With the support of the nuns, the tide of battle turned for the better. The pressure on the Special Powers Unit lessened, and they successfully surrounded the vampires.
At that moment, a tall, lean man clad entirely in armor and carrying a silver cross as tall as a person joined the fray. This was Song Liangpeng, in full combat gear. His physical constitution, amplified by the Special Powers Unit’s custom-made battle armor, was fully unleashed. Covered with antibodies, the armor made him a veritable human meat grinder for the vampire kin; wherever he passed, nothing was left standing.
“Die!” His roar shook the heavens. He had now transformed into an avenging demon, sworn to tear all evil to shreds.
The armor on his hands morphed into chainsaws as he charged through the ranks, leaving a trail of dismembered vampire limbs and corpses in his wake.
Their blood magic was utterly useless against this tall, thin man’s ironclad form.
Hundreds of blood spears rained down upon the armored man like a storm. Yet, he didn’t dodge or evade, simply tanking the hits head-on. The sound of metal clashing against metal rang out from his armor, making the hearts of everyone nearby pound with fear.
A seemingly endless downpour of cursed blood fell from the sky, corroding the ground into a putrid, black mire. The stench of decay nearly suffused the entire battlefield.
Over a hundred vampires joined forces, their sole aim to eliminate this ironclad man immediately.
However, contrary to their wishes, the armored man emerged slowly from the cursed earth with heavy, plodding steps. The spectral image of the Priestess materialized behind him once more.
In an instant perceptible only to Xue Ji, the Priestess glanced in her direction.
Xue Ji felt her gaze but didn’t stop, charging straight ahead towards the dark mages at the innermost part of the fray.
The armored man took the massive cross from his back and began dragging it by its iron chains. Each step he took felt as heavy as a mountain.
Gripping the chains tightly, he let out a furious roar and broke into a run, charging forward with the unstoppable force of a rhinoceros straight into the vampires surrounding him.
With a powerful swing, he hurled the cross, now radiating holy light, into the densest part of the vampire horde. The combination of sacred light and brute force transformed into an incredibly violent divine judgment. That single blow alone rendered hundreds of vampires, each comparable to a mid-level Awakened, combat ineffective.
But after executing this move, the armored man bore a significant burden himself, staggering but stubbornly forcing himself to remain upright.
Even so, the vampires maintained a full ten-meter distance, not daring to take another step closer.
“Come on! Come on!” His voice boomed like thunder, instilling fear in the hearts of the vampires encircling him.
Alone, he had managed to pin down nearly a quarter of the vampire forces, with over half of those falling by his hand. He had slain so many vampires that the ashes they left behind upon death nearly buried him completely.
Beneath his heavy faceplate, whether illusion or reality, the vampires saw a pair of eyes glowing with a sinister red light.
“What kind of monster is he?!”
Even a Royal Vampire, whose combat prowess rivaled a high-level Awakened, couldn’t help but feel a shiver of fear witnessing this scene, his expression turning grave.
“This monster must die here!” One Royal Vampire, dressed in a tailcoat, immediately took action. Instantly, a thirty-meter-high wave of blood congealed in the air, attacking the armored man like a demon’s claw.
Just then, Mu Panxia, clad in her black form-fitting combat suit and exoskeleton armor, finally made her move. She closed in on the Royal Vampire, her right hand—equipped with a silver brass knuckle—unleashing an earth-shattering punch.
“I’ve been waiting for you!” A sharp glint flashed in Mu Panxia’s eyes.
Caught off guard by the sudden close-quarters assault, the Royal Vampire was forced to interrupt his spellcasting. The massive bloody claw wave, before it could even strike the armored man, dissipated and collapsed. The resulting surge of blood merely washed the armored man a hundred meters away down the street, failing to cause any real harm.
The Royal Vampire met her punch with his own fist. His terrifying physical prowess caused the ground beneath his feet to rapidly crack and fissure.
Their fists collided. The immense shockwave sent everything within a fifty-meter radius flying. Some lower-level vampires who were too close were instantly killed by the sheer force of the impact.
Even with the aid of her combat suit and exoskeleton, Mu Panxia was sent flying backward by the punch. Song Liangpeng, who had just recovered from the blood wave, caught her in time.
