[Just a little warning. This chapter has a lot of info about runes (about 400 words worth), you can skip the part about the runes if you want, but as the author, I advise you to read it at least. The rest should be remain the same though.]
The sound of something moving echoed throughout the valley.
It had been about an hour since Lloyd had been attacked by Alex, and the sound of moving below the rubble began to echo throughout the valley for the first time since then.
Lloyd had been smashed into the side of the mountain alongside the monster, and while the monster was left on the brink of death from the attack alone, the mountain crumbling and falling onto it was its killing blow, and Lloyd's too.
Or at least that was what Alex would have liked to believe, yet reality was not so kind to him.
A moment before the mountain was about to crumble and fall onto the two of them, Lloyd coated his blade with flames and stabbed it into the softer body of the woman, instead of her scorpion spider side that was covered in scales.
She looked oddly human, but Lloyd didn't think of it much since he didn't have time for such a thing.
The moment he stabbed her through the heart, he released his blue flames into her body and cooked her from the inside out, leaving nothing but a charred body behind.
Of course, by then, Alex had run away with a grin on his face.
Looking up, Lloyd thought-
'Is this it?'
The ruble finally fell onto the two of them, and a dust cloud the size of a 14-story building shot into the sky, catching the eyes of the rest of his teammates, who instantly frowned...
Everyone except John, who was standing at the back, grinning just as much as Alex.
"Man, I almost thought I was dead... Not." Lloyd chuckled while kicking one of the boulders with all his strength, instantly blowing away half the rubble and creating a little path for him to leave.
Everything had been a part of his plan, from him fighting the monster alone with Alex to Alex betraying him and trapping him under rubble.
Lloyd had calculated everything, and it had all gone as he had expected.
Lloyd knew that they wouldn't return for him or try to get him out of the rubble since Alex would probably say something like 'there is a chance the monster is still alive' and make his death seem like a noble and necessary sacrifice rather than a murder.
However, just to stay safe, he decided to stay in the rubble and cultivate for an hour until they left, and since he didn't get the chance to cultivate his body much, he chose to cultivate it, allowing him to reach about 95% when it came to reaching the next stage.
Lloyd faked his death mainly because, despite the opportunity he was given to kill as many monsters as possible, he had to share it with a bunch of morons who couldn't kill anything above the peak first commandment even if they tried.
They not only slowed him down, but them being around also meant that he couldn't go all out, making his void energy gain extremely low.
Having scanned the creature, Lloyd looked at its scales with curiosity and greed.
'I could use this.' He thought and absorbed it into his dimensional storage rather than his ring that would have taken it straight to the base.
Firstly, he didn't want to bring up any questions by showing them that he was capable of killing a monster with an amethyst seal. It would have been a bother, and this way, not only did he not have to explain himself, but he now also had something to create armor with.
While the clothes they had were cool and all, their magical protections weren't as good as they seemed.
Every time something hit them, while a lot of the damage would be negated, it was not nearly as much as one would get from natural materials.
It was one of the reasons why their current uniforms all had a light piece of armor as their foundation. Naturally, strong recourses were always better for weapons and protection compared to enhancing a weak material like cotton or fiber.
The amount of enhancing the runes did was about the same no matter the quality of the material; the problem was that enhancing a fabric with a tier 2 rune was like enhancing metal with a tier 1 rune.
The rune system itself was quite complicated, but Lloyd understood the gist of it.
They went from tier 1 to tier 7, but a few years before the awakening of Solaris, the dwarves had found a way to create tier 8 and 9 runes.
Of course, nothing compared to the ancient society, which could create a rune so powerful that it was considered the mystical tenth tier. Of course, they didn't call it that in their journals that were left behind after their extinction.
No one knew how they went extinct, but almost everyone believed that it must have been the work of the "Great filter."
Anyway, most of the runes that could be found on Lloyd's clothes were considered tier 2 runes. An enchanter's runes were marked by their quality and the amount of mana used to create the rune.
This made it so enchanters of lower commandments could not create anything above their commandments. Still, at the same time, they also made sure that despite being an entity of a higher commandment, it did not mean that their rune tier would be equal to it since they needed to balance it out with their commandment.
It was also one of the main reasons why people of a lower commandment couldn't wear or use equipment that was two tiers or more above their own commandment.
And since Lloyd couldn't wear anything above the second tier of runes, the best thing he could do was create or ask someone to forge an armor of a higher quality material-wise.
Anyway, after Lloyd kicked open the building, and the rubble and left it, he began jogging through the valley, hoping to get through it as fast as possible.
Since he didn't know if anyone was around, he chose to not use his teleportation ability without reason or without thoroughly scanning everything within a mile with his mana sense and the mana eyes he finally figured out how to use.
When he finally reached the end of the valley, he saw a monster guarding it the same way that a giant angler fish was guarding the valley's entrance on the other side.
"Peak first commandment huh..." Lloyd grinned as electricity bounced off his body, and blue runes appeared on his skin momentarily.
Becoming a lightning bolt, Lloyd instantly appeared on the other side, of the valley and behind the monster, shown slowly sheathing his blade while looking back at the monster that was now split in half.
[Lightning Step]
After seeing the masked man use [flash step] during his final trial in the pre-first commandment entrance ceremony, Lloyd had etched the ability into his mind. He created his own technique that essentially created a burst of speed that allowed him to blitz past most opponents, possibly even those in the amethyst stages of the second commandment.
Of course, he didn't believe he could kill anything past a two-amethyst seal second commandment monster since the gap between seals at the stage was like the gap between the first and last topaz seal.
He estimated that he would have to reach the first commandment mid-stage to kill one, even with his void walker abilities (excluding void channel).
"I heard an owlbear's liver was a huge source of mana and could be cultivated by eating it... Let's see if that's true." Lloyd grinned while pacing to the owl bear and carving its liver out of its body before scanning it and absorbing it into the ring.
Putting the liver into his dimensional storage, he turned around just to feel his stomach churn, even though he was 99.99% sure he didn't have one.
He didn't really know where the food he ate went, but he just assumed that it would corrode and eventually turn into nothing but atoms consumed by the darkness below his shell.
However, the reason for this feeling was that instead of seeing lush plains or a beautiful forest on the other side of the mountain, what he felt instead was the snow.
And snow was never a good sign despite not affecting his void body.
***
*CLANG*
"Ugh." A girl with black hair, bronze skin, and brown amber eyes vomited onto the ground as a monster's fist shot past her team's tank and slammed right into her stomach, catapulting her through the blizzard and into a tree.
The monster before the was huge. It was three times larger than their largest teammate, and it had a bodily prowess beyond anything the girl could produce on her own.
Laying on the ground, she coughed out a mouthful of blood while stretching her hand out toward her boy as a final form of stubbornness.
She didn't want to die, yet the smell of death remained in her nose, smelling as cold as the blizzard around her, and as iron-filled as the blood in her mouth.
Her teammates lay around her, some bleeding out into the snow, and others dead, their eyes wide and their faces frozen by blizzard into the last expression they ever made.
And their third-year guide? She was laying in a pool of her own blood, barely alive as multiple grey-skinned creatures, skinny to the bone, ate her flesh with a certain craze in their eyes.
Just when the bronze-skinned girl was about to reach her bow, a foot landed on her arm while a loud crack followed by a blood-curdling scream echoed throughout the tundra.h
"That two-legged ape will do... Keep her alive for now; she will be the perfect test subject." Another monster walked through the blizzard. He was much smaller than the man stepping on Fatima's arm, yet the aura he expanded told every creature within a mile radius that he was a force to be reckoned with.
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