My lord, spare his life!

Guan Si was so angry that his wolf fur stood on end.

Her already translucent form became even more ethereal.

He was merely a wisp of consciousness attached to a staggering wolf cub, not his true self. He was struggling to protect himself, let alone help Zhang Yang restrain his opponent. Instead of showing sympathy for his predicament, Zhang Yang mocked his lack of strength?

In that instant, Guan Si deeply understood what regret meant.

She shouldn't have been interested in Zhang Boyuan's human skin in the first place. If she hadn't been interested in human skin, she wouldn't have inexplicably received two human skins that any Tom, Dick, or Harry could have, and she wouldn't have agreed to take over the Dongfan trade route and cooperate with her without thinking, and she wouldn't have been ridiculed.

The woman spat out a mouthful of bloody saliva.

His gaze swept between the young wolf Guan Si and Zhang Yang.

He sneered, "You little bastard, starting to fight like dogs?"

Guan Si scratched the ground in frustration, then leaned forward, baring his teeth menacingly. Centered on him, the swirling energy of heaven and earth surged towards him, and as his illusory fur solidified with each breath, the wolf cub's body rapidly grew taller. From shoulder height barely reaching Zhang Yang's calves, in just a few breaths, he had grown to be two heads taller than her, his ferocious armor covering his vital points.

Zhang Yang patted his beast armor.

"This gear is great, thick and high-quality, it looks incredibly defensive." A qualified tank not only needs to be able to taunt and draw aggro, but also needs high-defense gear. With a tank like this in the team, DPS and healers can rest easy, and even the boss can rest in peace.

Guan Si: "..."

His aura was forced to stagnate for a moment.

Besides himself, the first person to notice was that woman.

"You little bastard, it seems you two aren't on the same page."

The woman laughed loudly, looking up at the sky.

Guan Si felt that he had never been as humiliated and angry as he was now. Before the woman could say anything more hurtful, he pounced like a wolf, using his primal power to fight his way to her.

"Thump!"

A muffled thud accompanied the sound of a sharp blade piercing flesh.

Guan Si's wolf claws pressed down on the woman's shoulders, using immense force to send her flying. The two crashed through several giant trees, finally slamming the woman into a tree trunk, embedding her within. He bared his fangs, preparing to unleash his claws to cleave her body in two, but was thrown back just as his claws were about to touch their target. Upon closer inspection, dozens of eerie, black chains emerged from where they had been standing.

These chains, like sentient pythons, surged toward Guan Si like a rushing torrent, and no matter how he dodged, he couldn't shake them off.

Fragments of terracotta figurines fell from the woman's body into the tree trunk.

It revealed a face that was both more youthful and more ferocious.

She was panting heavily, her hands and feet still trembling, her chest heaving, but her eyes were astonishingly bright, brimming with a chilling madness. She said, "...Ha, you've ruined another scapegoat for me...you little bastard, I'm changing my mind."

Watching the disgusting chains chasing him, Guan Si grew increasingly agitated. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Zhang Yang watching the scene with his cane, and he froze for a moment. In that instant, the number of black chains doubled, one of them wrapping around his hind leg. Without hesitation, Guan Si tore off his leg, transforming into a streak of black light to escape the encirclement.

The wolf flipped in the air.

As soon as it landed, black mist surged from the broken end and new legs grew out.

Guan Si cursed his bad luck inwardly.

The scapegoat is different from other ghosts, and this woman is also very different from other spirits who descended to become scapegoats. Her chains don't harm the physical body much, but they have an overwhelming advantage over the soul, even easily breaking through the skin's protection to pull out the soul. Even with Guan Si's skills, he didn't dare to confront her directly.

call out--

The arrow, arcing through numerous obstacles, aimed directly at Guan Si.

Guan Si: "..."

Finally, unable to contain himself any longer, he shouted, "Zhang Boyuan, what are you waiting for?"

Zhang Yang said innocently, "I'm afraid I'll over-aggro once your hatred stabilizes."

Guan Si: "..."

These words, when heard by him, meant "I'm afraid I'll accidentally hurt my teammates if she beats you to death," which nearly gave him a heart attack. He hesitated for a moment, wondering if he should withdraw his consciousness and let Zhang Yang face the woman head-on. After thinking about it, he decided not to do it.

The woman shot the arrow so fast that it left afterimages.

Countless star-shaped arrows roared as they left the bowstring, their target Guan Si.

Ironically, if it were Guan Si himself, while he would be wary of women's abilities, he wouldn't be avoiding them like this. He could easily snap their necks before they posed a threat. Unfortunately, he's currently possessing the body of a wolf cub…

Zhang Yang watched for a long time.

The woman's gaze remained fixed away from herself. Judging that her hatred had subsided, she grabbed her cane, ready to strike. Before she could take a step, she felt a tightening force on her ankle.

