Chapter 335

The ground trembled before the tree even began to fall.

CRACK. CRACK. CRACKKK!

A massive trunk as thick as a house came crashing down right in front of them.

Something heavy stepped right over the splintered wood.

It had six legs, each ending in a curved black claw longer than Rudra's arm. Its hulking body was armoured in thick plates of grey bark, with pale moss growing deep in the cracks between them. A crown of twisted horns scraped violently against the branches overhead, sitting above a head that was mostly just a gaping, jagged mouth.

[Thornback Ravager (Lv. 368)]

"Mine," Rudra said.

Beside him, white mist was exhaled from Iris's lips as she regulated her breathing. With a slight nod, she took a light step backward, positioning herself beside a wide tree trunk with a clean line of sight.

Rudra drew in a deep breath of his own, his chest expanding before exhaling a stream of white vapour into the chilly fog.

[The skill 'Genesis Breath' is active.]

The Ravager lunged.

Rudra stepped straight into its path.

CRACK!

Extortion slammed directly into the joint of its front leg. White Blue Lightning exploded off the black metal.

[You have dealt 24,300 damage.]

[The target has been paralyzed.]

The Ravager froze up for half a second. Rudra didn't waste the opening. He leaned into the recoil of the first strike and activated a skill.

[The skill 'Avalanche (Lv. 4)' has been activated!]

CRACK! CRACK!

The black staff became a complete blur. He used the rebound of each impact to accelerate the next swing, the weapon looping around his body without a single pause.

[You have dealt 58,900 damage.]

[You have dealt 69,200 damage.]

The paralysis finally broke. A massive black claw whistled down toward his skull.

Rudra didn't dodge so as not to break his momentum.

[The skill 'Will's Construct Armor (Lv. 2)' has been activated!]

In an instant, heavy, ethereal red gauntlets and a glowing crimson breastplate materialised directly over his equipped gear. He rolled his shoulder into the descending claw, letting the solidified willpower take the brunt of the blow, and kept swinging.

Kwa-jeik!

[Will's Construct Armor has absorbed 6,061 damage!]

[You have received 1,200 damage.]

CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!

Three to four strikes a second now. The staff a black blur. Every landed blow of [Avalanche] stacked 80% more attack speed and attack power, and this was not mentioning the attack boost from [Saint's Momentum] and thus increasing his attack power and speed exponentially.

[You have dealt 98,600 damage.]

[You have dealt 107,300 damage.]

The Ravager reared back, all six legs churning, and swung its horned head at him like a battering ram.

Rudra met it head-on. Staff against horn.

KWANG!

The bark plates across the ravager's skull split wide open.

BANG!

Out of nowhere, one of the creature's four eyes suddenly burst apart.

"Hey, I said it was mine," Rudra called over his shoulder, not slowing his swings for a second.

"It was looking at me," Iris said.

The half-blind Ravager shrieked and charged wildly. Rudra planted the butt of his staff into the dirt, vaulted cleanly over its snapping jaws, and landed squarely on the beast's back right between its twisted horns.

He raised Extortion with both hands. Blinding lightning coiled around the black shaft until the air hummed.

[The skill 'Comet (Lv. 3)' has been activated!]

He drove the staff straight down into the cracked bark of its skull.

KWAAANG!

[Critical!]

[You have dealt 514,600 damage.]

A massive outward shockwave erupted from the point of impact, flattening the surrounding bushes and stripping the bark off every tree within thirty metres.

The Ravager froze beneath his boots. It collapsed into the moss with a sound like a falling wall, then broke apart into blue pixels that drifted up into the fog.

[You have gained 6,940,000 experience.]

Rudra dismissed the glowing red construct armour and dropped lightly back to the dirt.

"Nice shot," he admitted.

"Thanks," Iris said.

. . .

Life in the Gloamhorn Wilds quickly settled into a steady routine.

Log in, eat whatever Rudra cooked up, and push deeper into the fog. Every couple of hours, something massive and foul-smelling would crawl out of the mist and try to eat them.

And every single morning before they marched out, Rudra made sure she was fed.

[Party member 'Iris' has consumed 'Hunter's Breakfast'.]

[Dexterity +15%, Agility +10%, and Focus +30% for 6 hours.]

The stat boosts from this epic-tier food were nice.But the Focus buff—paired with her constant maintaining of the Genesis Breath—was what really changed the game. With her mind clear and sharp, Iris adapted to the high-level zone almost instantly.

By the second day, she had completely stopped using trees for cover. She fought right out in the open, constantly on the move, and she was frankly terrifying to watch.

