Chapter: "Rip and Tear [2/2]"
Made By: Eternal_Jokr
A/N: This fanfic is open to criticism and opinions, tell us what you think in the comments section and leave your support. Thank you
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Dante's advance from the 7th floor turned into a march of subjugation. Ignoring the fatigue that would paralyze ordinary adventurers, he used the monster guide provided by Rose Fannett to trace the fastest and most lethal line through the bowels of Orario.
On the 8th floor, groups of Elite Goblins tried to ambush him in narrow corridors but were met by the raw weight of the Demon Slayer.
The monster's rusted blades did not even come close to hitting him. Dante split them in half before they could retreat.
On the 9th floor, the dungeon tried to contain the advance of the vacuum with additional hordes of Large Kobolds and Purple Moths.
The toxic mist and the attacks infused by the Dungeon's mysticism collided against Dante's skin and were instantly disintegrated by the passive [Ápeiron Khaos], converting the stress of fighting with magic into even more physical attributes for his Falna. Dante crossed the floor leaving only a trail of ashes and shattered mana stones behind.
Upon stepping onto the 10th floor, the geography of the Dungeon changed noticeably.
The walls were wider and the floor presented a low, cold mist. Dante adjusted the bandages on his arms, his purple eyes glowing in the dim light beneath his hood.
The silence of the place was broken by a series of quick, short hops.
Emerging from the mist, a group of 15 Needle Rabbits surrounded the young man.
At first glance, they looked like defenseless creatures, but the long, sharp, cylindrical horns arranged on top of their heads gleamed like steel needles ready to pierce armor.
The rabbits did not hesitate, using their superior agility, the pack split, five of them lunged forward in a straight line, while the other ten used the walls to project themselves from unpredictable angles, turning into living projectiles aimed at Dante's vital points.
Dante planted his feet on the ground. When the first five Needle Rabbits collided against his sword, the horns struck hard against the dark metal leather.
"Clang! Clang!"
The impact was strong but not enough to leave marks on the sword, the density of the material blocked the punctures.
With a devastating circular motion of his bandaged left hand, Dante activated his anti-magic [BLACK OUT].
The dark energy exploded from his fist, obliterating three of the rabbits in mid-air and turning them into dust before they touched the ground.
The other two were crushed under the weight of his heavy boots.
The remaining ten monsters tried to exploit the opening to pierce his back and legs.
Dante executed a full spin with the Demon Slayer, the immense black iron blade cutting through the air in a perfect 360-degree arc.
The raw strength accumulated from his attributes caused the blow to generate a gust of wind that split six of the Needle Rabbits in half simultaneously.
The last four tried to retreat into the mist to prepare a new onslaught, but Dante's speed had already surpassed the limits of a Level 1.
In the blink of an eye, he closed the distance and delivered a clean thrust, impaling two of them on the black blade, while closing his fingers over the necks of the remaining two, letting his ability digest their magic stones directly.
Dante pulled the blade from the ground, breathing rhythmically, surrounded by 15 small mana stones that gleamed on the misty floor.
He was almost at the limit of the initial floors, and the presence of something much larger was beginning to prowl in the shadows.
The 11th floor of the Dungeon looked like a completely different environment. The mist from the previous floor had dissipated, giving way to a cold and damp dimness, where the stone walls took on dark-gray tones.
Dante advanced with his black cloak slightly shifted, allowing his bandaged arms and the matte leather of his armor to be free for immediate action.
He was at the recommended limit for low-level solo adventurers, but his goal remained a single one: to crush everything ahead.
Suddenly, the high ceiling of the tunnel seemed to come alive.
A sharp, shrill, and deafening sound echoed through the walls, reverberating directly inside the skull of anyone who was there.
A pack of Bad Bat, dark bats with red eyes and exposed fangs, plummeted from the darkness.
They began to flap their wings frantically, coordinating their attacks to emit continuous high-frequency sound waves.
For a mage or ordinary adventurer, this ultrasound would completely destroy concentration, preventing the chanting of spells or breaking combat posture.
Dante, however, did not even blink.
Since his mind and body operated under the absolute void, the magic and effects based on the Dungeon's magic simply found no ground to take hold.
