Chapter 173 - Hero: Yan Qing
Chapter 173: Hero: Yan Qing
At this moment, on the green battlefield on the Temple of Providence…
At the foot of the mountain, Yan Qing’s image had completely taken shape. He was wearing tight short-sleeved clothes with a bright yellow crossbow in his hand. He raised his blurry face and gazed at the Eagle Man player hundreds of meters away.
Whoosh!
Next, he ran towards the mountaintop in a streak of green light as agilely as Wu Song’s “Jade Ring Steps, Lovers’ Feet”.
Shoo!
The Eagle Man player on the mountaintop, however, had a hollow and expressionless face.
But a mass of green air surged out of his body and turned into an eagle, which had a wingspan of two meters and sharp claws that were shining in coldness.
In the next moment, the eagle cried and flapped its wings, before it swooped right towards Yan Qing who was climbing the mountain.
Whoosh!
Moving towards each other, the two parties soon reached within thirty meters of each other.
The swooping eagle suddenly paused, because a delicate bright yellow arrow that was only about one foot long appeared on its neck!
Pew!
In the next moment, the eagle vanished into nothingness in the air!
However, a Perfect talent clearly couldn’t be passed so easily.
“Zhou! Zhou! Zhou!”
Since the first eagle was gathered and swooped down, the Eagle Man player on the mountaintop had been unleashing eagles from his chest nonstop. All the eagles, with a wingspan of two meters each and hatred in their eyes, dived at Yan Qing down below!
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
Faced with the eagles that were coming to him incessantly, Yan Qing wasn’t really slowed down.
During his climb, he simply fired upward with the yellow crossbow in his hand, and each arrow from the crossbow hit an eagle and turned into a mass of air!
After the eagle dispersed, the delicate arrow that was shot out would return to him and be loaded in his crossbow for the next precise shot.
Yan Qing the Rogue was one of the few multi-talented geniuses in Water Margin.
He could sing, dance, play musical instruments, speak dialects of various places, and he knew the jargon of many trades.
In particular, while he wasn’t best at clashes on battlefields, he was exceptional in two aspects.
Firstly, he was very skilled at wrestling, and nobody could beat him in that aspect. Secondly, he only carried three arrows in his quiver, and he never missed a shot!
Such a hero wasn’t as famous as Wu Song or Lu Zhishen, but he was definitely no less popular on Earth!
Obviously, for this test, the providence of human beings had granted Yan Qing the ability that his arrows would kill the eagles as long as they hit the targets!
Also, having reached Extraordinary Rank-5, the Twin Dragon Mount fort’s power of providence provided suppression too and made it impossible for the Eagle Man player on the mountaintop to take action in person!
So, it seemed that the Perfect test had become rather simple.
However, how could it be as simple as this?
While the Eagle Man player on the mountaintop was suppressed and couldn’t attack directly, the difficulty of the test was still “Perfect” in general!
It was because Yan Qing needed to deal with not just the endless eagles but also the green gales that covered the whole mountain during his climb!
Ji Ye had experienced the Eagle Men’s gales and knew how painful they were. More importantly, the tiny arrows that Yan Qing used could easily be deviated by the strong wind.
The green gales had different directions and speeds after every dozen of meters due to the terrain on the mountain. It was definitely not easy to precisely hit the eagles whose trajectories weren’t fixed either!
Also, while the providence of human beings endowed Yan Qing’s arrows with a fatal effect, it had also given them restrictions, which was that the arrows were irreplaceable. On the mountain where the gales were raging, it would be impossible for him to recycle his arrow manually if he missed a target!
Thus Yan Qing couldn’t even afford one “miss” in this test.
That was because after some of the Eagle Man’s puppets were killed by Yan Qing, he no longer deployed the eagles one by one but gathered some of them at the same time and then released them to attack Yan Qing from different directions simultaneously.
It meant that Yan Qing had to ensure that he had all the three arrows in his hands all the time in order to pass the test.
Therefore, the challenge that Yan Qing was faced with was even more difficult than Gongsun Sheng’s!
“I probably can’t do it if I were him!”
Watching Yan Qing kill the eagles that came from the mountaintop with his dexterity and his arrows that never missed the targets, Ji Ye secretly compared himself to the man and felt that he couldn’t do that even though he had the Bulldozer Crossbow.
It was clear that this Rogue was better at his crossbow than the “Crossgod of Yang City”.
Also technically speaking, Yan Qing was not just good with the crossbow; he was talented at everything that involved shooting.
At the last phase of his fighting career in Liangshan, he learned to shoot with bows and casually shot at some wild geese that flew in the sky, but he missed no targets and “accidentally” hit a dozen of the geese.
What was more worth mentioning was Song Jiang’s remark after Yan Qing shot down the geese.
At first, Song Jiang said that every serviceman should know archery and praised Yan Qing for his precise shots. Then, he said, “Those geese leave the north, seek for food in the warm south, and then return to the north in the next spring. They’re loyal birds who respect each other and always fly in order. They’re just like us. When you shot a few of them down, it’s like some of our brothers have died. How will the rest of them feel?
“Brother, you must not hurt wild geese again!”
In the end, Song Jiang even wrote a poem to express his feelings.
Of course, while Ji Ye was slightly absentminded, his eyes were still focused on the battlefield.
Yan Qing, who had been charging nonstop, was only a hundred meters away from the Eagle Man at the mountaintop, but he was caught in big trouble!
The last part of the journey turned out to be a smooth and vertical cliff that was utterly impossible to climb.
The Eagle Man player stood high on the mountaintop. Yan Qing couldn’t even see him from his perspective.
Furthermore, the gales at higher altitudes were even stronger than those down below. Also, there were multiple changes in the gales between every hundred meters.
Since he was incapable of flying, even Yan Qing didn’t know what to do anymore despite his gifts!
“Zhou! Zhou! Zhou!”
On the mountaintop, the Eagle Man player kept summoning the eagles.
Also, he didn’t fly those eagles downwards anymore like earlier. Instead, all the eagles simply hovered around the mountaintop after they were gathered.
It was clear that he was preparing for his ultimate skill, and he was going for a fatal attack after he had accumulated enough eagles!