The thunderous detonation sent a shockwave tearing through the narrow underground space...
Carrying blood and shrapnel in a miniature storm of destruction.
The Stygian Poison Centipede took the full force of the blast head-on.
Its prized carapace—shattered at point-blank range—came apart in pieces.
Reeking green bodily fluid splattered across the surrounding rock walls, hissing and eating into the stone with a sound like frying meat.
But the vitality of a Tier-2 beast was something far more terrifying than Mo Fan had anticipated.
SKREEEE——!!!
Before the smoke had even begun to clear, a shriek of pure, venomous fury tore through the explosion's epicenter.
The Stygian Poison Centipede was not dead.
Its front half was a ruin—carapace shattered, bleeding freely, one of its terrible mandible blades blasted clean off.
But the grievous wound didn't break it.
It ignited it. A Foundation Establishment beast was not a soft target you could simply one-shot.
The agony drove it into a complete frenzy.
Its remaining compound eyes blazed with terrifying red light in the dim mine shaft...
They locked immediately onto the two figures dozens of meters away—Mo Fan hiding in the dark, and the skeleton mage that had just fired.
BOOM.
The centipede reared its bloodied front half upright.
Its ruined maw split wide, and a torrent of purple-black toxic miasma—dense enough to be almost solid—erupted from its broken mandibles like a dam giving way.
The miasma was so concentrated that the solid rock it passed over began smoking on contact, the surface eaten away in seconds.
It flooded the entire passage and came rolling toward Mo Fan and WTF in a suffocating wall.
Faced with a toxic cloud capable of dissolving a Qi Condensation cultivator into a puddle of pus, Mo Fan didn't retreat.
He smiled.
As a Necromancer, flesh-targeting weapons were the one category of threat he feared least.
"WTF—engage."
At his command, the white-boned spell cultivator stepped forward without hesitation, walking directly into the billowing wall of poison.
The miasma that could corrode solid rock washed over WTF's dense bone structure and accomplished nothing beyond an unpleasant friction sound.
Not a single point of substantive damage. The skeleton's magic resistance and poison immunity were on full display.
But that was only the opening move.
"Give it something to think about."
Mo Fan's intent shifted. The translucent, ice-blue soul wings behind WTF snapped open.
Whoosh——
Powerful lift erupted in an instant.
WTF rose from the ground like a drone that had never heard of gravity.
Ascending dozens of meters to the upper reaches of the mine shaft—cleanly above the centipede's massive body and any physical charge it could mount.
Simultaneously, a thick shell of bone plating—dark metallic sheen flowing across its surface—locked into place across WTF's entire frame as [ Bone Armament LV. 2 ] activated.
Hovering in the air above, WTF had become a gunship.
It made no attempt at close combat.
It simply hung above the centipede's head with supreme indifference and raised the [ Pale Bone Scepter ].
Below, Mo Fan worked from cover—pulling intact beast corpses from his storage bag one after another...
The collection he'd built up from the shallow mine shafts, and pitching them with precise aim along the centipede's path of movement.
Like throwing sandbags.
"Detonate."
Each corpse that hit the ground—WTF swung the scepter once.
BOOM. BOOM BOOM.
The mine erupted in a continuous rolling thunder.
One [ Corpse Explosion ] after another turned the entire underground fault chamber into a terrifying minefield.
The Stygian Poison Centipede was simply too large. In the confined underground space, it had nowhere to hide.
It thrashed and rolled under the bombardment, its already-shattered carapace blown into further ruin with each hit, green blood pooling across the stone floor.
The humiliation was absolute. A Foundation Establishment beast—being carpet-bombed by a floating skeleton.
SKREEEE!
The centipede's rage finally hit its limit.
It absorbed two consecutive Corpse Explosion shockwaves through sheer spite...
Coiled its massive body like a spring compressed to its breaking point, and launched itself upward!
The barbed tail hook became a black blur that tore through the air and connected with WTF before it could fully evade.
CLANG——!
A teeth-grinding screech of metal on bone rang out in the high air.
The centipede's full-force strike, driven by pure fury, was enough to swat WTF out of the air like a fly.
But.
Under [ Bone Armament LV. 2 ]—the same defense that had held against Venerable Miasma Dust's full-powered blow...
Layered on top of a Foundation Establishment bone frame, further reinforced by the [ Death Frenzy ] buff Mo Fan had quietly applied...
A tail strike that could have caved in a small hill left nothing but a hairline crack on WTF's outer bone plating.
The ghost-flames in its eye sockets didn't even flicker. WTF hung in the air, expression unchanged, utterly unbothered.
Can't hurt it. Can't even scratch it.
Under the relentless bombardment and repeated failure to deal meaningful damage...