The sound waves collided against the periphery of his hearing and were neutralized by the passive [Ápeiron Khaos], generating only a slight, harmless hum. The stress of resisting that property of the Dungeon was instantly converted into evolution, injecting a new rush of heat into his muscles.
With a swift movement, Dante drew the Demon Slayer. He did not wait for the bats to approach to bite.
Using the immense black iron sword with only one hand, he delivered three ascending vertical slashes at a staggering speed.
The displacement of air generated by the weight of the blade created a gale that split half the pack in mid-air.
The remaining Bad Bats tried to swoop down to drive their fangs into his neck, but Dante raised his left arm and activated his anti-magic.
The black energy expanded like a dome, disintegrating the monsters into ashes as soon as they touched it, leaving small mana stones to fall like hail on the dark stone floor.
Dante barely had time to sheath his sword when the ground shook with a heavy impact.
From the shadows of one of the side galleries, a massive silhouette emerged, completely blocking the tunnel.
It was a Hard Armored.
The monster rose on its two hind legs, revealing its height of over 1.5 meters.
It was a huge bipedal armadillo, completely covered by a gray, thick, and segmented carapace that gleamed with the solidity of steel itself.
On the guild's scale, that creature possessed the highest defense of all the Upper Floors.
For any Level 1 adventurer, trying to defeat it alone in close combat was considered an impossible mission, ordinary weapons would simply ricochet or break against that natural armor.
The Hard Armored let out a deep roar, threw its body weight forward, and tucked in its limbs, transforming into a huge ball of stone and bone shards that rolled at high speed toward Dante.
Dante did not dodge. He planted his heavy boots on the ground, leaned his torso forward, and extended both arms, waiting for the impact head-on.
"BOOM!"
The collision of the creature against Dante's bandaged hands generated a shockwave that cracked the ground around.
The raw impact pushed Dante's boots a few centimeters back, leaving grooves in the rock, and forced the resistance of his leather vest to the limit.
But Dante's arms did not give way. His raw strength forced the immense carapace ball to come to an abrupt halt in place.
With the monster locked in his hands, his ability came into action through direct touch.
The aura of anti-magic began to gnaw away at the magical integrity that the Dungeon used to harden that indestructible carapace.
Dante visualized through the memorized Bestiary the creature's hidden weakness: extremely hard on the outside, but completely fragile on the inside.
Dante released his right hand, leaving only his left arm sustaining the weight of the monster under the effect of his strength, and clenched his fist.
With all the power of his overloaded and evolved physical attributes, he delivered a direct, solid punch right to the center of the Hard Armored's carapace.
The blow did not break the external armor immediately, but the shockwave and the nemesis nature of the anti-magic pierced through the gray plates like a drill.
The raw strength expanded directly into the monster's fragile innards.
For a second, the Hard Armored stalled.
Then, an internal cracking sound echoed, and the creature simply collapsed from the inside out, turning into a gigantic cloud of gray ashes even before it could unfold its body.
On the ground, a mana stone considerably larger than the others rolled until it stopped at Dante's boot.
Dante took a deep breath, straightening his posture. His hands were still smoking slightly with the purple static of his skill.
The monster considered impossible for a Level 1 had been pulverized with a single punch.
The 12th floor of the Dungeon was the last of the Upper Floors, and the atmosphere there took its toll.
The air was heavy, laden with a strong smell of earth and moisture.
The gray stone walls gained dark recesses and natural columns that formed a perfect labyrinth for ambushes.
Dante kept his purple eyes focused on the dim light, his bandages and his firm posture were ready for the worst, but the mental fatigue from the continuous descent was beginning to pile up.
"The armor held up against the armadillo, but the attacks from the monsters on the next floors will demand more than raw strength" Dante spoke in a low voice.
The silence of the 12th floor was broken not by roars, but by sharp, echoing, and mocking giggles that seemed to come from all directions. From the shadows of the columns, the Imps emerged.
These small demonic monsters had dark skin that was flexible and tough like leather, underdeveloped bat wings, and yellow eyes that emanated a malicious intelligence.
Unlike the irrational creatures of the previous floors, the Imps knew exactly how to use the scenery to their advantage.
They did not attack in a straight line. The group of about ten Imps split instantly.
Three of them began to fly high, throwing sharp stones and crystal shards at Dante's eyes to force him to raise his guard and lose his field of vision.
