Chapter 90 — Scared Me to Death

Gao Yang took the chance to finish off the off-balance monster, and out of the corner of his eye saw that Rebecca had reached the edge of the battlefield under soldier escort. She raised her left hand high, another enormous fireball taking shape in her palm; then she tossed it upward, seized her staff with both hands, and with a great half-circle swing smacked the fireball away—bang! "Ancestor Yan! Let me hold them off for you!"

Girl, there is clearly something very wrong with your fireball training!

But Gao Yang had no time now to ask Rebecca just how she had trained her fireball technique, because he noticed that the foremost aberrations were already very close to the tent and the sphere. One militiaman mustered his courage and thrust with his spear to block the enemy, but was struck by a chaos energy arrow loosed by another aberration in the distance and blown clear off his feet—though the faint glow still lingering on his shield suggested he was not likely to die.

The stone sphere, floating less than half a meter off the ground, shrieked in terror. It darted wildly about, trying to evade the aberrations rushing in from every side, but against ten times its number its room to dodge grew smaller and smaller—until at last, with nowhere left to hide, the sphere let out a shriek mingled with metallic quavering, and its hovering height suddenly shot up more than ten meters.

Gao Yang thought the thing was simply going to fly away—but to his surprise, it made it only halfway before its momentum gave out, and it came plummeting back down like a meteorite.

With a tremendous boom, a monster directly beneath the sphere was struck square on the head. The luckless aberration, without even time to make a sound, was driven into the earth—and the entire crater sank at least a meter deep.

Just as when it had pinned three soldiers in place and even Gao Yang could not budge the sphere a hair—this was its true weight.

Not only was Gao Yang stunned; even the sphere itself was stunned.

But the monsters around it would not stand stunned. They could sense only that their prey was right before them, and so the instant the sphere hit the ground, they lunged once more.

And so the sphere shrieked again, again tried to launch itself into the sky, again failed, and again smashed an enemy into the ground...

Gao Yang gave the Pioneer's Sword a shake and suddenly felt that there had been no need at all for him to rush over here like a house on fire to save the day.

If this really was the end of the world, that lunatic egg would probably still come through it untouched...

The soldiers who came running and the militia left around the tents could only watch this faintly comical scene with strange expressions on their faces—the stone ball suspected of being a dragon egg shrieking in terror as it smashed the oncoming monsters to death on the ground one after another, while the brainless aberrations flung themselves into that patch of hot earth one by one like gourds on a vine queueing up to rescue their grandpa, until only three monsters remained. Then Gao Yang suddenly noticed that the stone ball's "takeoff" height had dropped to less than two meters, and he immediately drew his sword and stepped forward to finish off the last of the enemies cleanly.

The stone ball, having smashed over a dozen aberrations to death, drifted slowly out of the pile of monsters, floating only a dozen centimeters or so above the ground—clearly exhausted. Only after confirming there were no more enemies around did it finally let out a breath of relief: "Mother of God, I was scared half to death..."

Gao Yang: "..."