Free Web NovelChapter 468: These Damn Dungeon Keys and Door Opening Quests are Too Annoying!
The progression of the unfortunate situation was exactly as Flesh Render had predicted, with the Transians advancing at an unprecedented speed.
By the next morning, the vanguard squads of the most aggressive student groups had already appeared within view of the watchtowers of Plague Town. Those bastards, wrapped up like dumplings, brazenly carried the banners of the Blood Vulture Clan and Transia, and amid a commotion of jubilant howls, very arrogantly planted those things on the hill opposite Plague Town, celebrating like Battlefield veterans who had finally captured a point.
This was like an omen, a symbol, representing that the players’ forces had finally reached the last phase of the “Shadow of the Swamp” major event. They were only one step away from completing this event, clearing the dungeon right in front of them.
The students’ flag-planting action also earned them a hidden achievement called “Victory Day” in their progression track.
Unfortunately, Governor Murphy had set a 40-day time limit for “Shadow of the Swamp”. Just Brother Loyalty’s work on creating and producing incendiary bombs took almost 20 days, and with all the other operations before and after, there were only 12 days left until the final deadline.
To be honest, this wasn’t generous at all.
“Damn, this terrain is really deadly!”
Niuniu wrapped a grass ring around his battle helmet as completely meaningless camouflage.
He lay in the grass, holding up a monocular telescope to scan around in the direction of Plague Town. Although the heavy war fog made it impossible to see anything of value, at least the terrain issues wouldn’t lie.
“Those damn gnolls made the undead dig wide moats around the town by cutting up the ground. Though I don’t know what’s in that strangely colored water, I definitely don’t want to jump in and find out.
Only the bridges over the river allow entry into the town, but there are large numbers of high-level undead guarding all three sides. To enter the town, we must clear out this last group of elites blocking our way.”
Niuniu lowered his telescope and said to Brother Mao beside him, who was dressed similarly:
“The open terrain below means we’ll have no cover once we go down. The enemy has completely occupied the advantageous positions, there’s no other way except a frontal assault.”
“Yes, Lady Aqua and Meow King’s predictions in the posts were very accurate.”
Brother Mao, carrying a greatsword, nodded and said:
“This is clearly a dungeon cluster. To enter the team dungeon Land of Rotting Corpses, we first need to clear the small dungeons in three directions on the outskirts. A classic dungeon quest line, I bet we’ll need to do quests for keys too.”
“Hey, come back quick, the NPC is giving out quests!”
Just as Brother Mao finished speaking, Ah Yuen’s shout rang out from the temporary base behind them. Niuniu and Brother Mao exchanged glances, then reluctantly got up and returned to the base, where they saw “Blood Widow” Lady Mary, wearing a very conservative black dress, slowly descending with flapping wings.
Her left hand was placed flat against her chest holding a scroll. Taking on the pose of a “herald”, she hovered a few inches above the ground. She cleared her throat and called out to the warriors who gathered around, still smelling strongly of gunpowder:
“I bring orders from Blood Vulture Clan Midnight Faction Leader, Countess of Anderma, Lady Femis!
By Governor Murphy’s command, the young lady will come to the swamp to support your attack on Plague Town. However, the young lady of noble status will not directly participate in the attack against the gnolls. She will assist you in dispersing the fog of war and countering the mage towers stolen by the gnolls.
The young lady will ensure that when each warrior team enters Plague Town, they won’t face interference and attacks from the mage towers!
However, since Plague Town’s mage towers are built on nodes of swamp spirit energy flow, Lady Femis’s spirit energy counter cannot last too long, each counter will give you 6 hours of free attack time.
You must immediately withdraw from Plague Town when time expires to avoid devastating counterattacks from gnoll sorcerers.
However, to allow the young lady to safely conduct the spirit energy counter ritual, you must first clear out the undead garrison near Plague Town. But I believe this won’t be difficult for Transia’s warriors.”
“Damn! This mechanism is just the cursed rotation system isn’t it?”
