novelraw Chapter 200: Thunderous Feast
Chapter 200: Thunderous Feast
This metaphor unlocked the mental shackles labeled "standard tactics" in both hunters' minds, and they immediately understood Lin Jie's plan.
"Hold on tight!"
William stopped paying attention to the dark shape in the distance. He abandoned all defenses and poured every ounce of strength into steering toward survival.
A landing battle to beat the eel to shore had begun.
"Swish! Swish!"
William's arms moved like high-powered steam pistons, paddling the river with terrifying frequency.
The kayak, already falling apart as it drifted in the whirlpool, seemed to have been fitted with a powerful thruster, suddenly surging toward the nearest riverbank.
At the same time, Ethan used his now-empty pistols as auxiliary paddles, strenuously helping William correct their course.
Their opponent had not expected these tiny insects to resist;
instead of giving up when facing its power, they erupted with an astonishing will to survive.
The huge whirlpool churned by the creature's movement was torn open by William and Ethan’s unreasonable brute force, creating a small breach.It was that fleeting gap William seized.
He thrust his entire upper body out of the boat and clamped his right hand onto a rock jutting from the riverbank cliff.
"Shhhh—"
A rasping friction sound came from between his heavy tactical glove and the stone.
The muscles of his entire right arm bulged and veins stood out as he bore the kayak's massive inertial shock.
Finally, at the painful cost of his right shoulder muscles being torn, he succeeded in dragging the fragile craft—on the brink of death—toward the life-signifying riverbank.
"Quick! There's no time!"
William urged hoarsely, beads of sweat the size of soybeans mixing with icy river water and sliding down his twisted face.
They moved.
Ethan leapt first from the kayak, his lithe figure rolling nimbly across the slippery rock face, then immediately drew a fine engineer's dagger of Damascus steel set with a sapphire from his waist.
He treated this priceless work of art, worth enough to buy a small estate in London, like an ordinary iron spike and mercilessly stabbed it into the exposed mineral vein beneath his feet.
Next was Julian.
This normally feeble French scholar exploded with surprising strength.
He smashed the treasured briefcase he always treated as precious into another exposed vein gap.
"Clang!"
The sturdy case wedged into the fissure and became a makeshift "fork."
They began pulling every metal item they had, regardless of cost.
William's spare gun barrel, Ethan's spare magazines taken from his tactical vest, Lin Jie's brass compass used to draw maps, even the metal buckles they ripped off their belts were used as temporary "conductors," crazily shoved into the exposed mineral veins.
After they had contaminated seven or eight nearby "sockets," the subterranean giant eel lurking underwater finally moved again.
Its white skull emerged from the churning black river.
The hollow, degenerated eye sockets stared at the "dining plate" on the shore, blocked by the insects' pile of junk metal.
It had not expected its "cafeteria" to be poisoned.
Enraged, the thunder beast thrust its massive body out of the water with reckless force!
Its head, like a white meteor, charged blindly toward Lin Jie and the others on the narrow riverbank cliff!
"Scatter!!"
Lin Jie shouted a warning.
They had no time to think and relied on long-honed combat instincts, scattering like frightened rabbits in four directions.
"Rumble rumble rumble."
Lin Jie felt himself blown away by the fierce shockwave.
He rolled awkwardly across the rock face for several turns, dazed and disoriented.
When he struggled up from the vertigo and lifted his head, the sight before him shocked him.
The solid riverbank platform where they had just stood had vanished!
In its place was a massive impact crater over ten meters in diameter, its surface crisscrossed with spiderweb-like dense cracks!!
And the beast that had slammed the earth into shreds in a failed strike seemed to have exhausted most of its strength from that all-out collision.
It abandoned further futile attacks and aimed its several-meter-long tail at one of the nearest, still-uncontaminated primitive veins—not yet fouled by their pile of junk metal—to recharge.
Seeing this, everyone felt their hearts stop.
If this terrifying creature reconnected to the energy from the earth's depths, the result would be a thunderous hellscape ten times more horrific than the electromagnetic cage before.
And all the conductive "forks" they had were already used up.
At this critical moment.
At the instant the monstrous subterranean eel was about to jab its tail into the last unspoiled "charging socket," an unexpected echo occurred.
There was no warning.
It wasn't caused by any action from their team.
From the rock face on both sides, the ancient stone surface in which the mineral veins were embedded lit up with a mysterious emerald glow on its own.
Within the light, a complex ancient rune composed of countless spiral crescents and three-branched totems emerged from the hard rock like a dust-sealed ghost, carrying primordial natural force.
The rune's style was thick with Druidic faction flavor.
It was him.
Alexander von Humboldt.
One of I.A.R.C.'s revered elders, who, centuries ago, personally sealed this thunder beast here and laid down the last and most lethal safety device.
He had seemingly anticipated that some ignorant later generation or a sacrilegious opportunist might try to release the prisoner he had bound.
So he left on this vein a final ultimate trap fueled by the entire vein's vast energy, specifically designed to counter this thunder beast.
The eel's massive tail, thrust toward the vein, suddenly froze mid-air.
Then spiderweb-like arcs of electricity, now visible to the naked eye, began to course and flicker across its ghastly white body.
Its torso convulsed uncontrollably.
"It's temporarily paralyzed, attack its head!"
