Chapter 81 Explosion

I had heard people use the phrase elm heads before but I had never heard of stone heads.(1) Was it possible that this King Yama corpse had become fossilized? If the holes in the stone were soft, it would be extremely disgusting.

Fatty was thrown around, but his fingers were clenched tightly in the hole as if he were rock climbing. It seemed like the title of God’s Finger was about to give way.

But he still couldn’t put the grenade in. I kept twisting and wriggling, thinking that no matter how many hands this thing had, it was bound to loosen one or two if all of those movements weren’t enough to throw Fatty off.

As expected, the hand that was holding my head quickly loosened so I turned and immediately reached for Fatty with my hand, “Did you pull out the pin?”

“Of course I did!” Fatty shouted. “I’m not some second-rate German.”

“Throw it to me!” I yelled.

“Do you want to learn from Dong Cunrui?(2) You’ll definitely die if it explodes in your hand.”

When I shouted that I had a clever plan, Fatty cursed and tried to throw it over several times during the chaos but didn’t manage to do it in the end.

After the pin had been pulled from the grenade and the lever flew off, it would detonate a few seconds after being thrown out. As long as I could catch it and immediately hold the lever, I could keep it on standby. But if I couldn’t catch it, the grenade would explode under me and the mud and shrapnel would riddle my body full of holes.

I concentrated all of my energy. It was better to have two hands but now I could only hold the grenade lever with one hand if I caught it.

Since Fatty was tossed about several times, he didn’t dare take any risks, but he eventually got fed up, gave a loud roar, let go of the corpse’s neck, and flung himself at me.

As his whole body slammed into me and rolled down, he grabbed the hand that was holding my neck, lifted it up, and handed me the grenade.

I caught it and said, “Drop into the mud!” Fatty leaned forward and dodged the thing’s grabbing hand, let go, and then sank into the mud.

As it splashed everywhere, King Yama’s hand dove into the mud at an extremely fast speed and seized Fatty.

At this moment, its whole body was leaning down with its back exposed. I relaxed my grip on the grenade in my hand and threw it at the King of Hell’s back.

It flew in an accurate arc across its shoulder in such a way that if the corpse stood upright, the grenade would be blocked from behind. At that moment, although the light was very dim, everything seemed to slow down as I watched the grenade. If it slowed down any more, it would fall into the gap between me and the King of Hell and a head-on blast would cause all of my internal organs to be sprayed all over the stones here.

I curled up into a ball and shouted at Fatty, “It’s going to explode!”

He immediately copied me right as the grenade exploded on the King of Hell’s back. There was a loud noise as the water column around it shattered and pieces of armor were blown off. I saw the distorted shockwave appear and instantly wrap around King Yama. The corpse’s whole body broke from the shockwave and soared into the air like a pile driver before landing on its back.

Within a quarter of a second, my ears were suddenly met with silence. Then, there was a sharp sound as the blast wave rolled up in front of me and the armor on the King of Hell’s chest instantly blew up, the scales stabbing me all over.

The blast wave swept over me and blinded me in an instant. Then, I felt pinched and twisted like modeling clay, but I lost consciousness before I could register the pain.

Fortunately, it wasn’t the first time I had been knocked over by a blast wave at close range, but this time, there was such a big guy standing in front of me. Not only had the grenade exploded practically flush with its back, but most of the blast wave was drawn back so all of the shrapnel that had been flying towards me was sucked into its armor. As a result, my degree of damage was even a little lighter than the previous times.

A few seconds later, I struggled out of the quagmire with my ears ringing wildly and spitting out a mouthful of mud. Fatty stepped on the King of Hell’s arm and reached over to pull me out. “Come on, let’s go. You blew up something else!” At least, those were the words I thought he mouthed at me.

<Chapter 80><Table of Contents><Chapter 82>

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TN Notes:

(1) Per Tiffany: Elm heads is a Chinese idiom meaning “someone who is stubborn”

(2) A Chinese Communist soldier in the People’s Liberation Army during the Chinese Civil War who blew himself up on May 25, 1948 in order to destroy a Kuomintang bunker guarding an approach to an important bridge in Longhua County.

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Updated 2/12/2022