Chapter 46: Nightmare, 4th Floor (2)

– Black Golems are completely immune to any damage below a certain threshoooold... proceed with cautiooon...

...Now what?

Immune to damage below a certain threshold?

Ding...

The remains of the red golems vanished, and the entrance opened once again.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

A black golem came marching out.

Sure enough, its color was the only difference. Its shape was identical to that of the previous golems: bipedal, with a core embedded directly in the center of its chest.

Plli sprang at it and raked his forepaw across its body.

The black golem staggered briefly, then recovered and continued advancing. The blow barely seemed to have affected it.

Plli scrambled onto its body and began tearing into it with his teeth.

Only then did cracks begin spreading across its surface, fragments breaking loose beneath his jaws. Those attacks were finally getting through.

My expression hardened as I watched.

Hold on... its defense is this high?

So it simply ignores anything that doesn’t hit hard enough.

I left the first golem to Plli and turned toward the next.

The instant it emerged from the entrance, I struck it with Flame Strike.

Five concentrated fireballs slammed into the exact same point.

Kwaaaaang!

A tremendous explosion tore away part of the golem’s upper body, but it remained standing.

A cold unease crept over me.

‘Even that wasn’t enough to kill it in one hit...’

This was going to be a serious problem.

Another golem emerged.

I cast Scorching Zone across the path leading from the entrance.

Flames erupted around every golem that stepped into the area.

But they continued marching forward without pause. The spell inflicted no meaningful damage at all.

Sustained-damage skills clearly couldn’t overcome the threshold.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’

Light Bullet was obviously out of the question.

I allowed the second golem to pass, dropped down in front of the third, and cast Blade Storm.

Kwaaaaaa!

The black golems were much heavier than the red ones. The storm barely pushed them back.

And judging by their condition, it had dealt virtually no damage.

I climbed back onto the wall and glanced toward Plli.

The golem he had been gnawing on finally shattered near the corner at the end of Stretch 1.

The second golem—the one I had struck with Flame Strike—had already crossed roughly two-thirds of Stretch 1.

The instant Flame Strike came off cooldown, I launched another five fireballs at it, concentrating them on the same damaged point.

Kwaaaaang!

That finally brought it down.

Thank God. Two hits were enough.

I stopped time and took a moment to organize my thoughts.

Based on what I had seen, the only attacks capable of damaging the black golems were Flame Strike and Plli fighting at full strength. Destruction Ray would obviously work as well.

Even Blade Storm had failed completely. Flame Strike must have succeeded only because all five fireballs had struck the same location at once.

Naturally, every one of my weaker offensive skills was useless.

‘This is getting rough...’

Numerically, I could still handle the five currently on the field.

I should be able to destroy all of them before they reached the exit without resorting to Destruction Ray.

But the next stage would probably have ten.

And the stage after that, twenty.

...First things first. Clear this stage.

I allowed time to resume.

The remaining three golems had already emerged from the entrance.

I left the third to Plli, and the moment Flame Strike became available, I launched it at the fourth.

Kwaaaaang!

I had to conserve Destruction Ray.

Its cooldown was three minutes, and the one-minute interval between stages wouldn’t be enough to restore it. It was my final trump card.

Plli destroyed the third golem. I brought down the fourth.

I finally managed to finish the fifth near the two-thirds point of Stretch 2.

The signal light changed to blue.

“Phew...”

I caught my breath and stopped time once more.

Time to think.

I needed to devise a plan for dealing with ten of them based on everything I had just learned.

First, even on Nightmare difficulty, the golems’ movement speed and the intervals between them remained unchanged.

It took thirty seconds to cross each stretch, meaning a total of one hundred and fifty seconds from the entrance to the exit at the end of Stretch 5.

Given the distance between them, no more than five golems could occupy a single stretch at once.

To force more than five into the same stretch, I would have to physically delay their advance.

Plli needed approximately thirty seconds to destroy a single black golem.

In other words, the time it took them to traverse one entire stretch.

Flame Strike also had a thirty-second cooldown.

But since I needed two casts to kill one golem, it effectively took me sixty seconds to bring down each target.

Their special trait wasn’t the only problem. Their base attributes were clearly increasing with every stage as well.

Even slowing a black golem’s advance was far more difficult than it had been with the earlier varieties.

...After running the scenario through my head, I concluded that ten should still be manageable without Destruction Ray.

‘But twenty? Not a chance.’

To deal with twenty, I would have to compress them into a single stretch as tightly as possible and annihilate them with Destruction Ray.

The only real obstacle was the spacing at which they emerged. If I could delay them long enough to bunch them together, fitting all twenty into a single stretch should be possible.

Their ability wasn’t damage reduction. They simply ignored attacks below a fixed threshold.

That meant Destruction Ray should inflict its full damage.

Wiping them all out in a single shot wasn’t impossible.

Still...

Something about this felt deeply wrong.

Was I even approaching this challenge correctly?

The golems simply kept growing stronger, and I had no idea how many stages remained.

I surveyed the workshop again.

The entrance. The exit. The mechanical structures. The remains of destroyed golems scattered along the path.

I couldn’t leave through either the entrance or the exit. I was trapped inside, forced to deal with an endless procession of golems.

...Was I supposed to destroy some mechanism to stop them from spawning?

No. Every structure in the workshop was an indestructible object, most likely to prevent anyone from altering the terrain.

The only destructible objects in the room were the golems themselves, as demonstrated by the wreckage scattered everywhere.

I continued searching the workshop, but nothing stood out.

With time frozen, I pushed my mind into overdrive and thought for what felt like an eternity.

Nothing came to me.

There had to be something.

I simply couldn’t figure out what the fuck it was.

I allowed time to resume.