Ethan was the first to recover from shock. Hunter instinct seized the rare opportunity created for them by a pioneer who had passed away nearly half a century earlier.
He roared, pointing his reloaded Morning Star and Evening Star at the beast's upraised pale head, unleashing a barrage of Saint Relics rounds!
"Bang bang bang bang bang bang!"
William synchronized his actions, unleashing the full power of his Colt revolver. Specially made alchemical rounds screamed into the eel's skull.
However, the Saint Relics that could grievously wound spirits and the alchemical rounds that could harm ordinary UMA splashed like mud on the creature's soft pale skin, barely producing ripples.
Its skin's physical and energy resistance was astonishingly high;
their attacks couldn't break its defenses!
"Pointless, stop."
Julian, seeing the Druidic rune, recalled something.
He shouted hoarsely to Lin Jie.
"The pattern of that rune… it's 'stasis'! It's the Druidic 'stasis.' This is Mr. Humboldt's legacy;
he's helping us!"
"But that state won't last long. All alchemy has a cost! We must immediately think of a way…"
"Make it eat!"
Lin Jie understood Julian's full intention and, with a more direct phrase, called out the final execution plan.
Since Mr. Humboldt had already bound the beast to the "dining table" and external attacks were ineffective,
what they needed to do next was feed the main course into its mouth themselves!
Lin Jie's gaze locked onto the giant eel tail near the vein.
He could see a contact point at the tail tip different from its pale skin, an oddly charred dark red.
That was the "charging interface" it used to link to the vein and siphon geophysical energy.
That interface was less than half a meter from the bank's vein, but because its whole body was paralyzed it hadn't connected yet.
Knowledge from his past life about "short-circuits" flashed in his mind.
Lin Jie inhaled deeply, the air tinged with sulfur and ozone, and looked at the temporary "forks" stuck deep in the mineral veins to impede the eel.
"Remember all that junk we threw out earlier?"
"Wrap your hands with rubber clothing and move them to the vein under that eel!"
"Everything needs to be piled in the same spot."
No extra explanation was needed.
The tacit understanding forged by fighting shoulder to shoulder allowed William and Ethan to grasp Lin Jie's plan instantly.
They would "bridge" it. They would use the scattered metal conductors across the battlefield to forcibly construct a deathly thunder bridge between the beast seeking to recharge and the energy-filled mineral vein!
"Got it."
Ethan swiftly tore a sleeve off his rubber suit and wrapped his palm and forearm tightly.
Then, like a leopard, he dashed to the engineer's dagger deeply embedded in the rock.
William likewise protected his hands with torn cloth and forced out the strength to pull the most tightly jammed spare gun barrel.
"Use the case as the base! Ethan, insert the dagger into the notch in the case! William, place the barrel on top, aimed at that highest crystal cluster!"
Julian's precise directions guided them.
Braving burns from residual energy, they staggered but quickly carried and stacked the metal conductors as Julian instructed, piling them directly above the still-uncontaminated vein!
"Clang clatter—"
They clanged and collided, eventually forming a messy yet genuinely effective heap of metal conductors that, while precarious and crude, would do the job.
The eel, with its primitive and chaotic mind, could not comprehend the sudden "metal rain" before it.
Thousands of years of evolution had turned its body into a precise biological transformer, able to slowly and steadily draw the energy it required from the vein.
That process was like a trickle, safe and orderly.
But it could not understand that the crude conductor of metal now bypassed all its regulatory mechanisms.
This was no longer a controlled draw but a forcibly opened energy gate—one end connected to the vein's colossal power, the other directly leading into its unprotected body core.
It merely followed the charging instinct imprinted in its genes over millennia.
After struggling under the rune's paralyzing effect for about three minutes, it gently rested its dark-red, viscous-charged contact point on that pile of metal junk!
A massive, terrifying chain reaction occurred as current conducted.
"Boom!"
Far beyond the eel's body structure and biological capacitance limits, the pure energy from the entire mineral vein—untainted—was forced, unimpeded, through the metal conductors and funneled straight into the unlucky creature that had just placed its charging interface on the pile.
In that instant, the most indulgent thunderous feast the victim had ever hosted—self-catered to death—erupted within its body!
"Sssssssssssssss!"
Its mountain-sized pale body lit up like a blue-white bulb.
Pure blue-white bolts pierced crazily from every cell and every inch of flesh!
From its degenerated black eye sockets, from the abyssal maw ringed with keratinous barbs, from the countless tiny pores on its surface that sensed water flow,
they all erupted with cataclysmic light!!
The underground temple, silent for centuries, was illuminated like daylight by this absolute light from the earth's depths.
The subterranean giant eel convulsed and ballooned in a terrifying way during this internal energy short-circuit.
It did not even have time to utter a final dying howl.
Its entire nervous system and biological tissue were vaporized within the first millisecond by the unstoppable torrent of energy!
Finally.
After the ten-second white blaze that it had caused itself slowly faded,
the terrifying UMA that had occupied this underworld river and guarded the temple for nearly two thousand years—possessing Kingdom-class potential—vanished from the world.
All that remained was a segment of grotesquely altered body, its shell repeatedly scorched by lightning, fully carbonized on the outside while the interior flesh was roasted into char by the instantaneous extreme heat.
An overwhelmingly strong aroma of burning protein, like grilled meat, wafted through the post-apocalyptic subterranean river.