Chapter One Hundred and Thirty-Nine: The Death Mist’s Dread Lair (6)

"You, you... actually..." Moir pointed at Zhao Tianhe, saying with an expression of sheer disbelief. "You're abusing your public office for personal revenge... Didn't I just flirt with your wife a few times?"

Beside them, Artoria's cheeks flushed slightly as her hand instinctively tightened around the hilt of her sword, adopting a posture that suggested she might strike at any moment.

"Hey, take a good look at what you just vomited out." Zhao Tianhe did not pull the longsword embedded in Moir's back, but instead pointed with a smile at the pile of vomit on the ground.

Moir lowered his head, only to discover that what he had thrown up was not blood, but some strange, viscous black substance.

After quite a while longer, Moir finally stopped retching.

By this time, the pitch-black humanoid figure in the outer area had completely disintegrated, the black mist across the entire third tier had returned to its normal state, and everyone received the experience point notification.

"This is... the core?" It was only then that Moir understood.

As it turned out, right after the boss grabbed Moir earlier, it had directly concealed its core inside his body—specifically, in his stomach.

Logically speaking, this tactic was actually flawless. After all, even if opponents used a high-powered attack to shatter its physical body, they certainly wouldn't go so far as to kill their own companion in the process. Moreover, this creature's body was extremely tough; the enemy couldn't possibly just bypass everything and blast him to smithereens straight into his stomach in a single move.

Doing this effectively prevented it from being wiped out entirely, and its core could also take advantage of the moment its body shattered to escape.

The problem was, it never expected that Artoria could not only instantly pulverize its body, but also snatch Moir away at the exact split second the body exploded.

Though it had desperately tried to gather the black mist to seal off the path and block Zhao Tianhe and his group, unfortunately, Ralph and Xellos provided flawless cover, preventing it from succeeding.

What it anticipated even less was that Zhao Tianhe had been maintaining his super-tactile and auditory senses from the very beginning. The moment he touched Moir, he discovered that the man's stomach was completely packed with a strange substance.

At the time, Zhao Tianhe hadn't taken it seriously, assuming the boss had simply given him an enema in an attempt to rupture his internal organs.

However, upon entering the barrier and watching Moir retch continuously, Zhao Tianhe instantly realized the abnormality of that strange substance.

Acting on a whim, he casually asked a question and then plunged his sword straight in...

Saying he was abusing his power for personal revenge wasn't entirely wrong, because he felt that even if his guess was wrong, stabbing this bastard would still feel pretty satisfying.

Zhao Tianhe pulled out the sword, and the wound on Moir's back vanished instantly.

"What kind of sword is that?" Li Mei asked with curiosity from the side. "It's so pretty, it feels like some kind of natural elemental crystal."

"Xilian," Zhao Tianhe said with a smile. "A demon-slaying sword. It can't hurt people."

"Is that so? I think this thing is quite dangerous..." Tianxie looked at the pseudo-Xilian in Zhao Tianhe's hand, feeling an intensely strong sense of threat.

Xilian was one of the three ancestral heirloom swords of Kong Zhou from ancient times.

This sword possessed no killing power whatsoever; to be precise, it could not kill anyone at all.

The sword could only inflict light-elemental damage, and furthermore, this damage possessed a unique demon-cleansing and purifying attribute. While piercing the human body to inflict damage, the resulting wounds would also heal instantly.

However, against dark-elemental monsters formed purely of death mist, the power of this sword was formidable, which was why Zhao Tianhe chose to project the pseudo-Xilian sword to eliminate the death mist core located in Moir's stomach.

As for Tianxie, as a user of evil god power, he was naturally even more sensitive to this special demon-cleansing element.

"Ugh, ugh, ugh~~~~" Moir suddenly began to retch again.

Patter, patter.

Several brightly shining, colorful crystals fell to the ground.

Mixed within the stomach acid were a few Saint Quartz crystals.

"Phew~ Finally puked it all clean." Moir wiped his mouth.

"Well, you did deal the full amount of damage, after all." Xellos looked at the Saint Quartz and nodded, saying, "You can use these to gacha that kind of high-powered Noble Phantasm from before, right?"

"No, I don't want these anymore," Zhao Tianhe said expressionlessly. "Take them to be reinforced. Maybe they can turn into some A-rank boss gear."

"Stop joking! You can still use them after washing them off. Um... is that a pair of stockings?" Li Mei tried to persuade him, only to discover that amidst the stomach acid, there was not only Saint Quartz, but also a clump of black fibrous material.

"..." Moir stared at that ball of stockings, thought for a moment, picked it up, and swallowed it back down.

"Ugh—" Aside from the two profoundly experienced and knowledgeable veteran mages, everyone else began to retch.

Unable to hold back, Tianxie strode forward and kicked Moir right out of the barrier.

A few minutes later, under Artoria's persuasion, Zhao Tianhe cautiously touched those "filthy" Saint Quartz crystals and performed an on-the-spot card pull.

Making him store this stuff inside his body was completely out of the question!

Amidst swirling rainbow lights, a Craft Essence surfaced.

The Twilight Glimmer, Ereshkigal Limited Craft Essence.

Special skill: Soul Atavism. Instantly restores all mana and grants 300 points of additional temporary maximum mana, lasting for 10 minutes.

Skill cooldown: 48 hours.

"Eresh's Craft Essence, huh? Come to think of it, I should be using my Craft Essence in a bit, right?" Clearly, Artoria retained a very deep memory of the Summer Crown ice cream.

"Mhm." Zhao Tianhe nodded. At the mere mention of Eresh, his heart couldn't help but experience a violent throb once more, but the moment he remembered that he was the victim who had been abandoned, he stopped caring.

