Now, one should understand something important about the Land of Gears Dungeon. As the name implied, it was a Continental Dungeon with a heavy focus on magically engineered monsters.
This should not be surprising, as no matter the era - whether old or new - Goblins and Gnomes were the supreme authorities when it came to Engineering and Magical Engineering.
As such, given these clues, should it be any surprise that the throngs of monsters that smothered the lab were all automatons of different types? Currently, most of them were common rat, domestic cat, and domestic dog type automatons.
Basically, the bottom feeders of the lot.
There were too many of them for Riveting Night or anyone else to identify them, so they directly got into battle. Even though Continental Dungeons were one big gangbang of blood, it was still a dungeon in the end.
In essence, its design supported certain laws and theories of RPG games. For example, the lab was quite large, enough for a group of hundred players to maneuver easily, much less 20 of them.
Also, despite its size, there were many points to take cover behind or which players could use as vantage points to get some rest or keep a reserve roster of members for rotation purposes.
Even more interestingly, there was only one main entrance and its width was illogically narrow. As such, three men standing side by side should be enough to block anyone from entering.
This was strange given the expansive size of the lab's interior, but what was the use in questioning such designs at such a time? The entrance only allowed about 5 of these Rank 1 automatons to enter at a time.
However, the core members of Umbra had already maneuvered into position to meet this assault. At the forefront was Uno the Vanguard. His Legendary tank class made him more than just a defender, but he alone could fill in the role of 20 normal tank classes.
His Protection Aura passive blessed the members of Umbra with great resistance to damage and increased their HPs, himself included. With his current stats and being at Rank 2, his HP had already broken through the 100,000 mark.
Even though his armor had not changed, he had a special shield that had been given to him by Draco and Riveting Night in the past, an Epic shield called Reinhold.
｢Reinhold - Shield
Rank: Epic
Durability: 500,000/500,000
Passive 1 - Dispersion: Attacks that land on this shield have 30% of the incoming damage dispersed into the air.
Active 1 - Shield Toss: Throw the item like a boomerang, dealing 130% blunt damage and stunning the target for 5 seconds. The Shield will return to the arm of the user. Cooldown: 10 minutes.｣
Despite being a mere Epic shield, Uno felt that Reinhold was perfect for him. Its passive dispersed 30% of the total damage, and the remaining 70% had to go through his resistances, defenses, techniques, and aura.
Just how much would be left to actually hit him? Well, under the onslaught of endless Rank 1 monsters where many latched onto him, biting and scratching for all their worth, it did no damage.
Since his class wasn't a Divine one, he still had all his old skills, so he quickly used an Uncommon combat skill called Anguished Roar.
Anguished Roar made all the enemies within a 150-meter range shift their aggro onto Uno for 3 minutes. Its cooldown was 5 minutes, meaning that for two minutes between each cast, he had to have another aggro attracting skill active if he wanted to keep them off his teammates.
And thankfully, Uno did have another such skill. His other aggro attracting skill was called Infuriating Taunt, which was also at the Uncommon rank. It had a smaller range compared to Anguished Roar, at just about 50 meters, but it had a longer duration of 5 minutes and a shorter cooldown of 6 minutes compared to the other skills.
With these two, unless Uno was distracted or failed to pay attention, he would be able to keep all aggro on himself with ease, and so he did. Unlike his usual fighting style, where he fought even as he defended, he had chosen to go full defense for this bout.
While Uno handled defense, Warm Spring, Rambunctious Buttlover, and Sublime Notion handled support. Warm Spring especially handled the healing aspects for the team, but she had very little to do at this time since the enemies couldn't even squeeze past the almighty Uno.
She didn't even have buff skills aside from what her new class gave her. After all, Holymancers were all about healing, so she didn't have buff skills. This was where Sublime Notion came in.
Even though her current class was political in nature and all of her new skills were also political, the Seneschal class was special because it allowed her to use any form of magic whatsoever, as long as she had the requisite mastery of course.
Since she had all her old cleric skills, she had many buff skills she could use. Not to mention that Sublime had heavily increased her arsenal of skills with the endless amount of UPs she had, along with her limitless privileges.
As such, she fired out a slew of stackable buffs with relatively manageable cooldowns. These were entry-level buffs that even a dog by the roadside could cast, and it was just to add some icing to the cake.
As for Rambunctious Buttlover, his support came in the form of his basic buff skill, the Common Rank Lyrical Might!
｢Umbra Local Party Announcement
Player Rambunctious Buttlover has boosted the party's morale through vocals! The enemy is cowed by his supreme loquaciousness!
All players:
Attack +5%
Defense +10%
Speed +2%
All enemies:
Attack -5%
Defense -10%
Speed -2%｣
Even though it didn't seem like much, this was only the intro. Everyone was basically just warming themselves up, using only their Common skills from their old classes.
