Striking Behind Enemy Lines
**Crack!!**
**Crack!!!!**
Bone clubs slammed against the ground, against the tunnel walls, against the afterimages Mu Ningxue left in her wake.
This time, dispatching the cave fiends ahead of her wasn't going as smoothly as before. For one thing, seven had appeared all at once; for another, her Ice Lock was still on cooldown.
Using mid-tier Wind Element magic in a confined cave produced little direct effect — the space was simply too narrow. All Mu Ningxue could do for now was use her agile Wind Trail to keep the seven cave fiends at bay, buying time for the frost to spread and freeze them all in place.
The cave fiends, however, weren't entirely stupid. Whenever they spotted something pale and icy beginning to creep up their legs, they immediately smashed it with their clubs, shattering the frost before it could fully solidify and lock them in.
Their coordinated resistance pushed Mu Ningxue further onto the back foot, leaving her no choice but to fall back.
*I should have waited for that guy.* A flicker of regret crossed her mind.
She had gone too deep on her own. Mo Fan had no movement skills — there was no telling how long it would take him to reach her.
With him here, these cave fiends would be nothing. Lightning and fire combined was just violence stacked on top of more violence. Unlike her — the moment Ice Lock couldn't be chained continuously, or she had no time to trace her formations, she was left without any direct destructive capability.
*I'll have to use the Enchanted Gear.*
She had been weaving through all seven cave fiends on her Wind Track for quite some time now, but even she couldn't dodge bone clubs forever — sooner or later, one of those wild swings was going to connect.
"Qianjun — Lightning Seal — Furious Strike!"
Out of the pitch darkness, a tall, striking figure phased through as if from nowhere. The moment he appeared, countless writhing arcs of lightning seal marks already surrounded him.
At Mo Fan's command, every last one of those marks shot straight toward the hulking fiend that had been relentlessly chasing Mu Ningxue.
Lightning Seal hammered it again and again. Electrical arcs bored into muscle and bone, numbing everything they touched. The Spirit Grade Lightning Seed Qianjun added its concussive force to the assault. All of it converged on a single cave fiend at once — and the creature let out an awful shriek as it crumpled into a charred, limp wreck of burnt flesh, barely able to drag itself across the ground in its final death throes.
When Mu Ningxue saw who it was, a flicker of relief lit her eyes.
She glided to his side along a thread of Wind Track, breathing hard. She had clearly had a few close calls.
"One, two, three, four, five, six." Mo Fan curved the corner of his mouth upward. "Six of them. Just the right number."
His left hand still crackled with the residual energy of Lightning Seal, but his right wrist had, at some point no one had noticed, already burned to a vivid, molten crimson.
He hadn't thrown that punch earlier — he'd been afraid of hitting Mu Ningxue. Now there was no need to hold back.
"Rose Flame — Blazing Fist — Heavenstrike!!"
In a tunnel this narrow, using Blazing Fist required no aiming whatsoever. When it spread, it filled the entire corridor from wall to wall.
Mo Fan drove his fist forward. Furious flames shot down the passage in a straight line toward all six cave fiends. No matter how they shrieked and turned to flee, not one escaped the devastating might of Rose Flame Blazing Fist Heavenstrike.
Mo Fan's Rose Flame Blazing Fist was in a league of its own. Earlier, Zhao Manyan and Song Xia had needed Tidal Surge first — sweeping the fiends together — before following up with Blazing Fist, and even then they'd barely taken out seven or eight at a time. Mo Fan's fist needed no such preamble. Flames at double the potency were more than enough to blast these wretched creatures into ash — gone so fast they didn't even have time to feel pain.
Mu Ningxue watched from the side, watching the confident, almost buoyant look on his face, feeling the scorching heat radiating from him. She couldn't help but feel something stir quietly within her.
The man she remembered had mostly been full of empty bluster. Now he had changed — so much, in ways that ran deep. Even in her girlhood, Mu Ningxue had understood one truth: only with enough strength does one have the right to choose one's own path. She had once assumed that she and Mo Fan would drift apart and become strangers. She never imagined they would meet again like this — at the very peak of their generation.
"Impressive, right?" Mo Fan tilted his head toward her, one eyebrow raised.
"You got here faster than I expected," Mu Ningxue replied, neatly sidestepping his self-congratulation.
"Heh." Mo Fan's easy, sunny grin spread across his face. His inner voice, however, was saying something else entirely: *Of course I was fast — I Shadow Faded here. In League of Legends terms, that's Ghost plus Flash combined. Heroically saving a teammate, clear conscience intact.*
The embers from Blazing Fist had drifted and scattered throughout the cave in little pockets of firelight, just enough to illuminate what lay ahead.
Mu Ningxue peered deeper into the tunnel, then pointed to one side of the wall. "The cave turns at the corner up there."
"Probably connects to another den," Mo Fan said.
"Mm. You go first."
"..."
In the main tunnel, the fifteen students were still scrambling to hold their ground against cave fiends hammering in from both front and rear. Corpses were beginning to pile up at both ends — no one could say just how many of these grotesque things had made their home in this rail tunnel.
With no more threat from the sides, at least, the group had split into two teams of seven, alternating waves of magical bombardment from either direction. The cave fiends' advance remained suppressed, if barely.
"Damn it, there's still a massive mob behind us."
"Relax — they've lost the nerve to charge in and throw their lives away."
"Weird, what are they making such a racket about back there?"
"Who cares. Let them eat Blazing Fist again."
Song Xia threw a punch, and the result was remarkable — four cave fiends wiped out in a single blow.
What puzzled everyone, though, was this: the cave fiends that had just been rallying for a mass charge suddenly seemed to hit some invisible wall. Their formation dissolved into pandemonium.
"Rose Flame — Blazing Fist — Earthstrike!!!"
"Coiling Ice — Ice Lock — Bone Crush!!!"
Two voices — one male, one female — rang out from the darkness ahead. Before anyone could process what was happening, a brilliant flower of death bloomed in savage, vivid fullness among the dense horde. In the blinding flash of firelight, an incalculable number of cave fiends, bone clubs and all, were reduced to cinders.
Earthstrike alone was enough to level them. Then Ice Lock erupted — coiling chains, thick as a man's arm, wrapping around the remaining fiends and cinching everything tight. Those that might otherwise have leapt free of Earthstrike's flames were dragged back inward, herded straight into the funeral pyre blazing at the center.
Two mid-tier spells from second-level Spirit Seeds materializing from behind — it was the last thing the cave fiends had ever anticipated. Packed too densely together, they lost no fewer than ten or twenty of their number under the combined ice-and-fire onslaught in a matter of moments.
"That's Mo Fan and Mu Ningxue!"
"What the hell — how did they end up behind the cave fiends?"
"I am completely done with those two."
Everyone stared, slack-jawed, expressions priceless.
Moments ago they had been pinned in a desperate defensive position, cave fiends pressing in from both directions. Then those two had appeared out of nowhere, somehow flanked clean around to the enemy's rear.
Now it was the cave fiends caught between two fires.
In an instant, the seven students holding the front line surged with renewed energy. Together with the brutal duo tearing into them from the rear, they unleashed a torrent of magic on the horde — its formation shattered, its morale broken beyond recovery.