Chapter 429: The Decisive Strike
Chapter 429: The Decisive Strike
Three minutes earlier, at the other end of the tunnel.
Xiao Tan stood motionless in the middle of the railway track, his gaze piercing like a blade.
He wasn’t actively launching an attack, but the system had not flagged him as engaging in passive play either.
Wang Tan Zhi and Long Ao Min were among the first players to enter Terrifying Paradise. They both understood that if the system-generated map was a dead-end tunnel, a train would inevitably come.
Xiao Tan was betting everything on this train. To execute an instant-kill strike, he needed to harness this colossal machine barreling forward at nearly 200 kilometers per hour.
But the train had to be moving from his side toward Long Ao Min’s position. If it came from the opposite direction, his entire plan would collapse.
To be fair, Xiao Tan’s luck was decent. If it were Feng Bu Jue’s notoriously rotten luck, things might have gone very differently…
At last, the rumbling thundered through the tunnel, and the train arrived—heading in the correct direction.
Facing the oncoming locomotive head-on, Xiao Tan roared to steel his nerves.
The train moved at blinding speed, closing the twenty-meter gap in a blink. Calculating the timing, Xiao Tan thrust his right arm forward with his palm outward, unleashing Binding Fangs.
In an instant, a beast-like shadow erupted from his palm. A deafening roar rippled through the air as the shadow expanded mid-air, its monstrous maw lined with fangs wide enough to swallow the entire train. The jaws snapped shut.
Though the fangs lacked physical form, they pierced the train’s front, causing it to decelerate.
For a moment, it felt as if the train had crashed into thick glue, lurching forward with violent resistance. Over the next four or five seconds, it underwent a brief transition—from high speed to sluggish movement, then accelerating again.
Meanwhile, the moment Binding Fangs left Xiao Tan’s control, he pivoted and sprinted, using Nightmare Trail to run up the wall.
During those few seconds of slowed speed, he raced along the wall in the same direction as the train, maintaining a three-meter lead over the locomotive…
Then, just before the train accelerated again, he leaped onto its front. The maneuver cost him 39% of his vitality value, but the result proved worth it.
The front of this old-fashioned train featured a triangular, protruding edge, and the cylindrical upper frame was easy to grip. After expending a consumption technique and nearly half his vitality value, Xiao Tan successfully clung to the train’s front.
“Heh… scared the hell out of me…” Xiao Tan muttered, his heart still racing. Though he’d meticulously planned every step, the moment he jumped, his terror value spiked uncontrollably. Especially at that split second, his heartbeat felt like it had stopped.
“After all… it’s a freaking train. No wonder Binding Fangs’s immobilization effect was severely weakened…” he thought.
Before leaping, he’d considered every possible outcome of his skills. For instance, if Binding Fangs failed entirely, he would have immediately pressed himself flat against the wall instead of running along it. If the train froze completely, he could calmly climb onto the front. In extreme cases—like the train derailing or flipping backward from the skill’s impact—it would have swept toward the wall due to inertia, forcing him to flee for his life.
Thankfully, the skill created a cushioning effect. Though boarding the train was still extremely risky, he’d made it through unscathed.
……
In the conference room, Bei Ling had also tensed up earlier. Seeing Xiao Tan was safe, she exhaled in relief. “That was way too reckless… I thought he was going to kill himself.”
“I think I get what he’s doing now…” Si Yu added.
“It’s an incredibly risky tactic,” Feng Bu Jue agreed. “But from another angle, it’s also brilliantly clever.”
“Oh, I see it too,” Bei Ling said. “He’s using the train’s momentum to launch Terrifying Shadow Soul Chase, right? But there are so many variables! What if the train came from the other end of the tunnel? What if its speed far exceeded his estimates? What if the front of the train was flat instead of grippable? What if Binding Fangs failed completely?”
“Exactly,” Feng Bu Jue replied. “This was a gamble—a bet that placed the entire match’s outcome on a single move.” His tone turned almost admiring. “Any single misstep would lead to failure, and every variable was highly prone to error. To succeed, he needed extreme reflexes… and luck.” At the word “luck,” Feng Bu Jue couldn’t help but recall his own history with Zero Magic Crusher. His eyes clouded with melancholy as he paused before adding, “Undeniably, those are parts of capability. The fact that Xiao Tan conceived this idea and dared to try it… means he deserves this victory.”
……
Back in the tunnel.
Long Ao Min stared at Xiao Tan clinging to the train’s front, his body sideways, combat knife in hand. What he felt in that moment was pure despair…
“Standing flat against the wall won’t save me—it’s easy for him to attack me by extending his blade along the train’s momentum. If I jump…” His mind raced through countless possibilities. “Even if I could leap upward—my heavy armor reduces mobility. Even if I somehow slammed my head against the ceiling and curled my body… he’d only need to raise his knife high, using the train’s momentum to slash upward at my vulnerable spot…” His eyes darted to the railway track. “Lying flat on the tracks… letting the train pass over me… but then he’d just need to lower his weapon below the train’s chassis, slicing through me with the train’s momentum…”
A chilling realization struck him—every scenario ended in disaster. At that moment, he recalled a famous saying by Commodore “Yellow Monkey”: Speed is power.
Meanwhile, Xiao Tan, perched on the train’s front, also spotted Long Ge’s figure. Almost instinctively, when his eyes locked onto a living target, his fingers carved a large cross into the train’s front and activated Mark with Cross Curse.
A sudden, ominous chill ran through Long Ge, though he dismissed it. If he had opened his game menu at that moment, he would have seen the special debuff Curse applied to him…
But there was no time for hesitation.
Long Ao Min’s final countermeasure was to activate his title technique: Rage Shield.
This skill shared the same name as his title and functioned as a transformation ability, though its effects and side effects were far less dramatic than Demon God Descent.
In Rage Shield mode, Long Ao Min reduced all incoming damage by 30% and doubled his maximum health. This skill could only be used once per scenario, consuming 700 stamina value and 20% of his stamina value cap, lasting three minutes. In other words, after activating it, his stamina value cap would drop from 3700 to 2960 until he returned to the login space.
Of course, he had no time to worry about the consequences. To avoid being instantly killed, he activated every defensive skill at his disposal. Alongside his title technique, he deployed the main force defense skill Ice Shell, instantly coating the round shield in his hand with frost.
With his back to the wall and the shield angled in front of him, he braced for impact…
As for Xiao Tan, he too had committed fully. The Curse was cast, and Terrifying Shadow Soul Chase was active. This skill’s power scaled with movement speed and momentum. At this moment, he was like a train-riding superhero, amplified by a 10% bonus to his first strike. What would follow… only the system could predict.
In short, both players had exhausted every possible preparation.
The outcome… would be decided in this single strike.
(End of Chapter)
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