Chapter 493

Chapter 493: Emotional Detonation

The boundary between the inner city and the outer city had become a literal river of blood after nearly a week of relentless battle.

The majority of the blood belonged to extraordinary beasts, with only a small portion coming from humans. The corpses piled high beneath the city walls softened the once sharp angle between the walls and the ground, making it easier for the extraordinary beasts to climb.

The humans had considered clearing the bodies, but such tasks were typically reserved for after the battle. However, it seemed this battle might never end.

Thus, the bodies continued to accumulate, and the biomass oozed slowly from the wounds, forming rivulets that eventually trickled like a stream.

Unlike the inner city, the outer city lacked a complex sewer system, but it did have shallow surface drainage designs.

The blood flowed along the uneven terrain into the ditches lining the streets, spreading in all directions until it reached a severed drainage pipe, cascading into a bottomless pit.

This was the handiwork of Lachesis’s puppets.

In the pitch-black depths of the cave, something was brewing—a creation even Lachesis herself did not fully understand.

After all, she was not Atropos, and her knowledge of living beings remained incomplete.

Yet, the outcome did not disappoint her.

In the dark abyss, the planet’s biomass, nearly a hundred human puppet bodies, the mingled blood of countless extraordinary beasts, and seeds from Clotho…

These elements devoured and merged with one another, locked in a struggle with no clear victor.

Finally, Lachesis intervened from afar, injecting the extreme human emotions derived from Atropos’s research at the consciousness level into this chaotic life form.

At that moment, the mass stabilized into a coherent form.

This new creation began to grow wildly, driven by instinct, consuming all organic matter around it to complete itself.

In an unnoticed corner of the outer city, deep within a mine, a towering black-purple Giant Tree erupted from the ground, growing with the ferocity of a fountain.

The surface of the Giant Tree bore the rough texture of plants, adorned with the claws and feathers of extraordinary beasts. From a distance, these features twisted into distorted human faces—some serene, as if lost in blissful dreams, while others seemed to writhe in unease.

Through her connection with the hundred puppets, Lachesis began to gradually assert control over this newborn creation.

The Giant Tree continued to grow, its biological field denser than even Lachesis’s, which was dominated by tall grass.

This density allowed the Giant Tree to firmly establish itself within the outer city, unlike the tall grass and Misty Forest, which halted at the city walls.

Now, the Giant Tree served as a relay for Lachesis’s biological field, amplifying her corruptive powers.

Through the thick concrete walls, human emotions and thoughts lay exposed before Lachesis.

She could now influence those who approached the city walls!

The high population density no longer shielded them from her power. Lachesis once again began to manipulate human minds from the shadows.

She saw an elderly man huddled on a bed in an underground shelter area and planted the seed of "laziness" in his mind.

She saw exhausted workers rotating shifts in a factory and stirred a hint of "anger" in their thoughts.

She saw soldiers resting and tending to their wounds, carefully nurturing "pain" in their hearts.

These emotional seeds would subtly grow within the humans, like emotional bombs, until they detonated at the right moment.

Through the black-purple Giant Tree, Lachesis’s main consciousness roamed freely along the edge of the inner city, observing everything through human eyes.

At one moment, a fragment of her consciousness invaded a human’s mind, sharing their perspective.

That human looked up toward the High Position on the city wall, where a man stood in midair, his body slowly disintegrating.

Beside him, countless gray-black specks were crashing into the city with a sound that pierced the air.

That was the rain of arrows shot by extraordinary beasts.

In that moment, Lachesis noticed an almost infinite fear rising in this human’s heart.

A hauntingly sweet fear.

The fear affected not only his mind but also his body, influencing the hormones and muscles within him.

At this moment, Lachesis chose not to plant seeds of emotion but instead directly exploited this strong emotional fluctuation to begin eroding and guiding this humanoid body.

Screams loud enough to tear eardrums echoed in this temporary shelter area above ground, causing the nearest house windows to shatter instantly.

Just before his consciousness was extinguished, Lachesis detonated the fear within this human’s heart.

The impact at the level of the biological field spread rapidly with the scream, like an uncontrollable plague. In the shelter area’s square, dozens of people instinctively felt their hearts race upon hearing the scream, allowing Lachesis to complete her invasion.

Thus, more screams erupted, the sound waves influencing and overlapping each other, leaving people’s rational minds shattered amid the continuous screams, with only a high and mighty consciousness controlling the unmanned bodies.

—

Luke heard the screams.

This was utterly unreasonable.

Not to mention that the well-trained soldiers and warriors on the city wall rarely made such meaningless sounds, the sheer height of the several dozen-meter-tall walls should have muffled most sounds from below.

But now, the screams echoed through, an undeniable truth.

Luke knew that someone had seen the rain of arrows falling from the sky and realized they might have nowhere to escape.

It was his dereliction of duty.

But he still had a chance to rectify it—he was willing to do anything to protect the people behind him, just like his father.

Since losing his right arm, Luke had been training his abilities to specialize in compensating for the lost limb.

He could shape the shield-like constructs created by his abilities into various forms and use his power to touch certain things.

Ultimately, during intense training in the sewer, he managed to complete the restoration of his body using his abilities.

Thanks to the superb skills of the "Paster," the severed area of his right arm and shoulder had healed remarkably well. The new flesh slightly bulged, allowing his ability-formed arm to fit better with his physical body.

But it was only a fit; Luke’s ability-transformed right arm and his body were never truly one. He had grown accustomed to this, but at this moment, he noticed a tendency for them to merge—

Facing such an anomaly, Luke accepted without hesitation.

In the sky above the city wall, he transformed into a gentle light carrying lightning, merging with the shield of Hope City, blocking all the rain of spikes.