Mountain Sitting Immortal
Chapter 502: Hunting Progression.
Another round of fighting had begun. There were more champions in this round than in the last too.
This is how hunting usually proceeds. The fire ant colony will send more and more champions to get rid of him. So the longer the hunt continues, the more champions will appear and the more powerful they will be.
Of course, the fire ants won't start with the weakest champions. They will start with champions that they estimate are of the same cultivation as the enemy.
In the case of Arthur, they sensed that he had just become a third mortal coil cultivator so they sent their weakest fire ants to kill him. These weakest already have a power output of 1,000 units, so they were sure that the first champion would be able to get rid of Arthur.
But they were wrong. The first champion failed to drive away the enemy and even died. So they sent more champions that were also more powerful.
But their second attempt to defeat the enemy failed again. So they decided to send a champion with a power output of 3,000 units. What's more, they sent more than one.
There were four fire ants this time around. This was twice as many as the previous round of fighting, but Arthur was more relaxed than ever before.
He picked one fire ant and began shooting arrows at it one at a time. He shot three arrows at it in quick succession. The third arrow turned out to be unnecessary because the fire ant had been killed with the second arrow.
The fire ant had dodged the first arrow easily. But the second arrow had caught it off guard and struck it head-on.
Arthur could only shake his head in pity and said, "I truly overestimated these beasts."
He realized that he shouldn't have attacked the first fire ant with four arrows at the same time during his first wave of attacks against it.
His decision to attack the first fire ant like that wasn't entirely wrong. He had done so because he took the fight seriously and went all out against the fire ant.
His mode of attack then was the correct method to use against an enemy whose strengths and weaknesses he knew next to nothing about. They only look excessive now that he realized that the fire ants weren't worth taking seriously.
He said, "As they say, hindsight is 20/20."
He said this as he casually shot down the fifth fire ant. All he did was press it with one lightning arrow after the other until it slipped up and was killed.
He had figured out more weaknesses of the fire ants. The first one is that they aren't smart and are easily prone to making the wrong decisions and making mistakes.
Making mistakes is something no one is immune to. Even humans with their high intelligence also make mistakes. So it was a bit unreasonable to think that beasts couldn't make mistakes.
It was a mistake that made the second fire ant that he killed die so easily. That fire ant didn't produce a fireball to block any attacks, so it died easily. That mistake caused the fifth arrow that he had used as his ace to go to waste.
The second new weakness that he had noticed was that the fire ants had bad perception. Their eyes seemed to be poorer than those of humans. Their lack of a divine sense only made the disparity in their perception even worse.
This poor perception made it easy for them not to notice some attacks or react to attacks too late. Their poor perception also made them easy to be blinded by Roar's attacks.
This particular weakness made it easy for Arthur to kill the rest of the fire ants. He killed them with just one arrow. This was because Roar had blinded them, so they didn't react to his attack at all.
After the death of the four new champions, Arthur said to Roar, "Let's pack up and go."
Roar was already panting heavily by then, so he was glad to hear that they could leave.
He stopped panting and said weakly, "Yea!"
Then he turned to fly away.
As he flew away, Arthur noticed that the intensity of Roar's glowing fur had dimmed. It was clear that he was tired.
This made him nod in satisfaction. He was glad to see Roar work himself so hard. Arthur hadn't done so in a long time.
He said, "I'm glad that the sect made it a must to do these killing missions. It is a good learning experience. I can say for sure that I've learned something."
One interesting thing that he learned was how weak the fire ants were to lightning. His power output was at 1,100 units, yet he was able to kill champions with a power output of 2,000 units with one hit, while those with a power output of 3,000 units required two lightning arrows to bring down.
It wasn't that the first arrow did nothing. The first arrow did devastating damage to the powerful champions. It was just that it didn't contain enough energy to fry the powerful champions completely.
This disparity in how many of his attacks were required to kill the fire ants was because the more powerful fire ants had more energy in their beast cores to resist the intrusion of the lightning energy.
So both the weak and the powerful fire ants were vulnerable to his lightning energy. They just require a varying amount of the lightning before they are completely cooked.
He found this to be interesting because it taught him that power output wasn't everything that determined victory in a fight. The utilization and skillful use of that power was also paramount.
It was because the fire ants were lacking in spells and were vulnerable to lightning that he was able to take down champions that were three times stronger than him.