Chapter 7: The Second Battle — Facing the Biochemical Beast Legion

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The battle below the city came quickly and ended quickly. None of them had expected that such a strong force would be hidden in this tiny spirit-mech village. Besides his own squad of dwarf warriors, Suibian had brought only five brigades of dwarf diggers from the tree-replanting crews.

Against the six-level dwarven detachment commanded by Jiu Gang, the four-level dwarven warriors under Suibian were no use, even in numbers. On top of that, his special berserker transformation boosted friendly attack by 50 percent, but dropped defense by 75 percent, making his own warriors even easier to kill.
So not long after, Suibian withdrew with his troops, and the situation here at the spirit-village was reported to the headquarters of the Great Green-Leaf Alliance.

It was only then that the elders of the Great Green-Leaf Alliance realized there was such a difficult opponent on their own territory. But they still did not take Li Bin seriously, and simply sent out another stronger detachment to deal with him.
By the second night, that force had reached the outskirts of the spirit-village.

Their arrival was spotted on the spot by Lidas, who was on watch. After losing only a few little spiders, Lidas had captured several strange creatures for Li Bin. These creatures were mostly combinations of two or more animals; just their appearance alone was frightening enough.
After seeing one creature with the body of a horse and the head of an eagle, Li Bin asked, “Does anyone know what sort of unit this is?”

Bai Lingyu shook her head. “If they were spirit-mech troops, I can give you ten methods of making them, but in the Nature division, I’ve truly never seen anything like this.”
“The oddest troop types are in your Undead division. These should not be the strangest.” Cui Ter said.

Only the perpetually odd Armu kept circling those creatures, muttering, “No seams at all—what fine craftsmanship.”

“How do you know where these came from?” Li Bin asked, intrigued.
“It’s no such thing as knowing,” Armu replied, his eyes flickering pink. “I was only thinking: if this kind of technique were used on a beautiful woman, what a perfect one could be assembled.”
The thought of hitting him rose in Li Bin’s chest. “If that’s really what you want, I can make one for you with Undead techniques.”

“No—let’s drop it,” Armu said, shivering, and he slipped away, leaving Li Bin alone to consider the situation beyond the walls.

At dawn on the third day, the Nature detachment launched its attack. In the front were countless green two-legged little snakes.
When they reached the wall’s base, the snakes in front were instantly turned into stone statues by the snakes behind them, and the rear snakes climbed up along the statues.
Soon, at the foot of the three-meter wall there was already a mound of stone about one and a half meters high, and a hundred meters away, the eagle-headed horses Li Bin’s Lidas had captured the previous night were ready to charge.
Li Bin knew exactly what those eagle-headed horses could do with such mounds. He ordered Little Carter to lay a layer of poison fog across the rock piles, while he had Gru move to the battlement so he could thin the assaulters with a rain of arrows.
But it was already too late. Just as the poison wall rose, the eagle-headed horses charged, and the phantom-undead archers under Gru killed only half of them. Even after Gru withdrew his troops from the wall, at least two companies of those riders had already reached it.
Once they stepped onto the wall, Li Bin greeted them in full. Forty flame traps buried just ahead of the wall were detonated at once, and half the eagle-bodied horses were blown off the battlement.
Then Ted rode in with his knight unit and launched a short-range charge along the wall.
After driving all the eagle-horses off again, Li Bin finally saw the commander of this Nature force: a monster with three heads—a lion, a goat, and a snake—a pair of gray draconic wings, and an iron tail five meters long.
“Chimera?” Li Bin said, a cold sweat on his brow.

Hearing this, the creature immediately lifted its left snake head and asked, “Have we met before? How do you know my name is Chimera?”
“I haven’t seen you,” Li Bin thought, “but from your form alone, I know your kind.”
“Is that so?” The goat head in the center bellowed. “If you know my identity, then you should die even sooner.”
With that, the Chimera flapped both dragon wings twice and darted toward the wall. Behind it followed a small squad of two-headed chimeras.

“Ried, those lesser ones are yours.” Li Bin called out as he advanced to meet the Chimera.

After repeated hand-to-hand clashes, Li Bin had become accustomed to the mummy way of fighting. After acquiring Mummy City, he had not only mastered the mummy’s curse-on-hit skill, but also learned a sand-formation strike.
It let him shift swiftly between mummy state and sand state, and gave him command of a branch of earth magic—a mid-tier sand discipline.
Seeing that the Chimera’s strength sprang from the forest behind him, Li Bin entered sand form as soon as he appeared. He swelled to more than triple size. His body of yellow sand even began to turn the ground beneath him toward desert.
The Chimera’s goat head roared again, while its left snake head spewed venom and its right lion head cast lightning. Three assaults struck at the giant sand-scarred Li Bin at once.
Just as the shockwave, venom, and lightning were about to hit him, Li Bin’s body suddenly twisted at an odd angle and slipped past them. Then he slammed his palm to the ground and murmured, “Sand Fountain…”

At his command, three columns of sand shot straight upward from below and slammed into the Chimera’s three faces, filling all three mouths with sand.
Catching the opportunity, Li Bin leaped and dragged the Chimera to the ground, gripping its three heads and shoving two masses of sand into its left and right mouths.
As the Chimera regained consciousness and saw what had happened, it cried out, “What are you doing? Let me go at once.”
“Let you go—and then let you attack our city again?” Li Bin said with contempt, and the rate at which he forced the sand in only accelerated.
“Let me go. I swear I won’t lead troops to attack you again.” In desperate need of survival, the Chimera offered whatever condition it could.
“No. Not unless you agree to one condition.”