Chapter 322: Progress |
Grant kept everyone’s regeneration stable, never letting his mana drop below the safety level, while Ascalon, the berserker, reserved his fury only for the moments when Lohan signaled a critical vulnerability in the Elites’ defenses.
The blue Slime felt that with every corpse processed, his authority over the battlefield expanded.
The depth of the cave brought with it a change in atmospheric pressure and in the density of the ambient mana.
The inscriptions on the walls became more complex and luminous, emitting a purple light that pulsed like a diseased heart, and it was against this backdrop of tension that the group encountered a final challenge greater than expected.
This time, it wasn’t just an elite monster blocking their path.
Two Black Core Watchers, both Level 15 Elite, were positioned at the entrance to a colossal gallery. They appeared to be connected by pulsating vines that exchanged energy between them, creating a mana barrier that prevented stealthy advancement.
Upon sensing the approach of that group of humans, the two monsters let out a cry in unison that made the stalactites on the ceiling vibrate. The cave floor erupted into a web of electrified roots and pools of fermented acid, forcing the group to immediately form a defensive formation.
"Spread out! Dee, Alice, take the one on the left! VonB, Ascalon, hold off the one on the right! Don’t let them connect the vines!" Lohan’s mental command echoed clearly in everyone’s minds.
Lohan and Lisa acted as the central strike force. Lohan, realizing the danger of the situation, activated his partial division to a level he rarely used, scattering fragments of himself across the battlefield to act as sensors and buffers.
The battle that followed was surprisingly well-orchestrated.
Lisa leaped between the two Elites with ease, taking advantage of her agility and speed while using her spiritual fire to sever the connecting vines between the monsters.
Lohan, from behind her, fired acid cocoons that exploded against the Vigilantes’ joints, testing their resistance to this type of attack, while using vacuum detonation to lure the monsters into Tunder and Palana’s area-of-effect attacks.
Unlike the first battle, where the guild group had merely watched helplessly, this time they proved their worth.
Samantha and Richard moved among the electrified roots with blind confidence, trusting that Lohan’s armor on their bodies would not only protect them from residual damage but also aid in camouflage, making them far more lethal.
They attacked the Elites’ wooden heels, forcing the giants to their knees repeatedly while Dylan led the left flank with his spear, piercing the gaps created by Lohan’s explosions, frustrated that monsters like these had no blood, while Grant maintained an active purification barrier to neutralize the toxic fumes flooding the area.
The fight against the two Elites at the same time tested everyone’s endurance to the limit, but Astralis didn’t give up a single centimeter of ground.
Although Lohan’s armor didn’t completely absorb the damage from the attacks, after a long battle, Lisa delivered the final blow to the Vigilante on the left with a surge of pure white flames, while Lohan materialized a colossal ice spike that pierced the core of the second monster, shattering the petrified wood into a thousand pieces.
Since she was using fire to deal with wooden monsters, Lisa had to be very careful not to turn the monsters’ remains into fuel, thereby consuming the biomass that Halon would use to recover after the battle.
When the last fragment of wood stopped moving and the mana dissolved into the air, an oppressive silence fell over the cave.
The guild members remained in their positions for a few seconds, panting and with weapons in hand, looking around for any new threats.
Samantha wiped the sweat from her forehead, and Richard sheathed his daggers, though his gaze remained fixed on the dark tunnel ahead. Alice and Dylan approached Lisa and Lohan, noticing that even the blue Slime seemed more serious and focused than usual.
"Well... that went a lot better than I expected," Dylan remarked in a low voice, a small, proud smile on his face, his voice echoing through the silent tunnel. "I don’t sense any signs of life within a two-hundred-meter radius, though these wooden bodies are completely fooling my senses."
Then everyone looked at Halon, or rather, at his main body strapped to Lisa’s back, and only when a small, soft, bluish hand appeared beside his body, giving a thumbs-up, did relief wash over them all.
"Holy shit, did we just kill two Level 15 Elites at the same time?!" Surprisingly, the first to shout excitedly was WrymWood, the group’s druid, who usually acted the calmest of all the players.
But at that point, no one was surprised by that.
A feeling of euphoria completely flooded everyone’s hearts, prompting applause and shouts of joy to erupt immediately afterward.
Lohan then looked at the two floating screens in front of him with a big smile.
[Experience Gained: +20,000!]
[Experience Gained: +20,000!]
40,000 experience points from just those two elites! Adding that to all the experience he’d gained so far since leveling up, Lohan was extremely satisfied.
[Experience: 363,200 / 1,638,400]
Although it seemed like a small amount compared to the enormous amount of experience needed to reach Level 16, he was still happy to see his experience bar more than 20% full.
The higher the level, the harder it became to level up again, and while the experience monsters yielded increased with each level, it didn’t double in the same way that the amount of experience he needed to level up doubled each time.
But looking at the two corpses on the ground, Lohan broke into a broad smile and began digesting them.
[Biomass: 46 → 71]
[Pressurized Acid Detonation Lv 1 → Lv 3]
[The user is able to expel a highly corrosive fluid. When the liquid undergoes accelerated fermentation, it triggers a chemical reaction that increases the pressure until it reaches a critical point. Upon impact, the liquid explodes, releasing a shockwave combined with a spray of concentrated acid, causing damage to a localized area.]
After digesting the two corpses and the two Mana Stones, Lohan felt the invigorating sensation of his skill evolving, making the fluid he could now produce even more explosive, acidic, and dangerous.
Lohan retracted his clones, returning to the form of a blue sphere on Lisa’s back, satisfied.
He activated his perception skills at maximum level, and the result was the same as Dylan’s: an absolute void devoid of hostile life.
Counting all the monsters they had killed so far, Lohan surmised that the dungeon’s silence was not a sign of peace, but rather that someone even more terrifying likely lay ahead of them.
"The Dungeon Master..." Lisa murmured, feeling the hairs on her body stand on end beneath Lohan’s membrane. "I believe he’s the only one left now."
Lohan vibrated his membrane, feeling his biomass reservoir overflow as it processed the last of the Elites, and looked at the faces of each guild member.
They all bore the marks of battle, scratched armor and grimy faces, but the gleam in their eyes was even brighter than when they’d first arrived here, fueled by the excitement of being part of this conquest and earning their place there.
The respect and loyalty they felt for Halon had grown even stronger.
They no longer felt like mere hired hands; after so much bonding, they were the vanguard of Elysium’s most powerful guild, and they were ready to claim sovereignty over that cave.
Lohan clenched his small, bluish fist and pointed toward the black stone arch ahead.
"Let’s go, everyone. We won’t keep the Boss waiting. It’s time to bring yet another Global Alert about Astralis Requiem to the world!"
With a single, resolute movement, the guild advanced into the final corridor.
The sound of boots on the stone floor was the only noise breaking the silence of that cavern, while each member’s sense of danger began to warn them in different ways that the path ahead was extremely perilous.
They knew that some of them would likely die in the battle to come, but even if they did, just being part of something as grand as this would be worth the penalty of losing a level for dying there.
What was dropping a rank compared to sharing in the glorious honor of being congratulated in front of billions of people? Even if their names weren’t specifically mentioned in the announcement, just being part of Astralis would prove that they were part of it!
So, with their heads held high and without fear of death, they walked toward the unknown, driven by confidence in themselves and, above all, in Halon and Lisa, knowing that once they passed through that arch, the name Astralis Requiem would be permanently etched into the history of Elysium.