Max
The remaining hours before the Amphisbaena's spawn window blurred into a headache-inducing haze of tested barriers, shouted order numbers, and the endless clatter of Valis hitting the counter.
Max anticipated the crowd. He priced the rings to move, after all. But there was a humbling gap between predicting demand in his mind and watching several hundred armed adventurers try to climb over each other for a bunch of rings.
And the worst part? He brought this bottleneck on himself by making his rings so enticing. This must be what they mean by suffering through success. He mused as he released his current batch of (testing dummies) customers from the demo room.
And his success didn't stop there as Royman chose this time as their chance to open the public teleportation network on the other side of the floor, meaning another fresh wave of desperate adventurers were currently being dumped on PAL's doorstep.
Max was half a second away from pausing the teleportations in search of some peace when a pre-programmed ding echoed in his head.
The Amphisbaena alarm.
Since the exact timeline of the Loki Familia's expedition and their killing of the Monster Rex was finicky, Max set up a countdown using his second Simple protocol slot. It was an internal timer programmed with a generous buffer, just to make sure he didn't miss the spawn window and lose the kill.
The smirk vanished from his face. It was time to go.
Across the room, Rimuru's head snapped up—having heard the exact same mental ping. The proactive slime-merchant didn't miss a beat. He assessed the crowd volume, locked the front doors with a wave of his hand, and hung a brand-new [DAILY QUOTAS APPLY] board against the glass with restricted quota numbers.
Max caught Rimuru's eye and gave an appreciative nod.
He grabbed Chloe by the shoulder as she scurried past with an empty crate. "You're running the demo room," he told her, ignoring her panicked squeak. "I have a bad-tempered lizard to put down. Rimuru's got the floor. You handle the rest."
As if hearing that last part soared her mood, she replied with a joyful squeak as she stared at the remaining customers allowing Max to slip through the back door. As the safety locks clicked shut behind him, he dropped his transformation with a tired sigh.
A pulse of magic later, he appeared in the quiet comfort of his suite in Folkvangr.
The sudden silence was heavy after hours of retail warfare. Max let out a ragged exhale, rolling the tension out of his neck as he walked over to his armor.
I really wish I was Level 4 right now, he grumbled, strapping his chest plate.
His Independent Action was a godsend, but sitting at Level 3 meant he was limited to a single Complex slot—which Rimuru was currently using to keep the Orario economy from collapsing inside his lobby. If Max were Level 4, he'd have access to two Complex slots. He could spawn Gojo to handle the demos alongside Rimuru and remove himself from the retail equation entirely.
Levelling up is the absolute priority, he reminded himself, drawing his rapier to check the blade.
As his thumb brushed the metal, he paused. A thin red line welled up on his skin. He stared at it for a second, fully surprised. He definitely didn't remember his rapier being this sharp.
Now that he was actually paying attention, the balance felt different in his grip, too. The rapier sat heavier in his hand, carrying a noticeable increase in density that gave the slender blade a much more lethal heft. He glanced at his chest plate, finally catching the subtle changes there as well—new layers of reinforced plating had been worked directly into the dark metal.
He let out an amused breath. Kairu. His familiar had clearly been busy tinkering with his gear behind his back, possibly reinforcing the equipment with materials absorbed from stronger dungeon monsters which must have given the blade a wicked edge and a massive boost to durability.
Whatever the magic drain for another thought projection was, it's worth the automation alone, he thought, sheathing the newly upgraded blade.
Fully geared up, Max turned toward the plush cushion in the corner of the room. Resting quietly on the velvet was Kairu's clone. While the original was with the executives pushing through the Deep Floors, he kept this guy to carry his drops in the dungeon.
Max gave a final nod to himself as he scooped up clone Kairu and tucked it on his shoulder. He activated the teleportation circle under his bed.
VMOOM!
In a flash of crimson light, he vanished into the Dungeon.
Max appeared on the damp shores of Floor 27 and instantly, the cold air hit him with the river stretching out before him like a black mirror.
He swept his gaze across the water and the surrounding cavern. No two-headed water dragon cutting through the surface. No distant splash. No tremor in the stone. The boss room was empty, and the Amphisbaena was nowhere to be seen.
"Still hasn't spawned, eh," he muttered, checking his mental timer. He had the buffer, but standing around for hours staring at a lake was a waste of time and growth. He'd just have to keep swinging by until the Monster Rex showed itself.
An Iguazu burst from the shadows of the river, its crimson feathers blurring as it knifed up out of the dark water toward his throat. Max barely shifted his stance. He let his rapier slide free in an unhurried motion and flicked his wrist.
The bird's head separated from its body cleanly. For a moment, Max just watched the corpse hit the stone at the shore's edge.
"Huh," he said.
