Chapter 96: Chapter 96: Rulebreakers and the Spatial Phantom

The sudden, echoing voice abruptly shattered the deathly, suffocating silence hanging over the entire station hub.

Perhaps due to the sheer emptiness of the high-ceilinged terminal, Bai Cheng’s amused tone vibrated with a slight, resonant echo, ringing clearly in everyone’s ears.

The exact second the sound wave traveled, Yu Nian felt her ears buzz violently, her mind momentarily turning completely blank from pure shock.

She almost instinctively lunged forward, throwing her hands over Bai Cheng’s mouth in a desperate panic. But the moment she realized the sound had already cut through the air, an incredible wave of adrenaline surged through her. Recognizing that the rules had already been irreversibly broken, she quickly dragged her captain backward toward the far edge of the platform to avoid the immediate impact zone.

"Xiao Cheng... we’re seriously going to hunt this thing? We can actually kill it?!" she exclaimed in a breathless, low voice. The tactical pieces were finally clicking in her head. She suddenly understood exactly why Bai Cheng had been so aggressively stingy with their [Infinite Coins], flatly refusing to buy a single blueprint or survival skill from the storefronts since the moment they stepped inside.

Bai Cheng merely offered a calm, calculating smile. "Zi Yuan gave me the green light, which means it can be brought down."

The moment the final syllable left her lips, she locked her gaze forward, quietly analyzing the convenience store proprietor’s behavioral shift now that the absolute silence protocol had been violated.

The humanoid silhouette behind the register reacted instantly. The swirling dark energy coating its physical frame flared violently, erupting into a crackling aura of black fire as it rose to its feet from behind the counter.

The proprietor slowly turned its body around. Through the transparent glass exterior of the storefront, its twin blue ghostly embers scanned across every single intruder present in the terminal, as if finalizing an execution decree.

Then, its shadowy arm blurred, shifting slightly.

The very next fraction of a second, the convenience store owner vanished out of thin air.

The execution of the movement was staggeringly fast—completely bypassing any visible trajectory or acceleration arc. It was a flawless, instantaneous displacement that mirrored pure teleportation.

In that exact same millisecond, the shadow materialized directly in front of Chi Yan, who was holding the vanguard position at the absolute front of the line. The fiery general hadn’t even begun to shift his stance.

Clang—!

A sharp, whistling black blade-light tore through the air with a high-frequency vibrating hum, cleanly shearing through Chi Yan’s neck in a blinding horizontal arc.

The lion general’s head instantly detached from his shoulders, sailing upward into the air. Witnessing the sudden decapitation from just a few meters away, Bai Cheng and Yu Nian’s pupils contracted violently.

The boss’s offensive execution was terrifyingly swift—so fast that the baseline reaction speeds of their high-tier combatants were rendered completely useless.

"Chi Yan! He just—" Yu Nian gasped in horror, turning her head toward Bai Cheng, but her captain merely shook her head, her expression entirely unbothered.

Sure enough, before the severed head could even hit the apex of its trajectory, a torrent of brilliant, scarlet flames erupted violently from the open wound on the shoulders, surging upward to envelop the flying skull. In a flash, the entire entity dissolved into a massive, raging fireball that lunged forward, snapping shut around the convenience store owner’s blind spot.

The hellfire compressed back down into a physical mold, re-manifesting Chi Yan’s primary body as he channeled his momentum into a crushing, earth-shattering punch.

Boom—!

The structural floorboards trembled violently under the impact, sending waves of splattered flames rippling across the concrete deck. Yet, before the fist could connect with solid matter, the shadowy figure dissolved into nothingness once more.

Sensing a lethal fluctuation at her flank, Zi Yuan executed a rapid, evasive backstep. Her twin blades hadn’t even been fully cleared from their sheaths, yet she managed to snap them up horizontally, intercepting a lethal strike that materialized out of the vacuum.

Clang!

The metallic screech echoed out. Zi Yuan didn’t yield an inch of ground, her stance locking firmly into place. The sudden parry yielded an immediate tactical data point: the convenience store owner’s raw physical strength parameters were surprisingly unremarkable.