In contrast, the Royal Vampire had been forced back less than a meter.
The gap in power between the two of them and it was simply too vast. After training at the Special Powers Unit base, Song Liangpeng’s physical stats had only reached the level of a mid-level physical enhancement ability user. Mu Panxia herself was only at the初级 level originally; even after her transformation into a variant vampire, she was merely on par with Song Liangpeng.
Even with various aids and the element of surprise, they could only barely withstand a single exchange.
Now, the Royal Vampire looked down on the two of them with utter contempt. Supporting each other, they stared back defiantly.
“How utterly presumptuous, you two half-breeds.” The tailcoated Royal Vampire gritted his teeth in scorn. “I originally considered taking you as my servants, but I never imagined your bloodlines would be so filthy!”
With that, he raised his right hand, intending to rip out their hearts. But his right arm refused to obey, hanging limply at his side.
“Huh? What did you do? Why can’t I move my arm?!” A numbing sensation began to spread through his body. In a panic, he brutally tore off his own right arm.
His sharp instinct for danger made him decisively discard the limb. Watching his severed right hand gradually turn to sand on the ground, he couldn’t suppress a wave of fearful hindsight, instinctively taking a few steps back, his face contorted in a grimace.
“Cough, cough… scared?” The face beneath Song Liangpeng’s armor wore a triumphant smile. “You can die too! I’ll personally send every last one of you to hell!”
Seeing the vampire’s extreme reaction, Mu Panxia punched his thick armor with her left hand and muttered under her breath, “Calm down! We can’t afford to provoke him right now!”
Mu Panxia activated her ability. A healing energy flowed through the force of her punch into Song Liangpeng’s body. The earlier poisoning effect had also been achieved through this same ability of hers.
“Reckless half-breeds!” Enraged, the Royal Vampire ignored his declining physical state and directly used blood magic to coagulate the destructive healing energy running rampant in his bloodstream, forcibly extracting it from his body.
“Die, you wretched couple!” Gripping a slender sword at his waist with his remaining left hand, he thrust it towards Mu Panxia on the ground.
Song Liangpeng immediately pulled Mu Panxia into his embrace, rolling away to put distance between them.
“Panxia! Are you okay?”
Mu Panxia gritted her teeth, a film of moisture clouding her eyes. Song Liangpeng was startled.
Seeing his flustered reaction, Mu Panxia couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m fine,” she said. “It’s just a bit painful from the impact. Could you stop lying on top of me~”
Realizing he was still pinning her down, Song Liangpeng immediately sprang up like a jack-in-the-box.
“Uh, sorry.” You didn’t need to see his face to know it was beet red beneath the mask; his trembling voice said it all.
“I-It’s fine…” Mu Panxia got up, turning her head away to avoid looking at him.
Witnessing this scene only fueled the Royal Vampire’s hatred further, grating on his nerves.
“Stop flirting in front of me!” Having been single for two hundred years, how could he tolerate such a display? He raised his sword and thrust it towards them. “Die, you wretched couple!”
To his surprise, the two who had seemed at the end of their rope moments ago were now suddenly full of vigor, easily dodging the single Royal’s lunge.
“He’s mad, he’s really mad!” Mu Panxia taunted while nimbly evading.
“Brother Song, get him!” she said, deliberately using an affected, cutesy tone.
Fighting alongside a girl, and now provoked like this, Song Liangpeng felt himself getting more and more pumped up. He actually managed to land an uppercut, sending the vampire flying upward, snatched the slender sword, and plunged it straight into its chest.
Then he mounted the creature, pummeling it with punch after punch.
Ora ora ora ora!
“Wow, brother, you’re amazing!”
The Royal Vampire, enraged by this series of rapid blows and with the residual healing energy attacking his brain, spewed a fountain of old blood from his mouth.
“Natasha, I gave you everything… why…?”
Before he could finish, his body stiffened, and he died.
Thus, a prestigious century-old Royal Vampire, one who held a lofty position in vampire society, had been literally angered to death.
Future record-keepers would dub him the Legendary Trash Mob Vampire, for it was here that the legend of the two legendary Witchers truly began.