Chapter 281: Starving Crag Kenskerad
The battlefield where the black and white twin towers sent out troops to bombard each other was unexpectedly clean.
Whether it was the White Tower's projections or the Black Tower's demonic creatures, their bodies would disappear on the spot after death.
The soul fragments of the demonic creatures were plundered by the player side and became resources for re-summoning projections, while after the projections died, their soul fragments would also be taken away by the demonic creature side, integrating into the Source of Demons to become slightly higher-level demonic units.
However, overall, with the minion waves already formed, the White Tower side had already gained an advantage. A total of eleven players, with friendly reputations established in dozens or even hundreds of dungeons, generated projections with their own skills, which were indeed more effective than the purely local demonic creature groups.
Among them, the most noteworthy were the Imperial Heads from "Warhammer 40,000: Darktide" and the Vermintide Five from "Warhammer: Vermintide 2".
The original worlds where these two teams resided were massive meat grinders. Whether it was the dregs of the hive city or the ratmen of the mines, they always came in a tide-like, endless spawn mode. This led to these two groups being extremely adept at handling long-term combat situations. Not only could they continuously achieve excellent combat results, but they were also very good at rotating combat, allowing everyone time to breathe and resupply.
The core of both teams was Congming Tou. With this big tank holding the front, the damage output from the back was incredibly comfortable.
This made the surrounding players quite envious.
However, when the demonic creatures belonging to the Crying Domain, Water Prison Domain, and Blazing Fire Domain were exhausted and demonic creatures from the Silent Sand Domain began to appear, the situation suddenly changed.
Accompanied by a series of rapid ground tremors, the ground at the interface between the White Tower and Black Tower's minion waves suddenly began to show abnormalities.
The already dry earth was severely drained of moisture, and large rocks were crushed into dust by an invisible force, resulting in widespread desertification.
This caused the White Tower's forward momentum to immediately stall. To continue advancing, they had to bypass this area.
But before the players could make tactical adjustments, a gigantic monster suddenly burst out of the desertified land.
This was a demonic BOSS with an appearance somewhat resembling a combination of the sea monster Kraken and the terrestrial Rafflesia, but with a body composition clearly possessing both rock and plant characteristics—
Starving Crag Kenskerad!
As a guardian BOSS unit originally stationed in the fourth layer, the Silent Sand Domain, it had already been dispatched by the Dark Clan to block the fierce advance of the White Tower's super minion wave.
Just this large-scale quicksand terrain change, combined with the existence of the twin towers' no-fly zone, was enough to significantly slow down the White Tower's minion wave, and it indeed achieved that.
Although the Imperial Heads and Vermintide Five had combat experience against champion units like Chaos Spawns, Rat Ogres, Plague Ogryns, and Minotaurs, these monsters, considered large units in the game, became mere children when compared to the Starving Crag, whose body parts exposed above the sand alone were over ten meters tall.
Not only that, within the quicksand, which had a radius of about five to six hundred meters, many of the Starving Crag's summoned derivatives would emerge. There were eyes that could summon small insect demons, and tentacles that could drag units. Once entangled, it was very easy to sink into the quicksand and become unable to easily escape.
It severely restricted melee units.
The Starving Crag itself possessed a mixed attribute of rock, plant, and flesh, which allowed it to effectively resist ranged attacks from the player side. No matter how much flesh was chipped away, it could quickly replenish the loss of its surface rock armor by absorbing nutrients from the quicksand, and its health bar never truly dropped significantly.
Some players suggested bypassing the obstruction and engaging in flanking maneuvers, but other players immediately noticed a significant problem: the BOSS's erosion and alteration of the terrain seemed to be continuous. The desertified area was slowly but steadily expanding, and its radius was gradually increasing.
Correspondingly, the demonic units originally inhabiting the Silent Sand Domain were completely unaffected and could move freely on the sandy ground.
They couldn't avoid it! They had to find a way to defeat this demonic creature that was expanding its domain!
Players began to search for solutions among their summonable friendly units.
And surprisingly, two players each made targeted summons.
One player summoned a disheveled man with a super large nose, but he only had one arm. His attack method was to throw a carving knife. Units killed by the carving knife would turn into a collectible "Onigawara" (demon tile). This Onigawara, like floating blocks in "Minecraft," could be placed in the air without any support points according to the one-armed man's needs, while simultaneously forming an effective support point for itself—
The man's name was "Oh-Oh," from the FC game "Phoenix: Karma no Sho."
The other player summoned a small boy wearing a full-body protective suit and holding a unique weapon: a long spear with a drill bit. Once the drill spear in the boy's hand pierced a demonic creature, it would rapidly pump air into its body like a bicycle pump until the target exploded. Not only that, the drill also allowed the boy to easily dig holes in the ground like a human excavator, forming a solid underground passage—
The little boy's name was "Dig Dug," from the FC game "Dig Dug."
Oh-Oh's Onigawara could be built in the air, directly circumventing the no-fly rule in the scene.
The little boy, on the other hand, could directly dig out a sturdy passage leading directly beneath the Starving Crag.
Thus, the players split into two groups: one assisting in building Onigawara, and the other assisting in digging tunnels. They advanced simultaneously, both above and below ground, gradually approaching the BOSS.
The NPCs present could mostly understand and accept the act of digging tunnels, but building floating Onigawara blocks in the air clearly surpassed common understanding.
However, attempting the unconventional and repeatedly pushing the boundaries of rules was what players excelled at.
The Starving Crag's weakness was the center of its head, which resembled the pistil of a Rafflesia flower, where there were several purple demonic eyes. If the rock-textured petals actively closed, players would not be able to attack the weakness normally.
Whether it was controlled by someone behind the scenes or if it possessed a certain combat awareness itself, upon discovering the player side approaching via the Onigawara, this creature actually abandoned using its demonic eyes for casting spells, firmly blocking its demonic eyes with its rock-bone petals, leaving players with no way to attack.
But at this very moment, the player minion wave responsible for digging tunnels began to prove its worth.
Leveraging Dig Dug's tunnel-digging ability, the Prospector's ground-erasing ability, and the Bomber's bomb-laying ability, they completed a very peculiar "dig, bury, blast" triple skill combination!