He didn't even put his shoulder into the swing. The cut felt almost lazy, but the monster went down as if he swung a greatsword through it. Two more Iguazu burst from the river, clearly not having gotten the memo. Max stepped forward, tracing simple lines through the air. Each stroke carved cleanly through bone and muscle, dropping them mid-flight before they could circle back.
He could feel the way the upgraded blade bit and glided, the extra weight and density turning even casual slashes into decisive kills.
The rest of the flock rose from the river in a screeching rush, white wakes streaking across the surface as they dove in from every angle. Max rolled his neck, already bored. He channeled Destruction into his rapier, letting the crimson-black energy saturate the steel until it hummed in his grip. Then, in a single sweeping arc, he cut across the entire pack.
The slash erased the pack. The Iguazu dissolved into ash mid-scream, unmade the instant they touched the destructive edge.
On his shoulder, clone Kairu gave a pleased little bounce. Once the dust settled, the slime hopped down, flowing over the remaining scraps of monster and drop items along the shoreline, absorbing and sorting them with efficient ease.
"Good work," Max said, already focusing on his next destination. Floor 27 was boring without the Monster Rex and he couldn't see anyone around to snatch his kill as well, but just to be safe, he went ahead and made a big sign saying how the Monster Rex is his and anyone who tried to snatch his kill will face consequences like a good employee giving his 2 weeks notice.
Satisfied, he created a teleportation circle tapping into his newly expanded network, aiming much deeper to his next Excelia farming area.
VWOOM.
The crimson light snapped, depositing him on a jagged outcropping of white bone-stone.
Max didn't stop to admire the view from the edge, he simply walked off it. As gravity tried to take him, he started kicking the air, which solidified under his boots with a dull thud after a few kicks. Using Geppo, he climbed higher, suspending himself hundreds of feet above Floor 37's most infamous landmark.
The Colosseum.
It wasn't just an arena; it was a living meat grinder. Carved into the Dungeon's bedrock, the vast crater was consumed by a permanent war. Below him, hundreds of monsters tore each other apart in a sea of bloodless ash. Packs of skeletal Spartoi clashed with club-wielding Barbarians. Draconic Peludas unleashed storms of toxic needles into stampeding Skull Sheep. Lizardmen traded precise sword strikes with multi-limbed monstrosities Max couldn't even recognize.
The noise alone was a physical weight—a deafening cacophony of shattering bone and guttural shrieks.
As he hovered there, letting the full scale of the chaos wash over him, Max's mind began picking apart the mechanics of the slaughter. The first anomaly that caught his attention was the ash. When a Barbarian crushed a Peluda's skull, the beast dissolved, but no magic stone clattered against the floor. It was as if the Dungeon was deliberately withholding them, actively stripping away the chance of a monster consuming a stone and evolving into an Irregular.
Then there was the spawn cycle. It was a brutal, one-to-one replacement system. The second a Skull Sheep died, another clawed its way straight up through the crater walls to take its place. New Barbarians and Lizardmen spilled relentlessly from the gaping tunnels at the basin's edge. The arena simply refused to sit empty.
Max knew exactly what this place put Bell and Ryuu through in the anime. Jumping down there was, by any objective metric, an act of staggering stupidity.
But it was also the ultimate laboratory.
What would actually happen when he dropped into a closed ecosystem like this?
Would the horde immediately coordinate to kill the outsider, or would they trip over each other in their blind rage?
Would the Dungeon sense him and forcefully spawn an Irregular just to swat him?
If he used his teleportation to vanish mid-charge, would the monsters forget him and return to their civil war, or would they hold the aggro and hunt him across the rest of the floor?
These questions fed the itch beneath his skin. Ever since his duel with Hedin, a coiled tension had settled in his chest. He had forced himself to play the polite shopkeeper, burying his own battle lust to ensure PAL's launch went smoothly. But the shop was open. The bottleneck was handled.
It was time to unleash the Devil on the Dungeon.
Max drew his upgraded rapier, the heavy steel singing in the damp cavern air. He shifted his weight, his muscles coiling as he prepared to cut his magical foothold and plummet into the waiting horde.
But before he could sever the spell, a sharp ping echoed through his mental link, halting his momentum.
It was Kairu.
Max blinked, pausing in the empty air to pull up his internal map. The ping was originating from Floor 39. He hadn't checked on the Freya executives since they left, but if they were chilling there, that means they were taking a break.
Are you guys done with your dive? Max asked.
The response was a flurry of cheerful, echoing Ki!s that carried a wave of hyperactive energy. Beneath the cheer, there was an insistent tug as if Kairu was vibrating through the bond, with the desire to join him.
Max glanced back down at the churning meat grinder below. He was fully prepared to risk a solo dive, but he wasn't stupid. Dropping into the Colosseum alone was a massive gamble. Having Kairu here to cover his blind spots would drastically increase his odds of survival.
