The moment the words 'Death Festival' left Lexel's lips, the atmosphere in the corridor shifted from a raid to a slaughterhouse.
The Rot-Tusk Boars, driven by their unnatural aggression, didn't hesitate. A dozen of them lunged at once, a wall of gnashing teeth and mutated muscle converging on the lone figure standing in the center of the hall.
"Lexel!" Anthierin screamed, her hand reaching out uselessly.
Kael gritted his teeth, preparing to rush forward to save the idiot who had jumped the line. "Journ! Cover him!"
"No," Journ whispered, his axe hovering mid-air. "Look."
Lexel didn't dodge. He didn't weave. He didn't use a movement skill.
He simply stepped into the charge.
His right leg snapped out in a low sweep. It wasn't a martial arts technique; it was a collision event. His shin connected with the lead boar's ribs.
CRACK-BOOM.
The sound was wet and sickeningly loud. The boar didn't just break; it folded. Its body was launched sideways with the force of a siege weapon, slamming into the three monsters beside it. The kinetic energy transferred instantly, turning the group into a tangled mess of shattered bones and ruptured organs. They hit the stone wall with enough force to crack the ancient masonry.
"One," Lexel counted.
A boar bit down on his forearm. Its serrated tusks, capable of piercing plate armor, clamped onto his skin.
CLACK.
The tusks shattered. Shards of ivory flew into the air.
Lexel looked down at the beast attached to his arm, his expression unimpressed. His [END: A] skin was harder than the iron they tried to chew.
"Bad dog," Lexel muttered.
He grabbed the boar by its hind legs, lifting the three-hundred-pound monster as if it were a pillow. With a grunt of exertion, he swung it overhead—using the living beast as a flail.
SPLAT.
He slammed the boar down onto the skull of another attacker. Both monsters exploded in a shower of dark blood and pixelated gore.
It was chaos. It was madness. It was beautiful.
To the adventurers watching from the safety of Kael's shield wall, it looked less like a battle and more like a natural disaster. Lexel was a whirlwind of violence. He punched snouts into brain stems. He kicked torsos until they detached from legs. He grabbed two boars by their throats and smashed their heads together until they stopped moving.
Blood soaked his tattered clothes. The red aura of the War God Scion began to rise off him like steam, mixing with the metallic scent of the dungeon.
"He's... he's not using skills," Kael breathed, his tower shield lowering inch by inch. "There's no Mana signature. No Aether flow. He's just... hitting them."
"Pure physical stats," Journ rumbled. The giant warrior lowered his axe completely, realizing he was obsolete in this corridor.
Cresty stood frozen, her staff clutching tight in her hand. Her [Alert] skill was silent now—not because the danger was gone, but because the danger was on their side. She watched Lexel tear a boar in half with his bare hands, her mind replaying her attempt to recruit him earlier.
I tried to intimidate this? she thought, a cold sweat breaking on her neck. If he had wanted to, he could have wiped out my entire party in the inn with a sneeze.
"Hah! Hahahaha!" Lexel laughed in the middle of the carnage.
It wasn't a hero's laugh. It was the euphoric, terrifying laughter of a being who had finally found an outlet for his nature.
He spun, his elbow connecting with a leaping boar. The monster turned into a projectile, flying backward down the corridor and knocking down ten of its kin like bowling pins.
"Is this the power of a husband?" a young cleric whispered, looking pale.
Anthierin stood by the mages, her hands covering her mouth. She watched the man who had joked about cleavage and haggled for discounts now standing knee-deep in carcasses. His eyes were glowing lava-red, burning through the gloom.
She should have been terrified. She was terrified. But beneath the fear, looking at the absolute dominance he displayed, her heart hammered a strange, traitorous rhythm.
He really is a monster, she thought.
Within two minutes, the horde was gone.
The narrow corridor, once packed with screeching beasts, was now silent save for the dripping of fluids. Lexel stood alone in the center of the devastation, surrounded by a carpet of loot drops and dissolving bodies.
He rolled his neck. Pop.
He shook his hands, flinging the gore off his knuckles.
He turned back to the stunned raid party. Kael was gaping. Journ looked humbled. The random adventurers looked like they wanted to go home and rethink their career choices.
Lexel smiled. It was a bright, sunny smile that looked completely out of place on his blood-spattered face.
"Alright," Lexel said, stepping over a severed tusk. "First wave clear. Who's got the loot bag?"
The silence that followed the massacre was heavy, broken only by the wet plip-plop of dark fluids dripping from the mossy ceiling stones.
Lexel stood amidst the carnage, his chest rising and falling in a slow, rhythmic tempo. He wasn't out of breath; he was merely cooling down. The red aura that had wreathed him like a war cloak began to dissipate, retreating back into his skin, leaving him looking like a man again rather than a natural disaster.
"Lexel."
Anthierin was the first to approach. She stepped gingerly over the twisted remains of a Rot-Tusk Boar, her boots squelching in the mire. She didn't look horrified, exactly. She looked like a mechanic inspecting a machine that had been run past its redline.
She reached out, grabbing his wrist without hesitation. She didn't ask if he was okay emotionally; she went straight for the hardware.