While Dante ducked his head, another four Imps slid silently across the misty floor, moving behind the columns to surround him from the sides.
The leader of the pack, positioned on top of a stalactite, growled a low-level command, preparing to conjure an attack as soon as Dante took a false step.
One of the Imps from the flank lunged toward Dante's left leg, wielding a small knife made of chipped bone.
Dante spun his body to dodge, but the Imp hovered in the air, using its wings to change direction drastically and scratch the side of his boot. At the same time, the stones thrown from above ricocheted with dry snaps against his hood and the Wyvern leather of his vest.
Dante realized right away: they were testing his reflexes and trying to tire him out before the final strike. If he just swung at the air with the Demon Slayer, the monsters would retreat into the shadows and attack him from behind.
Dante quickly realized that chasing each of those agile demons on the ceiling and behind the columns would be a waste of pure energy. His situation required an immediate solution.
He needed to draw everyone's attention to a single point and crush the coordination of that pack.
"Fools" he muttered under his hood.
Instead of raising the Demon Slayer, Dante dug his feet into the ground and opened his arms, extending both hands flat.
In the second the leader Imp shot down from the top of the stalactite and the others advanced in coordination from the flanks, Dante activated [BLACK OUT] in conjunction with the maximum expansion of his ability [Ápeiron Khaos].
The purple static and the dark, corrosive energy exploded from his body not as a directed attack, but as a spherical shockwave of pure anti-magic void.
The attack disintegrated in the air before even getting close.
The Imps lunging toward him instantly lost the support of their wings, the magic formula that the Dungeon injected into their bodies to grant them that intelligence and agility was shattered by the touch of the anti-magic.
They fell to the misty floor, screeching in terror as they felt their existences being drained.
With the entire pack stunned and pinned to the ground by the gravitational force of his ability, Dante pulled the immense sword of black iron from his back.
He advanced like an implacable shadow, executing three low and precise horizontal slashes. The blade swept through, reaping the small creatures all at once, turning the intelligent pack into a unified pile of ashes and fifteen small magic stones.
The echo of the Imps' agonizing laughter had barely faded when the 12th floor shook with a force much greater than that of the Hard Armored.
The gray stone walls seemed to vibrate with heavy, rhythmic steps coming from the main gallery.
From the densest shadows of the tunnel exit, a colossal silhouette emerged.
It was an Orc. The monstrous beast stood at an impressive three meters tall, sporting a bizarre and terrifying pig head with yellowish tusks protruding outward from its lower jaw.
Its muscles were like stone blocks covered by a thick, greenish skin, and the only garment it possessed was a rudimentary skirt made of old, worn skins tied around its waist.
The air around it became instantly impregnated with the smell of sweat and blood.
Dante immediately recalled the warning in the Guild's Bestiary provided by the Receptionist Rose: that creature possessed a raw strength so overwhelming that a single direct blow was capable of completely incapacitating even veteran Level 2 adventurers
For a Level 1, crossing paths with an Orc alone was the equivalent of a death sentence.
The Orc let out a deafening roar that echoed through the ceiling of the floor and charged. Despite its massive size, the speed of its onslaught was surprising.
It raised a fist the size of an anvil and delivered a punch with the aim of crushing Dante against the ground.
Dante fixed his purple eyes on the mass of flesh descending toward him. He knew that his leather armor, though excellent, had not been made to withstand the full impact of a monster of this caliber without suffering serious damage.
Using the refined agility and reflexes that had been operating at the limit of his physical evolution, Dante slid to the left at the last moment.
The Orc's fist struck the stone ground where the young man had been an instant before, tearing open a crater and throwing rock fragments in all directions.
Taking advantage of the opening from the creature with its arm extended on the ground, Dante leaped onto the monster's thick forearm.
He jumped across the length of the Orc's upper limb, drawing the immense black iron sword of the Demon Slayer with his right hand, while extending his bandaged left arm directly toward the beast's porcine face.
"Let's see how much energy this carcass carries" Dante's voice echoed cold under his hood.
He dug his left hand into the Orc's cheek, instantly activating the [Ápeiron Khaos].
The anti-magic void roared, intercepting the massive flow of mana that fed the monster's colossal muscles.
