Chapter 475: Battle in the 3D Maze
Chapter 475: Battle in the 3D Maze
“Sure.” Before Nie Chenglong and Shen Yupeng could say anything, Meng Chao agreed to it.
Man-eating Shark Zhou Chong could not be considered to be making things hard for him by just asking for him to avoid capture for three short minutes.
The capture mission in the lair was not a child’s game. If his strength was not great enough for this capture squad (it had, after all, a grand lineup), what right did he have to go in and cause trouble?
The veteran hunters training in the 3D maze all heard Meng Chao’s confident voice.
They sized up Meng Chao curiously, puzzled as to why he seemed to have a killing intent that was almost the same as theirs and looked as if he had fought for years in the wild when he looked so young.
The superhuman circle in Dragon City was quite small, and the youngest Heaven Realm superhuman in the past ten years was quite famous.
Many people had had business cooperations with Meng Chao before through Ning Shewo, Yan Organization, or Soul Breaking Saber Luo Wu.
Some of them also worked for Sky Pillar Corporation and had heard about him through Lu Siya.
Everyone surrounded him curiously in a friendly manner. They wanted to see just what sort of skills this boy who had not graduated from university hadand why he dared to go with them into such a dangerous place.
“Senior Zhou, seniors, please treat me well!”
Meng Chao did not waste his breath. He removed his jacket, because the wind chimes and steel pipes might get caught in them, which left him in a nano fighting suit that was tailor-made for him with the top-tier technology from Agricultural University’s biochemical course.
The pure black nano fighting suit was clearly as thin as a cicada’s wing, but it had amazing stretchability, and its texture made it seem as thick as armor.
It could spread an enemy’s attacks evenly to all parts of the fighting suit and accumulate spirit energy to help the wearer execute skills that required accumulating spirit energy but had amazing power.
The fighting suit was known as Black Soul, and with Meng Chao’s bulging muscles that looked like dynamite packs, it instantly changed his presence from that of a harmless boy to a fierce fighter
Whoosh! Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!
Meng Chao casually exercised his wrists and ankles and easily threw a few punches and kicks to complete his warm up.
But the expressions of the veteran hunters changed right away.
They were people who knew their stuff, so they could naturally tell that Meng Chao’s punches and kicks were not that simple. In just those few short instances, he threw nearly one hundred punches that were as swift as lightning and delivered dozens of dazzling kicks.
However, his fists and kicks were too fast and the trajectories were so accurate that they completely overlapped with each other, which was why it only seemed like he threw three punches and two kicks.
“Interesting.” A few of the veteran hunters’ eyes lit up. They looked eager to test Meng Chao’s abilities.
Meng Chao scanned their faces; he did not intend to hide his might. When veteran hunters stared at him, he fearlessly stared back.
At the moment he removed his jacket, they were no longer seniors in his eyes. They were just opponents he longed to challenge.
Meng Chao sucked in a deep breath and climbed into the 3D maze. He found a tunnel with no glass and mirrors blocking his path and crawled in.
He first tapped the surface lightly with his feet to test the sturdiness of the steel pipes and how tightly they were bound together. Then, he carefully crawled into the depths of the intersecting pipes.
“Youngsters nowadays are getting more impressive.” Nie Chenglong gasped in amazement and smiled as he looked at the veteran hunters.
“Let me!” Before Man-eating Shark Zhou Chong could speak, a burly man with a crew cut pushed aside the crowd and strode forward.
His body shape was really unique. It was the standard inverted triangle, but it was not because his waist was too thin, but because his arms were too thick.
His arms were practically thicker than Meng Chao’s thighs. They gave off a metallic shine and were covered in pulsing blood vessels. Every pore on his arms seemed to have spirit flames gushing out of them.
His arms were also really long, and his fingertips were below his knees. When he walked, he was like a domineering ape.
The ape’s roars were as loud as thunder, causing Meng Chao to immediately notice him.
Multi-armed Bear Hong Li!
This veteran hunter’s information swiftly appeared in his mind.
He knew that this man was definitely not someone who was all brawns and no brains, despite what his appearance suggested.
If anyone could reach Heaven Realm and survive through hundreds of battles in the wild, they were definitely not people to be underestimated.
Hong Li might seem like a strength-type superhuman who had a firm character, but in truth, with his spirit energy, he could turn his arms so pliant that they might seem boneless. When his spirit energy magnetic field surged, everything within a circular area of three meters would be covered in his punches and palm strikes, and it would feel as if he had grown eighteen arms.
That was how he gained the nickname Multi-armed Bear.
Just as Meng Chao expected, while Hong Li’s body was large and seemingly clumsy, which might make one think that it was not suitable for him to move around in the 3D maze, the moment he shot in, it looked like hi bones and muscles had shrunk, and he turned into a meatball that rolled about everywhere while avoiding the steel pipes, wind chimes, and water balloons. He charged at Meng Chao.
When Meng Chao crawled into the 3D maze, he released his vitality magnetic field to sense and scan his surroundings.
He noticed that while the space in the 3D maze was pretty big, there were a lot of places that were blocked by glass, mirrors, wind chimes, and water balloons. There were not many places that could serve as escape routes.
Even though there were more than ten meters between them, both sides had to use all their brain cells and calculate each path swiftly while predicting the direction the other person might take to try to widen the distance between them or get closer to the other party.