She lowered her head involuntarily.

Coincidentally, the woman's barrage of arrows also paused for a moment.

She smiled at Guan Si, but Guan Si's intuition told him something was wrong. He glanced around and caught a glimpse of a long, thin black chain binding Zhang Yang's ankle. One end of the chain was connected to the ground, while the other end was embedded in Zhang Yang's ankle flesh, deeply rooted in her bones.

Seeing this, the woman sneered and wiped the blood from her mouth with the back of her hand.

"You little bastard, you think you're my target? How could I? Back then, I wanted to skin you alive and make you my scapegoat, so you could serve me for life. But over the years, I've wanted to turn you into a human pig, a fleshy Ganoderma lucidum, to keep you in a jar for life, so I can slice off a piece of your flesh whenever I want to eat you..."

After she finished speaking, she raised her chin at Zhang Yang.

He ordered, "Kill him!"

Guan Si's eyes widened in fury: "...How dare you!"

Zhang Boyuan's human skin and bones were the ones he set his sights on first!

What kind of Tom, Dick, or Harry dares to covet his future collection!

The woman, however, misunderstood his meaning and felt a genuine pleasure at his anger: "You little bastard, you actually have human emotions? So this is your weakness? Heh, since that's the case—"

She changed one of Zhang Yang's orders.

Let Zhang Yang cut her own face first.

Zhang Yang stood motionless, his gaze seemingly unfocused, drifting into some unknown void, much like someone who had lost their soul.

In fact—

She was looking at the updated system logs.

The boss has used "Soul Devouring" on you.

The boss has used "Soul Devouring" on you.

The boss has used "Soul Devouring" on you.

Perhaps because important information needs to be refreshed three times, Zhang Yang saw three scarlet system log notifications.

And the last message was—

[The BOSS is watching you from the sky, looking utterly bewildered.]

Zhang Yang subconsciously looked up.

Afraid that liquid might fall on her head, she only looked away after making sure there wasn't any. Seeing that Guan Si and the BOSS had stopped fighting and were both looking at her, she slightly moved her eyes. Was the BOSS dead? Or had the BOSS battle entered its next phase?

She glanced at the character dialogue in the system log again.

The woman first launched into a long speech about Guan Si.

He shouted triumphantly at Zhang Yang, looking at the map: "Kill him!"

Guan Si shouted angrily at the map: "...How dare you!"

The woman on the map exclaimed gleefully, "You little bastard..."

Zhang Yang stared at the plot, completely bewildered. She blinked, her expression cold. "Boss," Zhang Yang said, her voice trembling with confusion, "we're not on the same side. Why are you ordering me around?"

Before the woman could even process what he'd said, Guan Si already knew that Zhang Yang was still Zhang Yang; the woman's cruel methods had failed. He felt a mixture of schadenfreude and a twitching at the corner of his mouth.

"You—you tricked me!"

The woman tried to control it with her fingers, but found it had no effect.

The chain had clearly bound the target, but no matter how hard she tried, the soul, which should have been light and airy, was as heavy as a mountain and remained completely still, let alone being pulled out.

"Your soul..."

The strength of a person's soul does indeed vary.

For example, she could easily turn ordinary people she captured into scapegoats, but she would have to think twice when dealing with someone possessing the power of the Ranks of Stars. Zhang Yang's aura was very pure, without any Ranks of Stars. Naturally, turning him into a scapegoat was much simpler than dealing with Guan Si.

Zhang Yang: "What soul?"

Souls and such? Cyber ​​creatures don't have those.

In the past, dungeon bosses also had special skills that directly attacked the soul, and could even shake the player's "cyber soul" out of their body. Some bosses even required all the players' souls to leave their bodies in order to fight them. However, the player's soul form is only made transparent in the model.

Zhang Yang had to go to great lengths to imitate others so as not to give himself away in team battles.

She said, "I don't have a soul."

The reason she has no soul is—

The game designers did not create transparent models for the NPCs.

This type of modeling is only available to players and red-named NPCs with spirit-like attributes; ordinary NPCs—such as Zhang Yang, who was originally just a background NPC in the world's lore—don't deserve it. Without transparent modeling, there are naturally no cybernetics spirits.

She spoke earnestly, but to others it sounded like a thunderclap.

Guan Si said, "Oh no, she's trying to escape!"

The scapegoat's true identity has been seen; how could they possibly escape?

The woman cursed inwardly, but knew that the most urgent thing was to escape as quickly as possible. Her original plan was to use Zhang Yang as a pawn to launch a surprise attack on Guan Si, intending to at least annoy him if not kill him, and ideally severely weaken him. However, things didn't go as planned; Zhang Yang was soulless! This meant that Zhang Yang was completely unafraid of her methods, and she was about to lose a major asset.

