Chapter 282: Casualties

With Su Qing joining the fray, the battle reached a fever pitch. The Silver-tier teammates unleashed their abilities, slaughtering the twisted ones without restraint.

Though their abilities were peculiar, the twisted ones lacked raw power. At the mere Bronze tier, they were no match for ten Silver experts. The fight was a one-sided massacre.

Minutes later, the battlefield was strewn with severed limbs and mangled corpses.

"Why did those twisted ones attack us all of a sudden?" Su Qing asked curiously, flicking the blood from her hands. "Everything was perfectly fine a moment ago."

Since this was her first time in the Nightmare World, she was naturally curious about everything.

Su Mu cast a glance into the dense forest. "Lin Nanxing, scout the perimeter."

Lin Nanxing nodded and immediately activated the Eye of the Sky. A massive eye materialized, hidden within the clouds above, sweeping its gaze across the landscape.

A moment later, his face fell. "Bad news, Captain! I see a horde from the Twisted Divine Cult rushing down the mountain. They're coming straight for us!"

The color drained from the team's faces. Slaughtering a hundred twisted ones was easy enough, but there were a full 100,000 of them on that mountain. Such staggering numbers could effortlessly drown them in a sea of bodies.

"Captain, what do we do now?"

Under everyone's anxious gaze, Su Mu calmly pulled out the Void Key and opened a Gate of the Void.

They quickly ducked through the portal. When they emerged, they were standing inside a warped residential house.

It was here that Su Mu shared the intelligence he had gathered on the First Red King.

The team marveled at the revelation. They never would have guessed that the only proper way to communicate with a twisted one was to become twisted themselves.

"That's fantastic! I didn't expect finding intel on the First Red King to be so easy. Those nightmare apostles the Royal Family sent earlier were completely useless!" Su Qing cheered, waving her small fists in excitement.

The rest of the team shot her strange looks.

Easy?

She called that easy?

They had nearly been wiped out the moment they entered the nightmare. Had the captain not woken them up, they all would have become entirely twisted. And the method of obtaining that intel was difficult in the extreme.

They had to willingly become twisted ones and then revert to normal. Besides the captain, who else among them could pull that off?

It only seemed easy because the captain was here. If anyone else had tried it, they would have been doomed.

"Captain, are we infiltrating the Holy Temple next?" asked Wen Xuan, breaking his usual silence.

"Whoa, you actually speak! I honestly thought you were..." Su Qing gasped, staring at him in surprise.

Wen Xuan kept his eyes fixed forward, completely ignoring her.

"Before we infiltrate the Holy Temple, we need to deal with a little problem." Su Mu turned toward the window. Outside, a sizable number of twisted ones had already gathered on the street.

Moving in eerie unison, they converged on the house as if guided by a commander.

"Damn it, how did they find us?" The team's expressions darkened as they readied their weapons.

"Was some kind of tracker planted on us?"

Golden light flared in Su Qing's eyes as she inspected herself, but no matter how thoroughly she checked, she couldn't detect anything out of the ordinary.

"Let's go." Su Mu activated the Void Key again, teleporting the group away.

This time, they emerged near the outer wall of a town. But the moment they landed, disaster struck.

A massive horde of twisted ones suddenly surged atop the wall. Their leader's attire stood out from the rest; he was clad in armor folded from white paper and brandished a curved, rolled-up paper rod, continually barking orders at the mob.

Under his command, countless twisted ones leapt off the ramparts—plunging down like dumplings into a pot—and hurled themselves at the team in a frenzied assault.

Naturally, the team didn't sit there waiting to die. Raising their weapons, they fought back. But this battle was noticeably far more grueling; this was a city belonging to the twisted ones, and reinforcements were pouring out in a ceaseless tide.

At that moment, the white-paper-armored twisted one on the wall abruptly waved his paper rod, and an invisible force of distortion instantly struck out.

One of Su Mu's teammates didn't even realize the attack was coming. The next moment, the distorting power enveloped him. His body went rigid, and his head snapped in an eerie 180-degree turn to face directly behind him. At the exact same time, his limbs contorted, violently twisting into mangled braids.

He lost his life and collapsed to the ground before he could even scream. His corpse was a gruesome sight, looking like an articulated wooden puppet that a bratty child had maliciously bent out of shape and tossed away on the ground.

The death of a teammate horrified the rest of the group. They realized that the white-paper-armored twisted one on the wall was highly likely a high-ranking member of the Twisted Divine Cult.

To instantly kill a Silver expert with a single blow—he was not to be underestimated.

The white-paper-armored twisted one waved his paper rod for a second strike, but Su Mu didn't give him the chance. Moving like a phantom, he defied gravity and dashed straight up the wall.

He thrust the Demonic Sword: Void Devourer squarely at him. However, the distorting power gathered on the paper rod suddenly changed direction, acting upon the twisted one himself.

The air rippled like water. The white-paper-armored twisted one melted into it, vanishing from sight. When he reappeared, he was already atop the spire of a tall tower a hundred meters away.

'Spatial distortion?'

Su Mu's eyes flickered. Before he could make a move, a wave of distorting force crashed down from above, enveloping his entire body.

Crack, snap...

Every bone in his body violently collided with the twisting power. With a sudden burst of force, he fired up the Follower of Strength Law to its absolute limit. Bolstered by the powerful Mithril Body, he broke free of the distortion in mere moments.

His current physical durability was no longer something a casual touch could destroy. Snapping a person's neck and snapping metal were two entirely different concepts.

Atop the spire, the twisted one seemed to realize the danger and immediately distorted space again, continually widening the distance between them.

Su Mu knew his Void Key was ultimately less nimble than his opponent's spatial distortion. Chasing him down would be troublesome, but with his teammates at his side, he didn't need to handle everything personally.

He immediately pulled a fiery red Totem Stone from his person and tossed it to Lin Nanxing.

"Kill him."

Lin Nanxing nodded solemnly. Binding the Totem Stone to an arrow, he drew his bow.

The surrounding teammates were seasoned veterans; without needing a single word of instruction, they immediately moved to cover him.

The silver longbow strained into a half-moon. Lin Nanxing's arrowhead locked dead onto the white-paper-armored twisted one. Seeming to sense the lethal threat, the creature began frantically distorting space to shift his position.

However, under Absolute Hit, everything was futile.

Swish!