Free Web NovelChapter 148: The Dungeon’s Silence
[You have killed an E rank (Elite) Rabid Wolf.]
Confirmation finally came from the Origin Realm of the elite wolf’s death, to the great relief of Rohan. But the fight wasn’t over quite yet.
He didn’t even wait for the elite’s body to hit the ground properly before he was on the move again.
There was no time to stand there and admire the kill, no matter how satisfying it felt to see the massive beast crumple and stop moving. Under normal circumstances, he might have let himself enjoy it for a second. Might have stared down at the thing and basked in the sheer absurdity of the fact that he, an F rank Awakened, had just taken down an E rank Elite in direct combat. Without the use of any overpowered one time use genetic armaments as well.
But the chamber was still rife with activity.
Over a hundred ordinary wolves were still alive, and even though the elite was dead and the horde had lost the last thing holding it together, that didn’t magically make them harmless. They were still E rank beasts. Still fast. Still rabid. Still more than capable of tearing him apart if he got careless in the final stretch after doing all the hard work already.
And quite frankly, Rohan was barely hanging on by a thread.
His lungs were burning. His muscles were beginning to shake and crumple after so much overexertion, and his molten-stone skin was starting to show signs of crumbling, as the origin energy feeding it this whole time was running thin.
Every extra motion cost him more than it had just a few minutes ago, and he could feel the exhaustion building up in his limbs in a way that made him deeply, deeply uncomfortable.
’No. I can’t collapse yet. You can collapse after the job is done, Rohan!’
He planted one foot in the ground, used the rebound to twist, and kicked an ordinary wolf off his burning flank before it could clamp down on him with its jaws.
The beast hit the stone floor, rolled and immediately started howling again as molten lava clung to its face long enough for the life to leave its eyes.
[You have killed...]
He barely even registered the notification.
In fact, he blanked them out entirely, as his sole focus needed to remain on slaughtering the beasts. He couldn’t afford any distractions, not even from the Origin Realm itself.
He was on it the next instant. His spear punched through another wolf’s neck and pinned it to the floor before it could even react to his presence.
That one was followed immediately by a problem on his left. Then another near the chamber wall. Then a fourth one limping across the open floor, fur charred black and patch from his Napalm rain, but still somehow maddened enough to drag itself toward him despite one of its rear legs hanging by a few threads behind it.
It was safe to say the cleanup was about to be unpleasant.
The wolves were no longer coordinated, which took some pressure off Rohan’s shoulders.
But just because they weren’t acting with logic anymore didn’t mean they were easy. The death of the elite and the lingering pain from the molten lava had shattered what little pattern they’d been holding onto.
Still, Rohan adapted quickly after having faced off hundreds of these beasts.
The moment he realised the wolves weren’t going to regroup into another clean charge, he changed the way he fought. No more meeting them head on in the centre of the chamber.
Instead, he turning himself into a machine crafted for only one purpose.
Execution.
He went for the ones already burning first.
They were easier kills. Many of them were already half out of the fight before they even had the chance to fight back; even in their rabid state there was enough panic in their red eyes that had no room for further aggression towards him — some of them even tried to turn tail and flee.
Unfortunately for them, there was nowhere for them to flee to.
If he left them alive, some of the might still be far enough to escape back into the tunnels though, and Rohan didn’t fancy spending another two days traversing those to hunt them down.
’I didn’t receive any notification about the dungeon being completed after killing the elite, so the clear condition must be to kill every last beast inside.’
He wanted this place clean of any living beings but himself. It would be troublesome if he went through all this effort just to still be rewarded with nothing from the Origin Realm.
So he marched through the place like a man collecting on all his debts.
A wolf dragging itself across the floor with its front paws because its hind had been cooked by his napalm rain.
Dead.
One spear thrust to the skull, then gone.
Another trying to tear up chunks out of its own charred shoulder with its teeth in some doomed attempt to stop the pain.
Dead.
Two more slamming into each other in blind panic, one of them half burned across the back and the other party limping badly enough that its front legs did most of the work.
Dead.
***
Eventually, Rohan whittled the horde of howling wolves down to the very last one — a severely injured wolf laying silently on its side, holding onto its last few breaths.
Rohan would have thought it already dead if it weren’t for its weak breaths quietly reaching his ears after the chamber turned to silence.
He stood over the final wolf for a few seconds, mostly just to catch his own shaky breaths after everything he’d been through.
The beast was barely alive. It was done. The chamber, no, the whole dungeon. It was all done.
All he had to do now was take the final step and put this last beast out of its misery.
The silence didn’t bother him one bit, in fact he started to take comfort in it after the ruckus the huge gathering of wolves were causing over the past hour. His ears needed a well deserved break from that torture...
"Haaa..." Rohan let out a long, ragged breath, forcing air out of his lungs as they felt like they’d been scraped of every last ounce. "You guys really were a pain in the ass."
Rohan swore he could see the wolf’s ear twitching faintly at the sound of his voice, but he ignored it.
Not that it mattered.
He lifted his spear, then drove it down in a clean strike through the beast’s skull, ending its misery once and for all.
[You have killed an E rank (Ordinary) Rabid Wolf.]
Rohan remained there for another second, not even taking out his spear from the beast’s body. He looked up at the ceiling, disappointed that he couldn’t look up at the stars and breathe in some fresh air right now, and waited.
He waited for the notification.
Anything, really.
Something like ’Dungeon cleared! Dungeon complete!’ Would do. Heck, he’d even take a ’Congratulations, idiot, you survived!’
But nothing came. freewebnøvel.coɱ
Rohan blinked frustratedly.
He pulled his spear out back out the corpse and looked around the chamber again, wondering if he’d somehow missed another wolf still clinging to life.
But he was certain that nothing remained except himself.
He tiredly sat down on the ground, his legs finally giving in after all the stress they’d been through.
There was no prompt from the origin realm. No triumphant window. No completion notice.
"...You have got to be kidding me."
Rohan felt like shit. If it weren’t for him being dead exhausted at the moment, he most certainly would have been cursing loudly and kicking every last corpse from the small chance that one of them may still have some life in them.
But the fact of the matter was, he didn’t have the energy in him, literally and metaphorically.
Then, as another few seconds passed and the Origin Realm continued refusing to say a damned thing about the dungeon, his silence quickly derailed into irritation.
"What do you mean that’s it?" He snapped at the empty air. "I killed the whole fucking chamber! The whole dungeon even! Don’t tell me there’s still one or two alive and kicking down the other tunnel I didn’t take!??"
The Origin Realm, unsurprisingly, didn’t care about his complaints.
It remained just as dead and quiet as always.
Rohan sat there for a long moment, spear in one hand, his other arm hanging limp at his side after being severely beaten and bruised all day, and seriously considered stabbing the ground out of principle.
’Nothing...? Then what am I supposed to keep doing, there’s nothing left in this dungeon to hunt!’
That was the Origin Realm for you. Whenever it seemed like it was finally starting to make a little more sense, it would immediately remind you that you were still just guessing inside something much larger and much stranger than yourself.
Rohan started scrolling down his long list of notifications in a desperate attempt to see if he’d missed something.
’Huh...?’
