“What the fuck - ” FubeI Li looked back up, and saw that the thing behind the attack on the gate was a long and winding worm with only a round and wide mouth with layers of teeth within, visible sections on its body, elastic, semitransparent and smooth skins and shaking and twitching black hair coming from the gaps between sections. Under the semi transparent skins, they could see long strings of muscles, tubes and vibrating nodes on these tubes. Fubei Li could not find a better description of this creature, but likened it to a giant tapeworm the size of several commercial planes chained up head to tail, and with a more complex internal organ system.

One of the far away sections on the giant worm’s body lit up in bright light yellow, then in around five seconds, the section closer to its head lit up, then the next, then the next. Before long, around a third of the sections on the worm’s body and its head lit up, and another beam of bright white energy beam shot out from its mouth, aiming right at the gate.

“Boom!” this time the attack tore up more ground before the gate, and the broken pieces of the land got scattered and sent into the space around, leaving the team of four less room to traverse. The attack left a visible dent and several cracks on the spinning gate, and probably because of this, the speed in which the gate spun was slowed and irregular.

“That thing’s tearing up the land and breaking the gate! We must stop it.” Xyankor extended his hands to the side, and two grey balls of energy appeared on his palms.

Without any further calls to action, all members of the team of four started conjuring up their power and prepared for attack. Dave wielded a similar kind of grey energy, and Perketta’s power was unsurprisingly some kind of fog-like magical energy. Fubei Li, as one of Jiamen’s more independent avatars, wielded the same kind of energy as Jianmen but used a slightly different weapon - a traditional Chinese writing brush.

Fubei Li waved his writing brush in the air, and his powers were condensed and projected into the air into different symbols and words in different calligraphy styles. Each of the words and symbols launched themselves into space at the body of the giant worm once Fubei Li finished writing, some exploded on impact, some became energy drills drilling on the worm’s skins, and some became curses that took effect on the target areas targeted by him and his other three teammates.

The attacks startled the giant worm, but they did not deal too much damage to its body. The giant worm twitched and curled back its body but did not make a noise. The black hairs growing from the gaps between its body sections shot out from their original positions, some into the air, and some aiming at Fubei Li’s team.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Fubei Li wrote a Chinese word “trap” in the air and tried to capture one of the black hairs with it, while the other black hairs aiming at them were just buried into the land. The “trap” word turned into an orange and red energy web when coming into contact with the hair and wrapped around the hair like a normal capture net on impact. But the speed was too sharp and too fast that the web was impaled and the hair still buried itself beneath the surface of the land.

“Be careful of the hairs!” Fubei Li yelled immediately: “They’re alive!”

“Crack!” “Crack!” “Crack” just bare moments after Fubei Li’s warning, black tentacles with shiny eyes and long tongues covered in twitching bristles broke out from the ground, and almost immediately attempted to wrap around and capture the team of four that launched their attack on the worm.

Perketta swung her hand horizontally at her left side and unleashed a spinning saw blade made of fog. It made a high pitched metal grinding sound when it ran into the black tentacles along its path. It took only a few seconds for the spinning fog saw blade to cut through the first couple of black tentacles. But the process also exhausted its power, and it ended up dissipating when cutting on a separate black tentacle.

Fubei Li wrote a two character word in traditional Chinese in the air then struck the word with his left palm. The characters in the word exploded and turned into an orange and golden energy wave just like a high wave one could see on a beach. The energy wave crushed against three black tentacles that tried to attack Dave and Xyankor, and almost instantly, the three tentacles started cracking up from the points of contact with the energy wave.

Dave and Xyankor leapt away from the black tentacles that tried to attack them and unleashed another round of energy attacks on the giant worm. The giant worm curled its body in the space attempting to dodge the attacks, but its body was just way too big to maneuver out of the way of attacks at this close a range and this speed. The attacks struck true, right on the cursed and thus weakened spots on its body, and the team of four could see the burn marks and cracks on the worm’s body.

“Call out your fighters!” Dave yelled at Perketta as he swerved across the attacks of two black tentacles: “Their gate is under attack, why is no one coming?!”

“The gate seemed to be quite seriously damaged.” Perketta said while conjuring up a shield with spikes protruding out made of dense fog to block an attack from one of the black tentacles coming from the space: “The gate was built to shut down and bar itself when it sustained enough damage. They had to override the array to get out!”

“So - how quick can they override the array?!” Xyankor struck a black tentacle with a curved energy sword in his left hand, tearing it up into thousands of pieces, “We cannot just keep fighting here alone forever. At some point we will have to go beyond the gates or back off!”

“Let me try something!” Fubei Li reached into his pocket and took out a wooden coin, “Cover me for a second!”

Dave rushed to Fubei Li’s side, and with his two arms turned into dozens of shadows of arms extending from his back and waist, destroying the surrounding back tentacles trying to attack him.

Fubei Li closed his eyes and concentrated his Xuanli on the coin, and a marking appeared on the coin - it was giving off a green light.

“Holy sh - it’d better work!” Dave raised his eyebrows and said.