The Ballad of Barbatos in the Dungeon City

The expanse of black crystals in the depths of Floor 70 creaked horrifyingly as the labyrinth's womb began to tear its own walls apart. The pitch-black darkness in the area seemed to be forcefully sucked into a single point, condensing, before spewing forth the manifestation of a primordial nightmare.

The monster resembled a bipedal dinosaur made of a weave of thick bones coated in dark volcanic metal. Four sharp, bladed arms protruded from its torso, reflecting the dim light of the labyrinth's crystals. Its spike-tipped tail swung slowly, tearing the air with an ominous hissing sound.

Zald, the war veteran who had swallowed various horrors from two different eras, stood with a posture as calm as the surface of a dead lake. He rested his already cracking steel greatsword on his right shoulder, staring at the anomalous existence before him without a single sliver of dread.

"Long time no see, bone monster," Zald greeted with his heavy baritone voice.

As its only answer, the Juggernaut arched its long neck back and unleashed a roar that shook the dimension.

ROAAAARRRRR!

The air on Floor 70 rippled violently. The shockwave from the roar crushed the black crystal formations around them into flying dust.

Behind his hardened face, Zald's tactical brain—forged through hundreds of brutal battles in the Zeus Familia era—was spinning at maximum speed. He knew exactly what he was currently facing. A Juggernaut was not an ordinary monster born from the labyrinth's cycle. This creature was an absolute anomaly—the Dungeon's destructive immune system, deployed exclusively only when the labyrinth suffered fatal damage or detected an existential threat.

The strength of this destructive monster depended entirely on the floor it was born on. The deeper the floor, the more absurd its power. On Floor 70, a death zone untouched by any adventurer in this era, Zald estimated the Juggernaut's power scale had already pierced the limits of impossibility. Its specifications were clearly equivalent to Level 9, or perhaps even higher.

Zald sharpened his gaze toward the lower half of the monster's body. The Juggernaut's most deadly characteristic was its reverse-jointed legs. That deviant anatomical structure granted it highly abnormal jumping power and movement speed. Its speed was not merely "fast," but rather fell into the extreme category of being "impossible to see" by the naked eyes of high-class adventurers.

In the depths of Floor 70, this Juggernaut's movements certainly no longer obeyed air friction or conventional laws of physics.

Zald realized one absolute fact: even he could die instantly within the first ten to twenty seconds of the battle if he failed to anticipate or evade this Juggernaut's opening surprise attack. One wrong blink would separate his head from his neck.

Furthermore, this monster wore an absolute magic-reflecting shell shield. Like its weaker variants on the upper floors, the Floor 70 Juggernaut possessed an outer shell coated in dark metal that acted as a perfect mirror. However, the shell's durability at this depth was extraordinarily thick and hard. Even Grand Magic-class spells from the strongest mages would never be able to pierce it; instead, the spells would be reflected directly back at their casters with multiplied destructive force. Therefore, fighting it with magical projectiles was pure suicide.

Moreover, the Juggernaut possessed a destructive anatomy that defied the basic rules of monster biology. It did not have a single Magic Stone in its chest that could be destroyed. Its entire skeletal form itself was a giant piece of Magic Stone coursing with pure energy from the Dungeon's womb. The effect was horrifying: this monster would not die even if its head was decapitated, its arms severed, or its chest shattered to pieces.

The only way to kill it was to destroy its entire body until it turned to ash, leaving not a single cell behind to regenerate.

However, behind the design of that near-perfect killing machine, Zald knew of one fatal flaw in the labyrinth's immune system.

Because the monster's entire body was forced to work extremely beyond its material tolerance limits to produce strength equivalent to Level 9+, the Juggernaut had a very short lifespan. The monster's body would break down and melt on its own after a few minutes due to exhaustion and conceptual pressure.

The condition for victory was extremely simple in theory, yet like a bottomless hell in practice: Survive for one minute.

The main key for a high-tier adventurer like Zald to defeat the Floor 70 Juggernaut was to survive and evade all of its deadly storm of attacks in the first 30 to 60 seconds. Only if he could survive that extreme initial slaughter phase would he have a real opening to destroy it.

Zald lowered his stance, activating his Hunter development ability to its maximum limit. This ability sharpened all of his senses when facing a monster he had already recognized.

BAM!

The crystal ground beneath the Juggernaut's feet exploded.

The monster vanished from sight. There was no afterimage, no sound of the wind being cleaved. Purely a visual erasure.

Zald's veteran instincts took over. He didn't rely on his eyes, but pure danger instincts. He spun his steel greatsword to the right side of his neck at the exact millisecond when four sharp bladed arms emerged from nothingness, striking his sword with a kinetic force matching a comet's impact.

CRAAASH!

Zald was blown backward. His boots carved a half-meter-deep trench into the hard black crystal for a dozen meters. His arm bones screamed as they withstood the G-force from the impact. Zald activated his Strong Body ability to ensure his internal organs weren't crushed to mush.

Ten seconds.

Zald didn't waste energy counterattacking. The Juggernaut darted again, bouncing from the walls to the cave ceiling with its reverse joints, creating dozens of afterimages that surrounded Zald from all directions.

The monster transformed into a blind storm of silver slashes. Zald ducked, twisted his shoulders, and parried using the thickest part of his greatsword. The monster's attacks were too fast, cutting Zald's hair and scratching his chest guard until fresh blood splattered.