After Lady Mary finished delivering the young lady’s message, a clever person in the crowd immediately shouted:
“So now we don’t even have the right to freely clear dungeons? We need NPCs’ help just to open doors? What kind of design is this?”
“You don’t know shit, this is called key running, understand? Classic team dungeon opening quest, just like how you had to go to Blackrock Spire and find Rexxar before fighting the Black Dragon Sister.
Damn!
Speaking of this reminds me of those miserable days when I had to run around the whole map looking for that unlucky Rexxar.”
“By the way, people always say Rexxar’s bear was actually transformed from a druid girl, is that true?”
“Who knows, but Misha’s big paws really hurt.”
Seeing the crowd start their daily complaints, the guild leaders of several allied guilds on this western defense line gathered to discuss. Moon Demon Lan of the Eight Demon Elite Group spoke first:
“Obviously, the dev team is trying something both new and conscienceless. Whether we can clear the dungeon depends entirely on whether we can clean out Plague Town within the six hours when the young lady activates the counter.
I think it’s unlikely, what do you think?”
“Did you really need to say that? This damn game’s team dungeons have always been at max difficulty, okay?”
Leading Pigeon rolled his eyes, then said with a worried expression:
“And when clearing a team dungeon for the first time, the monsters inside won’t respawn. In other words, if we charge in but can’t kill the boss within the time limit, we’ll just be doing the next challenger a favor.
Plus there’s the already established Hall of Fame feature.
Damn!
The pressure is absolutely maxed out.”
“I think instead of considering how to clear the team dungeon, you should be more practical and think about how to deal with the small dungeons before it.”
Teacher Li sat cross-legged on the ground, shaking his head as he said:
“Old Yang and I just went down for a look around and lured a few skeleton soldiers to test their strength. I must seriously tell you that the strength attribute of the skeleton soldiers here is at least double that of the wandering undead outside.
And they even use a complete set of undead swordsmanship, they’re definitely elite monsters!”
“Yeah, in our direction it’s all skeleton soldiers and netherworldly knights, rarely any corpse mages.”
Master Yang used a whetstone to sharpen his spirit poison blade Ambition and Dreams in his hand. This was a weapon that Brother Mao had replaced and given to him to use. For a swordsman, having such a good weapon in hand was truly twice the result with half the effort.
He said to the others:
“I’ve been in contact with my wife. She’s now at Meow King and Silver Moon team’s defense line and has received Lady Aqua’s guild invitation. She told me that the southern defense line’s position is full of corpse mages and skeleton mages.
That side is a caster-type monster dungeon, and I estimate Brother Stick’s northern battle line will be a dungeon composed of ghost-type enemies.
The enemy styles in the three directions are completely different, which means our clearing methods definitely can’t be casually copied between them.
But what I’m thinking about now is, since the dev team set up support forces for us from the beginning this time, can the support forces provide help when we attack the outer dungeons?”
“Hmm? That’s something we hadn’t thought of.”
Leading Pigeon blinked, immediately sending a message to Cheche who was currently transporting wounded to Smuggler’s Woods. A few minutes later, Cheche sent back a message.
“I just asked Major Ron about it. That poor guy told me their second batch of supplies has already been delivered to the camp. Marshal Loren sent them 30 mobile field artillery pieces.
The Major said if we need it, they can move some field artillery along the ‘Path of Ashes’ to the front line position. This way we can get fire support from Goldflower artillery when we attack the dungeon.
Covering fire can help us deal with some of the undead trash mobs!”
Cheche’s voice echoed in the tent through Leading Pigeon’s computation bead.
This perfectly confirmed Master Yang’s guess, the support forces weren’t misnamed!
In early operations they could help guard outposts, and in later operations they could provide fire support. Sure enough, the dev team hadn’t made things absolute, they still left players a glimmer of hope.
“Hmm, following this line of thinking, the other two lines must have similar support right?”