As for the damage dealers, who formed a large majority of this group, they basically just lazed about while tossing auto-attacks or used some entry-level skills to cull some monsters.
After all, they were all Rank 2. Putting aside their extremely high stats due to their classes and their Rank up, they had Rank and level suppression on their side.
This mechanic was not patented by only NPCs and monsters to players, but players could also do it to other players and monsters. Of course, this meant that the experience received for killing lower Ranked monsters was severely cut down.
Right now, their experience bars were growing as they killed Private to Captain Rank monsters over the span of the first day. For Continental Dungeons, they usually lasted seven days, with the first day having Rank 1 foes, the second day having Rank 2, and so on.
However, putting aside the split due to the equal share mechanic, even if only one person killed more than 1,000,000 Rank 1 monsters at Rank 2, they would only get maybe 3 levels out of it.
Apart from Warm Spring whose experience gain was multiplied by 4, the rest were only slightly above 100% or under it, so their gained experience was truly disheartening.
Funny enough, there were some idle fellows present. Akainu, Sanji, and Noble Writer awkwardly stood around as they didn't know how to contribute to this slaughter-fest. After all, their classes were purely Tradeskill oriented.
Even though they were a part of the party, they received not even a crumb of experience. Otherwise, Money Lover would have definitely been present when Rina released the Ultimate Supernova.
As such, the first day was mostly spent by the various members of Umbra getting used to their new classes. These endless Rank 1 foes were the perfect targets to hone their skills, and they did not hold back.
Of course, their class skills were not easily used for such mundane tasks since those had day-long cooldowns. However, Riveting Night confidently told them to use their skills as they would come out of cooldown the next day.
There was no point in keeping them hidden, as their goal was not to somehow overturn fate and conquer this dungeon, but simply to assess their prowess. As such, the members of Umbra became more unbridled and unleashed their rage upon the poor monsters.
By the time day 2 came and the first Specialist Rank monster at Rank 2 showed up, the members of Umbra were lively. Many of them hadn't drained too much of their resources, so they could still keep on going even without the help of potions and the like.
Now, they also began using some of their Uncommon and Rare skills to fight as the day progressed. Even though they were heaven-defying at Rank 2 with their Legendary classes, they still had a tough time near the end of the day when the Captain Rank and Major Rank monsters appeared.
The latter especially were a challenge for them, as they were dubbed as Regional Boss tier monsters. To clarify, this was the same Rank that the Metal Dragon had been at, so one could imagine their difficulty.
Of course, the Metal Dragon was far more heaven-defying than them since it had broken through the limits of Rank 1 to be classified as a Major. The upper Rank limit for monsters in Rank 1 was Captain Rank, so becoming a Major showed that the entity had the power of a Rank 2, but was still capped at Rank 1.
So Major Rank monsters in Rank 2 were to these core members of Umbra what Captain Rank monsters were to a Rank 1 player. If it was only one of them, then they wouldn't even break a sweat with their cheat-like line-up, but would there only be one?
No! There was almost an endless sea of these monsters popping up at the eleventh hour of the day, forcing the members of Umbra to fight at 100%. They could no longer be lazy or fart about in this matter at all.
Still, despite all this, they were still the upper echelon of players worldwide. They weathered the second day and entered the third. This day also heralded the advent of Rank 3 monsters, so everyone was tense yet ready to fight.
When the first Sergeant Rank monster at Rank 3 came, it directly exerted pressure on the members of Umbra as they tasted Rank and level suppression once again.
With hardened expressions, they used their best skills and even consumed potions as they fought against the barrage of superior foes. All of them used their passive skills to the fullest, while their class active skills were brought out as well.
All of them had skills that seemed broken to the common player, so when they fired them out, they were able to do intense amounts of damage to their foes by coordinating their casting with their team members through Voice Chat.
Even their equipment skills were not spared, and their damage dealing ability rose to untold heights. However, at the end of the day, Continental Dungeons didn't care how awesome your skill was, but how well you, the caster, could endure a hellish battle.
When the Major Rank monsters at Rank 3 appeared, the core members of Umbra began to fall one by one. Even the heaven-defying Warm Spring could not change things, only allow them to struggle on for slightly longer.
Uno tried to use his all-out defense to weather some of the attacks to get breathing space, but this shield did not last long before being shattered under the endless barrage of attacks.
Interestingly, Riveting Night was the last to die in this battle, and she had not taken one step from where she stood, only calmly overlooking their fight the whole time as she identified flaws in their adapted battle styles.
After being sent out, the system updated them on how long they lasted and how many monsters they had killed, and the number would make any onlooker's scalp tingle.
They had essentially killed more monsters than there were humans on Earth, which was a horrifying thing to think about. Still, what was scarier to the members of Umbra right now was the cold aura of Riveting Night, who gazed at them with displeasure.
They could only gulp in fear, knowing a hellish training regime was about to begin…
