Hell's Handbook

Su Jin tried to dodge the attack, but the tongue holding onto him actually made it impossible for him to struggle free. Before the other tongue-like object could hit him, he could only move his body very slightly to make sure it didn’t stab him in the heart.

He let out a muffled grunt even as he continued to wonder what in the world this creature was. How could it be this formidable?

One of the other two creatures noticed that the first one hadn’t been able to take Su Jin down, so it started charging toward Su Jin too. Cold sweat began to drip down his forehead. These creatures were too difficult to handle, and he was going to die here at this rate.

Just then, two blades cfrom two directions and chopped off the tongue-like objects holding onto Su Jin.

Su Jin quickly retreated far, far away when he was freed, but also launched an attack on the last creature attacking Liu Bowen’s group so that it backed off before the group collapsed.

“Thank you so much!” Su Jin thanked the Golden Horned King and the Silver Horned King. The two blades that had sliced through the tongue-like objects had been these two demons’ swords.

“These creatures aren’t on your side?” the nine tailed fox asked Su Jin.

Su Jin shook his head and said, “I have no idea what they are, but they’re very strange, and very formidable! You guys have to be careful!”

“Watch yourself first!” Daitengu scoffed, then spread his wings violently to send out knife-like feathers that pierced the three creatures in many places. But Daitengu was clearly still quite wary of Su Jin, so he made sure his attack did not hurt Liu Bowen’s group.

“Our mission is to… kill everything in the Challenge! Our mission is to… destroy the Challenge!” muttered one of the creatures before it too, spread a pair of wings from its back.

Su Jin and the rest paled as the sthought hit them. Could this thing be capable of replicating their abilities?

The creature’s actions gave them the answer. Just as they had feared, the creature had indeed replicated Daitengu’s skill, and its knife-like feathers were just as powerful as Daitengu’s.

The nine tailed fox shrieked as she formed a nine-color flagain and set it in front of the demons in order to block the creature’s attack.

But the creature’s feathers flew right through the fltoward the five demons. The Silver Horned King let out a low roar, and his shrunken body suddenly grew bigger again. He took a step forward to protect the other four.

After the dust settled, Su Jin could see the Silver Horned King’s body again, but his body was already like a ragdoll. He had been pierced in many places and his body was swaying wildly.

“I’m going to kill all of you!” The Golden Horned King was furious. He slammed the bottom of his Suet Jade Flask, which sent it flying into the air to suck the creature into itself.

The Suet Jade Flask then flew back into the hands of the Golden Horned King. Anyone who dared to hurt his younger brother had to pay the price with their life!

Pfft!

But just then, the flask in his hands suddenly shattered. The creature leaped out and brandished a silver sword that lopped the Golden Horned King’s head off.

“That’s my skill!” Su Jin’s eyes widened. What in the world was this thing? It even managed to replicate his psychokinesis.

In a matter of seconds, the Golden Horned King was dead and the Silver Horned King was probably not too far from death. Almost half of the most powerful demons were dead, and the most terrifying part was that the three creatures were completely unhurt.

“What do we do now?” The remaining three demons started to panic. The nine tailed fox’s nine-color flwas already their most powerful move, yet it did nothing to stop their enemies.

“Run!” yelled Su Jin suddenly. He waved a hand in the air, which created a large silver hand that grabbed hold of Liu Bowen’s group. Then, he covered himself and the group in shadows and started running toward the border of the town. The other three demons immediately started running in three different directions away from Su Jin.

“We can’t leave the town… otherwise… we’ll die!” Liu Bowen was badly injured, but he still remembered the rules of the Handbook. If they stepped outside of the border of the Challenge, they’d die without question.

But Su Jin’s response was, “That’s the point! We need the Handbook to notice us!”

The group was completely confused, but Su Jin didn’t have the tto explain anything to them, and he threw one of them out of the town. If not for the fact that he wasn’t under the control of the Handbook and might therefore not be noticed by it even if he left the town, he would have offered to throw himself out.

“What are you doing?!” Liu Bowen was horrified. If Su Jin hadn’t saved them from those creatures, he would have thought that Su Jin was one of those creatures in disguise.

“I’m saving you guys.” Su Jin narrowed his eyes as he watched what would happen to the owner he flung out. All of a sudden, everything around them shook violently. Liu Bowen and the other owners disappeared, leaving only Su Jin behind.

“I was right.” Su Jin’s eyes lit up. He had found it strange that those creatures were not only killing the demons but also killing the owners. And when they continued to attack himself and the demons as well, he beccertain of one thing.

“Those creatures aren’t from Hell’s Handbook!” Su Jin was very sure of this. Also, those creatures had also said that they were here to destroy the Challenge.

Nothing created by Hell’s Handbook would ever utter such a thing. Very few of the Handbook’s creations placed inside Challenges actually knew about the Handbook or the existence of Challenges. If they did, they were either gods or creatures like the great demons in this Challenge. But they still had one thing in common, which was that they were unable to go against the Handbook’s arrangement.

Back then, the Demon Lord had borrowed Su Jin’s strength in hope of gaining a future. She had made a winning bet, but that also helped Su Jin to have a better understanding of the Handbook’s control over the creatures within a Challenge. The fact that those creatures were able to attack anything in the Challenge so recklessly meant that they were definitely not something the Handbook controlled.

Su Jin had purposely broken the rules of the Handbook because he believed that when the rules were challenged, the Handbook wouldn’t just kill the owners without conducting any investigation. It would probably investigate what happened and find out what caused the breach in rules. That would make more sense.

And Su Jin had clearly guessed it right. The owner he threw out had sounded the alarm, which also made the Handbook scan the Challenge. Once it realized something was amiss, it took the owners away immediately. The fact that the rest of the owners who weren’t thrown out also disappeared was proof of that.

Su Jin, on the other hand, had changed his attributes, just like how someone could change the file extension of a file on a computer. To the Handbook, Su Jin was a character in the Challenge like the demons, so he was not affected.

“But that Liu Bowen is one really unlucky guy. He’s gone through two Level A Challenges that didn’t end properly,” Su Jin chuckled to himself, without any consideration for who caused all this trouble in the first place.

Su Jin turned and headed back. He had to find out exactly what those creatures were. Why would saboteurs suddenly appear within the Handbook’s universe?

“Could this be the work of the Mad Hatter and his bunch?” Su Jin suddenly remembered them. The Mad Hatter was a revolutionist among the elder gods, so even though Su Jin couldn’t really understand what in the world they were trying to do, he knew that they would not stay silent for long. They might be the ones behind these creatures.

“If that’s really the case, I’ve totally underestimated them,” thought Su Jin. These three creatures were seriously a force to be reckoned with.

By the the got back to where he had escaped from, he found nobody there except for the bodies of the Golden Horned King and the Silver Horned King lying quietly on the ground. He immediately checked where the other three had gone and flew toward the one that was giving the weakest signal.

But when he got there, all he saw was Bifang with its flames extinguished and its wings torn and thrown aside. One of those creatures got up from Bifang’s corpse. It noticed Su Jin’s presence and stared at him with its creepy and unfeeling eyes.