The clearing in the Cave of Hungry Roots became a stage for Astralis Requiem’s execution.
The moment Lisa fired, the world seemed to slow to an agonizing standstill for the traitorous Players, while the fox, propelled by Spectral Step, became a trail of black-and-white destruction.
The Player, a warrior attempting to raise an ordinary iron axe, didn’t even feel the impact. Lisa struck his chest like a high-density projectile, crushing his armor and sternum simultaneously.
Before the man’s body could be thrown backward, the white Spiritual Fire emanating from the fox’s paws incinerated his vital core, leaving behind only a smoking carcass.
"N-no! Attack! Kill that beast!" Leader Marcus shouted, but his voice was drowned out by the hissing sound of Lohan’s Magic Weaving.
Lohan, operating the Parallel Processing Core at high intensity, completely controlled the battlefield so that none of them could escape.
He expelled three clones from his mass that rolled across the ground with extreme selective viscosity.
The clones, which seemed seemingly harmless to those Players, with the bright blue appearance of a weak Slime, not only distracted the targets but also clung to the legs of the three archers who were trying to retreat into the shadows of the trees.
The moment they made contact, Lohan made them as heavy as lead and as sticky as industrial tar.
"My feet! I can’t move!" one of the Players screamed, desperately tugging at his leg, only to see Lohan’s blue jelly begin to crawl up his thighs, starting the digestion process at full power.
Lohan’s digestion rate turned physical contact into a nightmare for those Players.
Their skin began to bubble and melt under Lohan’s acidic membrane, causing pain so terrifying that their minds practically froze, unable to think of anything beyond that dreadful sensation.
Unlike a standard slaughter, Lohan was performing a forced extraction. Through Bio-Synthetic Mana Circulation, he drained the traitors’ mana to fuel Lisa’s living armor, while converting their flesh and bones into raw biomass for his reservoir.
Lisa circled the rest of the group like a merciless goddess of war.
She leaped among the dungeon’s colossal roots, using Lohan’s anchored threads as pivots to make turns at impossible angles.
Each of Lisa’s kicks left a trail of plasma that sliced through armor and shields as if they were made of dry paper.
In less than sixty seconds, five of the seven Players had been reduced to organic waste and equipment scattered across the floor.
Marcus, the leader who moments earlier had been laughing greedily, was now alone, surrounded by the opaque mist that Lohan exhaled to saturate his field of vision.
He could see only the two sinister red eyes glowing in the gloom, floating above the fox’s armored silhouette.
"M-mercy... you... you can have the Dungeon for free! Just let me go, please!" Marcus begged, falling to his knees as the gravitational pull of Lohan’s Double Mythic Base crushed his will to fight.
"Your mercy has been consumed by your own greed," Lohan’s voice echoed in Marcus’s mind with a coldness that froze the Player’s blood. "I was even willing to pay a higher price for such valuable information, but you wanted to act like smart alecks and deceive me; now the price must be paid."
Lohan fired strands of web that wrapped around Marcus’s neck and arms, pulling him violently against Lisa’s back.
The Slime then spread its mass over the man’s face, forcing acidic jelly into his mouth and nostrils in a process of violent internal digestion.
Marcus struggled for a few seconds, but the qualitative difference in existence was so great that he was nothing more than a dead battery being consumed.
[You killed the Player: Marcus (Level 11)]
[Predator Title Activated: Extracting Class Evolution... 100% chance of success!]
Silence returned to the dungeon entrance, interrupted only by the hissing sound of the final decomposition of Marcus’s remains. Lohan retracted his clones and returned to his perfect spherical form, glowing with an even more intense neon-blue light after the "feast."
The rewards flashed before Lohan’s eyes, but just as he had imagined, nothing particularly interesting had come from these weak Players.
[Structural Stability Lv 21 → Lv 22]
[Instinctive Perception Lv 16 → Lv 17]
[Chemosensory Aptitude Lv 13 → Lv 15]
[Monocular Telescopic Vision Lv 9 → Lv 10]
[Biological Elasticity Lv 5 → Lv 7]
[Venom Production Lv 7 → Lv 8]
[Hydrophobic Coating Lv 3 → Lv 4]
Lisa shook her white fur, which now repelled dust and blood particles, and looked at the arch of roots leading to the dungeon.
"What do you think, should we venture into this dungeon?" she asked with a mix of apprehension and excitement.
Lohan looked into the dungeon and considered two points.
The first was that the power gap between them and the Level 15 monsters might be too great for them to handle right now, and considering they could lose their high-rarity Races, that was a very big gamble.
The second point was that, perhaps out of spite, the group of Players might try to freely spread information about this dungeon in Thalendor, which would be a pain for them, since other people might also try to conquer this dungeon.
But if even they, with Legendary and Mythic Bases, weren’t confident in handling this dungeon, other Players would have even less chance of succeeding at it, so the only ones who could "steal" this reward from them were people from this world, who until then had shown no interest in this information.
"I think we can wait a little while, at least until we reach Level 12 to see how different the progression will be after leveling up now compared to before; depending on that result, we can come back at Level 12 or Level 13," Lohan said after much consideration. "I believe that if we dedicate ourselves to leveling up, time won’t be an issue."
Hearing his explanation, Lisa nodded in agreement with that logic.
But just to be safe, they still tried to camouflage the cave entrance a bit by placing some dried branches and fallen logs in front of the cave, disguising the spot to make it harder for others to find.
With that settled and the location memorized, they returned to grinding together, now with even more motivation to level up quickly.
[You asked for it, here’s Lisa’s Visual Representation. You can also find it at Discord.gg/NunuXD]