These two so-called Commanders were nothing special, possessing only the strength of an ordinary Mid-stage Earth Soul Realm cultivator.
They were a world apart from the Fifth Commander he had faced before.
Furthermore, Hong Yu's strength had grown significantly, and his instincts for Martial Skills and life-and-death battles had beco even sharper. As a result, he won this fight with incredible ease. He had effortlessly obtained one hundred points, bringing his grand total to a terrifying one thousand!
'One thousand points. That's enough for to cultivate in the Cyan Nether Sword Tower for ten days.'
Hong Yu smiled faintly, his brow furrowed as he looked at the dazed Sword Sect disciples behind him. "What are you all standing around for? Get a move on!"
"Kill!"
"These sons of bitches! They had us completely suppressed just now. It was infuriating! I want revenge!"
The fifty Sword Sect disciples unleashed their ferocity.
They had been forced to endure far too much over the past half-month.
The four major units had attacked Liger Ravine, only to be ambushed and suffer heavy losses. Afterward, it turned out their intelligence was faulty. Besieged by tens of thousands of thieves, the four units, who had just managed to regroup, had no choice but to split up and wage a guerrilla war against them.
Just monts ago, their group of over fifty had been completely pinned down by the enemy, forced to cower like pathetic weaklings.
Now that both of the enemy's powerful Commanders were dead, it was ti to settle all scores!
The Sword Sect disciples' morale surged!
The thieves, on the other hand, had lost all will to fight.
Their two strongest Commanders had been instantly killed by that seemingly ordinary youth at the Half-Step Earth Soul Realm. The brutal scene was seared into their minds. Not only was it unforgettable, but it also made them terrified to linger for even a second longer.
They were terrified of provoking Hong Yu and having him turn his murderous attention on them.
It was a total rout!
Several hundred of the thieves' experts were chased down and slaughtered by fifty Sword Sect disciples who were fighting as if they were on steroids.
The chase lasted a full hour. They pursued the thieves for more than ten miles across the rugged mountain terrain until the very last one was cut down.
"HAHAHAHA, that felt great! So satisfying!"
"Aweso! This is what you call sweet revenge!"
Having been suppressed for half a month, the Sword Sect disciples roared with abandon, venting all their pent-up frustration.
This counter-slaughter not only allowed them to vent their frustrations, but more importantly, everyone had earned a handso amount of points.
In that mont, the fifty-odd Sword Sect disciples all gathered around, surrounding Hong Yu.
"Brother Hong, thank you so much for this!"
"If it wasn't for Brother Hong, forget killing these damned beasts—we'd probably be dead by their blades right now!"
"Brother Hong, you're a beast! With your strength, you could enter the inner sect directly. It's just a sha about that Senior Brother Hong in the inner sect... sigh..."
The Sword Sect disciples murmured among themselves. So offered flattery, so fawned over him, so feigned their sincerity, and others perhaps genuinely expressed their own feelings of injustice.
Hong Yu maintained a calm expression and smiled. "I was just a bit lucky. Those two Commanders got careless and underestimated , which is the only reason I managed to kill them."
"Brother Hong is too modest!"
"Hahaha, if we stick with Brother Hong from now on, we'll be unstoppable."
"Please take care of us, Brother Hong!"
Beyond the crowd, Dongfang Lang stood alone in silence, a stark contrast to the boisterous group.
'Even these Sword Sect disciples, who he had fought and bled with, were nothing but ants in his eyes, completely unworthy of associating with him. If danger arose, he would abandon them all without a shred of guilt to buy himself ti to escape.'
'But that didn't an he was fine with these ants, who once groveled and wagged their tails around him, now flocking to soone else!'
'What's more...'
'This person was Hong Yu, soone who thoroughly annoyed him!'
Dongfang Lang snorted coldly, muttering to himself in a voice only he could hear, "Just a show-off who got lucky. Even if you hadn't shown up just now, I could have killed those two myself."
He didn't want anyone else to hear him.
It was hard to say if it was the pride and ego of a genius, or if he was trying to hide the bitter taste of jealousy in his heart.
"Brother Hong, how co you're on your own?" soone suddenly asked.
Hong Yu was startled, then calmly said, "We were ambushed, and I got separated from my unit." After a pause, Hong Yu asked, "What about you guys? How did you end up here?"
"It's like this..."
Soone hurriedly explained.
The initial reasons were exactly as Liu Liyun and the others had said; because the Thief Gang was too strong, the Sword Sect disciples had to split up. As for why this group had co here, it was entirely due to being blinded by greed.
The Cyan Nether Sword Sect's encirclent had also inflicted heavy losses on the Thief Gang, forcing them to abandon so of their outer posts and shrink their sphere of influence. Now, only a few of the thieves' experts remained on the outskirts of Liger Ravine; the truly powerful ones were all gathered in the core region.
With ti running out on the training mission and enticed by the promise of more points, they had no choice but to press on toward the Thief Gang's main encampnt.
"...We just didn't expect our luck to be so bad as to run into an ambush by two Commanders here," that disciple said with a wry smile.
If not for Hong Yu, their chances of survival would have been slim to none.
Hong Yu nodded and mused, "Do you have any way to contact the others?"
"We have a distress signal we can use to summon everyone," the disciple replied with a bitter smile, "but that signal is only for life-or-death situations. If we use it, every Sword Sect disciple will converge on our position. But then, that gang of thieves will definitely find us too. I'm afraid it would trigger the final, decisive battle."
"In that case, we can only rely on ourselves to find the others!" Hong Yu said.
'The closer I get to the thieves' main camp, the more certain I am that the so-called Primordial Core Realm expert's cavern estate is real.'