Twenty seconds.

Zald was continuously forced to retreat. Every parry produced a shockwave that crushed the crystal formations around them. His temporary sword now let out a pitiful creak; its blade began to be filled with fatal cracks from colliding with the Juggernaut's reflective shell. If he tried to counterattack now, his sword would shatter to pieces and his defense would be left wide open.

Thirty seconds.

The Juggernaut leaped into the air and spun like a bone drill, aiming its four bladed arms and spiked tail directly at Zald's heart. Realizing an ordinary parry would break his sword, Zald released the hilt with his left hand, tilted his body at an impossible angle, and let the drill attack graze his left ribs.

Blood sprayed. His flesh was torn, yet Zald smirked instead. This pain ignited his Overeat ability. He was the Gluttony who had consumed the horrors of the Behemoth; physical pain was merely a spice for his endurance.

Forty seconds.

The air inside the room felt like it was boiling due to the friction from the Juggernaut's movements. The monster didn't give a single breath's pause. Its speed was still in the realm of 'impossible', but Zald's experience-forged eyes began to get accustomed to tracking its attack trajectories through the shifting crystal dust in the air.

Fifty seconds.

A small change occurred. The Juggernaut landed on a crystal pillar, but its foot claws slipped a fraction of a centimeter. The sound of tearing magical muscles and grating bones could be heard from beneath its metal shell. The monster's reverse joints began to spark with magical fire.

The monster's body, forced beyond its natural limits, finally began to collapse from within. The accumulated pressure of Level 9+ began to devour its own anatomy.

Sixty seconds.

The Juggernaut forced one last killing leap. The monster lunged straight from the front at full speed, attempting to skewer Zald with all four of its shell-clawed blades at once. However, while in mid-air, the Juggernaut's left leg, which bore the thrusting load, suddenly fractured severely. Its flight trajectory veered off, losing its precise balance for a single millisecond.

That was the absolute opening he had been waiting for.

Zald halted his retreating steps extremely, planting his right foot into the crystal floor until it shattered. He gripped the hilt of his greatsword with both hands. His arm muscles swelled enormously, bulging with thick veins pumping boiling blood.

He didn't use ordinary shooting magic that would be reflected, but rather triggered Rea Ambrosia. Hellish black-red fire exploded from his palms, enveloping the remains of his cracked sword blade with an aura of pure destruction. This was the manifestation of physical strength compressed into energy, which could not be categorized as conventional magic.

Utilizing his Supreme Attack ability, Zald met the off-balance Juggernaut mid-air with one ultimate decapitating swing.

"Afterglow!"

Zald unleashed a close-range shockwave slash that combined all of his body weight, strength, and the blaze of his hellfire.

BOOOM!

Zald's sword blade struck right at the center of the Juggernaut's chest. The absolute magic-immune reflective shell shrieked, bent, and finally shattered to pieces under the conceptual pressure of Afterglow. The Rea Ambrosia fire pierced through, spreading wildly and burning the monster's entire Magic Stone skeletal structure from the inside out.

The Juggernaut didn't even have time to let out a death roar. Its destructive anatomy disintegrated instantly. The giant bipedal body crumbled into blackish-ash dust swept away by the residual wind of Zald's slash, falling scattered upon the crystal floor without leaving a single cell to regenerate.

Zald landed on one knee. His breathing was rough and heavy, his chest rising and falling rapidly. Blood from the wounds on his cheek and ribs dripped slowly, staining the crystal floor.

In his hand, the mid-class greatsword he bought from Goibniu was shattered to pieces, leaving only the hilt and ten centimeters of melted metal at the base of the blade.

"As I expected, getting through this is quite tough," Zald said with a hoarse voice, wiping sweat and blood from his chin. He tossed the remaining sword hilt onto the floor. "If Alfia were here, everything would be so easy."

Zald laughed softly, his laughter echoing in the now-quiet room. He knew full well that Alfia was the natural enemy of this monster. His comrade-in-arms' ability would create a sound frequency barrier that absolutely neutralized the Juggernaut's speed. Not to mention the Silence's Silentium Eden magic, which could negate the special properties of the monster's shell without even having to get close.

However, complaining was not his style. Zald stood tall. The pain from his ribs slowly faded as Deus Ambrosia boiled his blood of victory. The experience and Excelia from this brutal fight pushed his Level 7 status ever closer to leveling up.

Zald turned and walked away from the pile of Juggernaut ash. He walked toward a large hole at the end of the crystal plain, a vertical tunnel connecting this area to even more terrifying depths.

Without hesitation, Zald jumped down.

After falling through the darkness for a while, Zald's feet finally struck hard ground.

The scenery around him changed drastically in an instant. The freezing aura from the black crystals vanished, replaced by waves of dry, lung-choking hot air. Streams of boiling red magma rivers carved through the dark, rocky terrain. The labyrinth walls in this place resembled ancient volcanic formations ready to erupt at any moment.

Zald had arrived on Floor 71.

He took a deep breath, savoring the scent of sulfur and dense danger in the air. His eyes gazed toward the distant volcanic walls, searching for the silhouette of his main target.

"It's time to hunt the Dragon Anole Alpha," Zald muttered, cracking his knuckles. His hunting instincts were fully ignited. "And the Ironscale Drake on Floor 72 for the materials for my new black greatsword."

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P - Gem_Blanks

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