The battle might be silent, but from the second it started, it reached its climax.
Both sides had loads of sweat covering their foreheads, but they soon evaporated because of their boiling hot skin.
Each step they took, each time they peaked out of a corner, and even each gaze they matched was a fight. They were in a fatal competition.
“It’s already half a minute?” Man-eating Shark Zhou Chong cast a glance at his watch, and a subtle, surprised look appeared in his eyes.
Half a minute had passed. Meng Chao and Multi-armed Bear Hong Li moved around the 3D maze, but the distance between them never shortened, and Meng Chao didn’t touch a single mirror or wind chime.
When they saw his increasingly relaxed movements, the interest in the veteran hunters’ eyes grew stronger.
“That silly bear is no good. He can’t capture that little boy even after half a minute? I told him to go on a diet!”
“I say, that boy does have some tricks up his sleeves. His senses are frighteningly strong. I think he uses his body hair to sense his surroundings.”
“Just now, when we climbed for the first time, we were thrown into confusion, but forget breaking a glass, the boy didn’t even make a single wind chime ring. Has he really just entered Heaven Realm?”
While the veteran hunters talked, they all expressed shock at Meng Chao’s performance.
Hence, due to some form of luck conservation law, in the next second, Meng Chao missed a step and fell down.
‘Oh no!’
Meng Chao had thought that the steel pipes supporting the 3D mazes were only bound loosely and swayed when he climbed on them.
He did not expect that whoever constructed the pipes had sinister intentions and left a lot of steel pipes suspended on practically nothing but air. They were not bound tightly at all.
Meng Chao had stepped into a trap and instantly lost his balance.
When he activated his maglev and regained control over his body, Multi-armed Bear Hong Li pounced on him and surrounded him with dozens of punches and palm strikes from all directions.
Meng Chao bit the tip of his tongue and hunched his shoulders. He gripped tightly onto another steel pipe like an eagle clutching its prey in a death grip. Then, he fell backward and did a 180 degree spin downward. The muscle fibers on his feet pulsed, and with the bounce from the steel pipes, he shot into a spot not far away.
Multi-armed Bear Hong Li snorted coldly. He fell down out of the blue like a weight and landed on the steel pipe Meng Chao had just stepped on. After he observed what Meng Chao did, he took action. He also wanted to use the bounce.
But to his surprise, when Meng Chao touched the steel pipe, he had gathered spirit energy and, through his soles, delivered a hidden force to the bound part of the steel pipe to destroy the sturdiness of the wires binding it.
When Hong Li stepped on the steel pipe with his sturdy body that weighed nearly 150kg, two intersecting steel pipes immediately collapsed. It made him miss a step, like Meng Chao had done moments ago, and he continued falling.
But Hong Li’s expression never changed. He swung his arm like a whip, and like a gibbon, he used only his pinky to hang onto a relatively sturdy steel pipe.
However, right now, Meng Chao spat. He had bitten his tongue and accumulated a mouthful of blood in his mouth. That blood now shot right to Hong Li’s face.
Hong Li’s expression finally changed.
For a moment, confusion and panic appeared.
Through great effort, he avoided Meng Chao’s blood, but nearly stepped on a swaying wind chime because of it. When he finally regained his balance, Meng Chao had already scrambled to his feet and agilely fled to the other side of the 3D maze.
The two people were once again at their original distance.
A full minute was wasted.
A few veteran hunters who were close to Hong Li laughed, showing absolutely no respect whatsoever.
“The boy’s good.”
“He’s not just good. When we were his age, we were far from having his abilities. It’s no wonder why he managed to become the club leader of a club with two hundred thousand members when he’s just in his twenties!”
“Look at the strategies he chose and how he created chances to dodge attacks as well as his mastery over the timing. They’re all things you can’t learn in the ivory tower. Only those who have really struggled for years in the fog and crawled out from mountains of corpses can get such... instincts to help dance at the God of Death’s scythe. It’s strange. Is he really a university student? Why does it feel like he’s even more experienced than we are?”
“Sharkie, the ones joining the operation this time are all those from the field. I wouldn’t trust any amateur joining us, but if it’s this boy, I can SOMEWHAT accept him.”
When he heard this, Man-eating Shark Zhou Chong nodded instinctively.
The situation was already clear. During the first minute Meng Chao had just crawled into the 3D maze and was still not used to it, yet Multi-armed Bear Hong Li was unable to catch him.
During the next two minutes, he would move with increasing ease, like a fish in water, and Hong Li would never get to capture him.
Zhou Chong cleared his throat and was just about to stop the battle simulation when Nie Chenglong raised his hand and stopped him.
“It has only been one minute.” The vice director of the abnormal beast research department smiled. “Sharkie, you didn’t limit the number of people going up, did you? Why don’t you add two more to play with him?”
Zhou Chong was stunned. “He’s your subordinate.”
“It’s precisely because he’s my subordinate that I have to be in charge of his life. At the same time, I have to be in charge of the millions of innocent lives in the lair.”
Nie Chenglong’s expression became stern, and he said methodically, “The cunning abnormal beasts and the fearsome robbers won’t adhere to rules with you lot and fight you one-on-one. I must let him know his limits!”