Slaughter — The Power of the Guardian Type

The three cat-kin Hunters' fury was all for nothing.

Their bodies lay flat on the ground, dissolving slowly into white light that scattered and vanished. Gene Warriors who fell within the Land of Origin would always revive back in the real world.

The moment the three died, space around them rippled and distorted, disgorging a pile of loot onto the ground.

Lu Yuan ignored their disappearing bodies. He snatched up the two white orbs and examined them.

*Two sets of leather armor — Gene Armaments.*

"Wait — are these Gene Armaments? Or Transcendent Genes?!"

He grabbed the third orb. A pair of daggers shaped like a sand ant's mandibles — sleek, white Gene Armament blades.

Common-rank creatures had an astronomically low chance of dropping Gene Armaments. He hadn't expected to be this lucky.

Though killing this many ants had probably helped.

*Two leather armor sets, one dagger pair — all common rank. But three sets of Gene Armaments? That's over a hundred thousand yuan right there.*

Satisfaction gave way to indignation almost immediately.

*That cat-kin swordsman was absolutely rotten. Claimed they had almost nothing on them — and look at this.*

Before he could dwell on it, the sand ants shrieked and swarmed him all over again.

Lu Yuan's expression didn't change. The defense potion had worn off long ago, but ordinary worker ants still couldn't crack his defense. Not unless he ran into a high-tempering worker ant or an elite soldier ant.

One sand ant latched onto his thigh with its mandibles. A dry *crk-crk* — and all he felt was a faint sting.

"Get lost."

A hard kick sent the creature tumbling.

He studied the two tunnels, still churning out ants in dense waves. The thought of retreating quietly dissolved.

*This many ants — even without collecting materials, just the Spirit Crystals they drop would be worth a fortune.* Finding creatures this numerous that still couldn't break through his armor? That was rare. He'd be throwing money away by leaving.

With that thought settled, Lu Yuan drew a slow breath and turned his gaze to the worker ants surging around him.

He stepped off one ant's head and vaulted himself down from the pit's edge into the nest below. His greatsword swept in a wide arc — two ants died instantly, the rest were sent tumbling, and a pocket of clear ground opened around him.

*Time to get to work.*

Dark sword-light flashed — one ant dead.

*Hssst!*

Five. Ten. Twenty. A hundred.

A white orb rose from one of the ant corpses.

*Something dropped?*

Lu Yuan — who had been fighting on autopilot by this point — felt his focus snap back. He kept sweeping through ants while scooping up Spirit Crystals and materials from the ground.

He'd long since lost count of how many he'd killed.

His armor was showing the wear: cracks had spread across the surface from the earlier three-way battle and the continued swarm. Gene Armaments needed a specialized armament-smith to repair — something Lu Yuan had no expertise in whatsoever.

He was stuck wearing it as it was.

Fortunately, his Beetle Claw longsword was elite-rank, far harder than the armor itself. That was still in decent shape.

As for defense — Lu Yuan had no concerns there. Black Iron Body at full capacity, all the time; the worker ants simply couldn't break through. Over a hundred were already dead without a stronger variant appearing. This nest probably wasn't that large. Even if elite soldier ants existed somewhere deeper, there couldn't be many — and when he finally encountered something genuinely beyond him, he could always leave.

As for materials — sand ants' most valuable component was a peculiar tendon buried deep inside the body, requiring dissection to extract. That wasn't possible here. Their corpses were being hauled back into the tunnels by their nestmates anyway. Nothing to collect.

He let it go. Just the Spirit Crystals.

When fatigue crept in, he crushed a Spirit Crystal and let the energy flood back through him, keeping Black Iron Body running at full tilt. His spirit power never ran dry. For someone else, a swarm this size would be lethal — sheer quantity has a way of becoming its own kind of threat. But Lu Yuan maintained his defense without interruption, and the worker ants were simply unable to get past it.

He killed until it became mechanical. Dodge, swing, absorb, maintain. But even in the monotony, he paid attention — adjusting his footwork, refining his sword angles, treating each ant as a small lesson. His technique was slowly, steadily improving.

