Free Web NovelChapter 148: Chapter 148: Absolute Critical
Dante walked out of the administrative office of the Astral Emporium and left his squad to manage the logistics of the massive bounty of Silas.
He didn’t leave the building entirely.
He took the grand staircase down to the sub-basement levels of the Emporium. It was an area Sera had specifically designated as a secure private training facility for Aegis Vanguard members.
The room was massive. It was lined with heavily reinforced stone walls and filled with high-end self-repairing training dummies.
The heavy iron door clicked shut behind him and sealed him in absolute silence. fгeewёbnoѵel.cσm
Dante needed to fully integrate the newly acquired [Asura Vanguard] class into his operational combat loop.
Reading the stats on a glowing blue interface was entirely different from physically feeling the mechanical adjustments in his digital avatar.
He stood in the center of the room. He didn’t draw [Voidsever] or the [Dawn-Breaker Blade].
He simply accessed the internal settings of his class.
"Let us see what the baseline feels like," Dante murmured.
He mentally activated the class passives.
Instantly, the atmosphere in the training room shifted.
It wasn’t a visible aura of glowing light or swirling dark matter. It was a suffocating and almost imperceptible heaviness.
[Class Passive 1 (Aura of Despair) Active.]
Dante focused on the heavy iron-reinforced training dummy standing thirty feet away.
The dummy was a simple system object completely devoid of consciousness or AI scripting.
But as the 100-foot aura of Dante washed over it, the heavy iron plating visibly warped and let out a low metallic groan.
The system was actively attempting to calculate the 50% defense reduction on an inanimate object.
"That is going to be brutal against organized shield walls," Dante noted.
If he walked into an enemy formation, their tanks would instantly lose half their physical mitigation before he even swung a sword.
And the 200% simulated pain feedback meant every glancing blow would feel like an execution and completely shatter their combat focus.
He shifted his attention to the second passive.
[Class Passive 2 (Absolute Ruin) Active.]
Dante casually walked over to a solid stone pillar supporting the ceiling of the training room.
He didn’t use a skill. He just formed a fist with his dark purple gauntlet and punched the stone with standard unbuffed force.
The impact sounded like a cannon firing.
The stone pillar didn’t just crack. It violently exploded. A massive crater formed where his fist had connected.
Dante pulled his hand back and watched the damage.
Normally, in a safe zone or a player-owned structure, the automated repair algorithms of the system would immediately kick in.
They glowed with a soft blue light as the stone knit itself back together.
The blue light didn’t appear. The crater remained perfectly and violently shattered.
"Permanent environmental destruction," Dante said and ran a hand over the jagged rock.
"No system resets. If I cut a trench into a road, it stays a trench. If I level a building, it stays leveled."
He realized the terrifying geopolitical implications immediately.
If Silas tried to turtle his guild inside a massive heavily fortified castle, Dante didn’t need to break the gate.
He could just systematically destroy the walls. The system wouldn’t fix them. He could physically dismantle enemy strongholds piece by piece.
He turned away from the pillar and pulled up his interface to check the final passive.
[Class Passive 3 (Predator’s Eye) Active.]
He looked at his core stat sheet.
His Critical Hit Chance had previously sat at a highly optimized 30% due to the [Celestial Strike Pearl]. It was now permanently and immovably locked at 100%.
Every single attack he landed would deal double damage.
No dice rolls. No RNG calculations.
He was mathematically guaranteed to hit as hard as the system allowed every single time.
Dante drew the [Dawn-Breaker Blade]. The gold sword hummed softly in the dim light of the training room.
"Alright," Dante breathed out and settled into a combat stance. "Let us test the active skills."
He focused on the first skill in the Asura tree.
[Skill Executed: Asura’s Descent]
The moment he triggered the ability, his system interface violently flashed a stark blinding white immediately followed by an aggressive pulsing crimson.
Dante felt the [Sun-Forged Cuirass] and the [Carapace of the Void-Devourer] completely lose their structural integrity.
The heavy protective weight of his armor vanished.
