Chapter 61: Too Stealthy to See

The first slime dropped from the ceiling. Zion expected the usual reaction: A startled shout, someone jumping backward, maybe a weapon being raised too late.

Instead, when he looked back toward the hooded figures, none of them were there.

The three had somehow moved more than a dozen feet backward in what felt like an instant. The slime landed where they had been standing and slowly spread across the stone.

"Interesting," the leader said as he stared at the creature oozing toward them. "Slimes."

The other two did not respond. They simply pulled out their daggers. Then the leader stepped forward and the other two vanished.

Zion leaned closer. For a moment, he thought they had used the same movement skill again, but something about the space near the walls looked wrong.

After what felt like squinting he finally noticed a faint distortion around two barely visible shapes.

"They’re still standing there, just...invisible?" he muttered.

Some kind of skill was hiding them. He tilted his skull. "So adventurers could actually turn invisible too."

He stared at them for a moment before his attention shifted toward the sealed doors of his throne room.

Could someone use that to sneak all the way in here?

His fingers tapped against the armrest. That was something he had not considered.

"Okay. Looks like I need a way to detect invisible people."

He made a mental note to figure out some way to detect invisible adventurers before the grace period ended. Maybe BoneCollector knew something. Honestly, anyone in the Bone Zone probably had a better answer than he currently did.

He turned his attention back toward the fight. The leader had already reached the slime and raised his dagger.

Zion almost smiled. Daggers were not going to work very—

Suddenly, the tip of the weapon flashed.

Before he could register what happened, the slime exploded. Acid splattered across the stone as its body burst apart, but the hooded man had already stepped safely out of range.

Zion couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Slimes were supposed to be highly resistant to piercing damage.

"They’re resistant," the dark-robed leader said calmly. "Use Burst Strike."

"Burst Strike?" Zion looked at what remained of the slime.

That must be some kind of skill.

Before he could think much more about it, two wet pops echoed through the corridor. The other slimes were gone. Acid dripped from the ceiling where they had been clinging moments earlier, while the two hidden adventurers slowly became visible again, wiping slime residue from their daggers.

The party continued, and the same thing happened again. A slime dropped. They moved before it landed. Someone disappeared, a dagger flashed, and the monster burst apart before it could do much of anything.

Their pace was slower than it had been on Floor 1, but only barely.

Zion watched with increasing disbelief. Most parties struggled on Floor 2 for one of two reasons. Either they could not deal with the slimes efficiently, or they burned through too much mana doing it.

This group did neither. They used skills, but not constantly. Their movement was controlled, their attacks were precise, and even when a slime managed to surprise them, it never seemed to matter.

Zion checked the active timer for their run.

"They might actually be the fastest for floor 2 progression thus far."

That was annoying.

While their movement was impressive, Zion couldn’t stop picturing the scene of them entering his boss chamber. Each passing minute he found himself leaning further back on the throne.

This isn’t good at all.

As they moved deeper, he opened the hidden cache information for the floor. No cache was set to spawn on this instance.

His shoulders relaxed slightly. At least he wouldn’t be giving away free loot to these people.

He still did not know if they were thieves, assassins, cultists, or something else entirely, but whatever they were, he had absolutely no desire to ’gift’ them anything that could make them even a little bit stronger.

A short while later, they entered the boss chamber. The Tidepool Basilisk waited beneath the surface of one of the acidic pools.

Three hooded adventurers looked around the room carefully, taking everything in, not just what was in front of them. The leader’s head shifted slightly as he studied everything.

Zion watched with interest. "Okay. Let’s see how you handle this."

The basilisk was much harder to read than the slimes, especially before anyone understood where it would attack from.

The surface of one pool rippled. Zion noticed it before they did. A moment later, the basilisk launched upward, claws sweeping across the platform where all three adventurers stood.

But just like what happened with the slimes, all three of them vanished.

The claws cut through empty air, and a heartbeat later the party appeared together on another rocky platform across the chamber.

"That move is getting really annoying." Zion said, clutching the armrest of the stone throne. The slimes were slow, so he initially hoped the more agile basilisk would catch them by surprise. However, seeing them completely unfazed showed just how much he underestimated this group.

The basilisk landed, realized it had missed, and disappeared back beneath the acid.

For several seconds, none of the three adventurers moved. They simply watched the pool until the leader pointed toward the person standing on his right.

"Go."

The hooded figure nodded.

Zion frowned. "Go where?"

The adventurer stepped toward the edge of the platform until it reached the pool of acidic water.

Zion looked at the acid below, then back at him. "Surely you’re not telling him to jump in there. Thats suicide."

Before Zion could come up with another explanation, the man dove straight into the acid.

Zion stared at the rippling water, unmoving.

"What the hell? What are you doing?!"

The acid churned once, then went still. For several seconds, nothing happened. The other two hooded figures remained perfectly calm.

Zion looked between them and the pool, waiting for one of them to react in any way.

"Did you seriously just sacrifice him? That’s your teammate! Hello??" He wished he could jump into the instance himself and ask the leader what he was thinking.

Then, a shadow passed beneath the surface. It was fast, but too small to be the basilisk.

A moment later, the basilisk erupted from the opposite side of the pool, twisting violently as one claw struck against the rock.

The creature hissed. Something was attacking it underwater.

"No way," Zion breathed out.

The basilisk thrashed again, and this time he caught a faint silver flash beneath the surface.