'For this band of thieves to co all the way from the Celestial Star Kingdom, they must have co prepared.'
According to the captured thief, their three leaders were all terrifyingly strong, especially the head chief, Ding Yuanshan, known as the Mountain Opening Tiger, whose power was unfathomable. Hong Yu felt a strange sense of unease about this head chief's strength. He thought it best to gather all the Cyan Nether Sword Sect disciples as soon as possible to prepare for the unexpected.
Many of the Sword Sect disciples nodded, showing an inclination to follow Hong Yu's lead.
This made the ever-silent Dongfang Lang unable to hold back any longer. He snorted coldly, "We went through all that trouble to disperse and avoid the thieves' encirclent, and now you want to go find everyone and regroup. This will greatly increase our risk of exposure. You're practically pushing us into a pit of fire."
"This..."
At his words, the Sword Sect disciples who had just been proclaiming they would follow Hong Yu beca hesitant.
Hong Yu raised an eyebrow. He looked at Dongfang Lang, sensing the intense hostility in his cold gaze, and said coolly, "Do you really think staying scattered will keep you safe? Have any of you considered that with over forty thousand thieves, they could easily conduct a thorough sweep of Liger Ravine and wipe us out completely? Instead, they're only sending small bands to hunt us."
"Could it be that they're stalling for ti?"
The question was a wake-up call for everyone.
With the power of the Mountain Opening Tiger Thief Gang, they absolutely had the ability to slaughter every last one of the three thousand-odd Sword Sect disciples.
Yet, they hadn't done that. Instead, they only sent out small groups of experts to pursue them. No one had given it much thought before and hadn't found it strange, but now that Hong Yu had pointed it out, they all felt sothing was off.
Dongfang Lang frowned. Hearing Hong Yu's point, he also sensed sothing was odd, but his pride compelled him to instinctively reject any suggestion from Hong Yu. He sneered, "What's so hard to understand? Obviously, the thieves are afraid that if they inflict too many casualties, we'll contact the Sect and call for reinforcents!"
"Idiot!"
Hong Yu spat. "If they were afraid of the Sword Sect's retaliation, why would they go to all the trouble of setting up ambushes?"
"That..."
Dongfang Lang's face stiffened, unable to offer a rebuttal.
His face turned livid as he snorted coldly.
Hong Yu couldn't be bothered to argue with him and was about to convince the others to go with him to find the other Sword Sect disciples.
Just then, in the sky dozens of miles away, a fiery red light suddenly blazed. The light was blindingly brilliant, like a scorching sun materializing in the void. It gradually converged, condensing into the shape of a colossal, heaven-piercing Celestial Sword that hung in the sky with perfect clarity.
"That's the Sword Sect disciples' distress signal, the highest level of ergency!"
The Sword Sect disciples gasped, crying out in alarm.
They had made a pact when they split up: unless it was a matter of life and death, they were absolutely forbidden from using such an urgent distress signal.
Sending a signal like that was a call to both the Sword Sect disciples and the thieves' experts.
It was a sign that the final, decisive battle was about to comnce.
"Brother Hong, what do we do?" soone asked.
Hong Yu's gaze hardened. "We're moving out!"
'It doesn't matter who sent the signal. They're a Sword Sect disciple!'
Besides, Hong Yu had wanted to gather the scattered disciples anyway. This was a godsend, saving him a great deal of effort.
The group sprinted toward the distress signal's location.
As the old saying goes, mountains are farther than they appear.
The signal had seed to be just over thirty miles away, but on the rugged mountain paths of Liger Ravine, it took Hong Yu's group more than an hour to arrive. By the ti they got there, over a thousand Cyan Nether Sword Sect disciples were already gathered ahead.
Opposite the Cyan Nether Sword Sect disciples was a dark, oppressive mass of thieves, at least three thousand strong and growing by the second.
Hong Yu's group of fifty-odd people entered the Sword Sect's formation.
In an open space between the two opposing forces, two experts were engaged in a life-and-death struggle.
One of them was none other than Duan Hong. His opponent was a middle-aged man from the Thief Gang, wielding two spears with a relentless assault. The sheer power radiating from his attacks was even greater than the Fifth Commander's. He must hold a higher rank among the Ten Great Commanders.
"Two Dragons Erging from the Sea!"
The middle-aged man's twin spears transford into long dragons, striking from both sides. With a loud BAM, he sent Duan Hong flying.
Duan Hong coughed up a spray of blood. He was heavily injured, his resentful eyes locked onto the middle-aged man, burning with rage and venom.
The middle-aged man sneered in disdain. "So this is a genius disciple from the Cyan Nether Sword Sect? Hahaha, not so impressive after all!" His provocative gaze swept across the crowd of Cyan Nether Sword Sect disciples as he continued to jeer, "You little grandsons from the Cyan Nether Sword Sect, who else has the balls to co trade a few blows with your grandpa? What's wrong? Are you all just a bunch of cowards?"
The faces of the Sword Sect disciples turned livid, but none could offer a rebuttal.
Duan Hong's strength was among the best of this group of disciples. Even Shi Tao, the one leading this expedition, was only on par with him. If even Duan Hong was no match for this man, who else would dare to step forward?
"Hahaha! A bunch of gutless wimps like you dare call yourselves geniuses? You're going to make your grandpa die of laughter!"
The middle-aged man laughed disdainfully, his expression full of contempt.
Among the crowd, Hong Yu watched the Sword Sect disciples, who were furious yet dared not et the man's gaze. He let out a long sigh, shook his head, and stepped out from the throng...
"Then let give it a try!"
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