The Orc let out a squeal of pain mixed with pure confusion as it felt its overwhelming strength being drained and weakened from the inside out by Dante's touch.
With the monster temporarily destabilized and its structure wavering, Dante spun his body in the air and delivered a horizontal slash with all the physical strength of his accumulated attributes, aiming directly at the giant.
The horizontal slash of the Demon Slayer followed a perfect and implacable trajectory. Fed by the colossal physical strength that Dante had accumulated throughout his descent and enhanced by the weakening that [Ápeiron Khaos] caused in the Orc's structure, the black iron blade found no resistance.
The steel cut through the thick flesh, the dense bones of the chest, and the spine of the three-meter monster in a single fluid and devastating arc.
The upper half of the Orc separated perfectly from the waist, and the two colossal parts of the corpse fell heavily against the bluish stone floor with a dull thud that echoed throughout the 12th floor.
The massive body remained there, bleeding a dark substance, without disintegrating immediately, the corpse would only turn to ashes after its core was removed.
Dante sheathed the immense sword on his back with a mechanical movement.
He walked to the upper half of the Orc's torso and kneeled beside the carcass.
Pulling a simple hunting knife that he carried on his belt, Dante began the raw work.
He cut through the thick skin of the monster's chest, making his way through the rigid muscles until he reached the center of the thoracic cavity.
Inside, embedded deeply near where the heart would be, the magic stone pulsed in an intense violet tone, emitting a dull light.
Dante wrapped his bandaged left hand around the crystal.
The instant his fingers touched the stone still connected to the monster's fibers, the [Ápeiron Khaos] acted, sucking the last vestiges of mana that kept the flesh cohesive. With a firm pull, he ripped out the magic stone the size of a human baby's head.
The moment the mana stone was completely disconnected from the core, the Orc's corpse finally lost its support.
The flesh, bones, and dark blood dissolved into smoke, turning into a thick curtain of gray ashes that collapsed onto the misty floor, leaving behind only one of its yellowish tusks as a drop.
Dante wiped the blood from the knife on the canvas of his black cloak before putting it away, holding the huge gleaming stone.
The 12th floor fell completely silent. Dante put away his weapon, gathered the crystals, and looked into the darkness ahead, feeling that he had reached the limit of the Dungeon's surface.
Dante rose slowly, holding the Orc's immense magic stone while the residual ashes of the monster finished scattering through the cold mist of the 12th floor. The silence that settled in the dungeon allowed, for the first time in hours, the rhythm of his own breathing to make itself noticed under the black hood.
He drew in the heavy air of the labyrinth, feeling the cold sweat dry against his neck. His purple eyes aimed at the darkness of the ceiling, and his mind began to calculate the time.
He had entered the Dungeon when the sun had barely finished rising. Since then, his journey had been an uninterrupted march of violence and absorption.
The Lizard on the 5th floor, the suffocating nest of Killer Ants on the 7th, the absurd resistance of the Hard Armored on the 11th, and finally, the raw strength of the Orc right there, at the limit of the upper floors.
By his calculations, the day outside must already be collapsing into the darkness of night.
Hours of continuous descent, testing the limits of his own body against the Dungeon's magic.
The burning on his back, where the purple hieroglyphs of the Inverted Falna pulsed, began to stabilize, leaving only a dull, heavy fatigue. He had gotten what he wanted, his attributes had been forced to higher heights. Now, mental exhaustion was taking its toll.
Dante stored the immense magic stone in the canvas bag under his black cloak, along with the other stones and the guide that Rose Fannett had handed him.
At that moment, the voice guiding him pointed toward a direction different from the abyss, the ascent. He felt no attachment to the glory or the warmth of the guild halls, but there was a silent promise of return.
He thought of the short goddess with the blue ribbon who was waiting for him in the basement of the abandoned church.
Hestia would probably already be pacing back and forth, biting her nails in worry over the delay of her only and troublesome adventurer, or perhaps preparing something simple for dinner.
The food that Syr had given him had already been consumed hours ago to keep his energy high during the slaughter of the ants.
Dante turned his back on the passage leading to the 13th floor. He adjusted the bandages on his left hand, firmly gripped the strap of the Demon Slayer on his back, and began to tread the path back through the tunnels he himself had cleared. It was time to go home.
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To be continued....