Niuniu squinted his eyes and said:
“Didn’t the Avalon Church help Meow King create a nature army in the south? Those treants will definitely provide help when they attack the dungeon, while in the north line there are Thorn Clan nightwalkers who can probably help Brother Stick’s legion pre-emptively kill those marked troublesome enemies.
However, the three types of aid must all be based on reputation. If reputation wasn’t grinded up in advance, I estimate the help available will be very limited.”
“Damn, it’s one thing after another. The dev team that used to be simple-minded to the point of being single-track has now grown to be cunning enough to block both ends.”
Ah Yuen cursed.
But the good news was that during their previous assault on the outposts, they had achieved quite a good cooperation model with the Goldflower vanguard. Plus the field hospital in Smuggler’s Woods had been operating continuously, players wouldn’t get injured, only NPCs needed treatment. The hospital run by Pants Stripping Demon had saved many wounded soldiers over the past half month.
Just this point alone was enough to change Colonel Frayzer’s attitude towards Transians considerably. At this time they probably wouldn’t hold back when faced with students’ requests for fire support, after all they were just cowards who only fired cannons from far away.
This was already much safer compared to the students and monks charging at the front lines!
“Then let’s do it this way!”
Teacher Li pressed his hands against his knees and said in a deep voice:
“It will take time for Goldflower soldiers to transport the field artillery over, but we can’t wait. Start entering positions this afternoon and wear down those skeleton armies in our own way first. The mortars delivered from the armory are excellent fire support, we all need to learn how to use these weapons of war.”
“Um, you guys attack first, we won’t participate in the early clearing.”
Leading Pigeon suddenly coughed.
Under others’ puzzled gazes, this student party leader looked left and right, then lowered his voice and said:
“Ah Yuen and I have a strange idea we want to try out. This isn’t within the dev team’s arrangements, but I’ve looked up a lot of information and I think this might work. We may need some time to verify our guess!
We’ll have results in three days at most, you don’t need to wait for us.
When the time comes, if it really works, we might be able to completely bypass this series of restrictions set up by the dev team and make a clean strike straight to the heart!”
“Have you guys discovered some weird bug?”
Brother Mao whispered:
“From what you’re saying, this bug seems pretty powerful? Look, the dev team is very serious about cracking down on bug exploitation now. Look at what happened to Meow King and Brother Stick before. What I mean is you should take it easy and don’t go too far.”
“How can this be called a bug?”
Ah Yuen crossed his arms and retorted:
“We just found some clues we can use between the lines of local legends, okay? If the dev team doesn’t welcome us approaching from this angle, then they shouldn’t have set up such background stories in the first place.
Can’t say more now in case other clever people figure out our plan and do a preview run, wouldn’t that ruin everything?
Anyway, you guys try clearing normally first.
We’re just making a backup plan.
If we find something’s wrong when we actually reach Plague Town, we can activate this adventurous plan then.”
“Mm, let’s do that.”
Teacher Li nodded, and Lan representing the Eight Demon Elite Group had no objections, but this guy raised a somewhat nonsensical request.
Because the Eight Demon Elite Group was a famous “cultist gang”.
Among their eight people, there were four tricksters and four coffin bearers. The common feature of these two professions was that they needed to find wraiths or undead creatures to bind and control in order to increase skill proficiency. Especially for coffin bearers, the lower-level profession of necromancers, unique undead servants were “combat resources”.
Therefore Lan hoped the other two teams could help out, if they discovered any strange undead during the assault on Plague Town, they must show mercy and leave them for the eight brothers to research.
These eight oddball jokers also had their own ambitions!
They were already planning to take advantage of the Plague Town raid to equip all eight brothers with elite versions of undead servants. Only this way could they demonstrate their “fallen majesty” as cultist players.
Uh, another reason for Lan to be so proactive was that the big rich guy Old Huo from Treasure Bay had also given them a strange order, that cultist village chief urgently needed some special wraith samples to improve his trickster profession skills.
