Chapter 84: Purging

A storm of metal plowed across the ground, tearing the ghouls apart like a hurricane of wind and rain.

The large-caliber bullets, driven far beyond the speed of sound, had been endowed with terrifying kinetic force. These hideous monsters, no different from humans in being made only of flesh and blood, had not the slightest power to resist; their bodies split open one after another, bursting into blossoms of blood.

Shredded flesh quickly smeared the ground.

Amid the shrill whistling of projectiles cutting through the air, Tsugawa and Ryoko Hashimoto poured in supporting fire.

RPG rounds came screaming in, smashing into the horde of ghouls, the blasts spreading outward in rings of flame.

Explosions and choking smoke devoured everything. The ghouls, their attack routes severed and constrained by belts of fire, threw themselves forward only to become the ones being harvested.

A few scattered ghouls managed to charge through the flames, their bodies ablaze as they lunged at Su Yi. Focused on mowing them down with the twin compact Vulcan cannons in his hands, he casually lashed out with a kick whenever one came close, sending it back into the fireline to serve as fuel for the blaze.

Within the zones cut apart by walls of fire, the number of ghouls dropped rapidly, reduced to heaps of charred black meat. Their mindless, single-minded assaults certainly allowed Su Yi’s side to maximize its advantage in firepower, but the problem was that there were simply too many of them.

The two compact Vulcan cannons, each capable of firing thousands of rounds per minute, burned through their ammunition in no time.

Su Yi tossed the emptied guns to the ground and, at top speed, pulled out another pair of compact Vulcan cannons and resumed firing.

Yet no matter how fast he was, there was bound to be a brief pause. Had he been facing human soldiers, they would naturally have been pinned down so hard they could scarcely raise their heads without heavy weapons to counter him.

But retreat was not a word that existed in the ghouls’ dictionary. Faced with a swarm of thousands of monsters that knew nothing of fear, even the firepower of Su Yi and Tsugawa could not suppress them completely.

When dozens of ghouls rushed to within arm’s reach, Su Yi was finally forced to unleash his protective true energy and blast them away.

He shot upward into the sky, vaulting over their heads, his feet stamping in succession as he drove force through them with true power.

Several ghouls had their skulls crushed; their sinews and bones went limp, and they collapsed like heaps of rotten mud, only to be swallowed at once by the black tide behind them.

Leaping into midair, Su Yi poured true energy into the compact Vulcan cannon in his left hand, now empty of ammunition, and drove it hard into the outer wall of the building about six meters above the ground, putting the spent weapon to use.

Using the metal body of the cannon as a support, he flipped himself up and sat astride it. The barrels, silent for only a moment, roared once more.

Seeing their prey climb to a higher perch, the ghouls let out shrieks of frustration.

The position Su Yi occupied was neither very high nor very low, but exactly the sort that could provoke the ghouls to frenzy while remaining relatively safe.

Their savage howls rose one after another. They lunged to the foot of the wall and clawed upward with all their strength, only to slide back down the smooth exterior.

More ghouls trampled over the bodies of their own kind, scrambling with hands and feet alike as they surged upward from the densely packed black tide like spray erupting from a rolling wave.

Wave after wave rose higher than the last, until the black surge was pushed to nearly five meters. The ghouls that had clawed their way above their fellows stood at the crest, leaping into the air with slashing claws, almost close enough to reach Su Yi’s body.

And yet that tiny distance was an uncrossable gulf.

With the added buffer of height, the number of ghouls able to reach him at any one time was greatly reduced.

Su Yi lowered the compact Vulcan cannon to its minimum firing rate of one thousand rounds per minute. With the firepower of a single gun alone, he firmly suppressed the ghouls lunging at him, reaping life after life.

Each time a cannon emptied its ammunition, he discarded it, pulled a fresh one from his storage space, and continued harvesting the ghouls with ferocious firepower. Meanwhile, concealed in higher windows of the building, Ryoko Hashimoto and Tsugawa used RPGs to scour the ground, thinning the concentration of ghouls below, and tossed down whatever firearms and ammunition needed replenishing.

By repeating this cycle again and again, even the vast ghoul army, too numerous to count, diminished at a rate visible to the naked eye.

By the end, the trio had all become a little numb to it.

Su Yi inwardly mocked himself. He was practically the human tank in a game, the one whose sole job was to draw all the monsters’ aggro, exploiting the terrain like a bug while his teammates spammed damage and farmed experience at insane speed.

Ding!

Who knew how much time had passed when a sudden sound rang out in Su Yi’s mind.

Host has completed World Mission One: Kill ten thousand ghouls.

For a moment, Su Yi felt dazed. A mission that had seemed as though it would not be easy to complete had somehow been achieved so quickly.

So the terrifying aspect of modern civilization was far more than merely those ultimate weapons capable of growing mushroom clouds.

At the very least, these ten thousand ghouls he had killed—if every Innate master from the previous instance world combined had encountered them, they would still have had no choice but to avoid their edge.

And now, for them, it had been nothing more than a matter of several hundred thousand bullets and a little over a hundred RPG rounds.

Mission reward: the host’s storage space has grown.

Su Yi felt a warmth between his brows, as though some mysterious passage had opened in the void. In a dim, ineffable way, he could sense that from the earth, from the sky, and from the ghoul corpses now strewn across the ground as mangled flesh, some kind of mysterious energy was being poured into another space.

Fortunately, this change did not affect the movements of his hands. He continued to hold the cannon one-handed with perfect steadiness, sending out a storm of bullets and grinding the remaining ghouls into ruin.

When the last ghouls in the entire Asahi Garrison had dwindled from several hundred to mere dozens, then to single digits, and were finally exterminated, Su Yi dropped down from midair, his feet landing lightly atop a thick black-and-red carpet.

His white shirt remained spotless, forming a stark contrast with the scene and delivering a shocking visual impact.

“Lord Su Yi, it’s so disgusting. Can you come up here?”

Wrinkling her nose at the nauseating stench spreading through the air, Ryoko Hashimoto called down from a high window of the building.

The mountainous piles of corpses were set alight. There was no shortage of fuel scavenged from within the buildings, and Su Yi saw no reason to be stingy. If these ten thousand-plus ghoul corpses were simply left here, never mind the severe pollution they would cause to the environment—once they rotted, the stench alone would spread for miles.

The raging inferno burned for more than half the day. With Su Yi intervening personally, the fierce flames did not spread to any of the important facilities or structures. Billowing black smoke blotted out the sky, and Ryoko Hashimoto disliked it so much that she shut the windows tight and hid inside the building, unwilling to come out.

That evening, a torrential rainstorm descended.

Sheets of rain poured from the heavens, drenching the world and washing away the ashes that covered the broad expanse. Thanks to the complete drainage system expected of an important military base, vast quantities of filth were flushed into the sewers and carried off.

The next day, amid the deep rumble of heavy mechanisms being unsealed, Su Yi and the others opened the doors of one of the garrison’s most important warehouses.