Chapter 718: Nevermore: An Inspirational Experience

"There was much debate if we should include this example of a Karmic Plague within the dungeon, but ultimately we agreed it would be for the best," the Wyrmgod explained to the Viper as they observed the slaughter going on in the Enlightened Republic. "Many mortals don't even know about them these days, so this can serve as... what did you call it? A public service?"

"Yeah, definitely a good idea to teach the masses. I can attest to how horrible those things are," Minaga shuddered. "I lost quite a few clones to plagues throughout the ages. I insisted we got the most insidious kind while also allowing it to serve as a nice mental screening of anyone who does the floor."

"You are still doing all that, huh," the Malefic Viper said. "I take it Umbra continues to pay well?"

"We can't reveal privileged information about what we do with the data of Nevermore attendees," Minaga waved him off with a smile.

The Viper shook his head, not bothering to argue. Combat information was usually difficult to come by, and it was a bit of an open secret that you could obtain some intel and potential recordings from Nevermore if you were in good enough standing and had the funds. Two criteria the Court of Shadows easily met.

"Oh?" the Wyrmgod said after a few hours of silence as he turned his gaze to Minaga. "Another flawless completion of floor forty?"

"I don't wanna talk about it," Minaga grumbled.

"Ah... I see... quite a group indeed. One of them appears to be from the same planet as your Chosen, too," the Wyrmgod noted as he threw a glance at the Viper.

Seeing that Minaga looked annoyed and the timing of it all, Vilastromoz had a very good idea of what party it was. He also understood Minaga's annoyance... for those who had embraced the powers of the void were truly annoying.

The Wyrmgod waved his hand, and another screen appeared, showing some clips from the battle. An impressive showing if Vilas said so himself. Beings who were blessed by Void Gods were always interesting and powerful creatures - at least those that managed to stay sapient. This party was definite proof of that.

A corrupted elf that could heal by removing the very concept of the person having even taken damage. A cyclops with chains that appeared unbreakable as it managed to seal away even Minaga's magic for several seconds at a time while landing incredibly powerful physical blows.

The corrupted Shapeshifter, with its many faces in flux, was incredibly unique, too, somehow seeming to contain far more souls than a single being. All bound together by the void into one Truesoul, which allowed it to fill its vessel anchored to reality with one soul at a time, effectively changing stats and likely even skills, making it an incredibly versatile creature.

When it came to the Void Shade - the most "normal" creature in the group - this one was still quite a specimen. An incredibly powerful caster and assassin both, able to merge into the gap between space itself. This was the kind of creature that came to be when something truly became stuck between a state of life and death and only embraced the emptiness of the void. Void Shades were creatures that would cease to be if they ever lost their Blessings, hence why Void Shades were regular agents of the Void Gods.

Finally, there was the human scientist. All of the others were beings made for combat and personal survival. Apex creatures of slaughter and destruction that could strike fear into nearly any being around their own level. This human was quite the opposite. His body was weaker than any of the others, not even reaching the level of other low-tiers of similar levels. In fact, when it came to any combat situation, he seemed relatively useless. He was a craftsman and a creator, but such skills would not save someone when in a direct confrontation. His mind would not save him from a descending blade.

Yet one had to remember... he was blessed by Oras. Not all Void Gods were equal, and the reason the others seemed to view him as their leader was precisely due to the one who blessed him. Oras the All-Seeing, Oras the Eyes of the Void. Out of all the Void Gods, he had the strongest connection to the world outside of the void due to his gaze being able to pierce through the veil separating the void and reality, making him an incredibly respected figure. For someone recognized by Oras, excellence was the baseline, and the human did not disappoint.

The moment he appeared on the fortieth floor and the fight was about to begin, the Viper saw what the human planned to do. Vilas could only flash a small smile as the scientist summoned a golem before his entire body flashed out of existence.

Vilastromoz saw it clearly. His entire soul became one with the machine in a fashion that reminded the Viper of how the automata gods operated. His soul was primed to be hidden within a pre-prepared core of the golem as the human himself resided elsewhere: within the nothingness of the void.

His weak body was entirely hidden, and the only way to force him out was to destroy the core of the golem that had a design reminiscent of the Altmar golem designs. To make matters more extreme, when Minaga was about to finish his speech, two more golems appeared. The Malefic Viper saw they were all linked through one mind controlling all three like puppets at once, and when the fight truly began, he did not doubt more mechanical constructions would appear.

What is more... this link the human had created was extended. It did not just link together the scientist's machines but all of his party members, allowing them to nearly operate as one being, independent yet guided. There even appeared to be some level of resource-sharing with his party members. When the fight began, Minaga was instantly pressed, and while the party did face trouble... they ended up doing the entire event more cleanly than Jake and his group had, if only by a little. It was also significantly less flashy, which wasn't surprising considering void magic wasn't exactly synonymous with colorful.