[Physical Defense reduced to 0.]
[Magical Defense reduced to 0.]
He was completely naked mathematically. A Level 1 rat could deal unmitigated true damage to him.
But the trade-off hit a fraction of a millisecond later.
[Maximum HP multiplied by 10.]
[Attack Power Doubled.]
[Absolute Invulnerability Applied. Duration: 5 Seconds.]
Dante gasped.
His health bar had previously sat at a massive 25,500. It aggressively expanded and completely overflowed its designated UI container.
It skyrocketed to 255,000 HP.
His baseline attack power surged, and the gold blade in his hand vibrated violently as the raw numerical value doubled.
The golden invulnerability frames wrapped tightly around his avatar.
He had five seconds of absolute undeniable godhood backed by a quarter of a million hit points.
And if he killed an enemy during those five seconds, the invulnerability window extended by three seconds.
He could theoretically chain the invulnerability indefinitely if he dropped into a massive crowd of low-level players.
It was the ultimate unyielding offensive stance.
He watched the timer tick down.
3... 2... 1...
The golden frames vanished.
His health and attack power instantly snapped back to their baseline numbers, and his massive defense stats returned to his armor.
"A one-hour cooldown," Dante noted and checked his interface.
But he possessed the SSS-grade [Chrono-Shift] talent.
The cooldown timer instantly halved and dropped to thirty minutes.
It wasn’t spammable like his mobility skills, but thirty minutes was a perfectly reasonable window for major guild engagements.
He moved to the second skill.
[Skill Executed: Asura’s Heart]
There was no localized flash of light or dramatic animation.
Dante just felt an immediate overwhelming surge of raw adrenaline flood his neural link.
His perception of time didn’t slow down, but his physical capacity to react accelerated to terrifying levels.
[Attack Speed increased by 100%.]
[Movement Speed increased by 100%.]
[Critical Hit Damage increased to 300%.]
Dante gripped the [Dawn-Breaker Blade] and swung.
He didn’t use a Zenith-tier skill. He just executed a basic horizontal slash against the heavy iron training dummy in front of him.
Because his Attack Speed was doubled, the swing was practically invisible.
The blade crossed the thirty-foot gap and hit the dummy in a fraction of a frame.
CLANG!
The iron dummy didn’t just dent.
The sheer kinetic force of the strike multiplied by the guaranteed 100% Critical Hit Chance and amplified again by the 300% Critical Damage modifier from [Asura’s Heart] hit the target with localized catastrophic force.
[-45,000! Critical Hit!]
Forty-five thousand damage on a basic un-buffed physical swing.
No spatial fractures, no primordial true-damage swords. Just raw optimized math.
"That is completely absurd," Dante laughed and stepped back as the iron dummy slowly regenerated its health bar.
And the skill possessed a secondary utility that was arguably more valuable than the raw damage.
[Asura’s Heart] explicitly stated that any successful hit instantly dispelled all positive buffs on the target.
If Silas triggered an [Aether Scroll] to gain invulnerability or Gawain popped a massive Paladin shield, Dante didn’t have to wait for the duration to expire.
He just had to touch them, and their defensive mechanics would instantly vanish.
The 30-second duration of the skill expired.
He didn’t bother testing the third skill, [Starfall].
Summoning a massive indiscriminate AoE barrage of superheated cosmic meteors inside a basement training room was a terrible idea even with his high health pool.
He saved that for an open-world engagement.
He sheathed the [Dawn-Breaker Blade].
His combat loop was fully mapped.
The [Asura Vanguard] class wasn’t just a raw stat stick.
It provided the exact specific mechanics he needed to dismantle highly coordinated deeply entrenched guild armies.
He could strip their buffs, ignore their armor, and maintain invulnerability frames while executing their backlines.
He was ready.
Dante turned and walked out of the sub-basement training room to head back up the grand staircase to the administrative offices.
He pushed the heavy mahogany doors open.
The atmosphere in the room had shifted from panicked to hyper-focused.
Sera was actively coordinating logistical routes on her holographic displays.