Seizing the opening, she violently drew her steel, unleashing a crescent wave of purple blade-light. But before the cutting edge could cleave the shadow apart, the target blinked out of existence again, causing the strike to slice through empty air.

Suddenly, a massive, powerful grip clamped down onto Bai Cheng and Yu Nian’s shoulders. Before they could react, they were lifted entirely off their bare feet, rising swiftly into the air toward the upper support beams of the high-ceilinged terminal.

The convenience store boss possessed absolutely no ranged options, and its displacement mechanics were clearly bound to ground-level geometry. It couldn’t fly.

By airlifting Bai Cheng and her tactical partner to an elevated vantage point, Qing Niao was effectively maximizing their personal safety.

"Qing Niao, can you deploy into the active skirmish?" Yu Nian asked, tilting her head up toward her avian defender.

Qing Niao offered a firm, intelligent nod. However, only Bai Cheng noticed that his golden eyes were already tracking the battlefield, calculating the optimal vector to assist Zi Yuan and Chi Yan.

The boss’s operational parameters completely subverted her initial estimates. Even with two elite, Battle General-level powerhouses working in tandem, they were temporarily caught in a frustrating stalemate, unable to land a single decisive blow.

Below them, three blurs of energy clashed continuously across the concrete floor, though for the vast majority of the exchanges, Zi Yuan and Chi Yan were forced entirely onto the defensive.

Their heavy offensive rotations simply couldn’t find a physical target to impact.

The proprietor’s raw striking power was fundamentally inferior to either of her generals, its offensive kit was exceptionally one-dimensional—consisting entirely of basic blade swings—and its structural defense metrics were likely paper-thin.

But its evasion loops were peerless. The displacement frequency was so high that Zi Yuan was burning through her focus pool just to deflect the incoming slashes, while Chi Yan was forced to continuously cycle his elemental physiology to absorb lethal strikes.

However, carefully documenting the rhythm of the engagement from above, Bai Cheng noted a crucial detail: the shadowy entity was completely incapable of bypassing Chi Yan’s elemental fire state.

"An entity operating at that speed has to possess a strict stamina consumption gauge, right?"

That was the only logical bottleneck Bai Cheng could exploit to engineer a victory. The boss’s raw stats weren’t overwhelming, but its mechanical kit was incredibly tricky to lock down.

Down on the floor, Chi Yan let out an enraged roar after taking yet another clean slash to his armored midsection.

Raging hellfire erupted from his skin, completely melting his humanoid form as he expanded into a massive, towering elemental lion.

Roar—!

An invisible, concussive shockwave laced with concentrated, white-hot flames detonated outward with the lion king as the epicenter. Chi Yan was intentionally deploying a 360-degree, omnidirectional area-of-effect strike to flush the target out of its displacement frames.

But the second before the searing thermal wave slammed into the four walls of the station with a deafening rumble, the shadowy silhouette materialized exactly within the eye of the storm, its black blade thrusting straight up toward the giant lion’s exposed chest core.

Shhhk!

A brilliant purple blade-light cut through the flames, deflecting the lethal point at the last possible microsecond.

Forcing the boss back with a heavy counter-parry, Zi Yuan shouted in a deep, sharp voice: "This thing’s ability isn’t high-speed movement!"

Chi Yan, reverting his stance, caught the implication instantly. "It’s an active spatial displacement skill. We have to interrupt its casting frame to anchor it in real-space!"

But neither of them possessed immediate, hard crowd-control abilities...

Wait, crowd control?

Hovering above the fray, Bai Cheng’s eyes lit up as the tactical puzzle fell into place. She immediately turned her head toward the Garuda beast holding them. "Drop us directly onto the flat roof of the convenience store storefront, then fly back through the mechanical gates and bring Lü Duo into the zone immediately!"

The flat roof of the central shop sat roughly three meters off the main floor; as long as the two of them remained absolutely still and silent, they wouldn’t register on the boss’s aggressive proxy radar.

