Chapter 4: yenna

The hidden zone of the First Floor was an absolute secret, officially blacklisted by the Hunter Association. In reality, it was a private resource farm secretly controlled by the Radiant Dawn guild. They kept the entrance locked with high-grade warding stones, ensuring their rookie prospects could harvest high-tier crystals without outside interference.

Dante stood on front of door. Attached to the center plate was a small lens—a remote surveillance drone left behind by the guild’s logistics department to monitor the zone’s status.

Inside the Radiant Dawn’s regional branch office, a low-level monitor technician suddenly spilled his coffee. The security screen for the First Floor’s auxiliary zone had just flashed from a green to a blinking red.

"What the hell?" the technician muttered, clicking his mouse furiously. "The warding stones just shattered? Did a Calamity-tier beast spawn in the tutorial?"

He zoomed the camera in. The lens captured the silhouette of a lone figure wearing a faded black hoodie, stepping casually over the broken fragments of the gate. The figure didn’t carry a shield. His hands were completely inside his pockets, looking less like a dungeon raider and more like a civilian taking a midnight stroll.

"A solo rookie?" the technician blinked, "Is he insane? That’s the lair of the Abyssal Shadow Stalker. It’s a Level 25 Elite Mutation. Even an A-Rank party would need a tank to—"

Before the technician could finish his sentence, the screen went dark. Dante hadn’t even looked at the drone; the sheer pressure of the ambient force radiating off his sealed stats had fried the camera’s internal circuits.

Deep within the cavernous nest, From the ceiling, a creature dropped down silently. It was the Abyssal Shadow Stalker—a terrifying, six-legged arachnid monstrosity woven from literal shadows, its rows of compound eyes glowing with an purple light.

The beast didn’t growl. It was a perfect assassin. It instantly disappear into the darkness, reappearing directly behind Dante’s head, driving two venom-dripping mandibles straight toward his skull.

Dante didn’t turn around. He didn’t even take his left hand out of his pocket. The moment the mandibles made contact with the back of Dante’s body, the [Vajra Mirror Body] erupted. The kinetic impact and the lethal neurotoxin were instantly calculated, doubled to 200%, and fired straight back into the monster’s nervous system as absolute true damage.

The Shadow Stalker let out a horrific, high-pitched screech as its own mandibles shattered into splinters. The shockwave traveled backward through its chitinous exoskeleton, causing its entire upper torso to violently rupture, spraying blood across the stone walls.

As the creature reeled back in pure agony, Dante finally moved his right hand. To the naked eye, his palm was completely empty. But with a slight flex of his wrist, the invisible [Seven-Sins Asura sword] sliced through the empty air.

’Slash.’

The completely bypassed the monster’s armored hide, cutting directly through its spiritual core. The beast didn’t even have a chance to hit the ground before its entire life force was violently drained into the sword.

Ding!

[You have slain the Floor 1 Elite Boss: Abyssal Shadow Stalker.]

[Unique Passive: ’Soul Reaper’ Activated.]

[Target’s Life Force absorbed. You have permanently gained: +5 Strength, +5 Agility.]

[You have leveled up! Level 20 -> Level 22.]

Dante felt a current of pure energy surge through his veins as his base attributes permanently expanded. He didn’t stop to admire the dead carcass. He walked straight through the back exit of the chamber, stepping into the floor’s central extraction elevator.

He didn’t care about the first floor anymore. He didn’t care about the guild’s panicking technicians.

...

Few Days Later. In 12th Floor of the Tower.

The progression was a blur of violence. By utilizing the hidden shortcuts from his past life, Dante bypassed the standard questlines entirely, blitzing through the lower levels like a ghost. Every midnight, his daily spins yielded mediocre F-rank and D-rank trash, which his 100x Sovereign Multiplier instantly forged into a collection of broken SSS-Rank passive perks—including [Spatial Void Step] and [Limitless Mana Well]. By the time he reached the 12th floor, his raw stats already rivaled a top-tier high-ranking hunter, all while his badge still read "F-Rank."

The 12th floor was a crystalline cavern system known as the Ice-Bound Wastes. The temperature dropped far below freezing, causing the breath of regular hunters to turn to ice instantly.

Dante was walking through a narrow canyon of glacial ice when he heard the faint sound of weeping mixed with the growls of low-level Frost Wolves.He rounded the corner and saw a girl collapsed against a wall of ice. She looked entirely out of place. She possessed black cat ears twitching on top of her head, and a furred tail coiled tightly around her frozen ankle. She belonged to the Beast-Kin Race from the parallel world of Anima-Terra—a dimension that had been completely swallowed by the Abyssal Network five years ago.

Her expensive armor was shredded, stained with frost-bite blood, and her party’s emblem had been brutally torn from her shoulder plate.

"Please..." she gasped, her voice trembling as her large, amber cat eyes looked up at Dante’s approaching figure. "My team... they took my extraction crystal and left me behind to draw the agro...save me , please let me join your party. Just shelter me until the next safe zone... I’ll give you everything I have."

Dante stopped few paces away from her. His expression beneath his hood remained completely cold, devoid of a single ounce of empathy.

"No," Dante said flatly. His voice carried zero warmth or emotions. "I don’t do teams. And I don’t do charity. Die here or crawl out on your own. It’s none of my business."

He turned to walk away. Having been dropped down a elevator shaft by his own closest allies, the concept of "trust" was entirely dead to him. A teammate was just a knife waiting for your back to turn.

"Wait! I’m not asking for a free ride!" the cat girl screamed, desperate as the howling winds grew. She forced her frozen hands to move, channeling the last remnant of her mana into the snow-covered ground. "Look at my skill! I’m an [Abyssal Echo-Tracer]! I can see the residual footprints of anyone who passed through this floor within the last 72 hours! I can track their exact unique mana signatures!"

Dante paused. His step hovered half an inch above the snow. He turned his head slightly, his sharp eyes narrowing as he looked at the intricate, glowing purple grid lines mapping themselves across the ice sheets.

"An Echo-Tracer?" Dante asked.

"Yes!" she panted, her cat ears pinning back against her head in fear. "My name is Yenna. My former team... they were a subsidiary squad of the Radiant Dawn guild. They are currently tracking an elite frost dragon three kilometers ahead. If you take me with you... I can lead you directly to them ."

Dante stared at the glowing lines. A regular hunter would see a useful utility class. Dante, however, saw something much more lethal. If her basic tracking skill was already this precise, what would happen if it was subjected to his 100x Sovereign Multiplier?

A calculation formed in Dante’s mind. He didn’t care about saving her life. But a bloodhound that could track Marcus and the Radiant Dawn across the infinite dimensions of the tower was a tool too valuable to leave rotting in the snow.

"I still don’t do teams, Yenna," Dante said, walking back toward her until his shadow completely covered her frozen form. He reached into his pocket and dropped a low-tier warming potion onto her lap. "But I do keep pets. If you want to survive, you follow three rules: You don’t speak unless spoken to, you don’t step behind my back, and you let me touch your skill book the moment we hit the safe zone. Agree, or I break your legs myself."

Yenna looked at the potion, then up at the terrifying, unreadable void in the young man’s eyes. She swallowed hard, gripping the bottle with her trembling claws.

"I agree," she said.