“Surely there’s more we can do,” Lev asked, agitated and thoroughly unbothered by the carnage around him. “Mana density continuously rises, and we have no damned clue why? How is that even possible after living on the surface for seven whole centuries?”
“Because the depths are not meant for us,” Drakys replied calmly. “Same as the oceans, anyone who crosses a certain line will just die. You’ve never been below iron mines, which explains why no one came to warn you.”
“Warn me?”
The Exalted looked into his eyes, the most serious Lev had ever seen the man. “Absolutely no one is allowed to pass a certain depth. The signs start showing up early as mana is siphoned by the stone itself, and light starts to lose intensity. Shadows become deeper and stronger, immediately making the caves way more dangerous. Humanity is barred from ever going further.
“That’s far from the worst part, though. We actually met some sapients down there,” Drakys remembered out loud, his eyes dulling. “I would be very surprised if any of those beings were below level 1500. So, for the love of all that is holy on Monarch, do not cross paths with them. Is that clear?”
Lev gulped. “Yes, sir.”
“Is it clear, Lev?”
“Crystal clear, sir,” he nodded repeatedly, more than a little spooked. Finding even one being at such strength could be disastrous if someone offended it. To find multiple, and all of them just as strong?
Humanity really only persisted because of the whims of the gods.
“Good,” Drakys nodded sharply, eyes turning towards the horizon. “Now, as for why we do not do anything long-term about it, you have a high Perception attribute, correct?”
“Yes?”
“Now imagine a monster with that attribute a thousand times more potent.”
Lev blinked, unable to really comprehend that scale. He could perceive a lot within his range of manipulation. Mana, different mana types, living beings, enchantments, intent behind manipulation, and other mundane movements. There was no end to that list if one really dove into the effects of Perception, except what Drakys asked him boggled the imagination.
“I can’t,” he replied bluntly.
“Not unexpected,” the Exalted smirked lightly. “Not for long, though. You can find that result in third-threshold monsters if you get unlucky, and knowing your track record…”
Lev scowled to himself, looking over the thousands upon thousands of corpses surrounding them. Just a few minutes ago, he was content with his progress, now able to reliably drag kinetic energy out of runes and manipulate it freely.
It suddenly didn’t feel enough. There was always a bigger fish to be wary of, and he happened to be like a bait dangling from a fishing rod.
“Get to the point,” he sighed.
“We can’t even risk better transport between cities,” Drakys commented. “That’s all there is to it.”
“I see,” Lev said and changed the topic. “Are there no vain enchantments to drain ambient mana?”
“None that will hold in the long-term. Besides, there will never be enough. We will be able to, at most, delay the inevitable by a few months by doing that. Dungeons were a way more promising option, even if the loss of hunters continues to mount.”
“What about the places where mana gathers naturally?” he questioned. “Like the Pit? Or the Dreadwoods?”
“The Pit is under constant surveillance. A fifth of humanity’s Masters usually reside in that place, and all of the upper layers have been transformed into mobile strongholds.”
Mobile? Lev wondered, not voicing the thought.
“The forest and the Dreadwoods… there’s not much to be done about them. We obviously try everything at our disposal, which helps quite a bit, but that’s about it. Any large-scale movements are bound to fail. Even the most ambitious noble in the Haven isn’t that deluded.”
Lev leaned forward. “And who would that noble be?”
“Someone cut out of the same cloth as you,” Drakys exhaled through his nose. “Marchioness Aurora Flynn, the Red Streak. The title was coined after she led humanity through the Pit’s layers like a streak of fire, representing both her rapid accomplishments and class.”
“How does that make her similar to me?” Lev shook his head. “I’ve yet to really do anything.”
“Hmm,” Drakys gave him an amused side-eye. “Yeah, you only ever escaped a fourth-threshold monster while somehow accessing twice or thrice-evolved lightning.”
Lev’s head snapped towards the man. “Twice or thrice? Not once? Also, thrice!? Is that even possible?”
