Powered by the Divine Breath technique, a stream of almost neon green poison was shot out a few dozen yards, arcing through the air in a graceful curve and raining down upon a huge swath of the leather clad Flares. Sage’s huge cobra head swayed back and forth like the end of a garden hose, dousing the line of enemies with green liquid. Each of them getting touched by many droplets from above like a sudden spring shower. Only, this rain was not cool and refreshing.

Anywhere the green venom touched, there was a soft sizzling sound and a rapid corrosion of any natural materials. It was too bad for the Flares that it was quite common among them to not wear shirts or full body coverings. They loved vests and sleeveless shirts, and even those wearing leather jackets had a penchant for tearing off the sleeves or not wearing a shirt underneath. Most of the Flares that the venom fell upon had no defense against it. Worse yet, even those who wore more garments found the clothing sizzling and being chewed through by the poison. Where the green liquid touched bare skin it sizzled slightly and then disappeared.

The victim wouldn’t even feel anything from the contact, and if they were somewhere noisy they might not even notice the sizzle sound. At the place where the venom disappeared, the victim’s skin begins to turn green, slowly spreading out into an unusual pattern that bears resemblance to a rose. After the rose pattern forms, the flesh turns from green to black, and at that point is essentially dead. From the rose shape, thick green veins would expand out into their body forming a pattern that looked much like vines. After expanding to an important acupoint or other spot on the body, it would start to form another green rose and the process continues again until the victim died or they could neutralize the venom.

Sage called it Greenrose Venom. It was based upon a poison that Guan Zhenyan said could harm even someone in Rank 8, at least in large enough volume. Even Sage had only been exposed to a few drops of the stuff at the time. It wasn’t the most quick acting of poisons, taking a full two weeks for the ‘rose’ to finish ‘blooming’ and kill the flesh it infected, but it was also extremely potent and hard to remove. Most infected would either need to amputate the affected areas, or merely wait out their death sentence. From what he’d seen and heard in this world so far, and with his life on the line, Sage didn’t hold back. Since he’d already been pushed to reveal his true form in order to fight back, then he already viewed all the Flares around him as his enemies. Thousands of the Flares were caught in his shower of venom and it was likely that many hundreds of them were now beyond saving. Already, the green roses were appearing on their bodies wherever the poison struck. While it might not look too terrifying, when the victims found that they lost all feeling in those places, they would surely be shaken. Even if it took two weeks for those places to completely die and for the roses to spread further, just the vivid green rose pattern and loss of sensation were attention worthy.

The stream of bright green fluid shooting through the air was quite attention grabbing. Many in the affected zone had ways to protect themselves, but most of them did not. Telekinetic shields, domes of flame, and even the wreckage of cars were used to block the venom, but there were just too many people in the crowd and not enough preparation. Sage was sure that if he repeated the feat, the other Flares would be prepared for it and he wouldn’t get nearly as good a result. Even so, the attack served its purpose of holding the enemy army at bay. It was far from stopping them, but knowing that he could shower acid-like poison over them, they would want to spread out as far as possible and not many would be willing to lead the charge.

At that moment there was a loud booming noise and the ground trembled. At the far end of the perimeter, a giant appeared. More accurately, it rose from among the crowd, its head lifting into the air and a massive body following along after. Sage had no idea where such a monster had been hiding, but he couldn’t stop from appreciating how imposing a thirty foot tall man was. More surprising was the man’s clothing, if it could be called that. Around the giant’s waist was a huge skirt made out of tires strung together with steel cable, layered together like some sort of scale or chain mail. Over his chest he had layers of metal that looked very much like stacked up car hoods, and he even had the digging bucket from an excavator or backhoe strapped to each of his fists as weapons. Yet, the most striking part of his outfit was his ‘helmet’, which looked much like the cab of a small car, with two huge eyes looking out from the windshield.

“The Boss is making a move!”

Seeing the havoc caused by Sage’s reappearance, the Flares made their own move. Sage couldn’t help but to commend the enemy commander on their move. He’d been trying to undermine their morale, but the enemy immediately swung things back into their favor. The ominous voice that came from every direction spoke yet again, “You should have obediently turned yourself over and let me use my trap to catch bigger fish. Such a waste of good bait! Now that you’ve forced me to step in it’s too late to beg for forgiveness, but if you hand over the Divine Amethyst’s you can still have a quick death.”

Despite the haphazard junkyard the enemy was wearing, the sheer size of the man was enough to be terrifying. The huge fellow crossed his arms over his chest and waited for a response, but the giant snake it faced did not give him a satisfactory answer. It started to slither towards the giant, but when it opened its mouth there were no words, only more poison. Instead of dispersing over a wide area like a shower, the venom shot out like a firehose. A high pressure stream aimed at the huge enemy leader.

The huge enemy wasn’t flustered. The Giant just reached down and picked up a huge block of stone that had been pulled out when the Flares dug the perimeter trench earlier. He held it up like a crude shield and deflected the stream of venom away. Unfortunately, blocking a stream of liquid like that with a rock was not very easy and much of the poison splashed onto the Flares nearby him. Quite quickly a huge clearing was formed around the giant, but that didn’t really help those who’d already been poisoned. With such a huge amount of poison it was inevitable that some of it also sprayed onto the giant, but with the size of his massive body, he barely seemed to notice.

A loud roar came from the giant’s mouth, not echoing from every direction like before. The huge rock was hurled towards Sage and he rolled sideways. The curling snake body spun on its axis and caused the now spinning spikes to deflect away most of the rock’s force while the roll kept it from landing atop his body and pinning him down. He’d already been moving quickly towards the giant when he made the second poison attack and the roll only impeded his speed slightly. The Greenrose Venom took far too long to take an enemy down and Sage needed to be closer in order to use his others.

Sage’s Spirit Power was devoted to holding back the transforming energy, and much of his Qi was being poured into commanding the Law of Poison to resist this world’s atmosphere. The Twin Soul had already been destroyed by some mysterious method, the Formation Machine could only buy him time, the army of Dragoons couldn’t resist the atmosphere, and he didn’t have the time to grow the hundreds or thousands of insects he’d need to turn the tide. That left him only with his physical body to fall back upon.

Time to get my hands dirty, and I don’t even have any hands.