Chapter 695: Treasures
Sylas zipped down the corridors. He had no easy way of finding where Professor Fembroise had been teleported to, what he did know was that usually, a Quicktime Event would have a
limited range.
The system almost certainly wouldn't let him leave this region until the Quicktime Event was over. In which case, for the sake of maintaining what little fairness there was left, Professor Fembroise should be in this region as well.
If she was outside of it, then the system might as well act to kill him now.
The question was... how large was this range?
That was Sylas' first thought. He wanted to figure out how much room he had to work with.
With his memory, winding through the tunnels he had come from was easy. But the issue was that when he took Professor Fembroise away for their talk, he had picked a random tunnel he had no familiarity with.
It was a minor mistake, but right now it was costing him. For all he knew, there was a dead end waiting for him.
Sylas' feet came to a grinding halt.
A group of three men appeared before him, but they seemed just as shocked to see him.
'Why didn't I sense them?'
This was the only thought Sylas could have before he was suddenly attacked.
His tail whipped out in response, knocking the poison-tip bolt from a hidden crossbow away.
The man seemed shocked that Sylas had been able to react to it at all, but he wasn't slow to back away, drawing his weapon. Unfortunately, not being slow wasn't enough when Sylas was so fast.
CLANG! CLANG!
A twin pair of Glass blades rebounded against their defenses, but the cracks that formed in their armors caught them off guard and filled their eyes with horror.
Sylas' body flashed forward, leaving trails of ice behind as he curved up the side of the cave wall swiftly, appearing to their backs.
They spun around, but they lost control of their bodies on the now slippery floor. BANG!
One of their heads fell right toward Sylas' fist. With their armor already cracked by Sylas' initial attack, they couldn't resist this time around.
The man's nose was driven into his brain as his forehead deformed.
Another glass dagger shot out, rebounding against a blade that slashed down toward Sylas' neck.
With a side step, a flare of red-gold wings appeared to Sylas' back, allowing him to accelerate to an extreme in a shortened burst.
He drove a fist into the side of the man's gut, shattering his ribs and tearing his heart to pieces with its shards.
The last of the group was the only one that Sylas hadn't managed to crack the armor of earlier. He was the fastest to retreat, and he was also the one who used the crossbow bolt earlier.
Now, he had finished charging up a skill, slashing it down toward Sylas' back.
And yet...
Sylas side stepped as though he had eyes in the back of his head. With his back still to the man, he used the torque of his hips to drive an elbow toward his temple.
The man unleashed a defensive Skill that made Sylas feel as though his attack had landed on a soft cloud. However, the feeling was brief before he exploded through, pushing beyond the limits of the defensive skill.
But the man was clearly already expecting this, using the missed swing of his own weapon as momentum to duck beneath Sylas' elbow, sweeping to the latter's front to attack him once
more.
However, before he could even finish the maneuver, Sylas' free hand spread out, a blackened aura surging from it.
<Vortex Capture>.
The swinging blade suddenly faced a strong suction force from Sylas, and the momentum the man was using was suddenly stifled as he found his weapon going in the opposite direction. Off-balance and taken off guard, the man mistimed his dodge, allowing Sylas' elbow to drive right into his head.
BANG!
The armor of the man rippled and dealt with a vast majority of the damage. Unlike his companions, between the armor and his earlier defensive skill, there was no crack. However, that didn't stop his head from spinning with dizziness.
The man's grip on his own weapon loosened and he found it vanishing into Sylas' hand. At first, he thought it was an illusion... until a cloud of ash obscured his vision.
Dead.
The series of events was too smooth and suffocating. The moment the blurred vision from this ash and his dizziness combined, the man knew that he was finished.
PUCHI!
A Glass blade tore through his throat as he had this final thought, his body convulsing once before collapsing.
Sylas stood amongst the three corpses, his brows tightly wound into a frown. These three weren't particularly powerful, only being in the high Level 20s. But aside from the last one, the other two were only FF+, while the final one was an FFF-threat. Considering how rare it was for people to reach the high Level 20s, and the fact Grades were all relative to the standard of Earth, the fact their Grades were so low meant that they were among the weakest high Level 20s there were on Earth.
Yet...
'Their armor and other treasures...'
Sylas knew that as time went on, and more people gathered Treasures and Leveled their items up, he would only struggle more and more because of these Scorned Wraps.
What did it matter if his enemies had stats weaker than his own by several hundred if they had Treasures that gave them double that in additional stats and defenses?
Against stronger opponents, this would only be worse.
Sylas' gaze coldly flashed. He took the three corpses with him, tossing them into the Madness
Key.
If he wanted to survive, he was going to have to be even more merciless. He had no doubt that the Terranova government would be sending quite a few people if they had a chance.
'Here.'
Sylas finally found the limit of the Quicktime Event as he pressed a palm against the barrier.
'The entire underground world, it seems... In that case, we'll have to go deeper.'