The rest period ended, and the signal light turned red.

Ten golems.

Stage 11 began.

The wreckage littering the path vanished, and a new group of golems emerged from the entrance.

I dealt with them the same way I had handled the previous five.

Plli took one. I took another.

I damaged them with Flame Strike while using Blade Storm whenever it came off cooldown to slow their advance as much as possible.

Whenever my Willpower ran dry, I stopped time and replenished it.

One by one, the golems fell.

We destroyed the first five near the end of Stretch 2, almost exactly as before.

Then we moved on to the remaining five.

It was close, but I brought down the last one in Stretch 4, before it could enter Stretch 5.

Stage 11 ended without incident.

Next came Stage 12.

Yeah.

There was no way I could handle twenty without Destruction Ray.

“This time, destroying them isn’t the priority, Plli. Push them back and knock them down as much as you can. Whatever you do, keep them from advancing.”

I ✧ NоvеIight ✧ (Original source) gave Plli his orders.

If he latched onto one golem and focused solely on destroying it, we were finished.

We had barely eliminated ten before they reached Stretch 5. There was no chance of destroying twenty before they arrived at the exit.

Our only option was to form a blockade.

We had to compress every golem into a single stretch and then wipe them out with Destruction Ray.

Ding...

The wreckage on the path disappeared, and Stage 12 began.

Following my orders, Plli focused entirely on obstructing their advance.

Kwang!

He slammed his body into them and swept at them with his forepaws.

He aimed for their legs whenever possible, trying to bring them crashing down.

What I had hoped would happen was simple: one would fall, those behind it would trip over its body, and the entire line would grind to a halt.

But the damned things simply kept advancing.

And their momentum was monstrous.

Whenever Plli knocked one down, the golems behind it either stepped directly over its body or shoved it aside with their legs before continuing forward.

They weren’t attacking, but the sheer mass of their bodies pressing against him meant Plli was taking damage simply by holding the line.

If he reached his limit and was Reverse Summoned, it would be over.

I couldn’t afford to push him too far.

Kwaaaaaa!

Naturally, I was doing everything I could to help.

Blade Storm, Flame Strike, every weaker spell in my arsenal—I hurled them all at the golems, desperately trying to force them back even a fraction.

Ice Dagger was a single-use skill, so I continued saving it.

Not all twenty had even emerged from the entrance yet.

Hold them.

Fall back a little.

Hold them again.

As we repeated the process, I realized that a corner was far easier to defend than a straight section of the path. Plli and I dug in there as though defending a fortress under siege.

It would take approximately two minutes for all twenty golems to emerge.

Had one minute passed already?

I finally reached my limit.

We abandoned Stretch 1 and retreated to Stretch 2.

Plli resumed holding the front while I supported him with each skill as soon as it came off cooldown.

At one point, I squeezed between two golems to cast a spell and was nearly crushed between their bodies. I had to use Teleport to escape.

This is never-ending.

That was the only thought left in my mind.

I continued scraping by, carefully managing the situation so Plli wouldn’t be destroyed.

At last, two minutes passed, and all twenty golems had emerged from the entrance.

They were now spread across Stretch 1 and Stretch 2.

Should I fire now?

No.

Just a little longer.

A little more.

If we had already come this far, we might as well force all of them into Stretch 2.

At the far end of Stretch 2, Plli and I made our final stand.

Every second dragged by like it had been dipped in tar.

At last, all the golems were lined up single file within a single stretch.

The instant I confirmed it, I ordered Plli to withdraw and stopped time.

‘Die. All of you.’

Two golems had been destroyed during the struggle, leaving eighteen.

But even so...

Could Destruction Ray truly eliminate this many at once?

Whatever.

There was only one way to find out.

After three hundred seconds of Mental Concentration, I unleashed a fully charged Destruction Ray.

A black beam erupted forward, consuming my entire field of vision.

“...!”

When the beam finally faded, the golems were still lined up before me.

A perfectly circular hole had been punched straight through the chest of every single one.

All eighteen had been cleanly perforated.

...This skill really was absurdly powerful.

The golems collapsed one after another, falling like a row of dominoes.

I climbed back onto the wall and confirmed that the signal light had turned blue.

Stage 12 cleared.

“Haah...”

At last, I could breathe again.

Honestly, I had hesitated until the very last moment between choosing the physical-ability reduction penalty and accepting the ban on Destruction Ray.

Had I chosen the Destruction Ray ban, I would have been completely fucked.

“...”

Still, I had cleared the stage somehow.

And yet no completion message appeared.

‘Not that I was expecting one...’

When the hell was this challenge going to end?

No.

Did it even have an end?

If something stranger or stronger appeared next, I genuinely wouldn’t survive.

By now, I was almost certain of it.

I was missing something.

Something important.

“...?”

At that moment, my gaze fell upon the golem wreckage scattered across the path.

The black golems lay in pieces, enormous holes bored through the centers of their bodies.

Strangely, however, the cores that had been embedded in their chests now rested on the ground, completely intact.

Destruction Ray struck them head-on...

So how are they unharmed?

It was the sort of detail I might easily have overlooked, yet something about it continued to bother me.

Almost without realizing it, I approached the wreckage.

I reached down to pick up one of the cores lying among the debris.

The instant my fingertip touched it—

[200P acquired.]

“...Huh?”

The core melted away, dissolving into nothing.

A succession of windows appeared before my eyes.

[Shop]

– Physical Damage +10% (100P)

– Magic Damage +10% (100P)

– Willpower +10% (100P)

– Attribute Conversion (500P)

– Force Field (50P)

– Slow (50P)

– Stop (100P)

– Special Gacha! (5,000P)

Points held: 200P

(Effects purchased from this shop disappear upon leaving Floor 4.)