*Roar!*
After the relentless, combined assault from John and his towers, the fight finally reached its conclusion. Yet, Sorolith still had one last trump card up its sleeve before the end.
As John landed another series of direct attacks, Sorolith let out its final roar. However, this ti, the sound was different. It was a prolonged, vibrating roar that made John hesitate. He doubted the monster was actually issuing its dying roar; it felt like it was performing a final, desperate ritual. His assumption proved right almost imdiately.
*Fwoosh!*
Just as the titan finally collapsed to the ground, its life force extinguished, a fierce gale of wind suddenly erupted out of nowhere. It didn’t co from the monster, but from the sky itself.
John looked up, squinting against the sudden rush of air, and spotted the black clouds finally dissipating. The heavy, oppressive ceiling that had lood over the territory for days was breaking apart, and the pure, clear sky started to appear again.
Before he could even heave a sigh of relief for the successful end of his bonus mission, sothing else happened.
"Damn! What’s wrong with this fog?!!"
Just as the sky finally cleared of the oppressive black clouds, sothing else began to gush forth from the direction of the northern den. It wasn’t a slow creep, but an explosion.
The purple fog expanded with a violent, supernatural pressure and speed, as if it didn’t bother with the local clearance they had spread using the cores for the past days and weeks.
It surged outward like a broken dam, reclaiming the territory in every direction, moving with a frightening speed that suggested it was a living entity reclaiming its stolen land.
The mont John got over his initial shock at the sudden shift of events, a scary realisation settled deep into his mind.
"Don’t tell ..."
He ignored everything else. He ignored the satisfying chi of the system notifications confirming Sorolith’s death; he ignored the heavy scales scattered around the titan’s carcass, or even its core; he even ignored the instinct to celebrate the approaching end of this gruelling and long sub-quest and quest. Instead, he funnelled his full attention into the map.
On the screen, he could clearly see that the phenonon occurring at the den was already spreading across the entirety of his territory like a virus. The purple fog was heading directly toward his friends.
Recalling the deadly, health-eroding effects of the purple fog, John felt a cold spike of panic. He instantly turned around, activating his Speed Lock ability in rapid succession, bolting like a streak of lightning back toward the south.
"Don’t die on ," he gritted his teeth, his heart hamring hard against his chest. He felt a sudden, bitter resentnt toward the system. How cheap would it be if his friends were wiped out by an environntal hazard, totally out of his control, imdiately after the boss fell?
His entire grand quest depended on keeping them alive, and at this mont, they were facing a threat they weren’t equipped or prepared to handle. Even John had suffered a one-point-per-second health loss when he first entered this fog, and his defences were significantly higher than theirs.
Yet, as he ran like a madman back toward his friends, who were currently entrenched in a chaotic battle against the fifth Wrather wave, fifty thousand strong, alongside a huge yellow monster wave, he finally noticed sothing peculiar.
"I’m not losing a single HP at all!!"
He realised no red numbers were popping up from his head. At first, he doubted his own eyes, thinking perhaps he was simply out of battle mode. However, when he double-checked his HP value in his profile, the numbers remained static. The fog had stopped damaging him physically.
"If it’s not this type of damage, then..."
Suddenly, he noticed the periphery of his vision. A small, circular countdown had returned to its place. It was a ten-minute tir, and he realised with a jolt that he had already spent most of it running crazily towards his friends.
"Tsk! It’s that damn infection thing again!"
He slowed his pace just enough to take out a handful of Wrathers cores, letting them get activated to clear a space in the purple fog. This ti, he noticed the efficiency had increased; he needed five cores just to totally push the violet fog away for a radius of hundreds of tres.
Furthermore, there was no lightning this ti. Without the black sky, there was no further lightning, and he could only activate the Wrathers’ cores without enhancing them.
He didn’t dither about the loss of the enhancent chance. His thoughts were occupied by the mory of how Ricky had behaved when he was first infected by the grey fog back at the start. "Having this madness hit in the middle of an over a hundred-thousand-monster battle? That could be fatal..."
He instantly opened his map again, zooming in with focus to see what was happening at the front line. As he had feared, his friends were already infected. He saw them acting bizarrely. Yet, luckily, they looked enraged rather than incapacitated. They were attacking the surrounding monsters with a mindless ferocity.
"Phew! At least they are alive, for now."
John knew that in such a berserk state, they wouldn’t face imdiate danger from the Wrathers. However, none of them seed to possess enough sanity to maintain their effective teamwork; none of them even had the presence of mind to take out a core to push the fog away.
Luckily for them, John was moving at his fastest speed. He arrived at their location in less than an hour to find a scene of absolute madness.
"I killed the one hundred and fifty-second monster now!" Cissel roared, her voice cracking with a manic edge. Her daggers were a blur of death, carving through a Wrather with unnecessary brutality.
"I beat you, btch! I’ve killed one hundred and fifty-three!" Ricky roared back, his eyes glowing with a faint purple light. It was as if the two were locked in so sort of grueso, high-stakes competition.
"You motherfckers! Let have a few monts of rest to cook and eat! I’m hungry! I want to eat!" On the opposite flank, Elena was moving with her sledgehamrs like an unstoppable force of nature, shouting with a pure rage that made even John shudder.
"Co here! I dare you co here, bastards!" The last mber of the group, Luke, was waving his heavy club like a lunatic, chasing a group of terrified Wrathers across the field. "You dare humiliate my Lockheart family? You dare to attack us? Co here! I’ll kill all of you and reclaim my family’s na! Co here, I dare you..."
"..."
John stood in the centre of the carnage and madness, his mind going slightly numb as he took in the spectacle. It was like watching a group of toddlers given the power of gods and the temperant of rabid dogs.
"Tsk! At least their lives aren’t in any danger soon," he muttered, shaking his head after a quick scan of their body codes. Within their green and white codes, he could see one large purple cluster forming, a composite of many smaller clusters, similar to the ones he had extracted from Ricky. Physically, they were fine; ntally, they were on another planet.
"Sorry, guys, but I’ll leave you like this for a bit longer," John decided, a small, wicked part of his mind finding the irony amusing. Once he saw how effective their mindless brutality was against the overwhelming numbers of the combined two types of monster waves, he realised they were actually more efficient this way.
At this mont, he truly regretted not having a cara with him to film and record these precious monts. They would have been excellent leverage for the future.
Before leaving them to their competition and vendetta, he made sure to clear a large area of the purple fog around the spot. Fortunately, the base-level coverage of the cores still functioned, so he had to use fewer than he had initially calculated to maintain a spacious safe zone.
Then, he turned his attention toward a much more pressing problem. While his friends were venting their madness on the enemy, the Bulltors were a different story entirely.
According to the map, the giants were attacking his main base. In their infected state, they had mistaken the silver walls for a prison. Lanmar was at the front, shouting like a revolutionary leader, ordering his kin to tear apart the steel cage and free themselves from the entrapnt.
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