"Your hands," she stated flatly. "Let me see them."
"I'm fine," Lexel said, rolling his neck. "Just a morning workout. These pigs were softer than they looked."
He moved to wipe the sweat from his forehead, but as he raised his hand, a metallic crunch echoed through the quiet corridor.
They both looked down.
Lexel was wearing—or had been wearing—a pair of dull, grey iron gauntlets. To the untrained eye of the adventurers behind them, they looked like standard-issue militia gear. Cheap. Heavy. Useless.
But Lexel knew better. These were Three Realms Standard Issue.
They had been forged in the Mortal Realm of his home dimension. His father, the Zodiac Emperor, had tossed them to him before his departure with a specific instruction: "No Qi. No Mana. No Aether enchantments. The Fourth World runs on a different operating system, kid. If you bring a Divine Weapon, the world might reject it—or worse, nerf it. Bring cold, hard iron. Physics is universal."
They were supposed to be indestructible by mortal standards. They had survived sparring matches with lesser demons.
Now, they looked like crumpled tin foil.
The metal plating on the knuckles was shattered, spiderwebbed with fractures that ran deep into the molecular structure of the iron. The leather straps had snapped from the sheer force of his muscle expansion during the fight. The fingers were twisted backward, completely ruined by the kinetic feedback of his own punches.
As Lexel flexed his hand, the left gauntlet simply gave up the ghost. It disintegrated, shards of grey iron falling to the dungeon floor like metallic dandruff.
"My gear..." Lexel muttered, watching the dust settle into the blood-soaked stone.
There was no blue window. No warning chime. Just the cold reality of physics losing a wrestling match with his stats.
He remembered the mechanics of the [Arsenal] passive he had unlocked. It granted him a massive spike in damage output, effectively doubling the stats of the weapon when equipped, but the trade-off was brutal. The System didn't generate the extra force from nothing; it cannibalized the durability of the item to bridge the gap.
"I hit them too hard," Lexel realized, rubbing the dust between his fingers. "I'm not just breaking the enemy; I'm spending my armor as ammunition."
Anthierin didn't gasp or cover her mouth. She frowned, picking up a shard of the fallen iron. She rubbed it between her calloused thumb and forefinger, inspecting the grain with a critical eye.
"This isn't normal wear and tear," she said, her voice rough with frustration. "This iron... the structure is completely blown out. It looks like it was put through a compactor."
She looked up at him, her green eyes sharp. She wasn't blushing at his shirtlessness or swooning over his strength. She was annoyed that good metal had been wasted.
"You can't keep fighting like this," she scolded, slapping his bare arm lightly. "I don't care how tough your skin is. If you keep punching things with this kind of output, you're going to be fighting naked within an hour. And while I'm sure you wouldn't mind the breeze, I can't fix you with a hammer."
"Is that a challenge?" Lexel grinned, flexing his bare hand. The skin was red, slightly bruised, but already healing thanks to his A-Rank Endurance.
"I'm serious, Lexel," she huffed, crossing her arms. "You need higher grade gear. Until I find an ore capable of handling your... ridiculous output... you shouldn't fight. You're just going to destroy everything you wear."
"Fair point," Lexel sighed, shaking the scraps of the right gauntlet off his hand. "I guess I'm retired."
"Not for long however, I can still do a refinement on the spot if we have some ores, but then again, there are only a handful of times I could patch the gauntlet."
Behind them, the sound of slow, rhythmic clapping broke their conversation.
"Bravo! Truly, bravo!"
Kael walked forward, his boots clicking on the stone. He stepped over the corpses with a grimace of distaste for the mess, holding his nose slightly with a silk handkerchief, but his eyes were shining with genuine professional admiration.
"I must admit," the Blonde Knight said, lowering the cloth. "I thought Cresty was exaggerating when she said you were a 'walking catastrophe' at the inn. I owe her an apology. You aren't a monster; you're a siege engine."
Journ followed, his heavy shadow engulfing the hallway. The giant warrior looked at the devastation—the shattered bones, the caved-in skulls, the sheer efficiency of the slaughter—and nodded solemnly.
"Efficient," Journ rumbled. "Brutal. You saved us a lot of stamina, Lexel. The raid appreciates it."
The other adventurers, the ones who had whispered about him being an amateur earlier, were now looking at him with wide, fearful eyes. They kept their distance, hugging the walls as if his violence was contagious.
"Don't just stand there!" Cresty barked at her rangers, though her voice was a little higher-pitched than usual. She was trying to regain control of the situation. "Collect the Cores! We don't leave loot on the floor! We aren't amateurs!"
As the adventurers scrambled to harvest the cores from the boars—cutting open chests and digging through the gore—the leaders gathered at the end of the corridor.
Here, the path split.
The ancient masonry opened up into a rotunda with a high, domed ceiling. Three distinct archways led deeper into the earth, each radiating a different energy.
The Left Path: Narrow, damp, and smelling of mold. Green slime dripped from the archway.The Center Path: Wide, pitch-black, with a cold, dead draft blowing from it. It looked like the throat of a beast.The Right Path: Well-lit by luminescent blue moss, with intricate carvings on the walls depicting ancient heroes.