“Who knows,” the Exalted laughed. “I sure as hell don’t. Maybe the Goddess does? Moonlight doesn’t seem to be an evolved element, though it might be a branch of light.”
Before the exchange could turn into theories, each more far-fetched than the last, Lev flinched.
“That’s quite the distance,” Drakys remarked with a raised brow. “My runes really do suit your barriers.”
“One last question,” Lev threw out before he could forget. “All these supportive runes and the enhancement formations, just how strong are these?”
Drakys stared at him for a long moment, both impressed and in disbelief. “You haven’t figured that out yet?”
Lev just shrugged in response. How would he know without seeing the man truly go out? The runes could easily be his stash from when he was a Master.
“I still use them regularly, Lev. They’re the best I have. You’re underutilizing them beyond belief, which isn’t your fault since you don’t have a class related to them. Just know that these will easily last you through most of the Exalted rank if you survive that long.”
After that, the man just vanished, leaving Lev frozen in place. Harun’s words came to mind. The aura mage had once mentioned that Lev carried a portion of Drakys’s inheritance. Did the Exalted know just how strong those runes were?
And here he was now, asking Drakys directly after brushing off the comment back then.
… I hope I didn’t offend him, he lamented with a tired sigh, turning his attention to the buried orbs.
Over the past few hours, monsters from underground had started swarming him. Many of the orbs were destroyed, so he quadrupled their number and spread them farther out.
The same orbs were now transmitting brief feedback, indicating a distant enemy. It approached slowly, or so his brain initially interpreted.
It was not moving slowly. The Goliath was still an incredible distance away, yet each of its steps carried a faint hint of mana, pinging his orbs well before the normal vibrations should have.
Lev wasn’t sure what to feel about that. If Drakys’s words were to be believed, he could very easily be awaiting a world-ending threat.
****
“What do you think?” Drakys sent to the majestic blue tiger standing right next to Lev.
The barrier mage didn’t catch as much as a whiff of mana, even as Shen, Drakys’s bond, waved his paw in front of Lev’s face.
“He reeks of recklessness,” Shen commented, nose scrunched. “If he were an enemy, I would kill him where he stands.”
“Hoh?” Drakys raised a brow. “To nip the threat in the bud?”
“The threat is more threatening to himself than he is to me,” Shen snorted, the sound still regal. Drakys was still slightly envious of his bond’s inherent royal traits, particularly that booming voice. “But yes. He represents a potential terrifying enough that I want to see him thrive, despite knowing he will eventually be able to eradicate me with ease.”
“He won’t,” Drakys reminded Shen, just in case.
“I know, my dull human,” came a mostly sarcastic remark. “Look at his expression. Where is the terror? A mere cub stands against a Goliath, one that will render his class obsolete. How can his legs still carry him?”
“Lev doesn’t know that yet.”
Shen turned to Drakys, his usually beautiful mane flat, and eyes even flatter. “Are you serious?”
“There are two reasons for that,” Drakys smirked, dragging out the answer by a whole second. Shen held himself back to an impressive degree, the patience belying his immense interest in the Favored of Kassavin. “First, I think you will be surprised by his class.”
“We will see,” the tiger immediately countered, though Drakys continued regardless.
“Second, he simply trusts me that much. When he finds out, the thought of retreat won’t even cross his mind. That’s part of what makes him stand out so much, constantly sharpening his willpower.”
Shen physically recoiled, his hair rising on end. “Foolishness of the highest order. I was an imbecile to harbor any hopes about this idiot’s future. But to put his life in the hands of a human Exalted, who is still far from the strongest in his own league? Ridiculous. Just what did the Lord see in this guy? I can imagine countless ways in which he is about to die, and half of them won’t even need a full minute…”
The rant continued for a while. Drakys merely listened with a smile, long used to his bond’s antics. The fact that they were standing beside Lev was telling enough. Regardless of what the barrier mage chose to do, they were going to be present to save him.
No matter what it takes, Drakys repeated to himself. Shen went silent, feeling some emotions bleed through the bond. A single glance was shared before they settled in to wait and see what Lev had in store for the overwhelming adversary.
