"Don't worry kids, Uncle Max will protect you" Max said as he fought off the intense pain in his ribs and stood upright while picking up two palm sized rocks from the rubble of the explosion.
*Grrrrrr*
The pack of five wolves growled as they slowly circled in on him, Max tried to summon [ Thunderblast ] to fry them to a crisp, but found his body once again unable to sense and mobilise mana as he could not summon his attack.
Harry the werewolf pounced on Max and despite his slow and heavy body, Max rolled out of his way comfortably as he threw one of the rocks in his hands towards another Wolf's head who was flanking him from the right, hitting him straight on his face.
Harry was slightly surprised that Max was able to evade him, but he immediately turned to face him again after landing and pounced once more.
This time he was coming in from Max's blind side and had expected to take his head off with one big bite, but at the last moment Max fell flat on his back, narrowly escaping his pounce as he grabbed something personal in the process.
[ Ball Crushing ]
An extremely painful howl that would resound throughout the upside was unleashed by Harry who felt his man parts turn into mangled mess.
Max had viciously crushed his private parts leaving him incapacitated and in a world of pain.
As if crushing it were not enough, Max was hell-bent on ripping it straight out of his body, and would have succeeded in doing so if his other werewolf brethren did not come to his rescue.
Words could not describe how good it felt for Max to finally crush the balls of Harry, the wolf who had gouged his eyes out during the final moments of his life as today after many years, he finally had an opportunity to exact his revenge.
Max realised that although he did not have any mana, any bloodline abilities and any physical prowess, he still had his knowledge.
He could still use [ Way Of The Wind ] and sense his enemies movements despite not having any mana, and could also sense the subtle temperature fluctuations in his environment, thanks to his deep understanding of the fire element.
This trial was designed to make him feel powerless once again, to make him feel as if without his special race, his class and his path of the perfect warrior, he was nothing.
However, all it did was remind Max that while everything else betrayed him, just with the knowledge that he had gained throughout his journey, he was much stronger than his previous self.
If instead of focusing on the wrong things in his past life that he could not control, he had focused on things that were within his control such as looking for all the knowledge in the universe from all the archives available to him, he might have found various solutions to his own predicament, or find new ways to progress in his life.
He could have been like Earth's late great scientist Stephen Hawking who despite being a cripple who needed to be spoon-fed was able minded and was able to use his mind to reach great heights.
Agreed that in his past life the odds were stacked against him.
But if only he had looked past his disability to not use mana and focused on his very competent brain, he could have been much more than a disgruntled government worker.
While he was reflecting on all this, he was jolted back to reality by a claw attack launched by the leader of the enemy werewolf camp who had become much more serious after seeing the bad condition that Max had left Harry in.
They no longer took Max lightly and had began circling him from all sides, willing to give him no chance to inflict more damage to their side.
Max's brain started turning full speed, [ Ball Crushing ] would no longer work as if he committed to injuring one wolf, the others would tear him apart, while standing without any weapons and unable to mobilise any spells there were not many ways in his disposal with which he could inflict damage on his enemies.
He needed to think about some solution to this and fast, because while he could sense their attacks coming and dodge for a while, his stamina would end up running out very fast with this frail body, after which he would be sitting duck for their attacks.
********
( Meanwhile Sebastian )
Sebastian spent about 3 full days calmly surveying the temple from all sides, drawing it's layout and trying to use his dwarf intellect to figure out the construction pattern.
He was very careful throughout the three days to only move when there were no undead around, as he absolutely avoided conflict.
After 3 days, he had a rough idea of the temple's layout and using his one encounter of entering the main hall as reference to approximately draw the boundaries of that room, Sebastian realised that there was about 300 metres of unknown construction space behind that hall.
That space behind had two bifurcations, one went straight backwards, while the other had a slightly right curve for reasons that Sebastian could not understand.
He assumed that the treasure room was at the very end of one of these two paths and by logic it should have been the one which was going straight backwards till the very end, which was why Sebastian decided to dig at the right corner.
If logic said that it should be straight, Sebastian had confidence in predicting the narcissistic necromancer's line of thought and putting it in the right side.
The reason why he thought this way was because, any person who willingly constructed a temple as ugly as this could not be judged by common sense.
Now only time would show if his prediction was right or wrong as there was a high possibility that instead of digging a hole to the treasure room he would maybe end up in a boss room fight.