Dungeon Diver: Stealing A Monster’s Power - Chapter 964

Two dark black crescents of aura come out of Ulgar’s blades into the masses.

A wave of rust-colored fire bursts out from Vardon’s fur, and layers of Glyphs peel off his tusks to create explosive arrays packed tightly within his aura.

Axel lets out a screech and flaps his wings to release two large gusts of wind magic tethered to Royal Vibrations and High Quality Ether Glyphs.

All three of them release vicious waves of Primordial Aura carrying their attacks as well, and in a matter of seconds, I watch hundreds of Ascended Demons explode into unrecognizable pieces.

Massive tears in the walls of Ascended Demons appear, carving out holes in their masses. It creates shockwaves of fractured glyphs and pure High Quality Ether that make all of the surrounding trees creak, and some of their branches crack off from the pressure.

Instantly, craters form all over the ground, and roots are lifted out of the soil.

Maria and I both add to the small amount of Glyphs we had active and create a large curved wall of protection arrays in front of us. As the first shockwave hits, we wrap the entire collection of arrays around us to fully isolate ourselves from the outside chaos.

By the rate that glyphs are being destroyed, I can tell the fighters outside are not nearly as weak as the outer guards, but far more shockwaves are being produced.

In fact, the bulk of the shockwaves we’re blocking is coming from Ulgar, Vardon, and Axel themselves. Their True Cores’ Purity and Primordial Aura density tethered to their Glyphs is the most harmful thing in the air; the passing glyphs from dead demons do not even come close.

Once a few seconds pass, the hordes of approaching Ascended Demons only get larger. Hundreds are being killed by every one of the mana-based monsters’ attacks, but the waves of them pouring out of the trees grow.

It’s making the forest extremely bright white as I can no longer even see the background of woods deeper into the forest. There have to be over ten thousand Ascended Demons now, and the air is getting cloudier and cloudier as it fills with white mist.

Whenever the Fiery Mammoth, Black Ogre, and White Griffin make drastic shifts, changing their locations to get better vantage points, I watch large amounts of the mist in the air slowly seep into their Astral Forms.

It is not as efficient as I assumed it would be. They’re still absorbing it at a similar rate to what they exhaust, not adding much extra ether to their pools. I can’t tell if their Soul Energy Cores have some kind of hard limit, or if their energy pathways just can’t withstand taking in vast amounts of ether at once. It intrigues me.

However, there is another factor to this all-out war that catches my attention even more.

With an up-close view of the fights in front of me, there are millions of stray glyphs now colliding with the barrier we’ve made. I know all the language by memory, as I saw them in the inherited vision. Yet now that I’m witnessing them all being used in combinations in the heat of battle over and over, their exact uses are becoming more and more clear.

All of these Ascended Demons have unique battle styles, but their defensive style and attacking patterns are very similar, because they all have to use the same set of glyph combinations.

As the masses are slaughtered, epiphanies stack in my mind, and they’re bounced off Maria’s unique view of the battle as well. We simulate their attack and defensive patterns, then begin to reverse-engineer them to see what the original glyphs in our own Legacy are that were used as the derivative for all these moves.

Without even absorbing a single drop of energy, many more of the deeper glyph imprints on our souls slowly rise to the surface. By the sheer volume of information alone around us, our proficiency rises again, and it becomes even easier to summon the barriers around us to block the barrage of shockwaves.

Not even 5% of our ether pools is used by the time the waves die down.

There are a few trees that have chunks ripped out of their sides from the blasts, and pretty much every one of them is missing at least one major branch. The ground has been completely torn to shreds; only dirt that is held closely with the roots’ Primordial Aura is left standing.

The air is dense with the broken remains of glyphs and the most potent cloud of High Quality Ether I’ve ever seen.

When the three monsters come back within range, I see white stretches all over their greater forms. As more High Quality Ether is drained into their souls, it slowly starts to heal, but it’s clear they actually did get slightly injured from this exchange.

Ulgar breathes heavily, staring at us with a stern gaze, then waves for us to follow.

