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[The Staff of Unmaking]
Rank: SSS (Unique — Soulbound)
Requirements:
• Class: Mage (or Equivalent Magic-Casting Class)
• Level Requirement: None
Abilities:
•—Supreme Lethargy Infusion—•
Enemies struck have a 75% chance to be afflicted with Eternal Slumber for 8 seconds.
Movement speed reduced by 85%.
Attack and casting speed reduced by 65%.
Take 250 damage over time.
Enemies lose 1% of their maximum health every second while affected.
Stacks up to 3 times.
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•—Aura of Absolute Apathy—•
Toggleable aura.
25-meter radius.
Enemies suffer reduced attack speed, casting speed, and increased cooldowns.
Allies receive enhanced spell power, cooldown reduction, mana regeneration, and damage resistance.
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•—Despair Cascade—•
Unleashes a devastating wave of lethargic energy.
Applies maximum stacks of Eternal Slumber.
Enemies attacking within the duration risk triggering Despair Echoes.
Provides temporary damage reduction while channeling.
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•—Mana Vampirism of Sloth—•
Passive.
Increases mana regeneration by 30%.
Restores mana whenever debuffed enemies die.
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•—Shield of Withering Will—•
Passive.
Converts spent mana into defensive barriers.
Reflects incoming damage as pure despair damage.
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•—Sloth’s Dominion—•
Passive.
Basic attacks spread miniature versions of Aura of Absolute Apathy.
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Kael stared at the Staff of Unmaking for a few moments before finally lowering the information screen.
A smile tugged at the corner of his lips.
It was a genuinely terrifying weapon.
Every ability attached to it was powerful, and more importantly, they all worked together perfectly. The staff wasn’t focused on dealing overwhelming damage. Instead, it slowly crippled its enemies, weakening them until fighting back became nearly impossible.
Unfortunately, there was one small problem.
He wasn’t a mage.
Kael twirled the staff once before returning it to his inventory. Though he couldn’t use it properly himself, he already knew someone who would probably treasure it more than he ever could.
Lyra.
Just imagining her reaction when he handed over an SSS-rank weapon was enough to make him chuckle.
Pushing the matter aside for now, Kael turned his attention back to his surroundings.
The desert looked almost exactly as he remembered.
The battlefield from earlier was still there. Huge trenches carved through the sand, collapsed dunes littered the area, and scattered craters stretched as far as the eye could see. The marks left behind by his battle with the Sand Worm remained largely untouched.
That alone told him something important.
Not much time had passed.
His eyes swept across the battlefield before suddenly stopping on something in the distance.
"The worm?"
The enormous corpse of the Sand Worm lay partially buried beneath the sand several hundred meters away.
Kael frowned.
The creature was dead.
Which immediately raised a question.
How?
He started walking toward the corpse.
The more he thought about it, the stranger it became. During their battle, he had certainly dealt significant damage to the monster, but nowhere near enough to kill it. Monsters possessed ridiculous vitality compared to humans of the same level, and creatures like Sand Worms were even worse.
If the fight had continued, he would’ve needed considerably more time before bringing it down.
Yet here it was.
Dead.
By the time Kael reached the corpse, his confusion had only deepened.
The Sand Worm’s body was covered in fresh injuries.
Deep tears ran along its hide. Entire sections of flesh appeared shredded apart. Some wounds were so severe that they exposed the monster’s internal organs.
None of those injuries belonged to him.
Kael crouched beside the corpse and examined the damage more carefully.
His first thought was that another hunting party had passed through while he was trapped inside the instance. However, the more he considered it, the less likely that explanation seemed.
A Sand Worm corpse was worth a fortune.
Its hide alone could sell for an absurd amount of money. Then there were its teeth, poison glands, bones, and numerous other materials.
No hunter in their right mind would kill a Sand Worm and simply walk away.
At least not willingly.
Kael ran his fingers across one of the massive wounds.
The injury looked violent and messy.
It didn’t resemble the damage caused by swords, spears, or conventional abilities.
Then a possibility surfaced in his mind.
"The spatial fluctuation..."
Back when the rift entrance appeared during their battle, the surrounding space had become incredibly unstable. Even now, he remembered how violent the phenomenon had been.
He had been swallowed by it and transported into the instance.
But monsters couldn’t enter instances.
That much was common knowledge.
A moment later, everything clicked into place.
The spatial fluctuation had taken him.
The Sand Worm, on the other hand, had likely been caught in the unstable currents and torn apart.
The explanation wasn’t perfect, but it made far more sense than anything else.
In the end, however, Kael didn’t care much about how it died.
What mattered was that it was dead.
And more importantly...
Nobody was claiming the corpse.
A grin appeared on his face.
Whether it was the spatial fluctuation, another hunter, divine intervention, or pure bad luck that killed the thing, he was grateful regardless.
The corpse was practically a mountain of money.
He wasn’t about to leave it here to rot.
Pulling a knife from his inventory, Kael activated the Nano Armor once more. Dark metallic plates flowed over his body and sealed him from head to toe.
Only after ensuring he was protected did he begin harvesting materials.
The poison gland came first.
The process required careful precision. One mistake and he could end up exposing himself to toxins strong enough to kill ordinary hunters.
After securing the poison gland, he moved on to the monster’s teeth.
Each tooth was enormous, nearly the size of a short sword. Their surfaces gleamed faintly beneath the desert sun, looking more like polished ivory than natural fangs.
One by one, Kael carefully extracted them and stored them inside his inventory.
The process took a while, but eventually everything of value had been collected.
Satisfied, he dismissed the Nano Armor and stretched slightly.
Now dressed only in his battle suit, he looked toward the distant horizon.
His expression gradually became serious.
There was still something he needed to do.
Find Adam and Zoey.