Maybe, just maybe, he would one day be enough to serve as humanity’s sword, for Hakim was terribly limited as their shield.
****
Time passed excruciatingly slowly. Lev’s instincts kept screaming at him in the background, warning him to flee. He was so out of his depth, it wasn’t even funny.
He wasn’t going to run, though. For a while, he had been subjected to monster waves and their formation. The very world turned hostile to humanity in a blink, attracting monsters from far and wide.
Something like that was already taking place, except all of it originated from one monster. Lev could feel it in his bones and in every corner of his mind. The approaching enemy wasn’t just another creature to put down. It was a force of nature, one that quite literally made his armor uneasy.
That had never happened before. Swallowing for the tenth time, he scanned his armor again, finding it stable yet odd, as if under an invisible assault.
He didn’t have to wonder for long. For the briefest of moments, all of his underground orbs winked out. Runes stopped functioning, and through mental feedback, he could feel the barrier that constituted them fighting against a pulse of mana.
Then the moment passed, and everything returned to normal.
Um…
Lev stood rooted in place, his unease growing by the second. So far away was the Goliath that he still couldn’t see it on the horizon, and it still managed to turn off his enchantments. That was plenty to make deductions.
Drakys’s words came to mind again: Perhaps you will be able to take it down in one move.
He already knew, didn’t he? He wondered with an exhale. It was pretty much confirmed that the monster would be a counter to his class, so it made sense to bring him along. The most he could do was pour everything into a single attack.
Still… why not just tell me?
Questions were the bane of Lev’s existence. Everything related to the soul and The System was already shrouded in mystery, one that only deepened the more he explored Monarch. His own past was a huge question mark, and the price for it still haunted his dreams.
Hell, one of the major reasons he didn’t get involved in big population centers was due to all the wonders on display. The daily lives of common folks, the small wonders of their countless classes, the effects of enchantments at every corner, and so much more. Every new glance was going to reveal even more questions and mysteries, and he had plenty of those already.
This, however, wasn’t some grand puzzle to unravel. It was merely a matter of informing him instead of keeping him in the dark. It… it…
It is a priceless opportunity curated by one of humanity’s strongest for me, and me alone.
No amount of annoyance was going to suppress how rightfully indebted he felt to Drakys. After all, just that brief pulse was enough to show him which enchantments resisted better, giving him ideas about how to arrange formations to account for such attacks in the future. Even those runes were some of the best in the plains, handed to him on a silver platter.
Exhaling the last of his complaints, Lev recalled his bubble and jumped inside. Creating a small cube around him, he summoned the treant corpse. Lacking the tools to harvest sap efficiently, he went with a simple option.
Forming a funnel into the cube, he stabbed a few pipes into the most obvious sap leakage points in the corpse. It was supremely overkill, but he planned to use every possible drop for the upcoming battle.
And so, the enchanting began. The bubble rose for several kilometers, shrouded in shadow mana and invisibility formations. Lev kept his eyes towards the distant Goliath, able to pinpoint its location without trouble despite not being able to see it.
Melee was out of the question. Going near the monster would simply destroy his armor and kill him through a pulse of mana.
That left preparing for said pulses, which left very few formations. Controlled Enhancement was the prime candidate for infusing willpower into the armor, and Flameforged Constitution increased his harmony with it.
So, that was all he carved. No concealments, no extra protections, no platings, no attack spells. Just two formations, extended to every nook and cranny of Arcane Protection to fight against the Goliath’s disruption.
Sap was dropped on his head and smeared on the entire armor. Given its quality, the conductivity of the armor increased significantly, just enough to handle the amount of mana he was about to dump inside.
Turning around, he gazed at the treated orbs full of mana. All of them combined held an amount that eclipsed two of his full pools, easily tripling the fuel he could use in the battle. He had a few plans, but none of them were going to survive first contact.
Perception made the wait extra terrible. His armor was fully treated, runes were checked a million times, and even the orbs holding mana were close to bursting from excess regeneration when the Goliath finally became visible.