The last fragment of the Stygian Poison Centipede's survival instinct finally asserted itself.
Its ruined compound eyes swiveled. The full weight of its hatred shifted downward—and locked onto Mo Fan!
Kill the master. End the puppet.
In its perception, the human below—radiating the warm, living pulse of blood and breath—was prey. Something it could swallow in one bite.
BOOM.
The centipede's massive body twisted mid-air and came crashing toward Mo Fan's corner like a derailed freight train, trailing foul blood and venom.
"Coming for the soft target?"
Mo Fan watched the enormous creature bearing down on him and felt no alarm whatsoever. His smile turned distinctly wicked.
"Then you've picked the wrong person."
The instant the centipede's venom-dripping maw was about to close on the rock where Mo Fan stood—
Whoosh——
A concentrated burst of black death-qi detonated from Mo Fan's back without warning.
A pair of ghostly blue soul wings—identical to WTF's, but wider and denser—erupted open.
RUSH.
Wind howled. Mo Fan shot upward like a cyan meteor fired in reverse, rising effortlessly into the air and hovering above the centipede's head.
"Surprise. I fly too."
He looked down at the centipede below—momentum carrying it straight into the rock wall, face-first—and his voice carried nothing but contempt.
Now Mo Fan and WTF held the high ground together, a two-point aerial suppression formation.
The centipede had lost control of its own airspace entirely.
Mo Fan worked the [ Floating Soul Wings ] with fluid precision, shifting direction constantly...
Dodging the furious bursts of venom the centipede sprayed upward while scanning for openings.
Even in the middle of the high-intensity aerial engagement, part of his mind was running experiments.
"Let's try this."
He reached into the Necrotic Realm, abruptly pulled Summon No. 004—the Heavy-Armored Bulwark, built like an armored vehicle...
And dropped it from several dozen meters directly above the centipede!
CRASH.
Unit 004 hit the centipede's back like a bone meteorite, gravity doing the rest.
Hiss! The centipede's spine buckled under the sudden weight.
But the result was disappointing.
Although 004's tonnage was astonishing, it was still a Tier-1 frame at its core.
The impact was spectacular in presentation but underwhelming in effect. It didn't deal fatal damage.
The centipede gave one violent full-body twist and sent Unit 004 flying into the far rock wall.
Tch. "Dropping a summon from altitude is a solid surprise move, but in a fight this intense, splitting my focus to calculate trajectories costs more than it's worth. Disrupts my rhythm."
Mo Fan felt the faint throb of mental strain behind his eyes.
He recalled Unit 004 immediately and filed the tactic away for future refinement.
Clear the distractions. Focus on the kill.
After the prolonged Corpse Explosion bombardment, the toxic miasma expenditure, and the impact from Unit 004...
The once-untouchable apex predator of this section of the mine had finally reached its end.
Its carapace was gone. Its spiritual energy was nearly depleted. Its movements had slowed to a crawl.
Fear had arrived. The crimson compound eyes showed it—the will to fight replaced by the will to flee.
The centipede turned, trying to drag its ruined body toward the deep cracks in the rock to retreat into the earth.
"Going somewhere?"
Mo Fan's eyes went cold in an instant.
"Stay."
The ice-blue wings behind him snapped back in a single powerful stroke. He dropped from altitude like a hunting falcon in a full killing dive!
[ Bone Armament ] condensed on his right fist—sharpening into the most lethal bone spike configuration it could form.
His blood and qi surged to their absolute peak.
"Die."
Riding the terrifying gravitational potential energy of the dive, Mo Fan closed the distance in an instant.
He slipped past the centipede's desperate last-ditch tail sweep and drove his fist—trailing that cold, death-laced gleam...
Directly into the massive fissure that the Bat King's Corpse Explosion had originally blown open in the centipede's skull!
It went in without resistance.
SPLAT——!
The tooth-aching sound of shattering bone and rupturing tissue hit simultaneously.
The punch drove clean through the Stygian Poison Centipede's hard skull.
The dark force behind it detonated inside the cranial cavity, obliterating every nerve cluster in a single, total destruction!
Crash...
One final, furious shriek.
The massive body locked rigid—then collapsed, a mountain of flesh hitting the mine floor with a ground-shaking impact, throwing up a cloud of reeking dust.
Still.
Mo Fan pulled his arm free and shook the green fluid from it, then exhaled a long, slow breath.
Battle over.
In the exact moment the Stygian Poison Centipede breathed its last, Mo Fan's retina flooded with System notifications...
Cascading down like a waterfall, the kind that made his heart rate spike:
[ Combat Settlement: ]
[ Killed: Tier-2 Early-Stage Beast — Stygian Poison Centipede (Foundation Establishment — Early Stage) ]
[ EXP Gained: +1000 XP! ]