As the final wave of bugs approached, Zhang Lie found a mysterious black bug among them.

"Sun Mengmeng, Fang Yi, protect the team. I'll be right back!" Zhang Lie shot forward like a bullet. As Venombane flashed, he suddenly vanished in mid-air. 

Sun Mengmeng and Fang Yi took over the defensive position that Zhang Lie had been holding. 

Sprays of fire erupted from Sun Mengmeng's body, the purple flames giving her the appearance of a malevolent villain. Her bow twanged again and again, releasing countless firebirds into the approaching swarm of bugs. The birds smashed into the swarm of bugs, stunning them and lighting them on fire. The woofbugs screamed and howled under the assault of the flames.

Fang Yi stood in front of Sun Mengmeng, waving his spear around as wind and storm swirled before him, clearing away the bugs that Sun Mengmeng's bombardment had missed.

Beside him, Li Feng and Sun Xiaowu also gave it their all. 

Li Feng stood encased in a suit of radiant armor, genetic energy swirling around his greatsword in the shape of a dragon. Much like Li Feng, Sun Xiaowu's fighting style also focused on body augmentation. With his [Adamantine Aegis] activated, Sun Xiaowu was wreathed in a golden aura, complementing Li Feng's silver one. Together, they seemed like a pair of holy knights in silver and gold.

Behind them, hundreds of hunters activated their own genetic techniques as they prepared to enter the fray.

Zhang Lie, who had left the other members of Team Zenith, finally found his target amidst the crowd of bugs, a big beetle encased in dark green chitin, looking like a snake that was rearing to attack. 

It had twelve eyes, tough mandibles, row after row of spikes on its carapace, and three long protrusions by its back, so dark a shade of green that they were almost black. This was an elite black-tipped scarab, a long-ranged attacker from the Kez.

The government had run a few tests on captured black-tipped scarabs: in just a tenth of a second, they were able to shoot out more than thirty of the poisoned spikes that dotted their carapace. Whenever they evolved, they would grow another dark-green protrusion out of their backs, and the specimen in front of him had three such protrusions!

The government had categorized the Kez in terms of the number of evolutions that each insect had undergone, ranking them from one-star to five-star. A black-tipped scarab that had undergone three evolutions was naturally a three-star black-tipped scarab.

As a three-star elite, not only was it endowed with surprising speed and strength, it was able to shoot out poisonous spikes more than ten times as rapidly as standard black-tipped scarabs. If he didn't stall it here, it would certainly cause massive casualties by the northern perimeter just by itself.

In truth, even with all his gene fragments, Zhang Lie wasn't confident that he would be able to take it down: under usual circumstances, it would require a hunter who had advanced to the second realm and had filled over half the superior gene capacity to emerge victorious against a three-star elite, but the hunters of this caliber were all dealing with even more dangerous elites.

He glanced all around him: on the northern front, there was no one else who could take on such a challenge. In that case, Zhang Lie had to step forth!

He crept close to a hundred meters of the three-star black-tipped scarab, but the moment he passed the hundred-meter boundary, the scarab's eyes lit up, and it shot a beam of green light toward Zhang Lie, breaking his stealth and revealing him for all to see.

Damn it, it discovered me so easily?! Zhang Lie hadn't expected that the three-star black-tipped scarab would have such a ridiculous sensory capabilities, but in truth, the scarab had only detected something unusual in that direction.

It had only shot out one poisoned spike toward Zhang Lie as a probe; if it were certain that there had been an enemy present, Zhang Lie would instead have faced a barrage of hundreds of needles, as was the case now.

Zhang Lie had barely regained his footing after rushing backwards before a spray of green beams shot toward his position. Any woofbug unfortunate enough to be caught within the spray immediately melted into a puddle of goo, highlighting the extent of the poison.

"[Fists of the Silent Sea: Quake]! [Fists of the Silent Sea: Soar]! [Fists of the Silent Sea: Fade]!"

Zhang Lie instantly unleashed three fists, even incorporating some elements of [Three-Wave Crescendo] in a combination attack. Three ripples of black mist spread out around Zhang Lie, causing even the air to vibrate.

[Fists of the Silent Sea] was the skill that Zhang Lie had grown most comfortable with, and it embodied a strength that could quell even the sea itself. That strength was smashing the bugs surrounding Zhang Lie to pieces. 

The attack clashed with the poisonous spikes that the three-star black-tipped scarab shot toward Zhang Lie, neither quite able to overcome the other. The poisonous spikes weren't able to make it past the ripples, but the ripples also lost their potency upon striking the spikes.

The scarab cried out; then, like a gattling gun, it launched a fountain of spikes in Zhang Lie's direction. Zhang Lie instantly activated his superior-grade forest wolfman and blood ant soulshards.

As a howl shook the entire northern front, Zhang Lie transformed into a three-meter-tall wolfman. At the same time, the wolfman's original dark-green fur turned blood-red, and his aura grew stronger by at least an order of magnitude, simultaneously transforming Venombane into a red and violet greatsword.

"[The Boundless Blade: The River Lethe]!" Zhang Lie yelled out, his greatsword cleaving the barrage of poisoned spikes shooting toward him and swallowing it in a torrent of blood-red liquid.

Zhang Lie's attack completely negated the scarab's spikes; the moment they touched Zhang Lie's attack, they dissolved in the corrosive aura of the blood-red liquid.

Unfortunately, as a three-star elite, the scarab's reflexes were quick enough that it managed to escape out of range the moment it noticed that its attack had failed.