Chapter 60: Mantis
Translator: Letty / Editor: DarkGem / IceTea
Those pairs of eyes were well hidden; they were as green as the ferns around them, and what made them more strange was that they didn’t even have pupils. They blended so well with their body that if Chang didn’t know their presence beforehand, he would’ve walked pass the fern without knowing he was under surveillance. This plant–like organism was an excellent hidden attacker.
Obviously, if anyone were to bypass them without noticing their existence, then there would be only one consequence – death. Regardless of what level they were, even though they were much weaker than him, as long as he was unprepared, his fate would be death in this jungle.
However, since Chang had learned that there were 2 lurkers, he was no longer concerned about them. As those eyes got closer and closer to the soldier, Chang hastily shouted out to remind him.
“Hey! Be careful!” Chang jumped out from the bush, “Something is behind your back!”
“What?” That soldier seemed relieved as he heard a human voice, and he quickly walked towards to the source of the sound.
“There is something behind your back!” Chang reminded him again.
“Something behind me?” The soldier looked back, but he noticed nothing except for some bushes and saplings. “What are you talking about? Where are you? Are you alone too?”
The man kept asking in a high volume, but what he didn’t know was that a “sapling” behind him straightened its body, and it moved as swift as wind but silently.
The “plant” bided his time well; it was so unnoticeable that no one would ever be aware of its presence. The next second, it had become a killer. As it moved, only a flash of green light was seen, but the soldier who was alive a second ago, now had his head disconnected from his body permanently – a brisk wave chopped off his head like a sickle. Perhaps he was decapitated too fast, so the flying head was not instantly dead in the air. For a moment, he was even able to make an expression.
From surprise to terror!
The terror was seized forever on that face – “bang” – the head landed on the ground and rolled forward, and thus a lively body had completely lost the breath of life.
“F*ck!” Accompanying a curse was a bolt ejected from the crossbow.
Whoosh!
10 meters was not a far distance for that bolt to travel as it firmly stabbed into that monster’s body.
The sharp spine penetrated the green armor, causing mild damage.
The monster turned around as it received an unexpected attack. It swung back and forth as if it was looking for the attacker. However, it lost its disguise as it changed its position, and finally Chang knew the identity of these creatures.
They were two mantises. They weren’t huge in particular, but the lines of their figure were smooth and sophisticated, like well-built architecture. They stood with four limbs and their “sickles” were wide open. Although they stood up completely, they still looked like saplings. They looked extremely vigorous even though they were only as high as two-thirds of a human adult.
“What’s going on?” Ming Yi stood beside Chang the whole time. but he didn’t see the tragedy in the fog. He first saw Chang and Jing whispering to each other, and then he heard Chang communicate with a person that he didn’t see. When he thought they finally found the soldier, Chang shouted “monsters” and shot a bolt. It was rather confusing to him how Chang acted.
“Two monsters attacked the soldier.” Chang pointed to the murky fog and described it to Ming Yi, “They seem like mantises, and they are smaller than us, but they are hard to deal with. Be prepared.”
“Alright.”
Chang’s words had hardly finished before the antennae of the mantises jiggled around on their head. They seemed to have determined the source of sound in the air; they then made a great jump to where Chang was hiding.
“They are coming!” Seeing the monster turn their heads, Chang pushed away Jing and rolled over to the other side of the bush.
Ming Yi was only able to see them once they entered his sight, therefore he was one second slower than Chang. A tibia waved at his neck directly.
“Sh*t!” The first thing Ming Yi saw was the sickle-like tibia swinging to him. He bawled out and quickly dodged; he was almost twice as fast as the mantis. He flipped over the machete that he held in his right hand and gashed its abdomen that had no armor covering it, causing the abdomen to be sliced open widely from the bottom up.
As Ming Yi made a deep cut, he performed a spinning kick at the mantis, breaking off its body like a twig. Tons of green mucus spewed out from the wound he inflicted.
“What a powerful and brisk kick!” Chang praised as he saw from the far.
Chang didn’t forget to refill the crossbow as he praised Ming Yi. He shot a second bolt to stop the sneak attack from the other mantis.
The extra time that Chang stalled the mantis for gave Ming Yi long enough to behead the other mantis with his backhand attack – he seemed as effortless as Chang beheaded that mosquito.
The winner of a deadly conflict was usually determined in a flash. There wasn't any so-called final attack in this survival game. It was all about who caught the right timing.
“It was a powerful fight! I thought it was going to be uneasy.” Chang put away the crossbow and showed himself to Ming Yi from the thick fog. He pulled out the bolts on the mantises’ dead body and tried to shake away the sticky green mucus.
“It was nothing; I reacted a lot faster than them and I was stronger. Also, you helped me distract the other one, so this result was expected.” Ming Yi gazed at the mantis corpses expressionlessly and said, “They aren’t good at attacking at all. Instead, it was their camouflage skills that helped their success. Look at them, they are just saplings to me! I have known that mantises were good at disguising themselves in bushes; they just blended into the surrounding with ease. But now I realize they are even better than before! I still have a hard time telling them apart from the saplings. If I didn’t know that they were aiming at me, I would have been dead even though I am stronger.”
“Exactly…being stronger doesn't mean you can win a battle sometimes.” Chang recalled how the soldier was decapitated by the mantis at such a small distance, and even Ming Yi nor Chang wouldn’t be able to dodge it.
“Where is he?” Ming Yi asked.
“He is dead, the body is over there.” Chang pointed in a direction in the fog; he didn’t even know the name of that poor man.
“I need to check him out. There aren’t any mantises around us, are there?”
“No.”
“Thanks.” Ming Yi strode to the location that Chang referred to. The bloodiness and the head were the first things that entered his sight.
Perhaps Ming Yi had seen quite amount of death and different corpses, but he didn’t react much when he saw the scene. He hunkered down to collect food and clips from the headless body, and then returned to Chang.
“Do you know him?” Chang was a bit surprised that Ming Yi did not display any emotional fluctuations as he pointed at the dead soldier.
“Not really, he wasn't in my company, but I met him a few times before. I only knew that his family name was Cao.”