast in almost uniform blackness.

When they took a closer look at where they had landed, they realized with horror that the blackness under their feet was not the original color of the ground, but a sight created by the bodies of numerous small black snakes.

When one of the raiders noticed this situation and lost his footing in shock upon landing, falling close to those small black snakes on the ground, the originally slowly crawling snakes suddenly became extremely agile. In just a few seconds, they completely covered the body of the raider who had tumbled to the ground.

The unfortunate raider let out a panicked scream as he fell, but once his body was covered by those black snakes, no sound emerged from beneath the swarm.

Seeing the miserable fate of their unlucky comrade, the others quickly adjusted their mentality. Although they too landed on the bodies of the small black snakes, they strived to maintain their balance, making sure not to fall like that unfortunate soul.

As the other raiders steadied themselves, each demonstrated their Divine Skills to start clearing away the black snakes wriggling at their feet.

For the vast majority of Martial Artists, the method of cleaning up the black snakes underfoot was very simple—the Imperial Court had announced a simple, area-of-effect move called Sword Energy Crossing for clearing out the riff-raff.

Although the move sounded powerful by its name, the technique itself was quite simple and not difficult to learn; it involved covering one's weapon with Inner Strength to extend its attack range and then using the weapon to strike at surrounding enemies.

If one was holding a sword, the move was called Sword Energy Crossing; with a knife, it would be Knife Energy Crossing. Essentially, the name of the move changed according to the weapon in hand, but since Sword Energy Crossing rolled off the tongue more easily, that name was habitually used by most people, regardless of the weapon they wielded.

In the midst of those raiders, aside from the fact that the vast majority were Martial Artists, Dong Tianyu, who used his Divine Sense for observation, also noticed a few Awakeners.

Compared to the Martial Artists who fought individually, those few Awakeners coordinated very well with each other. An Awakener with ice freezing Super Ability simply used their Awakening Ability to lower the temperature of the surrounding environment, and many of the black snakes immediately became rigid and immobile in the cold.

When the black snakes had become rigid and motionless on the spot, the ground nearby seemed as though it was being pressed by an invisible force; the black snakes around the Awakeners were instantly flattened, as if they had become sheets of paper.

Although only two Awakeners took action, any of the black snakes that came within thirty meters of them met a uniform fate: all dead.

According to Dong Tianyu's observation of those two Awakeners using their abilities, it didn't feel like active use of Super Abilities but rather like passive abilities, similar to a domain.

After observing for some time, Dong Tianyu became even more certain of his guess because whether it was the Awakener with the ice freezing ability or the survivor who could crush all the nearby black snakes, their abilities did not take effect instantly.

The black snakes that had just approached them did not immediately become rigid; it was a gradual process. While their bodies were slowly stiffening, their shapes were also gradually showing signs of collapsing and flattening.

After careful observation and study, Dong Tianyu also confirmed that the effective range of those two Awakeners' abilities was not thirty meters, but around fifty meters.

It was precisely because of this buffer distance of about twenty meters that the dramatic effects began to appear around thirty meters from their position.

In addition to the two using abilities, Dong Tianyu also noticed someone among that group of Awakeners holding something like a Compass, muttering words non-stop while constantly turning as if using the Compass for positioning.

When that person busied themselves with gesturing in Dong Tianyu's direction, Dong Tianyu initially thought the person had detected his presence, but it was only after he lip-read the person's spoken words that he realized their target was Ye Liuyun on the other side of the camp.

Although the person habitually located Ye Liuyun, the 'most valuable' individual in the camp, there was disagreement among them about whether to proceed with their actions.

After all, the camp they were in was too peculiar compared to the familiar raiding situations of the past. What seemed from the outside to be a standard camp turned out to be exceptionally bizarre inside.

Although they had encountered the attack of the swarm of black snakes after entering the camp, the fighting power of these small black snakes, besides their vast number, was not very high; since their invasion of the camp began, only one unlucky individual had died, and not even one person had been injured.