Chapter 3667 — A Narrow Victory
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
Yet just as Wei Zhao was pondering how to make the most of this, the giant mountain leopard, though both claws had come up empty—which by any normal reckoning should have left it overextended and exposed—was not so at all; far from being spent, its assault grew all the more ferocious!
With both claws thrust into empty air, the giant mountain leopard spun at once, and before Wei Zhao could do more than register a flicker of surprise, the slender, powerful tail at its rear came sweeping at him with a whistling cry.
And this was no ordinary tail sweep: in an instant the leopard's tail grew too fast for the eye to follow, one becoming three, three becoming nine, until a dense swarm of tail-shadows bore down on him!
This thing was vicious indeed! By Wei Zhao's estimate, the force of this Phantom Lash of a tail was already a match for the twenty-first stance of his own Blazing Fire Eight Trigrams Palm!
If that caught him again—even a graze like the one before—he would be lucky to come out alive.
The giant mountain leopard was brimming with confidence: this was its trump card, and no early Foundation Establishment expert could hope to survive it; even a peak early Foundation Establishment expert, stronger by a notch, would be gravely wounded if not killed outright facing this move!
Little did it know that the mightier the killing move, the more likely it is, at certain moments, to betray an unexpected and fatal flaw. Though this giant mountain leopard already possessed intelligence no less than a human's, its thinking still had the same fatal blind spots as any ordinary creature.
Facing the swarm of tail-shadows, Wei Zhao did not choose to dodge as he had before, but leapt straight up into the air.
Contempt flashed at once in the giant mountain leopard's eyes: to leap into the air before its trump card—this creature was simply in too much of a hurry to die!
But the next moment it suddenly sensed something amiss: though Wei Zhao had sprung into the air, his whole body was pressed flat against the cave wall behind him, and if its lashing tail went sweeping through, it might indeed kill Wei Zhao, but it would just as surely wreck the tree hollow.
And so the giant mountain leopard hesitated instinctively—and that gave Wei Zhao his chance to turn the tables.
One step of the Butterfly Microstep against the cave wall behind him, his footwork and speed driven to their utmost in a flash, and in the blink of an eye Wei Zhao had vaulted over the swarming tail-shadows and closed straight in above the creature's head.
Then came the twenty-first stance of the Blazing Fire Eight Trigrams Palm—and with the attack bonus of the Essence Necklace, at full power!
Boom! The whole giant tree shuddered, sending countless twigs and leaves raining down outside, and with a great rustling clatter startling up a flock of harmless little birds.
"Hoo—!" Looking at the giant mountain leopard lying motionless on the ground, Wei Zhao finally let out a breath. From the moment the creature had blocked the opening, he had been in extreme danger the whole time, and that last hair's-breadth palm strike had been a snatching of life from the very jaws of death!
Had he not, in the course of it, caught that infinitesimal flaw in his opponent, then even if Wei Zhao could in the end kill this giant mountain leopard, it would surely have been a mutual ruin, and he would have needed a good long while to recover.
Yet even so, that one strike of the twenty-first stance of the Blazing Fire Eight Trigrams Palm had still drained every last drop of true qi in his body!