Dungeon Diver: Stealing A Monster’s Power

After Maria landed a single blow on Samir’s lower leg, his entire demeanor changed again.

Now, after every movement, he activates countless glyphs all over his armor to heal the cracked portion, and secondly, to make sure he does not get hit again.

We start throwing multiple blue and red crescents of energy at this Royal Demon, but none of them can connect like before. That is because, with his additional caution, the counterattacks have been blasting at us nonstop.

The entire birdcage has filled with invisible orbs of energy, and from the state of my left arm and leg, still not healed after many exchanges have passed, it’s clear we can’t afford to be hit.

Even now, only small particles float inside the area where my Royal Sacred Body is rebuilding itself, and I cannot feel anything in the regenerated flesh. There is only a sharp static sensation that slowly grows stronger.

We cannot get close enough to throw any actual dangerous attacks, but with this increased intensity and the fact that we haven’t been hit again, I’d like to think Samir’s hitting his upper limit in strength as well.

“Is that all you’ve got? You said you’re a Royal Demon from the first generation, and you can’t take out a few humans?” I yell out back to try and make him hesitate or grow mad to exploit a change in his attack patterns.

The Demon is like a well-oiled machine, keeping us tens of billions of kilometers away, and even using the beams of rust and bronze-colored Celestial Energy from its sentinels as additional distractions.

I don’t dare to try and block these beams, as unlike our first clash, they now hold this Primordial Aura.

Our confidence does not weaken; in fact, it grows. As all of these massive explosions and residue shockwaves continuously pulse through the cage, the lingering demonic soldiers in the air are all killed.

I can feel fewer eyes on me, and this results in Samir’s movements becoming less precise. With a soul tie connected to a soldier with eyes on my back less than a billion kilometers away, he could more accurately predict his strikes.

Now, with them all gone, my aura spreads out further, dominating the space around me and forcing him to use more energy to get accurate readings.

While Samir gets slower, both Maria and I get more and more comfortable wielding this strange energy.

The blasts of Celestial Energy soak back into our cores, and we grow stronger as well. Both of us are very new to the zone, and our limits on the energy we can absorb are far from being met.

He does not respond to my taunts at first, but as I creep in closer, gaining a greater positional advantage every few exchanges, and the small specks on my arm grow into threads of energy, creating a shell and resemblance of bones and muscles reforming, he yells again out of frustration.

“This does not make any sense! There were never humans in the Primordial Garden! You could never have the knowledge… or ability to recover from a direct hit!”

His eyes sharpen, not out of an advantage he sees, but out of anger. The glowing white gaze shifts toward Maria, and a reminder of pain in his healed leg pulses. There is still sparkling source resin stuck in his armor and flesh, leaving a weight in his being he’s never felt before.

“And you… that is how you’ve done it. An Origin World submitted to your will… how could that be? There is only one race that can manipulate system functions like that—”

In the moment he turns his head toward Maria, I see my opening and take it before it’s too late.

A burst of red and white energy trails behind me in a zig-zag pattern. I use a perk of my soul sword I gained in the green zone to create weaker replicas of it in order to send them away from my main body and deflect off the invisible orbs to change direction faster.

I use over 20 of them and fly through the full length of the birdcage over twice as fast as I normally would to get a one-time wide-open attack on the Hydra’s blind side.

The entire cage within the Celestial Sea fills with flames, and I feel over half the remaining Hydra heads be vaporized by a sneak attack.

Not only do memories rush into my mind, but I also feel Samir’s vibrations make a dramatic shift.

He’s lost control.

Some of my flames even push against the Demon’s back, forcing him to use some of his Primordial Aura to block, weakening the defensive measures keeping Maria back.

A bright icy slash soars right into the center of the tortoise’s shell as it jumps up in front of Samir’s unguarded chest.

The foundation of this Royal Demon’s vibrations are shaken again as its screech echoes through the dome, and a blast of ice simultaneously fills the air, not interfering with the waves of fire from the other side. They collide and slide past each other as though they were thrown from the same wielder.

I grin while sinking into a trance for a fraction of a second.