Qing Niao executed the command instantly, lowering them onto the structural ledge before shifting his wings and rocketing toward the mechanical exit. With Chi Yan continuously dropping wide-range fire barriers to obscure the terminal’s sightlines, the avian warrior managed to slip through the security frame without drawing a single counter-attack.

But could an Elite-grade wood elf like Lü Duo actually tip the scales against a spatial boss?

Yu Nian, huddled silently beside her captain on the roof, looked thoroughly confused. She still didn’t fully comprehend the underlying skill kits of Bai Cheng’s veteran roster.

Seconds later, the heavy mechanical door hissed open, and Lü Duo stepped cautiously into the concourse.

Zi Yuan didn’t waste a single breath, shouting across the chaos: "Can you establish a ground-lock on its trajectory?"

As she spoke, the purple-haired assassin systematically altered her routing, closing the distance to form a defensive pocket around the archer. Lü Duo completely lacked the survival traits of Chi Yan, nor did she command the split-second parry metrics of Zi Yuan. More importantly, compared to the two Battle Generals, she was currently sitting at a lower Elite-grade threshold. Zi Yuan had to serve as her hard counter-proxy.

Lü Duo scanned the cracked concrete for a fraction of a second before speaking in a calm, focused tone: "General Chi Yan, please systematically shatter the foundation floorboards!"

Hearing the directive, the blazing lion king violently brought both front paws crashing into the deck. With a deep, echoing rumble, the smooth, polished flooring fractured into a massive network of web-like fissures that rippled across the entire station floor.

"General Chi Yan, please suppress your active hellfire matrices," Lü Duo commanded next.

Chi Yan’s white-hot fire was highly volatile and would instantly incinerate the biological casting lanes required for her wood-element skills. The lion general complied, pulling the external flames back into his core.

"Sister Zi Yuan, please break off your defensive guard. Your reaction speed is the absolute highest on our roster—you are the only one who can deliver the execution blow."

Having cleared her operational theater, Lü Duo suddenly slammed both palms into the broken concrete, activating her core talent.

A dense, vibrant wave of emerald-green life energy flooded down into the fissures, tracking along the spiderweb cracks across the entire width of the hub.

The next split second, a massive explosion of biological growth erupted from the stone. Countless thick wild-grass seedlings shot up toward the rafters, instantly converting the cold, industrial station into a dense, overgrown meadow.

When the convenience store owner executed its next spatial displacement, the thick foliage was the first thing to register the intrusion. Sensing a severe environmental threat from the archer’s casting signature, the shadow materialized directly in front of Lü Duo, its blade whistling toward her throat!

But what the spatial entity hadn’t factored into its calculations was that its perfect tracking loops could also miss. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

Precisely 0.5 seconds before the blade could connect, Lü Duo’s physical form dissolved into shimmering green particles, vanishing entirely into the surrounding grass matrix.

The artificial woodland terrain served as a perfect, flawless camouflage node for the wood elf.

Thwip—!

Before the shadow could reset its stance, a high-velocity wooden arrow erupted from the thick brush at a blistering velocity, tracking dead for its core.

The convenience store owner moved to trigger its spatial displacement loop, but its shadowy frame suddenly locked up. Unbeknownst to the entity, the moment it stepped onto the grass, thousands of microscopic, parasitic seeds had latched onto its lower limbs, instantly siphoning its energy to violently root and sprout through its shadow-flesh.

The parasitic micro-growth induced a critical, split-second delay in its spatial casting frame. With the high-velocity arrow closing the distance, it no longer possessed the operational window required to complete a full teleportation sequence.

Left with no alternative, the shadow was forced to abort its casting loop, twisting its body into an exaggerated, unnatural contortion to dodge the projectile.

Whoosh!

The arrow grazed past its shoulder, hissing into the dark.

But before the spatial entity could recover its balance to re-engage its displacement engine, a blinding, crescent wave of purple blade-light tore through the grass, aiming straight for its exposed neck!