Chapter 427
Darius laughed as well, pleased that he had managed to make that stoic fellow break his composure. Then again, if any of the other Gods heard him call them 'Fake Lords', they might just disintegrate his soul on the spot.
Only the True Lords of Faust who despised and looked down on them would find this distinction funny and fitting.
Darius left the Great Library of Krona as he thought back to his purpose in coming here, which was to acquire information so he could better deal with the Quest to cull all Insects.
With all the accumulated knowledge at his disposal, Darius realized that nothing had changed from his first Quest.
He had believed that the difficulty for this one would be lower after all of his preparations, but now, it seemed as if it was still as high as the sky.
Back when he had been a mere Amateur, he had to partake in a Quest where his final target had been an Adept Undead on the verge of becoming a Master, not to mention that the real power behind him had in fact been a True Lord of Faust.
Now that he was a Journeyman, he was forced to face off against an entire race that had Grandmasters at the top, although very few of them.
As for True Lord like entities, the Insect race did not have any, or the Gods would never have been able to push them so far.
His previous assertion that the Insects had Ancestors at the True Lord level and Insect Queens at the God level had turned out to be erroneous.
Although they technically existed, they nonetheless had been either killed or sealed by the combined efforts of all the forces in the previous war.
The early part of the History section had told Darius that the Insects of those stages exited, yet it was only the latter parts that had mentioned their demise.
True Lords were things Darius simply could not fight. Forget 100x the difficulty of an average Journeyman becoming an Adept, that was around 10,000,000x more difficult.
Even a gaggle of Gods and Demons with their armies had merely been able to manage a tie against Thanatos, eventually forcing him into migrating and entering a sort of pseudo-exile.
Since he couldn't even beat a God right now, how was he supposed to fight against an even mightier foe?
Well, Darius was lucky that his stats were now barely able to match mid-tier Grandmasters in terms of Intellect. Gunner too was far beyond the Grandmaster stage as long as he used his Earth's Guardian ability, even able to damage a whole segment of a continent with one of his skills.
This should make their mission tough, but doable. After all, the underground was the home ground of the Insects and Darius would be waging a war against them.
Ultimately, the main contributor to the high difficulty of this Quest, was the short time frame.
No matter how you spun it, 6 months was just too short to eradicate an entire race, especially one that could spurt offspring in seconds by the hundreds.
Darius and his people had the power to eradicate the Insects, but whether they had the time? That was up in the air. Luckily, he had spent time creating those spells and means, which would help him kill bugs en masse.
Even better, Gunner and Xela had taken the initiative to cull some hives, while that would not do much given the sheer number, it would certainly contribute something to the cause.
Well, Darius now had slightly less than 5 months until the deadline for his Quest was up, so he would be better off returning to his task and making sure that he achieved his goal.
As such, he traveled to a portal center and returned to Safemoon. He took out one of his special Space Stones and focused.
[Would you like to change the Space Stone into a Cross-Continental Temporary Spatial Array? This will cost 143 Conversion Points.]
From there, he laid down another Cross-Continental Temporary Spatial Array and returned to the city in which he had left, beamed over in a bright yellow light from within his mage tower.
No one noticed his coming and going, but since he had passed through Safemoon, Miranda had taken the opportunity to update the cloud while she was there and had also downloaded new information.
As such, Darius was privy to the changes in his five Apprentices. Seeing how much progress they had made with himself and Gunner having led them by the hand, he was impressed.
For the first time, he started to see them as actual students of his, instead of mere experiment samples for figuring out the value of pumping resources into training a Faustian under the native power system.
He soon put them on the backburner though, as he arrived in Pokterr once more. Darius appeared just outside the house he had renovated, and noticed that he could sense the presence of both his Branded Servants within.
Both of them exited the building with surprised expressions at seeing Darius back so soon. However, they filed in behind him after realizing that he had a slight smile playing on his lips.
His expression alone told them that the time for preparation was over. It was time for them to enter into action starting now, and they were more than ready to help him achieve his next goal.
Darius used Group Teleportation to send them down into the underground. As he had a detailed map of the entire place thanks to the efforts of the previous heroes who had ventured beneath the surface and survived, he moved faster than the Branded Duo's excursions.
He stopped first when he saw that Gunner and Xela had begun constructing connection towers within the underground, even praising them for their smart idea. Then he released hundreds of Critterbots and Guard Androids to widen the network.
The little ones were to construct the towers using materials that Darius provided, while the Guard Androids were to protect them and prevent any other person from coming underground after them.
Also, they were to set up patrols to monitor the passageways and prevent any Insects from escaping to the surface. After all, many would start to flee and migrate when a huge amount of their kin were being slaughtered, and tracking them later would be a chore that would waste more time out of their already unsatisfactory limit.