Nyx was monitoring the global bounty boards and tracking troop movements of Vanguard’s Legacy.
Lila and Mei were checking their inventory consumables.
"I am done testing," Dante announced and stepped into the room.
"Good," Sera said and did not look up from her screen.
"Because Silas is not wasting any time. Vanguard’s Legacy just deployed massive highly organized hunting parties across the entire Veridian Alliance."
"They are locking down key transit routes and heavily patrolling the mid-game farming zones."
Nyx adjusted her dark glasses and projected a map of the region into the center of the room.
"They are actively targeting players wearing the Aegis Vanguard guild tag," Nyx explained and pointed to several red clusters on the map.
"We have had three of our independent recruits ambushed and camped in the last twenty minutes. Silas is trying to bleed our roster dry through sheer attrition."
"Where is the heaviest concentration?" Dante asked and walked up to the map.
"Mount Daqing," Nyx said and tapped a massive jagged mountain range located a few hundred miles west of Aethelgardia.
"It is a prime A-rank grinding zone for Level 30 players. Vanguard’s Legacy currently has a standing force of roughly five hundred players establishing a permanent blockade at the base of the mountain."
Dante looked at the red cluster.
Five hundred players.
It was a significant force, but it wasn’t the apocalyptic army of thousands he had faced in the Sky Demon Forest.
It was a standard localized guild operation designed to control resources.
"They are using the blockade to funnel our players into kill-zones," Sera added.
"If we do not break that perimeter, Aegis Vanguard members will not be able to quest or farm in the western sector."
Dante crossed his arms, and his red eyes narrowed.
"I will break it," Dante said simply.
"Dante," Lila spoke up nervously. "You cannot just fly to every single resource node and fight their entire guild solo. They have five million members now. You will exhaust yourself."
"I am not going to fight all of them," Dante corrected her.
"I am going to make an example of Mount Daqing. I am going to hit that blockade so hard, so violently, that the new recruits of Silas realize that taking his money is not worth the repair bills."
He opened his system interface and pulled a basic unremarkable gray skillbook from his inventory.
He had found it in a loot pile hours ago and entirely forgotten about it.
[Item Appraised: Skillbook - Minor Mend]
[Tier: Novice]
[Description: A basic restorative spell. Heals the user for 5% of their total HP over 10 seconds. Cooldown: 1 minute.]
Dante tapped the book and absorbed it instantly.
[Skill Learned: Minor Mend (Novice)]
He didn’t use the skill to heal. He activated the command prompt and funneled the action through his anomaly.
[Skill Executed: Minor Mend.]
[Talent Activated: 10,000x Multiplier.]
[Registering 10,000 flawless executions.]
The enlightenment rush hit him.
He didn’t learn how to cast a gentle healing spell. His neural link flooded with the absolute fundamental understanding of localized blood magic.
He learned how to rip the vital energy directly from the code of a hostile entity and forcefully integrate it into his own digital physiology.
He understood the exact mathematical conversion of kinetic damage into localized restorative Aether.
[Minor Mend has reached Adept tier.]
[Minor Mend has reached Master tier.]
[Minor Mend has reached Grandmaster tier.]
[Minor Mend has reached Zenith tier.]
[Skill Evolution Triggered.]
[Minor Mend has evolved into: Blood-Lust Stance.]
The interface flashed a deep aggressive crimson.
[Blood-Lust Stance (Zenith)]
[Description: The ultimate expression of vampiric momentum. This is a toggleable passive stance.]
[While active, 20% of all physical and magical damage dealt to hostile entities is instantly returned to the user as direct healing. Bypasses all anti-heal mechanics. Cost: None (Chrono-Shift Active).]
Dante smiled. A permanent 20% lifesteal passive on every single strike.
Combined with his massive attack power, he could heal his entire 25,500 health pool with a single swing.
"I will be back," Dante told his squad and turned toward the door.
He didn’t wait for them to argue.
He walked out of the Emporium and headed straight for the western gates of the Capital.
He had an A-rank mountain to clear and a blockade to dismantle.
