I'm a monster in Demon King's Castle

But the next second, Shadow flickered and vanished, taking the finger bone with it.

"Escaped? Gave up? Decisive…" Huntelaar retrieved his arrow. "Perhaps this Lee… isn't as reckless as I thought?"

Huntelaar continued digging downwards, his speed suddenly increasing, clearly not having used his full strength before.

"He's chasing!" Shadow flashed continuously, and in the blink of an eye, it had followed the bone halfway into the soil, quickly distancing itself from Huntelaar.

"Escape quickly!" Lee Read was still heading down, his tentacles almost fully saturated with earth elements and heat.

"Looks like I still have to catch Lee…" Huntelaar assessed the situation and, no longer distracted by the Shadow Demon, went straight for where Lee Read was digging—trying to catch a shadow in the soil, even for an 8th-tier hunter, was difficult, better to catch the source.

"But this shadow looks very small and far from strong enough…" In just one encounter, Huntelaar judged the value of his prey.

"Could it be because Nolemore still exists?" Huntelaar, of course, knew the scarcity of the Unique Prey.

However, now there were two Shadow Demons on the continent.

"Don't worry! I won't kill you! You are a very rare demon!" Huntelaar shouted as he chased, "I will keep you by my side, raising you until you are fat enough, enough to become a 'Unique Prey'."

For hunters, raising the offspring of prey was perfectly normal.

Immediately after, Huntelaar noticed that Lee was no longer moving but was waiting by an underground river.

"Don't rush, I'm coming!" Huntelaar said, but still followed the path with the bone, constantly driving the Shadow Demons back to their main body.

Which was Lee Read's body.

Even the most confident hunter wouldn't willingly enter a demon's trap.

This had become their instinct.

After chasing and fleeing in silent confrontation for about fifteen minutes, both sides realized it was difficult to outwit the other, and because they both urgently wanted to eliminate the other, they finally met by this underground river.

Lee Read had already retrieved all the bones and shadows, examining the hunter in the indigo robe a hundred meters away.

Huntelaar had been observing Lee Read for a long time, and although he was far away, he had memorized this body and skeleton.

"Hello, I'm very pleased to meet you, I am Huntelaar." Huntelaar greeted, seemingly expecting Lee Read's reaction.

Before Huntelaar lost his memory, he remembered himself as the hunter closest to the Hunter King on the continent, the founder of the Hunter Kingdom, a legendary hero of the continent.

But the skeleton in front of him showed no reaction.

Looking at the hunter in front of him, who didn't seem like a hunter, Lee Read casually replied, "Don Quixote."

"Heh heh." Huntelaar was amused by the clumsy joke. "I will know your name sooner or later, and what you are called is not important."

"You don't recognize me?" Huntelaar still didn't understand why "Don Quixote" was so lacking in common sense.

"Should I recognize you?" Lee Read also hesitated, uncertain if the predecessor had any grudges with this hunter.

So both sides were a little awkward.

"Then why are you running?" Huntelaar didn't deliberately stall for time, and while asking, he silently laid out various traps in the underground river.

And because his movements were too subtle, Lee Read didn't dare to let Shadow go too far, so he didn't notice.

"If you're being chased by someone for no reason, wouldn't you run?" Lee Read still didn't understand why Huntelaar was chasing him.

He was clearly not a Believer, nor a Cleaner, and had nothing to do with Jesse…

Where did he offend him?

Even more awkwardly… Huntelaar himself wasn't clear either.

"You ran, so I chased…" Huntelaar also found it difficult to answer Lee Read's question.

The two fell into an awkward silence again.

"He said I am his Unique Prey," Shadow wrote in Lee Read's mind.

"Unique Prey? Does it have something to do with the hunter's promotion?" Having been on the Chaos Continent for so long, and having been in contact with the heroes on the Cage side, Lee Read fully understood that the heroes here basically had only one wish.

That was to advance.

Perhaps the only exception at present was Soya—he really wanted to rush into the Demon King's castle and kill the Demon King.

"It should be his promotion material…" Shadow speculated.

"Then there's nothing to discuss…" Lee Read had been using his X-ray vision on Huntelaar, realizing that his physical strength was comparable to Jesse's, so he hadn't made a move.

"Or… should we go up and talk? It's too hot here." Huntelaar tried to distract Lee Read.

"Stop talking, let's fight, I'm getting hot too…" Before Lee Read finished speaking, earth bullets burst out from his body!

The earth bullets mixed with heat, turning into fireballs in mid-air, crackling and falling towards Huntelaar—this was a new combat method Lee Read had developed after absorbing frost, lightning, and the heat he had just come into contact with underground in the Copper Mine Town church.

When the tentacles absorbed enough heat, Lee Read always had the urge to release them.

This time, using earth elements as a medium, Lee Read instantly emptied everything in his tentacles.

If there were die-hard fans of the colosseum present, they would remember a demon called the "Octopus Shapeshifter."

Lee Read's fighting style was leaning more towards demons.

And this brought Huntelaar a sense of discomfort—clearly, this guy was just someone who liked to fight hand-to-hand and shoot iron nails, how could he suddenly play by different rules?

Fortunately, they were all projectiles, and Huntelaar used a few ingenious explosive arrows to detonate the fireballs between them at the lowest cost.

Earth and fire filled the space, obscuring vision.

But this had no effect on X-ray vision and eagle eyes.

In an instant, the traps by the underground river erupted on a large scale, spraying vines, fire thorns, and ice walls, coupled with various arrows that suddenly appeared in the void…

Huntelaar tried to paralyze Lee Read's mobility.

After understanding Lee's fighting style, Huntelaar knew that he had the ability to fight 8th-tier knights in close combat, so he mostly used elemental traps and explosive arrows for ranged attacks.

However, whether it was vines, fire pillars, or ice walls, or even explosive arrows, none of them truly hit Lee Read's body—Lee Read's body split and scattered, avoiding the crossfire of explosive arrows and traps very flexibly.

Like a dancer dancing on the tip of a needle, each section of Lee Read's body was staggered, scattering around Huntelaar, passing through the vines and fire thorns to pounce over…

He actually split his body to avoid them?!

Lee Read was also surprised because he found that he seemed to have experienced similar battles.

Faced with dense traps and void arrows, he even felt a little comfortable?

What was even stranger was that there was no memory of this experience in his mind, as if the battle with this hunter had been embedded in his instinct, and all his movements were within his expectations.

At the same time, the elements and explosions surging by the underground river were all absorbed by the tentacles and then transformed into more intense earth bullets, carrying lightning and ice fragments, fiercely piercing into Huntelaar's body…

The tentacles could absorb elements and then counterattack?

He hadn't even used the power of the Shadow Demon?

Huntelaar realized something was wrong and felt that he might have underestimated this guy who had been hiding underground all day.

Just as Huntelaar "endured" the damage from the earth bullets and wanted to create distance to replan the battle, his shadow was pinned down.

Shadow Stitch?

Huntelaar changed his thinking, fully hooked his fingers, and shot out all the holy light arrows around himself…

When the holy light burst, the Shadow Demon's Shadow Stitch loosened, and it couldn't continue to twist and kill.

Huntelaar prepared to flee first and then make plans.

As if he had predicted his actions, Lee Read suddenly flashed behind Huntelaar and bit his shoulder.

Huntelaar began to bleed.