"Impressive," the Malefic Viper said, seeing the recording. "Definitely contenders for some of the top ten spots. I guess quite a few figures are."

"In the end, it shall come down to the Challenge Dungeons for the very peak. As always," the Wyrmgod said.

Somewhere the Viper had great confidence in Jake doing extremely well.

"So... to talk about something more fun, do you think Jake will do a planetary sacrificial ritual?" Minaga asked with genuine curiosity, clearly also more than happy to change the subject away from the void-touched. Again, understandable. Based on the clips of the fight, it had been an infuriating experience for the Unique Lifeform.

"Perhaps, perhaps not," Vilastromoz smiled, liking to see Minaga not have his curiosity satisfied.

"Manually slaying every single infected being is not feasible unless they want to spend the next many years on floor forty-one," the Wyrmgod chimed in. "I do reckon that a planetary sacrificial ritual is on the table if your Chosen is well-practiced in the art and dependent on how they wish to approach the end of the floor. I believe we will have to see if they perhaps want to make use of the other methods provided by the floor they wish to make use of. These floors are very much open to creative solutions."

"Are you insinuating my labyrinth didn't have a lot of creative solutions?" Minaga questioned.

"Yes, naturally, it was very limited," the Wyrmgod answered. "Your desire for control over scenarios and the inability of the system to offer assistance through skills make any and all floors you create inherently limited. Moreover, you made a labyrinth. Labyrinths having too many creative solutions at once would be bad design."

"Wow, just calling me out like that in front of our mutual friend," Minaga grumbled. "Look at Jake; he is a way better friend. He knows about the Viper's relationship with this little plague thing, right?"

"He does indeed," the Viper nodded. The books he had given Jake were very much restricted knowledge, after all, and had things in them that only a few gods were even aware of.

"And yet he hasn't shared it with everyone. How nice of him," Minaga said, shaking his head as he turned his attention back to the screen showing what was going on in Jake's dungeon instance of Tri-World.

Vilastromoz smiled wryly. Yeah, that was pretty nice of Jake, as it would be problematic if that knowledge spread too much. In hindsight, he maybe shouldn't have given Jake access to restricted knowledge so freely, but... eh, it was probably fine.

Jake had definitely also figured out by now that the Karmic Plague seen on Tri-World was originally a strain created by Eversmile as part of an experiment... and that the Malefic Viper had been a consultant on that project, Eversmile cashing in a favor to make him help.

But who could blame him for asking the Viper? Who was a better consultant than the original creator of plagues?

Jake wasn't sure how to feel when he stood far up in the sky and looked at the ruins beneath him. Not a single other living being was anywhere in sight, with every single powerful person in the Enlightened Republic dead. Most hadn't even been a threat... but this was a purge. Be they Lord Protectors, military personnel, or random squad leaders, all had been wiped out. Even the citizens who had survived becoming collateral damage were gone.

Is this my first time doing a full-on massacre like this? he questioned himself.

Sure, there had been the Deepdwellers in the dungeon near Haven and probably a few other instances of Jake killing a lot of creatures of the same race in a limited area, but destroying an entire capital city like this still felt different.

What's more... it had been so effortless, to a disturbing degree.

He sighed as he condensed an orb of destructive arcane mana and sent it flying downward to clean away the rubble to prepare for what he had to do later. The second it hit the ground, it created a massive explosion that consumed most of the city below him that hadn't already been destroyed in the earlier fight. It continued to expand as the destructive arcane energies annihilated anything it got close to, creating a massive crater.

It was an odd feeling he rarely reflected on, but being able to casually create an orb of mana with more destructive potential than a nuclear bomb was just something he and other C-grades around his level could do. Jake rarely, if ever, did it because there was truly no need to under normal circumstances. Large-scale attacks were a waste of energy and often far less potent as the intensity of the energy that hit your enemy would be wasted by just destroying the environment. Yet he had to remember that he could. Sure, an attack like the orb he just did wouldn't even injure anyone he considered worth fighting, even if he hit them point-blank, but if he wanted to wipe out a lot of weaker people... it was incredibly effective.

For a long time, Jake had wondered exactly how the Malefic Viper managed to wipe out all life on a planet while still in C-grade, but honestly, Jake understood why. Given enough time and a lack of foes capable of challenging you, it was just a matter of spending enough time on the task.

Jake tried to shake the thought out of his head as he turned to his notifications and saw the expected flood of notifications. Hundreds of thousands. The majority he really didn't wanna see, so he filtered out all but three.

