Chapter 145 - 145: Acid Fog

With a larger number of players in the dungeon for his second attempt at the hard mode Ezekiel began to notice that the number of enemies had increased, especially the swarms.

Attacking packs of enemies and swarms of small monsters felt significantly more dangerous with more players but the experience gained was slightly more even when split amongst all five of them.

Ezekiel also noticed that when attacking these swarms it was beneficial for Amaru since there were more targets for consumption to take stats from after their defeat.

With this in mind he decided that introducing Amaru to the others now rather than later was the best course of action, he hadn't really planned to hide his new pet but now it was important to discuss the possibility of the group letting Amaru have the last hits.

"Hey so I want to introduce you guys to someone, during a previous run of the dungeon I actually completed an event and got a unique pet who I had been helping to level up before you got here."

With this he saw their expressions shift to curiosity as he opened his cloak to reveal Amaru clinging to his body.

Since he had gotten her she had grown from over a meter to nearly three and they could see that under his cloak she had taken to wrapping around his waist to anchor herself while her trailed up along his back and under his wings to rest her head on his shoulder.

When they saw her the reactions were... unexpected.

Layla came close to feel if she was actually real while Hope was absolutely ecstatic.

"Does she have skills? Can she use spells like the other serpent you described? The boss?"

"What is their name! Oh my god they are so precious, is it a boy or a girl?"

He answered their questions and explained her abilities in depth before noticing that Keith was keeping a wide area between himself and Ezekiel.

"Hey man you ok?"

The assassin tensed up and began to shake his head before answering.

"Uh, nope. I don't do snakes, they freak me out."

"The boss of this dungeon is a serpent, how did you plan to fight it?"

Hope was shocked by this oversight and whdn she looked at Layla she saw that their unofficial leader was not surprised by this.

"He usually sticks to ranged combat when it comes to snakes, as of now we just assumed his skills would be most of his damage against the boss."

Ezekiel thought about this before sighing and turning back to the shop, specifically his own listings for two gold quality bows he had put up for auction.

When pulling them off the listing and removing them from the inventory he offered both to Keith.

"Here, there's literally thousands of snakes in this dungeon and I can't imagine you sitting there using some lower grade garbage to fight."

Keith tried refusing at first until Ezekiel threatened to leave the bows on the ground whether they were accepted or not.

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Venom Bow (Gold)

Agility +20% (below C)

Increases movement speed by 5%

Increased firing speed by 10%

+10% poison damage afflicted per shot.

Expert Sniper's Bow (Gold)

Agility +10% (below D)

Strength +20% (below D)

Bow damage additionally scales with strength stat.

Critical damage increased by 50%

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Keith selected the Sniper's Bow due to the enemies in the dungeon resisting poison damage and with that decision the party moved on to continue their dungeon crawl.

With more than just himself as the party Ezekiel began to pay more attention to the details of the dungeon rather than just where the next enemy was, the dungeon was actually beautiful in a strange way.

The trees were thick and dense at the bottom with many resembling mangrove trees that had so many roots he felt he would get trapped inside trying to maneuver through them.

The treetops were and the trunks had vines strangling them while the vines often had large cobwebs showing nests of basic spiders.

In the treetops he saw that the vines were not the only thing hanging towards the ground, he saw that the limbs were frequently heavy with the grayish green strings of something that resembled Spanish moss.

A thing his mother called old man's beard.

"Hm... it feels bad to suggest this but it might be a good idea to light the trees on fire again to start causing enemies to come out faster, this dungeon takes a long time when you are hunting each creature."

"Hey Zeke? You might not have noticed but not everyone can just fly away and bomb enemies from the sky."

As soon as they finished speaking Ezekiel rubbed the back of his head in embarrassment.

"Sorry, I'm so used to solo runs I forgot about that."

The others laughed it off but while they were they noticed a large area of fog that was slowly moving through the area.

"So what's the fog do? It feels like there's lots of of mana in there so is it just a way to block our sight?"

Ezekiel turned his focus on the fog with his mana sight taking over to examine it.

His heightened sense of hearing also clued him into a dangerous aspect of the fog before he confirmed it with his mana sight.

Inside of the fog he could hear the hiss of something burning and through his mana sight he noticed that the entire cloud was a mixture of potent poison mana and a strange blue mana he hadn't encountered yet.

The color and the phenomenon associated with the mana made him guess water elements however.

"Looks like a poison cloud, it seems to contain water mana too so might be a good idea to try snd absorb it?"

The others nodded and as they all sat in a position to begin absorbing the mana flowed over them.

"Ow, ow wait it's acid! Jesus this hurts!"

Ezekiel was immediately rushing to activate his life affinity through his mana to try and heal the wounds on himself and Amaru as the acid ate away their skin.

The others quickly removed their gear to prevent the acid from harming the durability while they took the time to do the same with their own mana.

When Hope saw Layla and Keith's healing not matching hers and Ezekiel's she pushed her own healing onto them as well.

The group felt for the elements that they individually desired while Ezekiel cycled his mana throughout his body the way he always did.

The fog was effectively a massive cloud and poison mana moving through the swamp loke a cloud due to the water mana, this meant the density of the mana in this cloud was high.

Cycling his mana as normal snd pushing the mixed mana types into his core he noticed a small problem.

The last time he had tried to gather mana for increasing his core and his affinity he had seen the increases were notable, small but still noticeable.

Now he realized that the growth was so miniscule that if not for his extremely high perception with mana and watching the particles of elements get pulled out of the mana when they entered his body, he would have assumed that the growth of the elemental affinities had been removed.

As soon as he noticed that the mana lost a large portion of the elements filling it upon entering the body he tried to use his mana control to pull the elemental particles into his body just like mana.

It felt so strange trying to simply manipulate elements themselves without the mana so what he did instead was use the mana escaping his body to get infused by those particles and begin to get absorbed back into himself.

The more he cycled his mana in and out the more he felt an improvement until he was cycling his mana like a whirlpool with his core at the center of the pull.

He got so intensely focused on this activity that he did not notice how his mana was affecting the surroundings.

Hope had quit absorbing mana entirely as her own ability to perceive mana was showing her a storm of controlled mana circling her friend.

Keith could not feel mana as well as his friends but he could feel the mana around him getting sucked away while Ezekiel was radiating with power.

Layla having the lowest perception of mana only felt the disturbance of the area around her ally.

All saw the same physical phenomena however.

Around Ezekiel were wisps of black that came from his skin and because of his rapidly swirling mana the wisps were disturbed so their friend resembled a winged devil sitting inside of a storm.

A storm of swirling, black mist that cycled around his body while he meditated with his large, imposing wings rising above his back.

As Ezekiel got closer and closer to breaking through he forgot that others were around him and he let out a roar of exertion as he released the black smog from his body like an explosion.

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Congratulations! Your Physical Cultivation journey has officially begun!

Strength: F- -> F

Vitality: F -> F+

Agility: F -> F+

Constitution: F+ -> D-

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