How come someone acts like a dog just from wearing a piece of broke armor

Faced with his teammates’ questions, Ikeda Masato’s confidence soared.

“That Liu Xuan guy? I never even took him seriously.”

“He might be pretty good at fighting monsters and bosses, but when it comes to PvP, nobody understands it better than I do.”

His teammates were still somewhat hesitant. “But I heard that before entering the battlefield, that guy was already the best gamer in the entire world. His mechanics should be top-tier too, right?”

“Mechanics?” Ikeda Masato let out a cold laugh. “What good are mechanics in the face of overwhelming stats?”

As he spoke, he raised his hand and showed off his clawed gauntlets. “You’ve all seen my damage before. A few rounds of backstabs can deal at least thirty or forty thousand damage.”

“Besides, there’ll be thirty thousand people fighting together. With that many people, there are bound to be plenty of hidden classes, or players with powerful buff skills. Once they stack me up with a full set of buffs, I’ll sneak over there and land one backstab! How many lives does Liu Xuan have? I’ll kill him as many times as I want!”

“Hahahaha!”

The more Ikeda Masato thought about it, the more pleased he became, until he couldn’t help throwing his head back and laughing.

Liu Xuan, huh? If I can’t beat the Monster Salamander, you think I can’t beat you?

……

Elsewhere, Vaughan, whom everyone had not seen for quite some time, leaped to his feet the moment he saw the announcement.

Things had not been going well for him lately. Everyone in his battlefield had begun questioning his strength and leadership abilities.

There was no helping it—their progress was simply too slow.

At the beginning, all the priests had followed his orders and chosen the healer route.

By the time they reached the quarry, they were already struggling to make any progress.

After finally waiting for everyone to level up, they had forced their way through it, only to discover upon reaching the outpost that the Monster Salamander was even harder to deal with.

Their team had an excessively high proportion of physical damage dealers, leaving them thoroughly countered.

They could only rely on the “recruits” who joined the battlefield later to slowly make up for their lack of magical damage.

Thus, despite possessing hidden classes, their battlefield’s progress still didn’t even rank among the best in the United States.

Under such circumstances, it was only natural that the others refused to acknowledge his authority.

Besides, think about it. The first batch of people randomly brought into the battlefield from the United States had all been ordinary civilians, so they were relatively easy to control.

At the time, Vaughan had stepped forward and used a mixture of threats and incentives, and everyone had obediently followed his orders.

But what about the people brought in afterward?

They were all vagrants and street thugs whom the U.S. government had forced into the battlefield at gunpoint. How could people like that possibly listen to him?

Even the gamers all had ideas of their own.

Vaughan had basically given up by now. You won’t follow orders, huh?

You look down on me, huh?

Fine, then I won’t bother with the campaign’s progress anymore. I’ll just play by myself!

For the past several days, he had been taking a few teammates around and leveling up like mad.

Actually, if one wasn’t concerned with campaign progress, hidden classes like theirs could level up quite quickly by grinding monsters.

Many people understood the principle that sharpening one’s axe wouldn’t delay the work of chopping wood. Leveling up first and tackling the campaign afterward would make things much more stable.

The problem was that someone named Liu Xuan was out there chopping wood like a madman. If you were in their shoes, wouldn’t you be anxious too?

At least half of the reason so many battlefields were progressing so poorly was Liu Xuan’s fault.

Vaughan was already level eleven and a half. The moment he saw the announcement, he immediately sat upright.

Although only the Asian countries could participate in this first round of ascension defense battles, it was obvious that there would definitely be a second round, a third round, and more afterward.

When that time came, he would surely have a chance to fight Liu Xuan.

Vaughan couldn’t help looking at his skill panel. One of the skills on it was glowing red.

[Death Decreed: Gather all your strength and deliver one lethal slash at an enemy, dealing 2,000 points of true damage. For every 1% by which your Strength exceeds the target’s, deal additional damage equal to 1% of the target’s maximum health. Skill cooldown: 1 hour.]

This was the Mythic skill he had obtained at level ten as the hidden class Tyrant.

Its base damage was already extremely high. As long as his Strength exceeded his opponent’s, it could also reduce their health by a percentage.

If his Strength was 100% higher than his opponent’s, he could instantly kill them regardless of how much health they had.

Apart from its somewhat lengthy cooldown, Death Decreed was an absolutely godlike skill.

Moreover, the earlier the stage of the game, the more useful the skill was.