Wick's Arcane Guns did everything Rudra had designed them to do and more. When monsters closed the distance, she kept them as dual pistols—weaving cleanly between snapping jaws and swinging claws, spinning and firing from impossible angles. When a pack held at mid-range, one pistol clicked and stretched into an assault rifle, raking the treeline with suppressive fire. And whenever something massive lurked way back in the mist, the barrel unfolded further into a long-range sniper rifle, ending the fight before the monster could even notice they were there.

She never stopped moving. She never broke her rhythm. Watching her clear a hunting ground was like watching a very beautiful, yet very lethal dance.

The notifications kept coming.

[Party member 'Iris' has reached Level 274.]

[Party member 'Iris' has reached Level 279.]

[Party member 'Iris' has reached Level 284.]

Rudra levelled up too, though much slower. At his level, even a Level 350+ forbidden zone handed out experience points stingily. Still, he was enjoying the grind way more than he expected.

Then, on the twelfth day, the horde came.

RUMBLE. RUMBLE. RUMBLE.

The earth trembled violently. Hundreds of branches snapped in the distance. Somewhere deep in the fog, something enormous was coming, and everything in the forest was running from it.

They barely had time to look at each other.

A literal tidal wave of panicked monsters burst through the treeline. Ravagers. Direwolves. Centipede-like horrors with way too many legs. Hundreds of high-level beasts rampaging blindly in the same direction, ploughing straight through their camp.

The sheer mass of bodies instantly split them apart.

"Iris!"

He caught one glimpse of her, already moving away through the trees, guns blazing. Then a wall of bark and horns closed in between them, and she was gone.

When the stampede thinned, Rudra was surrounded.

He did a quick headcount. Twenty. Twenty-five. No, closer to thirty. Every single one of them was over Level 360, sporting health bars over 50 Million.

For a moment, he thought about pushing through to find Iris.

Then he remembered he was worrying about a woman who had spent the last twelve days casually putting bullets through the eyeballs of monsters a hundred levels above her from across the map.

'Yeah. She'll be fine.'

Rudra let out a long, steady breath of white mist, activating Genesis Breath. He rolled his shoulders and spun Extortion loosely in his grip as ethereal red gauntlets and a heavy crimson breastplate snapped into existence over his body.

[The skill 'Will's Construct Armor (Lv. 2)' has been activated!]

"Alright then," he grinned at the circle of beasts. "Who wants to go first?"

The beast unfortunately didn't have any honor and instead came all at once.

Big mistake.

Instead of waiting for them to reach him, Rudra spun Extortion overhead.

[The skill 'Typhoon (Lv. 4)' has been activated!]

Kwa-gagagagak!

A violent vacuum of roaring wind erupted around him. The thirty monsters lunging from different angles were suddenly yanked off their feet, their massive bodies dragged helplessly inward as the suction radius expanded wider and wider with every passing second.

One second. Two seconds. Five seconds.

Rudra abruptly halted the spin.

KWAAAAANG—!!

The compressed air detonated outward in a massive shockwave. Every single monster within a hundred metres was blasted off its feet, crashing into the dirt in a tangled, stunned heap.

[You have dealt 184,500 damage to all targets!]

[Multiple targets have been Stunned and Knocked Down for 2 seconds!]

Rudra didn't let those few seconds go to waste. Before the stunned beasts could even hit the ground, he waded straight into the centre of the pile, his staff already blurred in an unbroken circle.

[The skill 'Avalanche (Lv. 4)' has been activated!]

Kwang! Pababak! Kwaang!

With this many monsters packed together, his combo chain literally never had to stop. Even when a Direwolf barely twisted its neck to narrowly dodge a downward smash, the compressed air of Avalanche ruptured its internal organs anyway, bursting blood from its jaws.

[You have dealt 141,800 damage.]

[You have dealt 151,800 damage.]

Claws and teeth scraped furiously against his crimson Will's Construct Armor, the weaker glancing blows failing to even pierce the willpower threshold while he tanked the heavier hits without flinching.

[You have dealt 263,400 damage.]

Whenever the pack tried to spread out to surround him again, he slammed the tip of Extortion into the skull of the nearest Ravager.

[The skill 'Comet (Lv. 3)' has been activated!]

KWAAAANG!

The 30-metre shockwave blasted the encroaching monsters backward like bowling pins, and thanks to Comet's unique property, Rudra didn't even have to reset his stance—he flowed straight out of the impact and right back into his basic chain, preserving every single stack of momentum he had built.

[You have dealt 418,900 damage.]

The damage numbers scaled endlessly. They had no ceiling. Slowly, one by one, the road-long health bars around him began to shrink.

'Honestly,' Rudra thought, cracking a Ravager's jaw in half as white mist streamed from his mouth. 'This is almost relaxing.'

