Chapter 296: Snow Lady’s Special Buff, [Mountain Breaker] Holger

Chapter 296: Chapter 296: Snow Lady’s Special Buff, [Mountain Breaker] Holger

"This should be the Iron Guard’s room."

Lance stood at the end of a passageway deep inside a mountain.

Ahead of him, a massive Bronze Gate was embedded in the rock.

The gate was so perfectly fused with the surrounding rock wall that, without precise coordinates, no one would have guessed they needed to turn sideways and squeeze through a hundred-meter-long, narrow crevice just to get here.

"What kind of bullshit map design is this."

Lance glanced back at the cramped, narrow stone crevice behind him and couldn’t help but curse.

Anyone even slightly more muscular would probably get stuck in that fissure, unable to move forward or back.

After he was done cursing, he turned his head and looked at Nieve, who was standing obediently by his side.

Lance’s purpose today was to conduct a test.

He wanted to personally probe the rules of these Iron Guard rooms to gather firsthand intelligence for the large-scale ten-Iron-Guard subjugation campaign to come.

"If Lance goes in, will he come back out?"

Nieve tilted her head up and looked at him seriously.

When they left this morning, Nieve had insisted on coming with him.

Now, Lance finally understood why.

She was afraid he would die inside.

"Of course I’ll come back. A single Iron Guard isn’t enough to kill me."

Lance reached out and ruffled her long hair, his tone light as he reassured her.

"Then after Lance comes out, you have to take Nieve ’power-leveling,’ okay?"

Hearing his promise, a faint look of anticipation appeared on Nieve’s face. She held out a slender pinky finger.

Lance smiled with a hint of resignation and extended his own pinky, linking it gently with the girl’s.

"Alright, I promise."

Having spent this time together, Lance had truly come to see how much Nieve depended on him.

For the past three days, Nieve had been like a little shadow, almost always staying quietly within Lance’s line of sight.

Although Lance felt this dependence was a little excessive, he had to admit that, as a man, being valued and trusted so much by such a beautiful and powerful girl felt pretty damn good.

After their pinky promise, Nieve suddenly spread her arms.

Lance froze for a moment, then smiled with that same resigned fondness. He bent down slightly and gently hugged the Snow Lady before him.

At that very moment of their embrace, Nieve suddenly opened her mouth and bit down on his neck.

She bit down hard.

But Lance didn’t feel any pain. Instead, a trace of icy coolness flowed into his body from the wound.

Immediately after, a special buff notification popped up on his panel.

[The Snow Lady has exchanged bodily fluids with you, granting you a buff.]

[Oath of Melting Snow: Your Spirit Attribute is temporarily +2, and your Constitution Attribute is temporarily +2. Duration: 1 hour. During this time, you will gain an additional 20% resistance to frost environments.]

After applying the status effect, Nieve released her hands from Lance’s waist.

She took a step back, looked at Lance, and used her hands to pull her own face into a slightly stiff but incredibly cute smile.

"Nieve will wait obediently for you right here."

Lance smiled, reached out, and pinched her cheeks, which had puffed up from her forced smile.

Then, he turned and strode toward the Bronze Gate.

He placed both hands on the bronze surface and pushed hard.

With a grinding of metal, the Bronze Gate slowly swung open.

Through the opening, he could see a vast, circular chamber carved into the mountain’s core.

At the far end of that space stood a colossal figure, estimated to be over three meters tall, draped in tattered clothes and leaning on a giant Warhammer.

As Lance stepped inside, the heavy Bronze Gate began to slowly swing shut behind him, closing with a heavy thud.

Nieve remained where she was, quietly watching the sealed Bronze Gate.

She began to silently count in her head.

’1... 2... 3...’

She thought back to when she was very little.

Back then in the village, her father and older sister had hidden her in a secret compartment, telling her that bad people were coming.

She remembered that in her father’s hometown, there was a huge tree and an ancient Legend: if you constantly thought of a wish in your heart and silently counted to 3,000...

...as long as you were sincere enough, that wish would surely come true.

That time, she counted to 3,000, and the bad people were indeed wiped out by the arriving Royal Knight Order.

But her father and sister, the ones who had hidden her, never came back.

’720... 721...’

Suddenly, Nieve, who was still counting, paused.

She lifted her head, her gaze turning to the Bronze Gate with a hint of confusion.

"The contract... I can’t feel it anymore..."

...

