Chapter 255
While waiting for Spencer and the author of the report to arrive, I planned to do nothing. Rosie had a point about pushing myself too much.
Too bad the world disagreed. Another corrupted monster boss had been detected, but it was the location that was scary. It had been detected in the lower floors.
“Damn,” I growled the moment I received the news, immediately moving back to the fifth floor. The same corrupted feeling was present on the fifth floor, only stronger. I didn’t need to talk with anyone about the location of the corrupted monster. The moment I arrived, their location burned in my mind like a lighthouse, the dungeon alerting me about the location of the corrupted bosses.
Three of them. The report only mentioned one.
I couldn’t blame the scouts. As the corruption spread, we had to pull the defensive encampments to camp around the pathways between floors, each point heavily fortified. We have done it for practical reasons. Even without sending some of our best fighters away to support the other towns, we lacked the numbers to properly control the fifth floor as we did before the corruption.
Though, it wasn’t entirely necessary. If there was one advantage to the corrupted monsters, it was their utter hatred toward anything living. They didn’t just wait in the dungeon floor until their numbers built up. They just attacked the higher floors, doing their best to escape.
“It’s probably why we’re facing so many small monster hordes,” I commented as I closed in the distance with the first boss. A giant insect monster, but any familiarity I might feel had been long corrupted by the mysterious energy, its shell melted and filled with tentacles. “Come on, rotten calamari. Let’s see how strong you are,” I said and closed the distance.
The answer, it turned out, was not too much.
[Level 89 -> 91]
[+10 Vitality, +8 Strength, +6 Dexterity, +10 Essence, +6 Wisdom]
It endured more attacks than the boss that had been outside, and the difference was significant. It recovered from decapitation twice, and regenerated its limbs more than a dozen times. As a tradeoff, it was slower to move, which was pretty much a death sentence against my fighting style.
But, it would have been a nightmare against a fixed defensive position.