## Chapter 1932: Paralyzing Clockwork Puppets
The Valkyrie and Via charged forward together. A Clockwork Puppet lunged at us with bared teeth and claws. I immediately raised my hand and used the Invisible Hand on it. In an instant, the puppet was ensnared by my insect legs.
Its strength was truly immense. Its four arms flailed independently, attempting to break free. Many of my insect legs were forcibly broken free, but they quickly reconnected. Ordinary people absolutely wouldn’t possess such strength. Even for extraordinary individuals, unless they were in power-focused professions like Warriors or Fighters, it would be difficult to break free from my Invisible Hand.
However, the Clockwork Puppet could do it. In fact, I felt a strain holding onto it, requiring constant spellcasting to restrain it, and my magic power was draining rapidly.
“Via! Hurry, I can’t hold on for much longer!” I shouted. Via flew to its side, aimed at the Clockwork Puppet’s core, and spat a mouthful of blood into it.
The idiom “呕心沥血” (spitting one’s heart and spilling one’s blood) became a literal description. Seeing Via, a beautiful girl, vomiting blood, and in such a large quantity, even the Glutton believers frowned.
Whether for ease of maintenance or accelerated heat dissipation, the Clockwork Puppet’s outer shell was not fully sealed. Two openings were made along the edges of its body, offering a direct view of the rotating gears inside.
Via spat her blood into these gaps. Her blood then infiltrated the central spring mechanism and the control hub. The Clockwork Puppet’s eyes, on its bird-like head, instantly turned red.
“Sister Parul, you can let go now,” Via said. I no longer felt the Clockwork Puppet struggling, so I released the Invisible Hand. As expected, the Clockwork Puppet became still. Parul had contaminated the spring mechanism, which served as its power source and control hub, with her blood, causing the Clockwork Puppet to change masters in a short time and obey her commands.
On the other side, a group of cultists had also controlled a Clockwork Puppet in a similar manner. They released countless flies that swarmed around the puppet. The puppet, naturally, became impatient, but these flies were all imbued with the Glutton believers’ magic. This meant that, in the Clockwork Puppet’s recognition system, they were all enemies, and indeed, they were.
When so many enemies flew in front of it simultaneously, the Clockwork Puppet instinctively thrashed its arms, launching attacks. But how could arms modified into blades and cannons be used to swat flies? Thus, they flailed for a long time without hitting a single fly. Instead, hundreds of flies burrowed into their gaps. The flies then exploded, spewing large amounts of blood plasma. This blood plasma gummed up the gears, solidifying into clumps of blood-red gel, adhering to the connections between gears and bearings, hindering their operation. Soon, after a few more twitches and struggles, the Clockwork Puppet collapsed onto the ground, rendered powerless.
On another front, my Ethereal Walker was steadily holding off another Clockwork Puppet. Three magic swords continuously attacked it. While it was fumbling, the Ethereal Walker unleashed an ice magic spell, freezing it into an ice block. Although the Clockwork Puppet’s entire metal body was anti-magic, freezing it in an ice block wasn’t a direct application of magic to it. After all, it hadn’t been damaged by the ice magic itself; its gears had simply jammed, preventing movement.
In the last battlefield, Giselle moved around the Clockwork Puppet with clean and neat precision. Her movements were so fast they became afterimages, making it impossible for the Clockwork Puppet to track her position. Giselle suddenly appeared to the puppet’s left. In that instant, she was severed by the puppet’s blade, but the two halves of her body, cut at the waist, quickly dissolved into black smoke and disappeared, revealed to be an illusion.
The Clockwork Puppet immediately spun its waist, dragging its blade and slashing in the opposite direction, but it only hit an afterimage. Giselle, clutching a core component, sped away at high speed. The Clockwork Puppet continued to spin. Without control commands, it wouldn’t stop. Its entire upper body spun like a top at high speed. Finally, after more than twenty rotations, it came to a halt. The light in its eyes dimmed, and its limbs became motionless. After Giselle removed its core component, it lost its ability to act, completely and decisively paralyzed. Giselle’s skill in extracting the core was similar to her “heart and lungs extraction” technique for living beings, but not entirely the same, as one involved a living person and the other a mechanical construct. This move of hers was somewhat like a new skill developed by combining thieving techniques with assassin skills, possibly researched while discussing thieving methods with Older Brother Jayad.
Finally, Sherris used the countless arms of her Underworld Gate to grab the last Clockwork Puppet, and with clean and neat efficiency, pulled it into the gate. She then closed the massive door, directly banishing the final Clockwork Puppet. With the assistance of my fellow girls, we cleared all five Clockwork Puppets like a swift wind sweeping through fallen leaves. The battlefield situation became one-sided, and many of the thieves, wavering, began to flee.
“Drop your weapons and get down! Surrender and live!” I shouted loudly. A few people hesitated, then actually dropped their weapons and stopped resisting. Those who attempted to escape over the wall were met by Karina’s surrounding ambushes, who dispatched them with a few fireballs each. This time, she intended to fight a battle of annihilation, permitting no one to escape or leak any information. Witnessing that even escape attempts would result in death, they became even more panicked. Many were killed in their frantic state. When they realized surrender was their only path to survival, large numbers of people chose to drop their weapons and surrender.
The resistance on the surface of the Logging Camp had been cleared, with only scattered resistance remaining, seemingly emanating from within or below the collapsed buildings.
“It’s not over yet! We haven’t found the Life Tree Seed, and the remote control for the Clockwork Puppets must be in the hands of a higher-level individual. We need to find them!” Karina declared. Via, controlling a Clockwork Puppet, vaguely sensed that the puppet’s core seemed to be connected to another location. That place was… “Underground!”
Actually, I already knew. As early as when the Elves launched their attack and I was observing, I noticed several underground rooms below. They were originally cellars for storing vegetables and grains, but now they had been cleared out and converted into strongholds. However, knowing there were several underground rooms was different from knowing the leader’s location. Via accurately pointed out that it was beneath the house on the northern side.
Ignoring the miscellaneous troops still putting up a stubborn resistance, we bypassed them and headed for a secret passage behind. I had seen it with my God’s Eye, and at the same time, I saw several people running towards the exit.
“I’ll go in first,” I said, relying on the Valkyrie’s tough hide. I charged forward and kicked open the hidden door of the secret passage, rushing in. We met head-on, and were glaring at each other. A moment later, they reacted and raised several submachine guns, firing at me. What a Thompson’s Ripple Dance.