For a few minutes, it was merely a dot on the horizon. Lev stared at it until the shape expanded, finally revealing what they were dealing with.
A monstrous spider marched towards him, all of its sixteen legs carrying it seamlessly. Four were used for every step as the Goliath glided forward without pause, eating through hundreds of meters in seconds.
Everything about it was dark blue, from the long legs to the hair protecting them. In front of it all was a face, and that was the most terrifying thing of them all.
Instead of a usual spider head, a humanoid face adorned the front of its body. Similar to a hairless gorilla, its half-open mouth packed rows full of disturbingly human teeth, whereas its two round eyes stared ahead without any light inside them.
It’s… blind?
That was the first thing Lev tested. To see if the Goliath was going to look at him with its eyes or not, he released a tiny sliver of his aura through the shadow mana concealing his bubble.
The monster didn’t as much as twitch.
Confused, Lev released even more. By now, even goblins would be able to identify it and start screaming bloody murder.
Except, none of that happened. The Goliath just continued trudging, mindlessly moving towards the human lands. Even when the full might of Lev’s aura was displayed, infused with mana, it did not take notice.
What the hell? He scratched his armored head. That wasn’t right.
Just to be certain, he tried to move the bubble closer. An extremely potent pulse of disruption shot out of the monster’s front limbs, nearly destroying the bubble. Only the shadow mana cycling in the enchantments saved him from the worst of it.
That was pretty stupid, Lev exhaled in relief. He had already dealt with the occasional pulses disabling his orbs, though they came at random intervals. Good to know they were caused by proximity as well, even if he was still kilometers away.
There wasn’t much else to do besides testing just how bad the matchup was for him. Forming a few lances at the edge of his manipulation range behind him, he didn’t enchant or infuse them.
Instead, he launched the first with nothing but the power of his mind. Accounting for gravity, it flew in an arc, aimed at a limb to not trigger most of the monster’s danger senses.
For a few seconds, the flight continued unimpeded, then a targeted pulse of disruption just disintegrated the projectile.
… I see.
The next lance was infused with lightning, still not enchanted. Its flight was straighter, shooting towards the same spot like a blue streak.
Another pulse, and it vanished. Even the lightning mana was reduced to the pure kind.
One by one, Lev tested all of his lance variations. Extreme infusion without enchantments was the least effective, barely affording the projectile another moment of flight before it was reduced to ambient mana.
Runes in general performed significantly better, which still amounted to nothing. Armorbreaker, Kinetic Acceleration, Elemental Infusion, and several other supportive enchantments combined to create the ultimate lance, and yet, it didn’t even get within fifty meters of the Goliath.
And throughout all of that, the Goliath didn’t even turn in his direction. It was just as mindless as before.
One move, huh? Lev breathed in deeply. His aura was carefully controlled to spread inside the bubble, targeting all of the orbs holding the extra mana. Time to test which move is even viable.
****
“He’s about to do something stupid,” Shen sent, feeling the mana start to move. “Ignore that. He’s about to kill himself.”
“He’ll be fine,” Drakys snorted. “You’ve never seen him actually fight, have you?”
“I just returned from a seven-year hunt. Stop poking fun at me and start talking.”
“Always so impatient,” he clicked his tongue, keeping an eye on the Goliath just in case.
[Wandering Goliath - Level 897]
“Lev has a really strong soul,” Drakys began, contemplating his words. “He will be able to channel all of that mana without risking any damage.”
“That still leaves him vulnerable,” Shen grumbled, knowing he was there exactly for that reason. “Is this wise? If he can actually hurt the creature, the boy will gain at least 15 levels. Jumps like that can be disorienting.”
“This is why I’m telling you to shut up and watch for once,” Drakys sent with an exasperated sigh. “His class isn’t one that depends on attributes. The mind is the main driving force, with runes empowering it to even greater heights.”
Shen huffed to himself, creating a platform of solidified air and getting comfortable atop it. “This show better be worth watching.”
“Don’t bully him if you don’t like it,” Drakys reminded his bond.
“I’m not nearly stupid enough to risk angering a god, dumb human.”