novelraw Chapter 158: The Great Avalanche
Chapter 158: The Great Avalanche
Lin Jie pushed the cylinder into the chamber of the Serene Heart, and the world immediately slowed.
The rain of falling stone froze midair, William’s mechanical sounds of reloading became distant, and Julian’s gasps from mental exhaustion sounded unreal.
The valley became a vast, silent operating table.
Lin Jie was the only surgeon in this operation.
In his hand, the revolver loaded with five Salt-Core Bullets was the scalpel to excise the lethal tumor lodged in the mountain’s heart.
He could feel the worm clinging to the rock face tens of meters away, its invisible, indifferent gaze already fixed on him.
This was a gaze beyond visual senses, a scrutiny originating from the spiritual plane, cold and heavy, carrying the oppressive prelude to an attack.
Yet Lin Jie’s mind entered a state of clear emptiness in that precise moment.
The Hearing Bone embedded in the Serene Heart’s grip transmitted a deep-sea calm and majestic field of Zen to him.
His thinking cooled like a superconductor, stripped of distractions, leaving only the logical calculations serving the hunt.He had only five chances.
Five bullets were the chips deciding the fate of everyone present, including the three Root Guardians whose stances were unclear on the ridge.
Not a single one could be wasted.
So where should the first cut land?
Lin Jie’s gaze became a high-precision caliper, sweeping repeatedly over the gray-brown, continually writhing body of the Petrification Worm.
His brain’s database—constructed from countless UMA files and occult knowledge—spun rapidly.
Although this was a geological-biological hybrid never before recorded, its essentials were analogous.
Any living organism must have a core that sustains its life functions.
That might be an organ akin to a biological heart or brain, or some unique energy hub or spiritual node.
He recalled the earlier shot that hit the UMA’s midsection with ordinary alchemical ammunition.
That shot had indeed injured it and provoked a violent pain response.
“That’s it.”
A calm conclusion formed in his mind.
That area was likely the worm’s digestive tract or a region dense with neural cords.
It might not be the absolute lethal core, but it was certainly a weak point with sensitive reactions.
If the first Salt-Core Bullet could be delivered precisely into that position, the purification storm triggered by the Consecrated Salt would erupt from within, instantly destroying its core physiological structure and ending the fight.
This tactical inference, grounded in biological common sense and battlefield evidence, was logically sound.
Lin Jie also had confidence in the Serene Heart in his hand, a scalpel with Divine Ballistic Stabilization.
He no longer hesitated.
He slowly raised the Serene Heart, steadying the sights on the midsection of the giant worm on the distant rock face, the section where it funneled all its power into its mouthparts.
He could see mysterious magma-like hot veins ripple across the UMA’s dark red body as energy overconcentrated.
It was charging.
Lin Jie waited for the optimal surgical moment.
Time stretched into a taut string.
Finally.
At the instant the Tatzelwurm opened its abyssal maw, preparing to unleash its breath, a sharp glint passed through Lin Jie’s eyes, and his finger squeezed the trigger steadily.
Bang!!!
A crisp gunshot shattered the valley’s hush and sounded the prelude to the final showdown.
The first silver Salt-Core Bullet, carrying all hope, trailed a scarcely visible white halo and flew in an absolutely straight line toward its long-targeted point.
Ssssh!
The bullet unsurprisingly pierced through the slick mucus defense and sank deep into the worm’s midsection soft spot.
“Hit!”
Those three words erupted simultaneously in everyone’s minds.
Klaus’s dust- and blood-covered face broke into a relieved smile.
Julian tightened his grip on his staff, ready to cheer victory.
William had already begun sweeping his muzzle around, wary of a dying counterattack.
However, the anticipated scene of the UMA collapsing into powder from core damage did not occur.
“Roar—hissssss—!”
The Salt-Core Bullet detonated inside it like concentrated sulfuric acid injected into a bloodstream, triggering a fierce alchemical reaction.