***

Iris stopped running when the trees opened up.

She had let the stampede carry her away on purpose. In the middle of that crush there was no room to move and no line to shoot along. Out here, at the edge of a wide clearing of grey grass and fallen stone, she could see everything.

Which meant she spotted the culprit the exact second it lumbered out of the fog.

It was the thing the whole forest had been running from.

Four legs as thick as temple pillars. A broad back armoured in a jagged, ridged shell of dark stone. Its long, low-slung head was crowned with a ring of curved grey horns, with two small, pale eyes tucked deep beneath heavy stone brows. The ground physically sank several inches under every step it took.

[Gloamhorn Behemoth (Lv. 385) has appeared!]

Almost a hundred levels above her.

Huuu—

A thin stream of white vapour slipped past Iris's lips as she activated the Genesis Breath skill.

Iris checked both guns without looking down. Full. She ran her thumb once along the thin blue line on the nearest barrel.

She still was not used to them. For years she had fought with weapons that could not keep up with her and would fall apart if she ever pushed them. She had grown so used to working around her equipment that she had forgotten what it was like to work with it.

These guns did not hold her back in any manner. They were the best guns she had ever held, in this world or the real one.

The Behemoth lowered its head.

Then it charged.

DOOM. DOOM. DOOM.

Iris did not run. She stood her ground and watched. She observed its steps, watched its weight roll from leg to leg, and as it came, her cold eyes slid across its body.

[The skill 'Weak Point Detection' has been activated.]

Three glowing red reticles lit up in her vision. The narrow joint behind its right foreleg. The soft hide beneath its lower jaw. The deep-set eyes.

At the last possible moment, she stepped sideways and let it go past, close enough that the wind lifted her hair.

[The skill 'Armor Piercing Shot' has been activated.]

BANG!

[Critical Damage!]

[You have dealt 81,700 damage.]

The bullet punched straight into the exposed joint behind its foreleg. The Behemoth's leg buckled, sending the giant skidding violently across the turf before it whipped its bulk around.

It was furious now.

'Good.'

Iris started moving.

She ran along the edge of the clearing, guns in both hands, white mist coming out of her mouth, never staying in one place for longer than a single shot. The Behemoth followed her, crashing through rocks she had just left, swinging that great horned head through the space where she had been standing a moment before. Every time it turned, she fired.

Every single bullet went into that exact same wounded joint.

[The skill 'Concentrated Fire' has been activated.]

BANG! BANG! BANG!

[Critical Damage!]

[You have dealt 72,100 damage.]

[Critical Damage!]

[You have dealt 73,400 damage.]

[Critical Damage!]

[You have dealt 74,800 damage.]

Each shot on the same spot hit harder than the last. Step, turn, fire. Step, step, fire. Her feet knew where to land before she decided. Her body moved in time with the beast's, always half a step ahead of it.

To her own surprise, she realized she was actually enjoying this.

Not the danger. She had never cared much about danger since she was 6. She liked the rhythm. It was the closest thing to dancing she had let herself do in a very long time.

Suddenly, the Behemoth stopped chasing her.

It planted its feet in the dead centre of the clearing, heaving ragged breaths, and dropped its chin until its horns scraped the dirt. Its massive front legs rose high into the air.

Iris saw what was coming and moved first.

KWAGAGAGANG!

The feet slammed down. The earth heaved. Spikes of grey stone burst out of the grass in a ring, racing outward toward her, each one taller than a man.

Hup!

She leapt. A stone spike tore through the exact spot she had just left. She touched down lightly on a fallen boulder, felt the earth rumble beneath it, and kicked off again just as a fresh spike split the rock in two. She bounded from rising stone to rising stone without losing a fraction of her balance, finally coming to a clean stop perched atop the tallest spike at the far edge of the clearing.

Way across the field of jagged rock, the Behemoth raised its head to search for her.

It lifted its chin. Its heavy brows lifted with it. For one second, one of its small pale eyes was open and exposed, in the narrow gap between two curved horns.

The distance was absurd. The angle was worse. A sliver of a gap between thick horns, across an entire field of obstructed terrain, on a moving target.

Iris did not think about any of that.

[The skill 'Quick Change' has been activated.]

Click.

In one smooth motion, the pistol in her right hand stretched and unfolded, the barrel lengthening, the stock sliding out against her shoulder, until she was holding a long, slender sniper rifle.

[The skill 'Precision Shot' has been activated.]

She let out half a breath.

CRACK!

[Critical!]

[You have dealt 518,300 damage.]

