Chapter 53: True Damage Abyssal Hunger

"Ding Warning: You are entering the Hollow Vein. Monsters within this zone significantly exceed your current level. Proceed with caution."

The notification chimed the instant Kael stepped past the threshold. He barely registered it.

He’d run this exact mine more times than he could count in a life that no longer counted for much beyond what it had taught him.

He knew every tunnel branch, every monster spawn, every collapsed shaft worth avoiding, all of it memorized the hard way, long before tonight.

Every monster inside was elite-tier, level 30 and up genuinely dangerous territory for an ordinary level-26 player, the kind of place that chewed through full parties working together and spat back nothing but wipes.

For a Beastlord running three top-tier companions, it barely qualified as a warm-up.

The tunnel opened wide enough that even Void Behemoth’s bulk moved through it without trouble.

Thunder Roc took point, wings crackling with restrained lightning, throwing off enough light to cut through the mine’s permanent gloom.

They hadn’t gone far before three massive shapes detached from the ceiling ahead bats the size of grown men, hanging upside down from damp stone, each one jolted awake by the light and sound of an apex predator moving through their territory.

Blood-red eyes snapped open, and a trio of piercing shrieks split the air as they dropped from their roosts.

[BLOODFANG BAT] (Elite) Level 32

Thunder Roc met the charge without slowing, a lance of condensed lightning punching clean through the lead bat before it finished closing the distance.

Wraithlord and Void Behemoth closed in from either flank a heartbeat later, and between the three of them, all three bats hit the ground in a matter of seconds a pile of gold coins and three fresh Evolution Points left behind where they’d fallen.

Kael only really registered the point gain when the credit chime sounded in his ear.

He’d been sitting on a stockpile for a while now, deliberately.

A handful of streamers had trailed his footage all through the Strange Tide event, and the last thing he wanted was a live audience watching him hand out a full bloodline evolution in real time too much information, volunteered for free, to anyone patient enough to slow the footage down and study it.

Better to bank the points and cash them in somewhere private.

He opened the panel now, alone in the dark, and the number staring back at him made him pause.

Over fifty thousand Evolution Points banked.No reason to wait any longer.

He selected Void Behemoth and confirmed the bloodline evolution without hesitation, then spent a smaller chunk pushing a handful of its active skills up a rank each while he was in the menu anyway.

"Ding 10,000 Evolution Points consumed. Silver-tier companion [Void Behemoth] has evolved into Gold-tier [Void Leviathan]. New B-rank skill unlocked: [Voidquake]."

[VOID LEVIATHAN]

Bloodline Tier: Gold

Constitution ★★★★★★★★★

Strength ★★★★★★★★★

Agility ★★★★★★

Spirit ★★★★★★

Skills: Voidwoven Carapace (C), Voidrend (B), Voidspike Barrage (C), Dread Wail (C), Voidquake (B)

Voidquake: Channels raw void energy through the earth, erupting jagged spikes beneath every enemy in the target zone for 120% attack damage. 200 mana, 30s cooldown.

The new form carried a meaner, harder-edged silhouette than the one it had walked in with, and the fresh area attack gave it real teeth against anything foolish enough to group up.

But the real payoff was still waiting one line down.

"Ding 625 Evolution Points consumed. [Voidrend] (B-rank) has evolved into A-rank: [Abyssal Hunger]."

Abyssal Hunger: Tears into the target with a ferocious bite, dealing 170% attack power as true damage, converting 60–70% of the total into the user’s own health.

A kill permanently increases maximum HP by 30–40, with a corresponding increase in size. No mana cost. Cooldown: 24–28 seconds.

The Leviathan’s frame had already darkened another shade, its silhouette heavier and more monstrous with every upgrade layered onto it, but Kael barely spared it a glance.

His attention was locked on one single word in the skill’s updated description.

True damage.

The raw numbers hadn’t actually gone up same 170%, same brutal lifesteal conversion.

What had changed was the damage type itself, and that single word rewrote the entire equation.

Physical damage bent around armor, got chipped away by resistances, occasionally shrugged off entirely by something built to tank it. True damage didn’t negotiate.

It didn’t care what the target was wearing, how thick its hide was, or what it had stacked against physical hits. It simply happened, in full, every time.

That’s not an upgrade. That’s a different category of weapon entirely.

"Of course it’s this one," Kael murmured, more to himself than to anyone listening. "Out of every skill on that whole kit, the Devour line was always going to be the one that scaled hardest."

And this is still nowhere near the ceiling.

Pushing that evolution any further would cost real points, though and the number sitting on his panel now read thirty thousand, with another seventy thousand needed before the whole bloodline could climb from Gold to Legendary.

Which was exactly why he’d picked this mine in the first place.

Dense monster density, elite-tier kills stacked wall to wall, every single one worth an Evolution Point.

There was no faster grind on the map for what he needed right now.

With three companions leading the way, the rest of the trek deeper into the Hollow Vein went about as smoothly as anyone could ask bat after bat falling to the same efficient rotation, until the tunnel finally opened into a cavern large enough to swallow the light whole.

The chamber ahead was massive easily the footprint of two stadiums laid end to end, its ceiling lost somewhere in total darkness.

The moment Kael and his three companions crossed the threshold, the ceiling answered.

Crimson eyes ignited by the hundred, then the thousand, blinking open across every visible surface of stone above them.

The entire roof of the cavern was alive a colony of Bloodfang Bats packed in so dense they’d looked like part of the rock itself, and every single one of them was now very much awake.

A wall of shrieks tore loose at once, and the whole colony dropped from the ceiling in a single, undulating mass a storm cloud made of teeth and wings, rolling toward Kael like something out of a fever dream.

Even Kael’s confidence took a half-second pause at the sheer scale of it. Elite-tier or not, a number like this changed the math.

Fortunately, the terrain gave him an answer.

He triggered Spectral Aspect, and a translucent, crimson-toned duplicate of Void Leviathan bloomed into existence beside the original.

He sent both forward together, angling their massive bodies to plug every tunnel mouth leading out of the chamber, sealing the only routes the swarm could use to flank around behind him.

Wraithlord followed a beat later, spear raised, calling Army of the Damned the ground splitting open in eight places at once as skeletal archers clawed free, bone bows already rising as they filed into the gap between the two Leviathans’ legs.

Kael planted himself in that same gap, drew his bow, and loosed skyward.

A single shot split mid-flight into a spreading rain of arrows, punching into the leading edge of the swarm and lighting the cavern with a cascade of damage numbers.

Both Void Leviathans threw their heads back in the same instant, jaws stretching impossibly wide toward the ceiling.

Voidscream.

A distorted shriek tore out of both throats at once, warping the air itself as it rolled outward through the swarm and somewhere past the wall of noise, a new voice cut through, small and clear and entirely unexpected.