But the wealthy patron was busy happily counting money surrounded by the Four Golden Flowers right now, how could he have time to come to the battlefield himself?
So the job of collecting powerful wraith seeds fell to the Eight Demon Elite Group.
Old Huo offered quite high bounty for this job, and Lan really couldn’t bear to let it go for the sake of team development.
But you can’t say this is using public office for private gain. After all, during the process of clearing the dungeon, the Eight Demons Group had also put in great effort. Without them dispersing undead along the way, the guilds on the western battle line wouldn’t have been able to traverse the chaotic lines so quickly to reach here.
For example, players on the other two battle lines were still trudging along with difficulty.
“Although we can’t complain about hardship when fighting for the majesty of the Holy Light, but by the Holy Light, the roads in this stinking swamp are too damn hard to walk on, and these cursed undead who should go to hell keep running out to ambush!
Fortunately there are treants protecting around us, otherwise just this stretch of road would cost another batch of people.
Didn’t they say last night’s bombing was very successful?
Why are there still undead running all over the swamp?
F**k, the vampire pilots at the front line wouldn’t be falsely reporting military intelligence, would they?”
On the southern battle line, Uncle Fording who was sent over to support the battle was cursing up a storm, not caring at all about the dignity of a paladin. But you couldn’t blame him, the crowd behind him were all full of complaints. Even the usually energetic and dignified Miss Becky had wilted now.
She hadn’t bathed for nine whole days.
Fully armed every day, she felt like she was turning into a stinky can. What bothered Becky most was that everyone was trudging through the swamp the same way, why could her good friend Knight Liwen still maintain a clean fragrant and soft state?
“Don’t look at me like that, this is power granted by my god.”
Knight Liwen felt Becky’s resentment and shrugged, explaining:
“The Astral Dragon is the god of purification. Its followers naturally maintain natural purity. Being spotless is just a basic ‘benefit’ of our life. Speaking of which, little Becky, would you like to spend some time listening to me describe our Eastern Holy Spirit and Lord of Purification?”
“No no no! So annoying!”
Becky covered her ears and screamed:
“Having Typal chirping about the Holy Light’s will in my ear all day is annoying enough, don’t you come join in. Ah! Wild undead appeared ahead! Watch my master hammer! Throw!”
“Bang”
The rotating heavy flying hammer was precisely thrown by Becky, knocking off the skull of that skeleton archer who had poked its head out of the muddy ground.
This was like poking a hornet’s nest, more undead rushed out from their hiding places, while Becky, who had already built up anger in her heart, led other paladins full of complaints charging out with howls to fight those skeletons.
For a moment, the terrible conditions of swamp life were temporarily forgotten, and the passion for battle surged back into the warriors’ minds.
Knight Liwen, mounted on her horse, did not participate.
This half-dragonkin knight just quietly sat there, then she tilted her ear to listen to that formless voice and after several seconds lowered her head, saying softly:
“As you say, they have not yet found their path forward, like confused and combative rams, but they won’t always be like this. Didn’t you say last time that the subspace had already experienced slight, almost imperceptible vibrations?
Though still barely audible, it’s like a light cry, announcing that seeds of certain changes have already been planted.
My Lord.
May you treat these foreigners and their beliefs kindly. They are not bad people; in fact, I think they are exactly the kind of people this world needs as it heads towards chaos.
Not to promote any authority, not to achieve any purpose, but simply fighting for the most beautiful part of human nature.”
Another formless wind blew past, making Knight Liwen open her eyes again.
The shifting of those emerald snake pupils represented great power observing the material world through mortal eyes. Just seconds later, that power withdrew, leaving only a touch that could be called gentle as response to its unique follower.
Perhaps the mysterious and powerful Astral Dragon was also anticipating this change that was currently just a ripple, after all even the smallest seed will grow into a towering tree given time.
Every Astral Grand Spirit was born this way, like a new miracle about to unfold in this chaotic era.
One day, the power called Holy Light will respond to yearning and calling.
Yes.
One day.