The high-purity Consecrated Salt burned and decomposed its internal structure from within.
The Petrification Worm’s body convulsed wildly, rolling across the rock face.
But it did not die.
On the contrary, pain birthed a desire to destroy;
it had charged to the limit. Its breath, which should have been aimed precisely at Lin Jie and the others, spun out of control due to muscle spasms.
A gray-green torrent more than five meters across swept indiscriminately toward the other side of the battlefield.
That direction happened to be the ridge previously sealed by the collapse, the very foothold where the three Root Guardians stood.
Lin Jie’s face drained of color.
He had made a mistake.
A fundamental error rooted in the basic logic of his thinking.
He had used human—and all Earthly biological—common sense to judge an unknown from the inner world.
Conventional creatures die when struck at vital points.
But this UMA, this geological-biological amalgam, did not conform to the model of a normal organism.
It had no traditional heart, no fragile brain, no centralized nervous hub.
Its body resembled a molten ore vein that had flowed within the crust for eons and developed self-awareness.
Or it was a massive distributed system composed of countless independent energy units.
Any local damage, no matter how severe, would simply be isolated and cut off, and then replaced via its terrifying regenerative capacity.
Salt was indeed poisonous to it.
But the poison could not kill it instantly.
The toxin only stimulated it, transforming all its pain into an indiscriminate, annihilating assault.
Watching that petrifying flood, capable of burying everything, about to swallow the three Root Guardians—innocent enough not to deserve death—Lin Jie felt his heart sink.
Was this the price?
This the heavy cost demanded by a single small mistake in the hunter’s world?
But at this critical moment, just as Lin Jie sank into self-blame and helpless despair, a roar erupted from the rubble behind him where stones half-buried a collapsed area.
“Don’t you dare!!!”
It was Klaus!
Despite having supposedly lost his combat effectiveness, the German supervisor erupted with a force born of willpower and desire to survive that even made the UMA take notice.
The rock layer crushing his should-have-been-crippled right shoulder flashed one last dazzling streak of gold light from the Unyielding Wall as he roared.
Crack!!!
He shattered the hard stone purely through will and the Unyielding Wall’s final strength.
Countless gray-white rock fragments scattered, revealing the arm beneath—bloodied and stripped to the bone.
Klaus used that newly freed, mangled limb to brace the ground and slowly pull himself from the rubble.
He did not look toward the enraged UMA or at Lin Jie.
He fixed his burning gaze on the petrifying torrent about to kill innocents.
He ripped out from the wreckage the hunting shotgun that had served as a brace, its barrel bent and deformed.
With lightning speed he loaded a red signal flare into the chamber.
This was not a combat round.
It was a last-resort beacon fired skyward to call for rescue in extremis.
And now Klaus Weber would use that last hope to create a miracle.
Bang!
He aimed the muzzle above the flood, at a huge glacier clinging precariously to the cliff—geologically weakened by the upheaval.
The red flare trailed a tragic, heroic fiery tail like an ascending meteor and struck the glacier’s vulnerable point with precision.
A violent explosion occurred.
Rumble!!!!
A man-made avalanche thundered down.
Tens of thousands of tons of ice, snow, and rock tore free from the mountain wall, forming a white torrent that blocked sun and sky.
They crashed into the rampaging, out-of-control petrifying breath with unstoppable force.
Ice met stone.
White met gray-green.
Two of the mountain’s most primal forces collided in midair with a violent impact that made the entire Alps tremble.
In that instant the world lost sound and color.
Everyone’s vision was swallowed by the destructive chaos of flying ice crystals and rock splinters.
Within that chaos, no one could know whether the collision would result in salvation or a more complete annihilation.
Where would the enraged Tatzelwurm, driven by agonized fury, reemerge from this turmoil?
Lin Jie clutched the revolver that still held four bullets.
He knew the fight was far from over.
Those four bullets were the last hope determining whether everyone could emerge alive from this chaos.