The images of one of Ember’s past lives betraying his soul-bonded Demon, and taking out an entire generation of the strongest demons promoted from the Lower Realm, are what I see.

Many of the Hydras, Tortoises, and even Light Elves all look horrified, as they do not know what is happening, except for a very small few. They are the oldest of their generations and must have seen him or heard of him in the past.

The Crimson-eyed Dragon sends out a burst of telepathy that echoes in everyone’s minds. It sounds similar to the Ember I know, but far more fierce, angry, and truthfully, filled with the vengeance of a wild beast I do not recognize.

“Do not resist, and follow my lead! Once they find out I’m here… Their second wave will destroy you all. So this is no time to celebrate either. Those of you that come with me will pledge their loyalty to a future Emperor that will save us all, and those that stay will be massacred!”

He gives no time for any of them to respond and bursts outward with white strands of Celestial Energy, connecting to every array the Elves have created to protect their last citadel.

Every single one of them links directly to Ember; soul, and their eyes go blank as they’re given visions and commands their conscious minds cannot handle.

They all break formation and begin carrying out extremely weird techniques on each other.

The roughly 100,000 light elves begin connecting their Celestial Energy flows and siphoning their auras into selected elves. Some of them glow brighter and brighter white with so much Celestial Energy it begins compacting into a more pure form of ether, while others become completely void of any ether or even mana in their bodies.

Their vibrations even merge and strengthen each other into the strongest of the elves, and only a select few keep the arrays together.

Lastly, even their divine cores are mutated. Ember’s Primordial Aura begins suppressing their divine cores. He makes them so weak, it’s as though they’ve regressed to a cyan core, then eventually green, and by the end of this development some are as harmless as yellow cores in the lower realm. Yet… they still glow dark blue.

The sky above this Celestial Sea tears open, but this is not the Crimson-eyed Dragon’s doing.

He yells through their minds. “If you survive, I will see you all again, so we can find a candidate to fulfill the Legacy the elves could not!”

Then, over a hundred thousand miniature tears in space open up, allowing the elves to leave just as an overwhelming aura stronger than any of the previous waves starts pouring in from the sky.

Some of the rifts glow cyan, green, and yellow, corresponding with the strength of the elves’ current abilities. A small few even tear through space into a bright purple zone, in front of the small amount of elves that claimed the mass’s Celestial Energy and held the arrays together for the last few moments.

These rifts close and disappear just as the sky fully opens up.

A massive pair of black demonic claws pull on the rift’s edges, allowing for purple eyes to peer through.

The eyes glow brighter purple, then shine bright enough to turn white.

Millions of flashes of High-Quality ether light up the Dark Blue Zone. Their make ups are similar to standard system-based fast travel commands, activating in a perfect circle surrounding the last of this Zone’s natives. All of the elves’ arrays unravel and expose the citadel to the open air.

My interest is fully piqued as these flashes start to fade and reveal what is beneath them, and the outline of the face of the Demon in the sky tearing through space gets easier to make out, but these shared memories fade again.

I slip right back into reality, hearing Samir roaring in anger as the Bronze Tortoise that jumped in front of him is blown to bits.

A direct attack from Maria’s blade cannot be stopped, and the concentrated Primordial Aura inside her Source Resin seeps into every fracture her energy crescent creates.

While the initial impact only cut halfway through, the fast-spreading icy infection bursts through the Tortoise before Samir can destroy the problem like last time.

The Bronze behemoth clings onto life moments after, even sending out a beam of Celestial Energy from its disembodied head one more time before it completely covers with sparkling ice and shatters into dust that eats itself and disappears.

The residue of this horrific death splatters all over the armor of this Royal Demon and tries to spread in the same manner, but an unfathomable amount of spinning ether commands start to activate and stop the spread.

As I focus on these magic circles and complex commands manipulating ether and primordial aura, I start to see them move with far more clarity than before…

I recognize a lot of these symbols now that I didn’t mere seconds ago.

They were in the Hydra’s memories… compacted in the eyes of that Demon in the sky.