Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 2755: Martial Spirit: Lightning Lancer

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Zhongguo (China), Liaodong Province, Shuntian Prefecture, Shenyang City

Captain Ma Ming looked at Captain Cheng’s back with a blank expression. Beneath that calm mask, however, he did not like his colleague’s words one bit.

After a moment of silence, he spoke quietly, his gaze drifting toward the corridor where the princess’s body lay, ”I wonder how the Emperor will react when he learns that this palace, which already claimed his favorite concubine, has now claimed her daughter as well... his own blood.”

The words hung heavily in the corridor, colder than the stone walls around them.

”His Highness will be pleased,” Captain Cheng replied almost immediately. ”After all, she is the reason the Thirteenth Concubine had to part from him so early.”

There was a sharp edge in his voice. The more Captain Ma Ming brought it up, the more irritated he became. Frowning as he glanced over his shoulder, and asked, ”What’s with you, old man? Why do you keep bringing this up again and again?”

To him, it made little sense. A fallen comrade lay reduced to ash in the corridor, yet the old captain seemed far more concerned about the death of the princess freak.

Just as Captain Cheng looked over his shoulder to meet Captain Mo’s eyes and press him for an answer, something behind him shifted. Out of the corner of his vision, he saw Corey the Second’s body move. She was standing. Captain Cheng froze. The hole that had been torn through her chest was gone, as if it had never existed. Only blood remained, soaking the front of her clothes.

Noticing the horror spreading across his colleague’s face, Captain Mo turned as well. His eyes widened when he saw it. The princess freak was back on her feet, her upper body drenched in blood, yet the wound that should have killed her had vanished.

Seeing the stunned, hollow look on their faces, frozen in sheer horror, Coryn threw her head back and laughed manically. Then abruptly stopping, With her blood-streaked grin widening, she shouted at the top of her lungs, ”I have two hearts. Two of everything. If you want to kill me in this form, you’ll have to kill me twice in a row before the wound heals up, you dumb fuck!!!”

Coryn made sure her voice carried through the corridor. She spoke loudly and exaggerated every word, convinced that if she didn’t, the language barrier might stop them from realizing she was openly taunting them. The point was never to inform them. It was to provoke them by making sure they felt the insult.

”Captain Mo, what is she saying?” Captain Cheng asked his older colleague, a disturbing grin slowly spreading across his face.

Killing her too quickly earlier had given him no chance to vent the grief and fury burning inside him after Jiangya’s death. But now, seeing her standing again, alive and defiant, something dark stirred in his eyes. If she was still breathing, then he finally had the chance to take his time with it.

”Nothing ladylike,” Captain Mo replied, unwilling to repeat the foul words that princess freak had used.

Hearing that, Captain Cheng’s face flushed even redder, and the grin on his lips widened. Giving into darkness stirred behind his eyes. He flexed his bloodstained fingers and sneered toward Corey the Second, muttering coldly, ”If she thinks coming back to life is enough reason for her to be arrogant before me. I’ll make her wish she had stayed in her stinking little kingdom where people bathe once a week... or once a month.”

”Lightning Lancer,” Captain Cheng called upon his martial spirit and a lance entirely made of lightning formed in his hands. Its shaft and blade were forged entirely from a singly condensed lightning. Arcs of electricity crawled along its length, snapping and crackling in restless bursts like a flock of starlings crackling together, except the sound was far sharper and far more grating.

Lightning began to spill from the lance in Captain Cheng’s grip, crawling up his arm before spreading across his entire body. In moments, it wrapped around him like a cloak of crackling lightning. The next instant, he vanished from where he stood. Just like before, he shot toward the princess freak at an unbelievable speed.

By the time his figure reappeared, the tip of the Lightning Lancer had already struck. Coryn’s mental field shattered on contact, breaking apart like thin glass. The lightning lance tore through it with almost no resistance, as easily as a blade cutting through paper.

He closed the distance in an instant, angling the Lightning Lancer toward their left leg, intending to cut it clean off. But just as he was about to strike, something went wrong.

Almost abruptly, flames burst across his body even though his mental field and lightning cloak was still intact. The fire clung to him without warning, forcing him to halt mid-charge and retreat at maximum speed and the flame died with it.

Only then did Captain Cheng realize something was different about the air around them. It was not normal air. The atmosphere surrounding the princess freak felt thicker and far denser, as though the space itself had been packed tight.

Moving through it was like forcing his body through a heavy current. The moment he tried to push his speed through that dense air, friction ignited across his lightning-covered body, setting him on fire. His speed only fed the flames further, the friction intensifying the fire around his lightning-cloaked body.

Realizing this, Captain Cheng immediately retreated from the dense air surrounding them. The moment he burst out of it, he accelerated even more, using the rushing wind created by his speed to smother the flames clinging to him.

”Why are you running? Come back, you coward!” Coryn shouted after him.

Only when Reven finished weaving their mental field back around them did she finally relax. The earlier strike had shattered it completely, and without it they had been dangerously exposed.

What they just pulled off had been Reven’s idea. Instead of fully completing a Conjoin, they began conjoining air molecules and stopping midway, then repeating the process again and again in rapid succession. The half-formed conjoins forced the surrounding air molecules into violent vibration, stirring the atmosphere into a dense molecular turbulence.

The effect was subtle but deadly. The vibrating air drastically increased friction in the space around them. For someone moving at normal speed it would mean little, but for Captain Cheng, who relied on extreme velocity, it turned the air itself into a trap. His own speed would ignite the friction and burn him.

Unfortunately, Captain Cheng caught on quickly. The moment the flames began to spread across his body, he understood something was wrong and retreated before the trap could finish him.