*You have slain [Lord Protector of the Enlightened Republic - lvl 291] - Bonus experience earned for killing an enemy above your level*

*You have slain [General of the Enlightened Republic - lvl 271] - Bonus experience earned for killing an enemy above your level*

*You have slain [Ranger Commander of the Enlightened Republic - lvl 278] - Bonus experience earned for killing an enemy above your level*

*'DING!' Class: [Arcane Hunter of Horizon's Edge] has reached level 226 - Stat points allocated, +50 Free Points*

*'DING!' Class: [Arcane Hunter of Horizon's Edge] has reached level 227 - Stat points allocated, +50 Free Points*

*'DING!' Race: [Human (C)] has reached level 227 - Stat points allocated, +45 Free Points*

Jake read them through as he flew a good distance away from the capital, away from all the destruction, as he looked for a nice place to take a breather. He soon came across a forest, where he promptly landed and found a nice clearing to relax in. After a quick Pulse to confirm there were no threats, Jake sat down and deactivated his Arcane Awakening, feeling the wave of weakness wash over him.

The fight with the Lord Protector and Ranger Commander hadn't been incredibly difficult, but not overly easy either. Both were a lot higher level than him, and their pure stats were nothing to scoff at. The power of their attacks had been more than enough to severely threaten him, but it was clear they had severely limited experience fighting life-and-death battles with people of near-equal power.

If they actually knew how to fight properly, Jake would have had a far harder time and probably just fought them all with the party, but... they had sucked. Well, the Ranger Commander had actually been kind of okay, and Jake did get some inspiration from some of her skills, which also made him realize something else.

He seriously hadn't fought a lot of archers, had he? Were archers rare in the multiverse or something? He had faced so damn many with other weapons - even the bloody space mage using a sword - which had helped him a bit with his melee skills and learning from the fights, but, yeah, not really any archers.

As he sat there thinking to himself, he also quickly checked in with his four party members to see how things were going on their ends. To the surprise of no one, they were all just traveling to their destinations with likely weeks, if not months, to go before they would reach their designated targets. The planet was ultimately pretty damn huge, and they had to travel from deep within the Enlightened Republic. Well, former Enlightened Republic.

That left him with some time to recover fully, ponder a bit on archery stuff, and look through the capital for anything of value. Maybe even clues about the Karmic Plague. He didn't want to get his hopes up, but it was his current plan for now. The Sword Saint would handle the Risen while the Fallen King took on the Beastfolk, with Sylphie and Dina going to where the fourth faction had once been located.

The territory of the witch's faction was marked on the map, making them all certain that the place held some meaning or clues to handling the Karmic Plague. Jake didn't believe that wiping out the entire population manually was the go-to method for this floor, nor did he believe that a sacrificial ritual was the only way to go. No, the floor had to have some methods built in.

Sitting in meditation, Jake pondered a bit more on potential solutions to the floor before switching to replaying the fight with the Ranger Commander in his head. That she was the last of his kill notifications was no coincidence, as Jake had fought her for longer than he needed to in order to bait out all of her skills.

Jake was the kind of person to not really learn much combat-related from reading books or getting taught but instead did best with some live demonstrations. The only other archer he had really ever seen fighting was Maria, but her Path was far too intertwined with using fire magic in everything that it didn't help Jake much.

The Ranger Commander had been a lot more standard. She did use wind magic - probably the most common form of magic to combine with archery - but otherwise just stuck to the basics. Both of them had Splitting Arrow skills, and both of them had variants of Powershot, but the elf did also have some interesting skills he didn't.

One of them was a skill he had seen but skipped that allowed her to blast herself all over the place by amplifying the energy that pushed herself back after every shot, which turned out to be quite a nice way of dodging when combined with wind magic. She also had bouncing arrows that could redirect themselves mid-air, which was another skill Jake had skipped, but he felt pretty confident he could somehow bake that functionality into his archery skill with time.

But the skill she had used that interested Jake the most initially wasn't really any of her "flashy" attacks. It was the normal arrows she fired. Jake reckoned it was her archery skill, but every single arrow she fired spun around with impressive speed and appeared to have small whirlwinds around them, increasing their stability in flight, and wind mana also seemed to increase its penetrative power. He noticed how the wind magic would strike first before the physical arrow would make contact, which got him thinking.

However, it was only when he saw her big finisher he truly got an idea.

Jake knew that her method wasn't the way for him, considering he didn't really do wind magic, but the idea of packing mana around it was interesting. All of Jake's other attempts of infusing an arrow with magic had always been difficult due to the arrows often being poisoned, but also due to the arrows already being arcane arrows.

So, seeing as Jake had some time, he began working on an idea he had. Honestly, he had been thinking about this for a while and worked on the idea a bit prior. Seeing that Ranger Commander had convinced him to try and bring it to fruition as he aimed to improve a skill that he should probably have improved a long time ago:

Arrow of the Ambitious Hunter.