The battle began the very millisecond the dust from the explosion touched the damp floor of the cave.
The monsters that Lohan recognized as the Corrupted Root Mutants, creatures with moss-green skin and twisted limbs, charged forward with a roar that, despite their plant-like bodies, echoed off the stone walls.
Lohan, maintaining absolute focus through his parallel thought process, sensed every vibration in the air and every thermal signature of the Players under his protection.
The black biomass armor he had formed over their bodies pulsed with a neon-blue light, ready for the onslaught to come.
Dee and VonB were the first to act.
Dee, the tank warrior from Alice’s team, raised his heavy shield, while VonB, Dylan’s warrior, swung his two-handed axe in a devastating horizontal arc.
The fragment of Lohan’s jelly on VonB’s arm expanded upon impact, injecting a pulse of kinetic energy that made the axe slice through the guards’ petrified wood so easily that these initial monsters seemed like wet paper.
The sound of snapping branches and spurting sap was accompanied by Halon’s mental command, which guided each fighter’s positioning to avoid the encirclement.
On the right flank, Ascalon, the berserker whose muscles seemed ready to explode at any moment, let out a roar of fury.
He plunged into the center of a group of three creatures, ignoring his own defense, while Lohan, sensing the danger, activated the non-Newtonian resilience in his armor.
When the monsters’ toxic claws struck the warrior’s chest, the blue gel instantly hardened, transforming what would have been a deep cut into a harmless impact.
At the same time, Lohan used the weaver mother’s connection to inject refined biomass directly into Ascalon’s tendons, allowing the berserker to deliver blows at a speed exceeding his current human limit, while taking advantage of the contact to digest these monsters and recover the expended biomass.
Lohan was prepared to expend large amounts of biomass to sustain this battle, so to that end, the group had also gathered numerous corpses on their own over the past few days so that he could digest and accumulate as much biomass as possible.
While the front line held the line against the onslaught, the ranged damage dealers launched their counterattack.
Justin, the archer, fired mana-imbued arrows that whistled through the air, striking the creatures’ glowing eyes with pinpoint accuracy, guaranteed by the shared vision Lohan provided, while he spread smoke throughout the area, obscuring the enemies’ vision.
Beside him, Tunder and Palana raised their staffs; Tunder summoned electrical discharges that leapt among the enemies, while Palana shaped the mana from her new staff into spheres of arcane energy that used the electrical path as a guide.
Lohan acted as the conductor of this orchestra of destruction.
He realized that the creatures were trying to regenerate through the green slime covering the cave floor, so through the mental link, he sent a quick command to WyrmWood and Grant.
WyrmWood, Alice’s druid, struck his staff against the ground, causing pure roots to sprout and strangle the sources of plant corruption, while Grant, the focused-eyed cleric, raised his hands and summoned a pillar of light that purified the area around the vanguard, preventing the toxin from the roots from penetrating their biomass armor.
The synergy between them under Halon’s command was on an entirely new level compared to the previous battle.
Samantha and Richard, the assassins from the two groups, moved like shadows among the combatants. Richard seemed to blend into the cave’s rocks, appearing behind the guards to strike at their vital centers with poison-imbued daggers, while Samantha took advantage of the distraction created by Lohan’s clones, who leaped from one target to another, acting as decoys and draining the monsters’ mana to replenish the biomass reservoir.
The initial battle against the root guards was going well, but the air in the dungeon suddenly grew colder and heavier.
"Get ready, something big seems to be happening." Lohan was the first to notice the anomaly and warn the group.
From his previous experience in dungeons, Lohan knew that any hint of a change in the environment could signal different and more powerful enemies; the problem was that he never imagined this subtle sign was already a harbinger of a creature they hadn’t expected to encounter so soon...
The green slime in the center of the chamber began to rise, coalescing into a colossal and grotesque form.
A distorted, melancholic human face emerged from the trunk of a millennia-old tree that now possessed the jointed legs of giant insects.
Clearly, this was not a Level 14 creature like the monsters they had just dealt with, nor did it even resemble an ordinary Level 15 creature as they had imagined... what stood before them looked like a Level 15 Elite creature!
"Damn it, do we really have to deal with something like this right off the bat?!" Alice couldn’t help but complain, staring at the monster in disbelief.
And she wasn’t the only one, everyone there had assumed they’d have to kill at least a few dozen monsters before running into a Level 15 Elite monster...
The Sentinel of Rot let out a mournful cry that caused Lohan’s obsidian slabs to vibrate violently.
The monster wasted no time and swung one of its massive wooden arms toward Grant and Justin.
Lisa, who had been watching the battle from atop a stalactite, didn’t just stand there watching indifferently; she shot forward like a white bolt of lightning toward the attack.
She activated her spectral step and appeared ahead of the attack. Lohan, sensing her intention, withdrew all the clones protecting the players for a brief second, fusing his entire biomass onto the fox’s body.
Knowing how powerful the attacks of the last Level 15 Elite Monster they had faced were, Lohan didn’t want to risk Lisa’s safety and formed heavy symbiotic armor, with black ice spikes and reinforced plates that covered Lisa almost entirely.
The impact of the Sentinel’s arm against Lohan’s obsidian shield generated a shockwave that cracked the cave floor.
Thanks to its structural stability, the blow was slightly deflected, allowing Lisa to advance for a counterattack while ignoring the pain of the strike, and Lohan quickly repaired the damage the attack had caused.
Surprisingly, the damage caused wasn’t as great as he had imagined.
Lisa opened her mouth and channeled her spiritual fire, which now carried an intense golden glow due to the constant infusion of Holy Light that Lohan was pumping from his natural energy core, ready to cause as much damage as possible!