The Behemoth let out an ear-splitting shriek. It reeled sideways, thrashing its ruined head and smashing through its own stone spikes as its massive health bar plummeted.

Iris was already airborne. Dropping off the tall spike, she sprinted straight across the shattered ground. The sniper rifle folded smoothly back into dual pistols in mid-stride.

[The skill 'Double Shot' has been activated.]

BANG-BANG!

She unloaded dozens of bullets straight into the monster's blinded eye socket, firing relentlessly while weaving around its thrashing limbs until the colossal beast's legs finally gave out.

Kwa-duduk... Kung!

It crashed into the dirt, shaking the entire clearing one last time before dissolving into a massive storm of blue pixels that floated lazily into the mist.

[You have defeated the 'Gloamhorn Behemoth'!]

[You have gained 101,600,000 experience.]

[Level Up!]

[Level Up!]

Iris stood in the middle of the clearing, breathing harder than usual, and watched the light drift away.

An item lay in the grass where it had fallen. She walked over and picked it up.

It was a long, straight sword with a pale grey blade and a hilt wrapped tightly in dark leather.

[Warden's Fang]

[Rating: Unique]

She stared at the blade for a moment, then tossed it into her inventory so that she could sell it to the guild for Genesis Credits.

***

Rudra found her 15 minutes later, sitting on a stone in the middle of a clearing full of broken spikes, calmly cleaning her guns.

Rudra paused at the treeline. He looked at the spikes and the huge crater in the middle of the clearing. Then at the trail of destruction leading back into the treeline.

"You okay?" he asked.

"I am fine."

"What the hell happened here?"

Iris reached into her inventory and held out a sword by the hilt. "A behemoth monster showed up. It dropped this sword, I want to sell it to the guild."

Rudra took the weapon and used [Legendary Sage's Eyes] to see its information. A Unique-rated longsword—honestly, the stats were on par with some of the best pieces Alex had ever created in Stormbreak. He pictured just how many sword-users they had back in the Genesis Guild, and how quickly a riot would break out over a drop like this.

"I'll put it in the guild treasury," he decided. "Whoever wants it can redeem it."

He placed it in the treasury. Somewhere far away, several Genesis members received a notification at the same moment and immediately started arguing.

Iris finished cleaning her guns, holstered them, and opened her status window. She looked at it for a while.

[Name: Iris]

[Level: 291]

[Class: Gunmaster]

[Title: [Thousand Shots Without a Miss] + 14]

[Health: 50,420 / 50,420 | Mana: 26,980 / 26,980]

[Strength: 2,195 | Stamina: 2,337

 Agility: 2,787 | Intelligence: 2,087]

[Dexterity: 1,574 | Insight: 1,936

 Persistence: 1,104 | Luck: 127

 Charm: 786]

[Stat Points: 0]

Two hundred and ninety-one. Twenty-one levels in a little over a month.

She closed the window with a little smile in her face.

Rudra, who had been watching her expression out of the corner of his eye, didn't bring it up either. Smiling faintly, he pulled up his own status window.

[Name: Rudra] 

[Level: 329]

[Class: Staff Saint / Deep Sage] 

[Titles: [Different Species' Lord] + 40 others ] 

[Health: 370,400 / 370,400]

[Mana: 998,200 / 998,200]

[Staff Energy: 3,500 / 3,500 ] 

[Divine Energy: 43,500 / 43,500 ] 

[Demonic Force: 153,200 / 153,200 ] 

[Enlightenment: 10,500 / 10,500 ]

[Strength: 4,203 | Stamina: 4,233]

[Agility: 4,223 | Intelligence: 5,816]

[Persistence: 3,911 | Dexterity: 4,725]

[Courage: 3,506 | Charm: 11,897]

[Dignity: 5,388 | Insight: 3,597]

[Wisdom: 1230 | Divine Power: 4,350]

[Demonic Power: 15,920 | Regeneration: 2,304]

[Composure: 2,182 | Indomitable: 2,191 ] 

[Willpower: 1,828 | Political Power: 1,688 ] 

[Super Sensitivity: 20.4 | Good Luck: 120]

He had increased 15 levels since they had left the Orcs in the past 1 and half months or so and the main reason was due to his various titles that increased his experience acquisition rate and his hunting of higher levels monsters. He opened the unified ranking out of habit.

1. Rudra
2. Kraugel
3. Zibal
4. Red
5. Chris
6. Hurent
7. Yura

Still sitting comfortably at number one.

He swiped the translucent window away, stretched his arms overhead until his spine popped, and hefted Extortion onto his shoulder.

"Ready to move?" he asked.

Iris stood up smoothly from the rock. "Ready."

Side by side, the two of them walked deeper into the fog.