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Chapter 268 - Fear (Happy New Year!)
🕑 Added 2024-12-31 11:11:38 +0000 UTCThe skill Savage Shot leveled up. You received 500 experience points.
The skill Hunter's Rage leveled up. You received 700 experience points.
After soloing two more waves of ice drakes, I got the hang of it. When they were ready to use Cold Breath, I would step in with Shadow Step and then surprise them with my skills and an insane barrage of arrows. That was enough to keep the frontline at bay, but soon I had to retreat since the back line wouldn’t fall for the same tricks.
To deal with the back line, I used a bit more magic with Fire Wall… I wanted to deal with the entire wave by myself, but Roswald stepped forward to give a hand, even though I wasn’t particularly in a bind.
“I guess with this, we dealt with five of the fifty waves of Ice Drakes. Ten percent of the work is done after five hours.”
Roswald wasn’t good at math… this wasn’t even nearly close to ten percent of the work, since the deeper levels would have more room for the monsters to spawn. So, unless he knew something and he was hiding it. All this would be around four percent of the total process.
‘If things stay like this and at this pace, I guess we will deal with this in four days. Alissandra is behaving for now, but she will eventually get angry. Why does she have to be the unpredictable factor in the fights when she isn’t part of the enemies?’
She probably won’t make a fuss if she is on my back, but I couldn’t fight with her like that unless I was absolutely sure that I could decimate the enemies… even though I didn’t suffer any damage until now.
I couldn’t help but think that I was starting to behave like a father who fusses too much about their kid. Speaking of fathers, I wondered what Rayner was doing now… I didn’t consider him my real father, but his image showed up in my head. He didn’t seem like the type who worried about this kind of stuff… not like he had ever taken his kids to a labyrinth.
While I was lost in thought, a sudden chill ran down my spine. It wasn’t the residual cold from the Ice Drakes’ breath, it was something far more dangerous. Every instinct screamed at me to be on guard.
Before I could fully process the sensation, I dropped into a defensive stance, my bow already in hand and an arrow nocked. At the same moment, the entire labyrinth began to shake violently, dust and debris falling from the high ceilings. The once-solid ground beneath my feet trembled, and I felt the vibrations of something massive moving through the labyrinth.
“What’s going on?!”
Roswald was confused too… The shaking intensified, and deep, echoing roars began to reverberate through the stone walls. The sound was unlike anything I had heard before, it wasn’t the Ice Drakes. This was something larger, something stronger, and something angry. My heart pounded in my chest as I struggled to maintain my balance. If this was the labyrinth’s way of warning us, then we were about to face something far beyond the Ice Drakes.
“What the…”
Roswald looked around, trying to keep his balance… When I saw some pieces of the ceiling falling, I turned around and then I saw Glacien putting the basket with Alissandra on the ground and protecting her with her body. As expected, she was really smart…
“Is it another break?”
“No, it is impossible… this one isn’t even over yet.”
The dungeons and labyrinth breaks could last for a while based on the size of a labyrinth. It was the norm for the break of a demonic tier labyrinth to last for a week. He had a point. The mana levels in the labyrinth were still haywire, but it was impossible for the place to have obtained so much extra mana to expel a large amount of monsters again… unless our actions were the source of it.
“HHHHHRRUUUUUUUUUUUMMMMMMMMM!”
Before I could decide anything, I heard that powerful roar that made the skin of my back crawl… once that happened, I realized that this mission was over.
“Wahhhhh!” Wahhhhh!”
“Time to bail. Sorry, I had said that I would help, but too many weird things were happening and they weren’t according to the contract.”
“I agree that we should leave this place, but you don’t have any idea on how to deal with the final guardian of the labyrinth? That roar definitely came from it…”
The thought of the final guardian approaching so soon didn’t sit right with me. It was too soon. The guardian was supposed to remain sealed within the deeper layers of the labyrinth, far from the section we were currently in. Even if it had gotten closer, it should have taken more time for it to reach us. But the tremors and that roar… it showed that it was moving and fast.. Something else was wrong and that could be the boss wraith.
It was a troublesome possibility, but the only logical explanation. The boss wraith wasn’t supposed to act until the final guardian was fully under its control. Yet, if it had somehow sped up the process, it could explain why the labyrinth was shaking so violently and why the mana felt even more chaotic than before. If the wraith had already begun its possession, then it wasn’t just the guardian we were facing. It was a combination of two apex forces, working as one.
He wasn’t wrong. A guardian on its own was bad enough—massive, relentless, and nearly indestructible. Add a wraith’s cunning and malice into the mix, and we were looking at a monster that defied even our best strategies.
“I won’t make myself a target while I have to protect Alissandra… but we can at least watch it from a distance while using camouflage. Let’s go.”
The ice drakes stopped coming too, so that only made things more suspicious. At the same time, Roswald couldn’t hide the complicated expression on his face… I wondered if he regretted holding back now.
Putting that aside, I couldn’t help but wonder while we were moving toward the exit of the labyrinth. Was it a coincidence that this was happening? Roswald knew that this labyrinth would sooner or later unleash an army of monsters in the territory, but he didn’t expect that something like this would happen.
It made me recall what I had heard about the clairvoyant of the empire… they couldn’t see anything related to me. Was it because I was someone from another world, or was it because my existence made all kinds of weird things happen around me?
All sorts of weird things had happened to people around me… the old lady that rented me a room, Zyra and her crew, even Glacien got into trouble when that crazy Cellica decided to help Renna in her weird way.
Maybe I was being too hasty… but it was a fact that I had a knack for finding trouble, or find others that are in trouble or will be in trouble, eventually.
While I was thinking about that, I suddenly began to hear some grunts coming from behind. Roswald frowned too, but then he opened his eyes widely when he saw a group of ice drakes flying in our direction… it wasn’t like they were ready to attack us or following our smell… they began to collide against each other while also trying to get in the front of the group.
‘Are they angry? Or is that…’
Fear… the ice drakes were fearing for their lives as weird as that sounded. Dungeon and labyrinth monsters typically didn’t show emotions at least, not in the way living creatures did. Most of them were little more than constructs of mana and intent, controlled by primal instincts to attack and defend, eat and survive. Even the more intelligent ones, like certain bosses, rarely showed anything beyond calculated anger.
But what I saw now was something entirely different. The Ice Drakes were panicking. Their once-coordinated movements dissolved into chaos as they flew in every direction, colliding with each other in their desperation to run away. I tightened my grip on my bow, my mind racing. Fear like this didn’t come from us. No matter how many waves we had cleared, we weren’t nearly enough to inspire this kind of terror in creatures bred for battle.
‘If they are afraid of their own dungeon, boss, then things are truly bat shit insane… let’s try that and use it as reference.’
I used Hunter’s mark for a moment and then closed my eyes while I was running. It was a bit weak, but I could tell where the enemy was. I could use this to mark the final boss of the labyrinth and then eventually end up with a plan to dispose of it.
For situations like this, I knew that I needed a bigger weapon… a special one like a giant ballista or something like that. This wasn’t the first time that I had faced a monster that could defeat me like I was an ant, after all. I decided to work on this seriously.
In any case, the ice drakes began to get closer, and I turned around to face them… since they didn’t try to attack, disposing of them with Savage Shot and Hunter’s Rage was easy. Still, I felt a bit bad since they were so desperate while trying to survive and I was taking advantage of the situation… Well, I had to keep as many of them from leaving the labyrinth after all.
