This astonishing discovery tore a gap open in the passive stalemate of the battle.
Lin Jie discerned the fundantal and fatal design flaw of this stitched UMA.
It was not an organic whole.
It was rely an aggregate forcefully pieced together from countless “excellent parts,” each with its own muscle mory and instincts.
Its consciousness could command the parts to perform perfect motions, but it could not erase the soul-imprints belonging to the original owners, etched deep inside those parts.
Once he understood this, a dangerous plan that used psychology and tactical deception flashed through Lin Jie’s life-and-death-calculating mind.
“William! Julian!” Lin Jie’s voice rose above the whistling threads cutting through the air, like a captain issuing orders amid a storm, “Stop defending! Change tactics! We stop dodging, we start provoking!”
“What?!” Julian, who was using Withered Thorns’ “attenuation field” to shield the team, turned back and shouted in disbelief, “Lin! Are you insane?! You want us to actively ‘provoke’ a monster that can slice us into pieces with its threads?!”
“Exactly!” Lin Jie’s eyes burned with fervor, “We can’t keep following its rhythm! We must impose our rhythm to disrupt it! To exacerbate the contradictions already inside its body!”
He quickly told his two teammates the discovery and his new tactical concept in concise language.
“William!” His gaze locked on the hardened veteran, “I need you to unleash your warrior instincts, abandon excess defense, and attack the fragile-looking ‘non-combat parts’ on its body in the most direct and provocative way you have!”
“Like that left hand, or the leg it uses to keep balance! Use your battle cry to rile up the ‘warrior soul’ inside it!”
“Julian!” He turned his eyes to the wise curator, “Your task is the opposite. You should try to use your staff and wisdom to create traps that embody ‘order’!”
“Draw the attention of the ‘artist souls’ inside it! Make them instinctively want to admire or correct!”
“It thinks it’s conducting a symphony. Then we’ll make the violinist and the timpanist in its orchestra start fighting on stage because they heard different conducting cues!” Lin Jie sumd up his mad plan of “soul-rending” with a blunt taphor.
Julian and William were stunned at first, then they imdiately grasped the essence and feasibility of Lin Jie’s plan.
An absurd operation of “inducing internal conflict” was about to play out in this horrific theater.
“Co on! You stitched freak! Look over here!”
William let out a roar that was pure provocation.
He abandoned dodging and defense, his whole body like an out-of-control carriage heading straight into the web.
He charged toward the UMA’s most elegantly fragile-looking part: the pianist-like left hand that deftly manipulated the threads, launching a near-suicidal sprint.
At the sa ti Julian acted.
He slamd his Withered Thorns staff onto the ground.
This ti he did not activate the attenuation field.
Instead, he activated the ancient Druid “Harmony” runes engraved on the staff.
A deep green ring of interlaced Celtic knotwork imprinted on the stage floor with the staff at its center, more than ten feet across.
The halo was perfectly symtrical, filled with a classical sense of harmonious beauty.
The contradictory, divisive spectacle officially began.
The Limb Collector, conducting elegant slaughter on the stage, had its fragile unified will assaulted by conflicting signals arriving from two opposite directions.
The parts inside it that ca from “warriors,” saturated with violent attacking urges, were ignited when they felt William’s provoking battle-cry and charge;
deep subconscious combat instincts were triggered.
They wanted to abandon elegance and et the challenger head-on with the most direct, brutal force.
But at the sa ti, the parts born of “artists,” obsessively devoted to beauty and harmony, were deeply attracted to the perfectly symtrical Druid ring Julian had created on the ground.
Their compulsive, perfectionist instincts scread, urging them to “correct” the crude charge by William that threatened to ruin the perfect composition.
Fighting versus creation!
Rage versus appreciation!
Two diatrically opposed yet equally powerful underlying directives erupted into a fatal conflict inside that UMA’s consciousness.
Its movents beca chaotic.
Its right leg wanted to step forward to confront William, while its left hand uncontrollably reached up to pluck threads to “fine-tune” Julian.
Its stitched-together body seed to be controlled simultaneously by two different puppeteers, yielding a series of contradictory, rending, ridiculous convulsions.
The precise, harmonious thread-control process collapsed under a flood of mutually conflicting “wrong orders.”
The spirit threads that perford lethal cuts turned into leaderless serpents.
They flailed and collided in midair, even tangling with one another, becoming a harmless, knotted ss.
The Limb Collector’s central body, perched at center stage, resembled a clock whose internal gears had jamd, collapsing stiffly and awkwardly onto the stage.
