Chapter 15: Phase 1 Comes to an End
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The third death left a trace of exhaustion between Su Ling's brows. Sure, she could respawn, but the mental toll of dying never got any lighter. Her body was still in peak condition, but her mind had started to wear down.
That said, Su Ling's deaths weren't without progress. She was someone who actually took advice. After Lu told her that her current strength wasn't enough to take out the tank as a first kill target, she shifted her focus to a human girl instead.
She was the team's support. "Kill the healer first" is an age-old rule in any group fight, but the remaining 4 had done a solid job protecting her. Su Ling's second death happened precisely because she tried to force the kill and ended up trading one for one.
That was obviously unacceptable to Su Ling. Her goal was a clean 0-for-5 sweep, not some even trade. She had to admit it: weak people working together could genuinely threaten someone stronger. Sure, most mobs lumped together are just that, a mob. But if you let that make you underestimate a team that actually knows how to coordinate...
Then the one time you run into that rare group that can really punch above their weight, the only outcome you could've seen coming is getting completely wiped.
Su Ling got her head back on straight. The little spark of arrogance that had lit up after her cross-level solo kill on the Contaminator fizzled out entirely after those 2 deaths.
She seemed to finally understand what Lu had been trying to tell her: never, ever take any enemy lightly.
So on her third life, she played with complete focus. She cut off the support's healing spells, dodged the tank's attempts to lock her down, went after the archer and the gunner, and dealt with the assassin's constant harassment in between.
She ultimately took down the support and the archer, but the assassin caught an opening and rooted her in place for half a second. A gunner who can land precise shots on moving targets, you think they'd waste a stationary one?
Su Ling took a headshot, ended the run with a 1-for-2 trade, and started over.
"Is the kill order still off? Should I have dealt with the assassin first? But he's way too slippery..."
Su Ling frowned, running through every detail of the fight in her head. That vampire assassin had been glued to her the entire time, and it drove her crazy. The moment she used Blood Butterfly, he'd instantly jump on the opening to lock her down.
But if she went after him directly, he'd just dodge and run. That would drag her into a completely different rhythm, and once the tank circled back to fill the gap, she'd be right back to being trapped with nowhere to go.
Seeing that Su Ling was deep in thought, Lu didn't rush to restart the fight. She walked over, gently ruffled Su Ling's hair, and her cool, clear voice guided Su Ling's thinking, walking her out of the maze one careful step at a time.
"The core of fighting one against many is cutting down their numbers fast. The moment they lose people, even the tightest coordination starts showing cracks."
Su Ling didn't stop thinking, just picked up from where Lu left off: "Cutting numbers fast needs burst speed. But you told me before that Dragon Wing is my most important survival tool and shouldn't be used as a standard opening move."
Lu showed no sign of annoyance at being pushed back on. If anything, a warm smile spread across her face, the kind of maternal glow that couldn't be hidden, like watching a child finally grow up.
She kept guiding Su Ling's train of thought: "Combat isn't a rigid formula, and different principles apply at different times. Think about it, back then, what was it that you didn't have?"
"Didn't have?" Su Ling paused, then immediately thought of the ability she hadn't unlocked until after she left Planet Isha. "Blood Butterfly?"
"Exactly. Back then, Dragon Wing was your best and only reliable safety net. But now that Blood Butterfly can serve as your last line of defense, doesn't that mean you can loosen up a bit on how you use Dragon Wing?"
"Oh, right." Su Ling chewed on Lu's words, thinking back through the first 3 fights. Dragon Wing really hadn't done much for her survival in any of them. If that was the case, using it for rapid target elimination might genuinely be the better call.
With a new angle to work from, Su Ling launched into a fresh attempt. Dragon Wing straight to the support — her pick after careful consideration, because the support could buff the other 4. Leave her alive, and the fight got exponentially harder.
As it turned out, the approach was spot-on. Dragon Wing's burst speed was something neither the tank nor the support could react to. The assassin tried to interfere, but he had absolutely no way to block Su Ling head-on.
He managed to slow her down for a brief moment, but that wasn't nearly enough time to save the support from her fate. The support's head left her shoulders in one clean strike, and Su Ling locked onto her next target: the gunner, the other human on the team.
Compared to the elven ranger, the gunner packed more firepower but was far less mobile. With a team around him, he was no question the damage dealer to fear. But with no one able to cover for him, he was about as threatening as a fish on a cutting board.
On top of that, Su Ling noticed something: the only one on this 5-person team with any crowd control was the assassin. And as long as she held onto Blood Butterfly, he didn't dare make a move.
It was a deadlock. Blood Butterfly wasn't actually being used, yet it was doing its job on a completely different level.
The gunner was the classic high-damage low-defense type. Once Su Ling got close, it took less than 5 seconds before a sword through his throat ended him. 2 down out of 5, their suppression had dropped by more than half.
Looking at that result, Lu knew the match was already decided. Lose 2 out of 5, and the precision coordination they had built would inevitably start falling apart. As long as Su Ling didn't somehow dodge every right answer in front of her, there was no way she could lose.
And sure enough, that was exactly how it played out. With their hardest-hitting damage dealer gone and no support holding her back, Su Ling went straight after the elven ranger. Just the ranger and the assassin couldn't hold against Su Ling's relentless offense.