*Compared to everything else going on,* he thought, *being a bit slow on my feet really doesn't matter that much.*

A sharp, piercing cry rang out from the tunnel ahead. Heavy, rapid footsteps — wrong rhythm, wrong weight.

Lu Yuan didn't think. He planted a foot on an ant's head and launched himself upward.

A Gene Warrior's physical capabilities were exceptional across the board, and his jumping was no exception. He cleared nearly four meters in a single bound, right hand gripping his greatsword, left hand seizing a protruding rock at the pit's edge. One flex of his arms and he was up — out of the five-meter pit in under a second.

He hit the ground running.

Fifty meters out, he glanced back.

Two colossal sand ants burst from the pit — roughly 1.7 to 1.8 meters tall, their bodies a vivid, uniform yellow. Behind them came a dense wave of followers, averaging about 1.2 meters, stockier and clearly more powerful than anything he'd faced so far.

*The nest's real fighters.*

His chest went cold. He kept running.

He ducked down a random side passage and didn't slow. Stone Men and Black Scorpions crossed his path; he ignored every one of them, letting the attacks clatter harmlessly off his armor. Between the armor and Black Iron Body, he was plenty safe for a sprint.

Shrieks and pounding footsteps pursued him from behind.

He ran for the better part of half an hour before the sounds faded into silence. He finally stopped in a stretch of tunnel free of creatures, leaned back against the wall, and caught his breath.

A moment passed. His breathing steadied.

He glanced down. A coating of transparent slime from the ants' burst bodies covered him from head to toe. Lu Yuan's brow creased.

He found a corner of the passage, retracted his Gene Armament, stripped off his outer clothes, and scrubbed down with clean water and body wash. That was better. Much better.

Fresh clothes on. Armor back in place.

He found a spot to sit and began tallying his gains.

He spread everything out on the ground before him, and his eyes went wide.

First: three sets of Gene Armaments. Two leather armor sets and the mandible dagger pair — all common rank. But three common-rank Gene Armament sets on the open market? Well over a hundred thousand yuan. The odds of getting a Gene Armament drop from any common creature were nearly nonexistent. He'd been extraordinarily lucky. Then again, killing this many ants had probably tilted the odds.

*And that cat-kin swordsman claimed they had nothing on them.* He shook his head.

Next, the Spirit Crystals. Not just what the three Hunters had dropped when they died, but the crystals from the ants they'd killed before being overwhelmed, plus everything Lu Yuan had harvested himself. The Hunters' death drops alone had been over a thousand; the roughly hundred ants they'd killed had yielded another two-hundred-odd on top of that. Total: over fifteen hundred Spirit Crystals.

And materials. Stone Man's Hearts, scorpion tail stingers, dungeon spider silk, ant tendons — varied types, over two hundred items altogether. Worth tens of thousands on their own.

But the real showstopper was the Spirit Crystals themselves, heaped into what could only be described as a small mountain.

*Everything else was just the opening act.*

Gazing at that gleaming pile, Lu Yuan couldn't hold back a grin.

He still couldn't quite believe how many ants he'd killed. The three cat-kin Hunters working together had barely managed a hundred before the swarm consumed them. He alone had killed five times as many.

*Over five hundred sand ants.*

"This time," he murmured, "I'm actually rich."

He turned it over in his mind.

*So that's the thing about Guardian type — it really does have its advantages. If my combat technique had been offense-based instead of Black Iron Body, I couldn't have shrugged off the ants' attacks. I'd have taken injuries. I'd have been swallowed.*

Against a fast, agile Gene Warrior in a duel, Guardian type might feel sluggish and cumbersome. But against a swarm? Against an unending tide of creatures that couldn't break through his defense?

That's where it came into its own.

In a dungeon packed wall to wall with monsters, that advantage was enormous. Pair it with effectively limitless spirit power from his Spirit Crystal supply, and the whole thing started to feel like cheating.

Lu Yuan smiled — quiet, small, satisfied.

He stowed his Gene Armament and began preparing to head out once more.