Not a word is spoken. He only turns around once he sees we’re unharmed.

Maria and I pull back our Glyphs to decompress them and let the refined medium-quality ether fall back into our cores, not only to conserve power but to get a better sense of what this cloud is made up of.

It’s extremely pure High Quality Ether as expected. Little to no absorbable Celestial Energy is present, so that eliminates one potential source of the clouds we’ve been sensing. It’s ether from the Outer Guards, or the Ritual Site itself.

Instead of leaving the intact glyphs and larger chunks of fractured ones to just phase through us, I allow my corruption to seep out of my body and attach to tons of them in the air. Maria’s greater form starts to sparkle with Source Resin, and everything that comes within her Primordial Aura is pulled in toward her.

We quickly drain large amounts of the most potent glyphs in our vicinity. None of the energy enters our ether pools, but when I contract my corruption back into my core, the same pulse of pure refined High Quality Ether pours back out into the atmosphere. It stimulates all of our glyphs for a moment. Maria’s Source Resin digests the glyphs it devours and looks more lively, moving faster and sparkling brighter, but nothing external changes.

This leads to more complex theories rushing through my mind as we move deeper into the trees.

I can feel the unbothered and sarcastic aura of Vardon become completely serious. He doesn’t even make a grunt or a rude remark. Even his Royal Vibrations are starting to tighten into pure unease.

Axel flies up above the trees again, and the landscape before us starts to shift.

Once we leave the cloud of slaughtered Ascended Demons, flickers of white show up all around the Garden. There are clearly hundreds of white demons that were not killed. They stay just out of range, either running away or gathering data on us.

All of them migrate back toward the area we’re headed to right now.

The trees become far more spread apart, and the potency of both High Quality Ether and the frequency of Celestial Energy pockets increases drastically.

Faint outlines of structures that look like black towers are visible far beyond the trees.

I can’t exactly see what they look like, but they all give off an incredibly firm Primordial Aura and Royal Vibration reading that imprints a visual in my mind.

The closer we get, the stronger this imagery becomes.

Stray groups of ten to a hundred Ascended Demons try sneak-attacking us from all sides, but Axel swoops down from the trees every time with fierce yellow eyes and kills them all with two waves of wind from his wings.

Eventually, the images in my mind start to show up in reality around me.

The first structure I see is abandoned…

It looks similar to the ancient Elven civilization I saw in Ulgar’s domain, but thousands of times larger.

The width of these structures is almost as wide as the trees they stand next to, but it does not reach nearly as high. At best, it stops at the lowest hanging branches of the Primordial Trees.

Half of the top section of the tower is crumbling off, but inside there are dozens of complex rooms where a prospering civilization once lived. Each of the facilities in this mega structure was capable of fitting races like the ones I’m watching float forward past it, even in their Astral Forms, passing a billion kilometers in height.

There are even layers of ancient ether commands still activated in the bottom of the building where it wasn’t destroyed.

Everyone floats past it like it’s not even here, so I quietly admire and memorize all of the patterns I see.

As incredible as it is, moments later another structure comes into view.

It’s similar in size, but all of the glyphs filling it are unique and complex, nothing like the first one.

The next structure is unique in the same way.

More and more abandoned buildings show up and even appear in clusters of two or three.

I can tell they were all made with Dryad’s Glyphs, not demons… After witnessing the craftsmanship in the domain barriers, these are very easy and quite simple to dissect and understand.

Eventually, the central mass of this civilization pours into my consciousness. A wave of new buildings appears in my mind, as they’re all in a perfect straight line.

When we move close enough, passing a few more trees, another line of them appears, and a third line moments later.

There is an enormous city of structures deep within this domain, and from the strength of Primordial Aura infused in these buildings, I can tell they’re much more advanced than the ones we just passed, and even recently used.

My eyes widen even more as my probing of our surroundings hits the fifth line of structures.

Not only are they even stronger, but I sense over 30 Purple-Cored lifeforms moving our way with extreme speed.