The moment he stepped through the Bronze Gate, Lance immediately pulled up his panel and glanced at the "Oath of Melting Snow" buff in his status bar.

’Looks like buffs applied outside the gate are still effective inside.’

This meant that as long as support-type Professions stacked all sorts of buffs on the challenger at the entrance before the room challenge officially began, the gap in raw power when facing the Iron Guard could be significantly narrowed.

Having discovered this blind spot in the rules, he felt much more confident about the upcoming plan to tackle the ten Iron Guards, and his mood lightened considerably.

Lance stopped and began to carefully observe the battlefield.

This was the interior of a massive, artificially hollowed-out mountain.

The surrounding rock walls had a dark red metallic sheen. The ground was perfectly flat but scattered with numerous thick stone pillars, which were likely load-bearing structures to support the dome.

The moment he had stepped inside and the Bronze Gate had closed, the entire space was sealed off by an invisible barrier.

’Just as the rules said, it’s a one-on-one duel mode only.’

Furthermore, once inside, there was no way to retreat and no option to quit midway.

There were only two paths before him: defeat the Lord and walk out, or become a corpse and stay here forever.

The most important reason he had come alone this time was to gauge the true strength of the Iron Guards. This would directly influence how the Grand Guilds would arrange their combatants.

On the other hand, he also needed to experience it firsthand to see if there were any loopholes in this space to exploit.

Lance turned his gaze toward the colossal figure in front of him.

The Demon before him was a monster twisted into existence by the obsession of the one known as Holger, the "Mountain Breaker".

It wasn’t wearing conventional armor. Instead, its body was covered in a twisted Armor formed from disgusting, dark-red flesh and Dark Gold ore tangled together as they grew.

The monster stood there, its posture extremely stiff, and it didn’t seem to possess any advanced intelligence.

Moreover, its massive head had no eyes.

’As expected of a stitched-together Demon spawned by the Underground City. Its form is truly twisted.’ 𝑓𝑟ℯℴ𝓂

As Lance took one step after another, drawing closer, the Demon seemed to rely on its keen hearing to pick up the sound of his footsteps.

Its enormous body suddenly twitched.

As it moved, large amounts of dust and stone fragments that had settled on it rustled off.

It straightened its back, its height of over three meters combined with the massive Warhammer in its hand creating an extremely oppressive aura.

"ROAR!"

The Demon let out a muffled roar, hefted its Warhammer with one hand, and charged straight toward Lance.

It crashed into several protruding load-bearing pillars along the way.

Before its terrifying body, those hard stone pillars were like fragile crackers, shattering on impact and sending fragments flying everywhere.

Lance sidestepped the flying debris, assessing his opponent’s stats.

’Its linear sprinting speed isn’t very fast.’

Probably equivalent to the burst speed of a Level 2 Agile Professional.

However, due to its enormous size and astonishing mass, the physical kinetic energy it carried in its charge was terrifying.

A head-on collision would probably break the bones of even a Heavy Armor Knight.

Seeing the Demon charge close, its Warhammer swept horizontally with a whistling sound.

Lance’s footwork was nimble. With a light sidestep, the giant hammer whistled past, grazing the hem of his clothes but failing to even touch him.

’Strength Attribute is probably around 45 points.’

Its attack having missed, the Demon let out an enraged roar.

Its massive body defied physical inertia, forcefully halting its charge on the spot.

Then, it raised the heavy Warhammer high with both hands, its waist bending back into an exaggerated arc.

With the force of a thunderbolt, it slammed the hammer down viciously toward the spot where Lance had just been standing.

[Rock-Shattering Warhammer]!

"BANG!"

A deafening boom that could shatter eardrums exploded within the mountain chamber.

The entire chamber trembled with the force of the blow.

Centered on the crater where the Warhammer landed, the hard rock ground in a roughly sixty-degree arc in front of it violently shattered.

Dozens of razor-sharp rock spires, each over two meters tall, shot up madly from the ground like bamboo shoots after a spring rain!

However, by this point, Lance had already safely evaded this area-of-effect attack.

His Perception Attribute of over 30 points had already sent him frantic danger warnings the moment the Warhammer was raised.

Therefore, the instant he dodged, he directly summoned a [Heart Intent Martial Structure] under his feet.

He used the small-scale recoil from its Suicide Bombing to perform an utterly unnatural double jump in mid-air, easily escaping the range of the ground spikes.