I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 852: The Extra Seventh-Levels

Several days later Augusta sent word back, reporting that she had found traces of the seventh-level mushroom-men.

Jie Ming opened a spatial teleport the moment he received the message, but when he arrived he found that fighting had already broken out.

Augusta was facing three of them at once, the four fundamental forces woven into a dense net of attack and defense about her body, pinning three seventh-level mushroom-men more than a hundred meters in size firmly at the center of the battlefield.

The gray-yellow vault of the sky was torn by the violent elemental fluctuations into countless dark fissures, and the residual force of the shockwaves alone flung every mushroom-man within several hundred kilometers away.

Jie Ming stopped at the edge of the battlefield without immediately joining in. He took one look at the state of things and could not help narrowing his eyes.

The fighting strength of these seventh-level mushroom-men far exceeded expectations!

From the look of the battlefield, Augusta had not actually gained the upper hand, and was unable to break these mushroom-men decisively at all.

That was a rather astonishing thing. With her fighting strength, taking on ordinary seventh-level creatures should not have cost her nearly this much effort.

On close observation Jie Ming found that every seventh-level mushroom-man possessed an utterly exaggerated defensive power, and more troublesome still, they had evolved a capacity for high-speed self-healing that ordinary mushroom-men did not have.

Severed tentacles or a shattered outer shell, for instance, would restore themselves automatically almost in the blink of an eye.

All in all, the fighting strength of these seventh-level mushroom-men no longer conformed in the slightest to the growth curve of the mushroom-men below sixth level.

Whether in their control over the elements or in their explosive power, they were far above the mark.

Boom!

As Augusta fired off a reinforced shell with electromagnetic force, one mushroom-man's cap was split cleanly in two down the middle.

At the wound flesh and bone turned outward, and crystalline body fluid sprayed in all directions.

Yet the next instant a layer of newborn rock shell had already congealed over the severed edges.

And seizing the opening that mushroom-man's willingness to eat the attack had bought them, the other two raised their tentacles and lashed viciously at Augusta.

Augusta gave a cold snort, and the force field shrouding her body contracted abruptly, wrenching the incoming tentacles bodily aside.

But the mushroom-man from before, the one whose cap had been shaved into a Mediterranean, closed in at that same moment of vulnerability, its thick arms flaring with a dazzling earthen-yellow light as it smashed down at Augusta!

Augusta at once took hold of the magnetic force around her and launched herself clear, dodging the blow by the barest margin.

“Troublesome.” She muttered it under her breath, a certain gravity in her tone.

These mushroom-men, by virtue of the innate compatibility an earth-element creature has with the earth element, possessed considerable control over matter, and that in turn rendered useless Augusta's greatest strength, the use of electromagnetic force to manipulate matter into an attack.

Short of an ultra-high-speed projectile compressed and accelerated to the limit, methods such as the one she favored, using electromagnetic force to congeal matter into a fist, had no effect whatsoever on these mushroom-men.

Just as Augusta was considering whether to raise her output and settle the matter with the resolve to tear apart a portion of the plane, two more powerful auras erupted from deep in the wasteland below.

Two more seventh-level mushroom-men came howling up out of the hollows beneath the earth, heading straight for Augusta.

Seeing it, Jie Ming, who had been watching from the side, raised his hand without hesitation.

The dozen or more Echo Shell Talisman-Rune Artifacts worn at his wrist activated together, and a dozen light shells fanned out in formation and swept violently over the two mushroom-men.

Boom boom boom boom boom!!

The first volley of light shells struck home one after another, yet could only blow shallow craters across the surface of the two mushroom-men's shells.

That strike of Jie Ming's had, however, exposed his presence.

One mushroom-man roared and hurled its massive body at Jie Ming, tentacles whipping and coiling in.

Jie Ming's foot shifted slightly, the Great Void Step unfolded in an instant, and his figure slid half a pace aside to evade that killing blow by the narrowest margin.

Immediately after, the second volley of Echo Shells swept over them again.

In the instant the new shells landed, the elemental particles left behind by the first were detonated in their entirety.

Boom!!!

The rock armor layered over that mushroom-man collapsed on the spot, the broken shell scattering in all directions like hail.

Yet the fruits of that volley amounted to no more than this; the mushroom-man's body had scarcely been damaged at all.

“Then let's go again.”

Jie Ming raised his hand, and a third volley of light shells poured down in succession.

This time the power had already climbed enormously.

Ka-boom!!!

The mushroom-man's entire body blew apart with a roar, the aftershock spreading across the ground in wave upon wave, scorching a great swath of the surrounding area black.

Even so, this mushroom-man still had not died.

What remained of its self-healing was still desperately repairing the wounds, newborn tissue welling ceaselessly from the ruptures.

But having recognized how dangerous Jie Ming was, the other mushroom-man threw itself at him before he could deliver the finishing blow.

At the same time one of the mushroom-men on Augusta's side broke off and charged Jie Ming as well.

Seeing this, Jie Ming fired his dozen-odd Echo Shell Talisman-Rune Artifacts in rotation, and the unbroken stream of light shells blasted the two mushroom-men's shells to pieces.

Every hit accumulated more elemental particles upon them, so that the destructive power of the next climbed higher and higher, until the two of them had been shattered utterly.

And once Jie Ming had joined the fight, Augusta was finally free to act, using the double suppression of gravity and electromagnetism to lock down the movements of the other two mushroom-men completely.

As time went on, the destructive power of Jie Ming's Echo Shells grew stronger and stronger.

Earlier, working together, the three mushroom-men had been able to resist in turns, reducing the damage while seizing the time to knit themselves back together.

But as the number of detonations mounted, the concentration of elements in the area climbed higher and higher, and the power of every Echo Shell rose at a furious rate.

At last…

Boom!!!

Amid a deafening roar of explosions the bodies of the three seventh-level mushroom-men were blasted apart and toppled thunderously to the ground.

And on Augusta's side, the bodies of the other two seventh-level mushroom-men had been twisted into the shape of wrung-out rags.

Five seventh-level mushroom-men lay sprawled across a stretch of charred and ravaged wasteland, their auras faint in the extreme.

Yet through the restraint Jie Ming and Augusta had deliberately shown, a last breath of life still remained in them.

Jie Ming slowly put away the Talisman-Rune Artifacts in his hands, their light not yet faded, and gazed out over that devastated battlefield.

But neither on his face nor on Augusta's was there any ease of a job finished.

Neither of them had expected five seventh-level mushroom-men to turn up all at once.

This… did not match Jie Ming's earlier deductions in the slightest.

After all, according to Augusta's earlier intelligence, only five to seven seventh-level fluctuations had been detected across the entire plane.

He walked slowly over to one of the mushroom-men he had crippled and cast Soul Search on it directly.

A moment later he withdrew his mental energy, his expression turning a shade graver. “This is trouble…”

The soul memories of this mushroom-man were shattered past all recognition, exactly like those of the other mushroom-men who had been advanced to sixth level on a temporary basis.