If his opponent had fifty points of Strength, he only needed one hundred—being fifty points, or 100%, higher than his opponent would be enough to kill them instantly.

But if his opponent had five hundred points of Strength, he would need one thousand points himself, five hundred higher than his opponent.

That was why Vaughan was impatient to fight Liu Xuan as soon as possible.

Of course, Vaughan would not completely underestimate Liu Xuan.

The fact that Liu Xuan had cleared the campaign so quickly proved that he was powerful, and his Strength attribute was probably quite high as well.

But that didn’t matter. He could simply find other people to give him buffs when the time came. With thirty thousand people present, there were bound to be hidden classes with support abilities.

With those buffs active, even if he couldn’t kill Liu Xuan outright, one full combo would leave him dead or crippled!

The others only needed to follow up with some additional damage.

“Hahahaha!”

Like someone else, Vaughan also couldn’t help bursting into laughter.

He seemed to have already imagined himself cleaving Liu Xuan in half with a single strike.

……

When Liu Xuan left the city, he took the opportunity to inspect the condition of its walls.

After all, he had entered through a secret passage when he arrived.

As it turned out, he couldn’t say much about the other three directions, but the main gate on the southern side had already been completely destroyed.

He didn’t know whether it could be repaired.

There was no way they could count on those people to fix it. The only question was whether the NPCs had a solution.

Having a gate would naturally make the city easier to defend. With walls more than ten meters high, it would be troublesome for an attacking force to get inside.

Relying on Fleetfoot, Liu Xuan quickly found Zhang Meng and the others.

The group was struggling to fight the weaker monsters. Zhang Meng was the busiest of them all.

Since they had a large number of people, the advanced monsters did not pose too much of a threat to their survival. With all the equipment and materials Liu Xuan had sold them, every member of the group was well equipped.

The only issue was that the healers were a little overworked.

The most troublesome things about advanced monsters were their high armor and massive health pools, which made them especially slow to kill.

At their current speed, they might not even reach Orenburg by the time the extra day granted by the system ended.

Why was Zhang Meng the busiest? Because he had an armor-breaking skill that reduced an enemy’s armor by 10%.

As everyone knew, armor reduction became more effective the more armor the opponent had.

And now that they were fighting these advanced monsters, they desperately needed the armor-breaking effect.

That meant Zhang Meng had to run back and forth, applying armor break to every monster. Once the effect expired, he had to apply it again.

Just as he was exhausted from the work, Liu Xuan came strolling over, casually kiting a small monster behind him.

He hooked an arm around Zhang Meng’s shoulders while the latter was still chasing after monsters and applying armor break.

“Old Meng, you guys are way too slow.”

How could someone get as tired as a dog just from applying armor break? Wasn’t this effect supposed to be active simply by standing there?

As he was speaking, the small monster happened to touch his body.

“-6,666!”

“-31,340!”

“-31,340!”

“-31,340!”

“……”

Centered around Liu Xuan, it was as if an invisible bomb had gone off. The surrounding small monsters exploded one after another, collapsing like dry weeds before a scythe.

The little monsters that had sent the group scrambling and left Zhang Meng exhausted were wiped out in an instant.

Zhang Meng: “…”

He shot Liu Xuan a sidelong glance. “Easy for you to say. Do you even realize what level we’re at—and what level these monsters are?”

“Haha, we don’t have a choice. We’re short on time, and we’ve only got one day. I’ll lead the way and clear a path. You guys just follow as fast as you can. Old Meng, I’ll start a party and give you party-management privileges. You can invite everyone else.”

Zhang Meng assumed they were simply forming a regular party, so he quickly added everyone.

He was just about to ask what they should do with the remaining players, since there were more than a hundred of them, when several eye-catching, highlighted notifications popped up before him the moment he joined.

“Everyone, split into twelve teams while continuing toward our destination.”

“Each team must have enough healers and tanks. Equip your gear with the strongest survivability and sustain you have. Damage output isn’t important.”

“Once we reach Orenburg, each team will be responsible for one monster portal. Surround the area within thirty meters of the portal, and try not to let the monsters emerging from it wander outside that range. If there are simply too many monsters and you can’t hold the line, you may let some of them through.”

“The monsters are level-20 Destroyers. They drop an item called Mutagen. For every 100 Mutagen collected, you’ll gain one additional free attribute point whenever you level up.”

“So once your teams are formed, quickly decide who will be responsible for collecting the Mutagen.”