Its brain crashed, unable to comprehend the absurd conjunction of logical contradiction and aesthetic conflict before it.
The spiritual force that sustained the entire “performance field” developed massive ruptures.
William, this veteran hunter who had been lying in wait, was ready for exactly this priceless opportunity.
“Roar!!”
A long-suppressed roar exploded from William’s chest.
His gray eyes flared with a dazzling light, filled with killing intent.
His combat boots slamd hard into the floor.
With a trendous crack, the hard oak stage splintered into a shallow pit beneath his feet.
Using that reactive force, he beca a human projectile, a living cannonball determined to crush any obstacle, breaking through the already chaotic, powerless layer of threads and charging straight toward the final target, collapsed and unable to resist on the stage.
The briefly rigid Limb Collector’s mismatched eyes seed to regain a trace of clarity out of the chaos.
It saw the human rushing at it and, instinctively, tried to lift its arm to reweave the cutting “thread-net.”
But it was too late.
William’s speed and resolve outstripped the reaction limits of the Collector’s still “rebooting” chaotic brain.
On his charge, William paid no heed to the scattered threads drifting through the air.
He let those sharp threads slash deep and shallow wounds across his body.
In his burning, furious eyes, there was only the one enemy on the stage.
Under the tense yet expectant gazes of Lin Jie and Julian, William’s hefty fra crashed into the massive body of the Limb Collector.
He did not use a weapon.
He simply slamd his iron fist, infused with every ounce of his strength, with the most primitive violence onto the “core joint” along the spine on its back—the joint that connected and controlled all the spirit threads.
That joint’s exterior was protected by a hard shell.
But under William’s full-force blow—
Crackling sounds of bone and shell breaking rang clear.
The hard shell instantly spiderwebbed with fissures and then shattered into pieces.
Beneath the shell appeared sothing like a precise neural nexus, a spirit core woven from tiny white nerve-like fibers, flashing a faint light.
The Limb Collector emitted a collective wail, its stitched, slender arms dropping limply.
Its chaotic eyes dimd, losing all their brightness.
All the links between it and the centuries-old theatre, which had beco part of its body, were cleanly severed on a physical level by William’s destructive strike.
It was no longer the “god” of this stage.
It reverted to a pitiful, lonely stitched monstrosity made from a pile of rotten parts.
But William’s assault did not end there.
After successfully disabling the opponent’s core control ability, the veteran launched a textbook deadly combo.
He didn’t pause after the first hit;
his body stayed glued to the UMA’s torso.
Then his other iron-hard fist, moving like a steam piston, began raining a frenzied barrage on the UMA’s defenseless “head.”
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
Each punch carried his disgust for this kind of “artist” who took pleasure in toying with lives, and his compassion for the innocent travelers cruelly murdered.
While William conducted this bloody, violent execution on stage, Lin Jie stopped watching the physical fight;
he knew William would handle everything.
At the sa ti he pulled out his prepared final trump card from his chest.
It wasn’t a high-tech alchemical bomb, nor a holy rune scroll.
It was a crudely fashioned incendiary bomb that Lin Jie had made himself.
He had bound three wicks, borrowed from the theatre lobby and soaked in high-concentration whale oil and alcohol, with the threads on the ground, fastening them tightly to a glass bottle of high-proof alcohol from William’s d kit.
This was a classic, simple “Molotov cocktail,” an “art piece” from his world full of the wisdom of people’s war.
He struck a match and lit the wicks.
Reflected by the blazing fla, he threw the incendiary along a calculated arcing trajectory, accounting for all leads, landing it precisely at the back of the stage where a table held nurous glass bottles of formalin and preservatives and was piled with fresh puppet materials—skin, fat, hair.
Crash!
The glass bottle struck the hard edge of the surgical table and shattered.
The high-proof alcohol inside erupted like molten lava and was ignited by the burning wick.
In an instant, a column of fire shot upward.
The blaze ignited the oily human skins and fat on the table, the surrounding bottles full of chemical reagents, the white-bone throne built from countless dry human bones, and finally, the velvet curtains above the stage, dried like gunpowder after centuries.
The roaring inferno consud the entire stage area, turning it into a literal hell of fla.
The Limb Collector, already beaten near death by William, as the all-consuming blaze swallowed it, showed a face of imnse pain as it watched its lifelong collection being reduced to ashes.
The depraved, frenzied “art collection” room, along with the Collector’s own body—also constructed from “art pieces”—let out one final wail as they were consud in the final curtain call staged by the Iron Triangle.
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