A dark shadow drifted in like a ghost, looming over the woman's head.

Invisible ripples emanated from Zhang Yang's palm, covering his cane.

clang!

With a loud bang, the cane came crashing down on his head.

With a devastating blow, the woman's legs were almost driven into the ground, up to her calves. Immediately afterward, another wolf's claw lashed out, and she raised her arm to block. The instant the two made contact, the woman felt her bones tremble violently, her blood nearly stop flowing.

boor!

The woman clenched her teeth and swallowed the thick, bloody liquid.

The great bow in her hand was snapped into dust by her force, and countless dark lines extended from her heart to her limbs and bones, covering half of her face. From a distance, it looked as if a pair of ghostly hands were cradling her head, and the pattern on her forehead bloomed, resembling a ghostly eye.

"Kill them!"

A dense, yin energy rose from the ground.

A grotesque, semi-transparent ghost crawled out from behind the woman, its laughter echoing faintly. One hand gripped the woman's neck, while the other clutched a black chain, its ghostly eyes greedily fixed on Guan Si and his companion.

Zhang Yang stared at the long, long blood bar above the ghost's head.

I understand now that this is the BOSS's berserk form.

She asked Guan Si, "Can you handle it?"

Guan Si: "...Speak like a human being."

Zhang Yang then asked, "Can you handle it?"

Guan Si stared in disbelief: "...Are you even speaking human language?"

What do you mean by whether he can hold on or not?

Was Zhang Boyuan planning to throw him to this scapegoat? It wasn't that he couldn't beat him; if he were physically present, he could dismember the scapegoat in just a few moves. But that didn't mean Zhang Boyuan could justifiably push him into the scapegoat's mouth!

Zhang Yang: "..."

She sighed, "Sure enough, you get what you pay for."

Guan Si is mostly a tank who assists players in completing game missions, but the tanks provided by the system are weak and ineffective. They can't even defeat bosses, and they can't hold aggro properly. If players are even slightly aggressive with their DPS, it will cause aggro chaos. You get what you pay for!

Free T is even worse.

Zhang Yang weighed the cane in his hand.

"Fine, if it's overtime, it's overtime."

Some bosses become more difficult to kill when they enter a berserk state, while others will forcibly kill players when they do. Zhang Yang didn't know which type of boss this was, only that a quick victory would definitely be to her advantage. She looked up at the scapegoat who was still laughing oblivious to his own death, the latter tearing a piece of flesh from the woman's body and stuffing it into his mouth, his lips covered in bright red blood.

The more flesh and blood one consumes, the more ghostly energy one possesses.

nail!

Zhang Yang's attack came without warning. His cane, though without a blade, unleashed a massive, transparent blade several dozen feet long. The force was immense; one strike followed another before the previous one had even subsided. Forsaking fancy techniques and visual effects, it revealed only the purest, most primal power!

The ghost let out a shrill and piercing roar.

Ghostly energy dissipated, and countless faintly visible, grotesque faces split into three. One part blocked the blade's edge, while the other two attacked Zhang Yang from two directions. Break! Zhang Yang's expression was cold and hard, his eyes resolute and unwavering, focused on only one target!

click-

It was as if an invisible barrier had shattered.

Then came increasingly piercing screams.

The heavy blade pressed down like a mountain, tearing through the ghostly mist with unparalleled force, ripping apart countless ghostly shadows, and then slamming heavily into the ghostly blade formed by the sacrificial spirit. After the clang of metal against metal, spiderweb-like cracks crawled out of the ghostly blade, and it shattered with a crack.

The scapegoat stared wide-eyed at the ground, his crimson eyes wide open.

Until the blade flashed and the scapegoat was swallowed by the dazzling light, it was still thinking about the scene of Zhang Yang being devoured by a hundred ghosts.

Little did they know—

The two streams of ghostly energy had barely entered within ten feet of Zhang Yang when they encountered a faint golden light. This golden light was neither thick nor blinding; the resentment within the ghostly energy melted away like ice and snow upon contact, and before they could even utter a scream, it transformed into a cool breeze and dissipated into the world…

The scapegoat was violently cleaved in two, the remaining force of the blade landing on the ground without causing any tremor or sound. When the dust settled, only the severed female corpse remained, half of her beautiful face still bearing traces of terror.

Zhang Yang looked at the gray name above her head.

He raised his hand and grabbed the woman's right arm.

Guan Si instinctively realized, "What are you going to do?"

Zhang Yang: "Collect the corpse."

I wonder if the mini-boss's corpse can be sold for money.

Guan Si took a step forward: "That's right, let him rest in peace."

Zhang Yang: "..."

??|??w?`)

?T: Tank the BOSS

OT: The aggro value exceeds the T, causing the BOSS to randomly target other enemies.