Millions of them caused the sky to fall completely into darkness, and the buzzing of flapping wings merged into an overwhelming torrent of noise, causing even the glass of ground-level buildings to burst one after another in the high-frequency vibrations.
And at the center of this black canopy, a silver-white figure was charging straight toward the southwest.
Lilith flapped her 20-meter-wide wingspan, each vibration of her wings trailing two pale sonic boom clouds behind her.
The air around her was distorting—not an illusion caused by speed, but the materialized manifestation of the [Blood Domain] being fully deployed.
One thousand two hundred meters in diameter.
A slowly rotating dark red spherical force field enveloped her within.
Within the domain, countless blood-colored particles as fine as dust floated and drifted; they possessed extreme adhesiveness and corrosiveness, like a living plague.
The first batch of flying monsters to charge into the domain underwent a bizarre change the moment they touched the blood-colored particles.
Their wings began to be coated by the blood-colored particles, and their movements became sluggish and stiff.
Spiderweb-like red cracks appeared on the surfaces of those bodies composed of pure spiritual power; the hundreds of monsters at the very front didn't even manage to advance fifty meters before disintegrating and vaporizing in mid-air, finally dissipating completely.
But there were too many of them.
A torrent of millions of monsters crashed into the Blood Domain one after another, using their bodies to consume the domain's energy and their spirits to dismantle those blood-colored particles.
They were like moths to a flame; the speed of their deaths was startlingly fast, but the speed at which the gaps were filled was even faster.
Finally, after paying the price of tens of thousands of their kind being annihilated, the monster tide broke through the outer defense of the Blood Domain.
The dense mass of monsters, like a flood from a burst dam, surged toward Lilith at the center from all directions.
Lilith did not slow down.
She didn't even change her flight path.
Wing Blades raised, held level, and then, she spun her body!
The silver-white Wing Blades carved a perfect ring of blade-light in the air. All the monsters that rushed into Lilith's range—regardless of size, form, or angle of attack—were sliced into fragments at the same instant.
The wreckage fell from the sky and dissipated.
But more monsters continued to swarm forward, treading on the corpses of their own kind.
They began to perform even more bizarre actions.
No longer charging blindly, they instead crashed into, fused with, and reorganized one another.
Dozens, then hundreds of monsters glued themselves together, their flesh and spiritual power crudely stitched, completing a deformed evolution even while in flight.
A colossal behemoth with a wingspan exceeding 20 meters condensed into form directly in front of Lilith.
It possessed six pairs of asymmetrical wing membranes, its body pieced together from parts of dozens of different monsters, its three heads roaring in different directions, each howl carrying ripples of spiritual shock.
This Composite Beast smashed through the final blood-colored barrier, its six pairs of wing membranes vibrating simultaneously as it pounced toward Lilith with an air-tearing shriek!
Facing this deformed monster, Lilith didn't even make a move to dodge.
She simply raised her head, her four crimson eyes locking onto the largest head at the very center of the Composite Beast.
Then, she accelerated.
Not a side-step, not an evasion—it was a straight, brutal, head-on collision!
"BOOM—!!!!!"
At the moment of impact, time seemed to freeze for a single frame.
The twelve eyes on the Composite Beast's three heads widened simultaneously; it saw that creature, which was roughly the same size as itself, smash through its hardest sternal plate and tear through layers upon layers of muscle and fascia.
Under this force, its body rapidly dismembered and shattered, finally turning into a pile of mangled flesh.
The energy of the mangled flesh dissipated quickly, turning into pink light dust that drifted across the sky before finally vanishing completely.
Lilith charged out from the light dust, not a single speck of filth clinging to her silver-white Bone Armor.
Her speed did not decrease but instead increased.
Because five hundred meters ahead, at the top of that bell tower, the figure dressed in a black robe was already clearly visible.
At the top of the bell tower, a girl stood at the edge; behind her, the Mutation Tyrant loomed like the most loyal guardian, sheltering the girl's petite figure beneath it.
Under the hood, the girl's pale pink lips pursed slightly.
Through the shared vision of the Spiritual Spore network, she had seen everything that just happened—the corrosiveness of the Blood Domain, the destructive power of the Wing Blades, and that unreasonable head-on collision.
Every detail was conveying the same message to her.
The actual combat strength of this Hunter before her, who had taken the Slaughtering Path, far exceeded her estimates.
"Such a powerful body indeed..."
She murmured to herself, her voice betraying no panic.
"Power, speed, and domain intensity all exceed the expected thresholds. Recommend re-evaluating the threat level."
But there was no time for a re-evaluation now.
For Lilith had already torn through the final barrier of the monster tide and arrived directly above the bell tower.
Her massive body hovered in the air twenty meters above the girl, her 20-meter Wing Blades flapping slowly, the resulting wind pressure causing the tiles on the roof of the bell tower to peel off and rustle.
Crimson vertical pupils cast their gaze downward; there was no anger in that gaze, no killing intent, only a nearly indifferent scrutiny.
At this point, the two SSS-Level Talent Hunters met for the first time in a true sense within this dying City.
Alice reached up and gently pulled down her hood.
Her long golden hair cascaded down like a waterfall, swept up by the fierce wind behind her.
She looked only about sixteen or seventeen years old, her face as exquisite as a doll's, her skin so pale it was almost transparent—only those eyes, with their peculiar pink-blue pupils, seemed to have countless tiny points of light slowly rotating deep within.
She looked up at Lilith in the sky, her pink-blue pupils slightly contracting.
Even though she had shared the perspective through the spore network, the impact of seeing this Hunter's true form with her own eyes still exceeded expectations.
Beneath the monstrous, hideous, and massive crest were four emotionless crimson vertical pupils.
In the full-coverage biological Bone Armor, dark red energy pathways flowed at the joints of every plate.
That Tail Whip slowly swaying behind her was composed of interlocking layers, its tip as sharp as a spear.
This was not a form that biological evolution should have.
This was a war machine pieced back together using the most cruel laws after dismantling the two concepts of slaughter and survival.
"Truly... a marvelous work."
Alice's voice was very light, like an ethereal lark, her tone carrying a scholar-like admiration along with a hint of imperceptible wariness.
Lilith did not respond, or rather, she simply could not understand.
She hovered in the air, her four eyes scanning the surrounding environment at different frequencies.
He structure of the bell tower, the distribution of zombies in the streets below, the concentration of psychospores in the air, even the direction of the cloud flow...
Cunning and slippery!