The reinforced elites on the fourth tier were outrageously numerous, and the area was also much larger than the previous tiers. Black ash not only permeated the air but had also formed a thick layer of black desert.

Occasionally, bosses would also spawn on the fourth tier—meaning three bosses in a single dungeon—and it was quite common, happening once or twice a month.

The Undersea Dungeon could indeed foster rapid growth, but the heroic teams here were essentially all pairings of Heroic Spirits and Summoners, while native heroes were practically extinct.

Upon entering the fifth tier, everyone was slightly stunned.

Because this place turned out to be a desolate wasteland...

There was no black mist and no black desert. Within the narrow space, hundreds of listless, drooping minor monsters wandered aimlessly around.

This scenery was extremely bizarre, because the monsters on the other tiers had all been very actively excavating the rock layers of the ground in an attempt to create a spiral-shaped cellar capable of collecting black ash.

A-rank monsters possessed intelligence, yet the monsters on this fifth tier currently looked just like the trash mobs in a low-level dungeon.

"None of these are bosses; the energy-level reaction is far too low." Li Mei shook her head as she looked at these monsters. "There are spiral cellars on the ground as well, but they all look like they were only half-dug. The boss must have done something that caused a drastic change in the surrounding environment, making it impossible even for ordinary monsters to survive."

"It's the most dangerous 'Tyrant' type," Ralph nodded and said.

The Tyrant type referred to a situation where a boss acquired greater power by devouring its environment, while simultaneously ruining the entire dungeon ecosystem.

Such a boss concentrated domain power into itself, and its strength was naturally beyond question.

"Could it be hiding among these ordinary monsters?" As he spoke, Xellos flicked his hand, and a hundred swords of light formed, descending like a fierce storm upon those seemingly trash-tier ordinary monsters.

Li Mei and Zhao Tianhe also made their moves. However, after a thorough baptism, the ordinary monsters were completely wiped out, and the entire fifth tier was cleared instantly.

"Something's wrong..." Seeing this, Zhao Tianhe directly switched to the single perception mode—super-tactile sense.

If there were no traces in the sky or on the ground, then the only place left was underground.

Zhao Tianhe touched the ground with one hand, sensing carefully.

"Underground. That boss seems to be trying to unearth the source of life energy..." Zhao Tianhe smiled.

The dungeon system formed a world of its own; with the strength of a newborn boss, trying to excavate through a minor plane's crystal barrier was nothing short of a pipe dream.

"Can we just use a direct firepower bombardment to seal it off?" Xellos asked.

"The A-rank space is too large, and the stratum depth exceeds three hundred meters. It should be hard to hit, right?" Zhao Tianhe shook his head. "I can sense the tunnel it excavated, though. It's right there."

With that, Zhao Tianhe pointed at Moir.

"Right under me?" Moir looked at the nearby spiral-shaped deep pit, smiled, squatted down, and shouted into it, "Hey! Did you hear that?! Crawl out here! Let your Grandpa Moir teach you a lesson! You don't even know the basic common sense of a dungeon, Hahaha~~~"

"Ah, it's starting to ascend. It seems to have realized the dungeon can't be breached either... Such speed!" Zhao Tianhe felt the pulsation coming from the depths of the earth, and his heart skipped a beat.

Before that boss, this hard rock ground was practically like water or air, creating not a single ounce of resistance!

Though, perhaps it was also partly due to the fact that it was traveling through the tunnel it had previously dug downward?

And thus, Moir, who had been squatting beside the deep pit, was directly sent flying backward by a dark shadow.

Judging from the crisp sound of fracturing bones, his entire jaw had likely been shattered.

Moir crashed heavily to the ground, and the black shadow landed as well.

It was a pitch-black humanoid figure with a well-proportioned build, standing around two meters tall.

Unlike ordinary monsters, this fellow's physique was closer to that of a human, though its arms were exceptionally long, hanging all the way down to its knees, making it look somewhat like a gorilla.

Its body surface was covered by a dense layer of black mist, but this black mist was not the drifting black ash from the previous tiers; instead, it was composed of much finer and more active particles.

Zhao Tianhe shifted his perception to his super-visual sense. He watched the micro-structure of that black mist and began to analyze it.

Tianxie had already charged forward, Artoria was eating ice cream to restore her status, and Ereshkigal's figure had also appeared beside Zhao Tianhe.

"Protect Ah-He." Artoria glanced at Ereshkigal, licked the ice cream from the corner of her mouth, and charged forward with high fighting spirit!

Ereshkigal nodded, and Garula spirits shaped like whales materialized around Zhao Tianhe. At the same time, numerous spear-racks appeared around her as her mana instantly recovered and poured into the scorching temple, Meslamtaea.

On the other side, the black humanoid gazed at Moir, who was crawling back up while cursing, and with a single step, smashed Moir's chest to pieces!

Tianxie threw a punch straight at its head, but the boss easily blocked it, grabbed Tianxie's fist, and hurled him away.

Clang!

Artoria, enveloped in a burst of magic power, slashed her sword against the boss, only for the creature to parry it squarely with both arms!

The terrifying immense force drove the boss's legs deep into the ground, causing the earth within a radius of dozens of meters to violently collapse and fracture.

Moir was likewise driven deep into the earth by the sheer impact...

The boss lashed back with the back of its hand, but Artoria blocked it with her sword.

Yet that terrifying force batted Artoria far away into the distance...

Compared to the sneaky elemental boss from before, the strength of this Tyrant clearly exceeded it by more than just a notch!