As for the tank? He was still riding over on horseback.
Catching the ranger and assassin in a misplay, Su Ling put a fist through the vampire assassin's skull and sent the ranger girl off right after with a clean sword strike. That left the field with nothing but the completely harmless tank. Game over.
"Quick on the uptake, that talent really wasn't wasted." After Su Ling finished off the last tank, Lu stepped up behind her and reached out to gently ruffle her hair. She had a soft spot for this little gesture. After all, if Su Ling "grew up" a bit more, she might not be able to reach anymore.
Su Ling didn't resist the gesture at all. She looked down at the Immortal-Slaying Sword in her hand. The last inscription on the blade, closest to the sword's crossguard, showed a faint shift toward gold right as she finished off the final member of the 5-person team.
She pulled up the Immortal-Slaying Sword's panel to check. A new Awakening gauge had appeared after the name, currently sitting at 50%. On top of that, Weapon Resonance had gone up by 1%.
The Immortal-Slaying Sword had growth potential, that was well within what Su Ling had expected. After all, the sheer strength Lu had shown was completely at odds with her current white-tier quality rating.
She was growing alongside her. Su Ling was still a fresh-faced newbie just barely getting started, so the sword was nothing more than the lowest-tier weapon. It would grow stronger as she grew stronger, rather than dragging her along from some position of overwhelming power.
Su Ling lightly ran her fingers across the inscription that had just shifted, not even noticing herself, how gentle the smile that had crept onto her face was, or how easy it would be to get lost in it.
"Alright, that's a wrap on Phase 1 of the special training."
Training needed balance between effort and rest, Lu understood that much at the most basic level. The back-to-back deaths had already started wearing on Su Ling's mind. Pushing further by force would only get half the results for double the effort.
Su Ling wasn't a machine. She got tired, and she needed rest. The Silver Dragon Gene hadn't directly granted her the raw power of a fully grown dragon, though what Su Ling didn't know was that this wasn't actually a limitation of the Silver Dragon Gene itself. It was Lu's doing.
Lu had intercepted the vast majority of the Silver Dragon Gene's power and held it back, leaving only a portion of the enhanced physical conditioning for Su Ling at this stage. The reason Su Ling couldn't transform into her full dragon form, or could only partially dragonify parts of her body for short bursts, was entirely because of this.
Su Ling's body gradually faded out and disappeared from the strange space. Lu, however, didn't immediately follow her out.
She walked through the kneeling crowd, stepped up the stairs of the altar, and with every step she took, the guardians standing on either side dropped to one knee, a reverence that looked for all the world like they were welcoming the arrival of a king.
She reached the foot of the bone throne, reached out, and softly stroked the dragon girl's cheek. She looked in silence at the quiet, sleeping face before her, closed her eyes, let out a slow breath, and then left the small world as well.
The moment she returned to reality, Lu spotted Su Ling asleep against the wall. Her sleeping face was identical to the dragon girl's on the throne, only where the dragon girl carried a cold, mature elegance, Su Ling in this moment looked soft and childlike.
When Su Ling woke up, the World Tree notified her that it was time to send her back to the real world. Along with the notification came a full list of rules and guidelines from the World Tree.
Su Ling skimmed through it. Most of it was standard stuff: don't share any World Tree intel with ordinary people in the real world, don't use any supernatural abilities in the real world.
Storage space would be sealed off in the real world too. Equipment, items, none of it could be brought back. The gist of it all, basically, was: go back to the real world and live like a normal person. Don't go causing trouble as a Contractor.
Su Ling had no real feelings about any of that. She wasn't the type to let power go straight to her head. And even if she had been at the start, after Lu's persistent efforts to keep pouring cold water on that, she was more or less fully back to earth by now.
The Immortal-Slaying Sword wasn't allowed back into the real world either. The moment she left the World Tree and returned to reality, it would be sealed inside her storage space. Lu, as the sword spirit, was unaffected by any of that, not like anyone else could see her anyway.
The transfer back to the real world was smooth and uneventful, almost anticlimactic, and Su Ling found herself slightly disoriented by how normal it felt. She was back on the same street she had left from. If it weren't for the fact that she was still in the body of a soft, sweet-looking young girl, she might've thought everything before had just been one wild, impossible dream.
More and more people were gathering on the street, clearly drawn in by the sound of the gunshot earlier. Su Ling pulled her hood up and slipped quickly through the crowd of murmuring onlookers, then called a car on her phone and headed home.
Leaving Tree City, the World Tree notified her that her first official mission would launch within 2 to 3 days. Plenty of time to go celebrate day one with her brothers. As for the person who tried to kill her...
Honestly? Not easy to track down. The only lead was the Gene Collapse Bullet. All she knew was that the other party was also a World Tree Contractor. It was a complete needle-in-a-haystack situation.
That said, letting a murder attempt slide entirely was obviously never going to happen. Su Ling decided to focus on getting stronger first, then pick a good day and find a Contractor with some kind of divination-type ability to see if they could suss out whoever had tried to have her killed.
Revenge is a dish best served cold, after all. Su Ling wasn't in a rush. She was still a newbie.
A young snake needs to learn to keep its fangs hidden first, that's the only way to strike from the shadows and finish the job in one clean hit.