Hanging over a pit of hundreds of furious monsters, Max let out a dry laugh. Who was he to deny his familiar a good fight?
"Alright," Max murmured. "Come on up."
The clone resting against his shoulder began to glow. In a seamless flash of purple light, the gel vanished, rerouted down to the 39th floor to keep up appearances. A split second later, the dense weight of the original Kairu materialized in its place.
"KI!" the slime chimed aloud, his core burning a battle-ready crimson that cast a cold light against Max's cheek.
Feeling that familiar weight anchor him, Max smiled. "Good to see you too, buddy. You good to continue?"
Kairu gave a firm bounce against his shoulder.
Max reached up, giving the slime a quick pat before tapping the hilt of his drawn rapier. "I noticed the edge on this, by the way. The reinforced plating, too. Good work. Thanks for keeping my gear from falling apart while I was playing shopkeeper."
Kairu pulsed warmly, a distinct hum of pride radiating through their mental bond.
With his familiar watching his back and his gear freshly reinforced, the last lingering shred of caution evaporated from Max's chest. This wasn't a suicide run anymore—it was an execution.
"You see that mess?" Max asked, pointing at the endless slaughter below. "It's an infinite spawn loop. Kill one, and another immediately replaces it. It's the perfect place to farm your Excelia."
Kairu shifted his liquid mass in preparation, his core flaring brighter.
"Let's get to work."
Max stopped kicking at empty air, lost his foothold, and gravity immediately dragged them down. They plummeted hundreds of feet toward the ground, wind roaring past his ears and rattling the plates of his armor. He bent his knees right before impact, hitting the floor with a bone-rattling thud.
The heavy landing kicked up a thick plume of pulverized ash. As Max straightened his posture, his boots sinking a fraction of an inch into the crushed stone, Kairu sloughed off his shoulder. The slime hit the ground with a wet slap, pooling into a battle-ready mass at his side.
For a few seconds, their arrival went unnoticed. The Colosseum was too consumed by its own permanent war to care about two figures dropping from the ceiling. While the vast majority of the horde kept tearing each other apart in the gloom, only a half-dozen Spartoi broke from the fray. The towering skeletal warriors turned their hollow gaze toward the new arrivals and charged through the settling ash, raising their rusted bone lances and jagged kite shields.
Max didn't bother drawing his rapier. He needed a baseline for their durability, but a quiet erasure wouldn't give him the feedback he wanted. If he was going to push himself against a floor full of Level 4 threats, he needed to set the tone immediately.
He raised both hands, pressing his palms forward. Instead of channeling Destruction, which would easily blend into the dark cavern, he channeled a good amount of magic into one of the flashiest Kidō he had.
"Sōren Sōkatsui."
A roaring torrent of pale blue fire erupted from his hands. The twin blasts spiraled tightly around each other, illuminating the entire sunken crater in a daylight-bright glare before slamming head-on into the charging Spartoi.
The overwhelming thermal force of the spell shattered their bone shields on impact. The skeletal warriors were engulfed in the blue inferno. Their cursed bones cracked and violently popped under the extreme heat, and they let out a horrifying shriek as they burned to ash.
And just like that, everything stopped.
The blinding blue light, coupled with the echoing screams of the dying Spartoi, acted like a flare in the dark. The mindless brawls across the arena ground to a halt. Wolves dropped the mangled remains of Skull Sheep from their jaws. Barbarians slowly lowered their stone axes, gore sliding off the crude edges onto the ash.
The silence that settled over the crater was far heavier than the noise. Hundreds of glowing red and yellow eyes turned in unison, locking onto the single anomaly standing in the center of their home.
Max slowly lowered his hand, physically feeling the crushing weight of that collective hostility. Every single monster in this arena hit with the force of an elite adventurer, and they all just decided he was the primary target.
Okay, Max thought, a feral grin spreading across his face as the entire Colosseum roared and surged toward him as a unified wave. Time to test my limits.
The first threat arrived from his blind spot. A blur of silver fur closed the distance across the ground with terrifying speed. It was a wolf—a muscular, humanoid beast exponentially faster than anything he fought on the upper floors. It lunged, wielding a jagged white stone knife aimed straight at Max's neck.
But Kairu was already there.
A whip of highly pressurized water lashed out from the slime's mass, moving with a predatory fluidity that caught the wolf's ankle mid-leap. The water acted like a steel chain, violently yanking the beast downward and slamming it face-first into the stone. Max didn't even turn his head to look. He sparked a dense Byakurai through his heel, stomping down and electrocuting the wolf's skull before it could recover.
Before the beast's corpse could even dissolve, a hiss echoed from the left. A Peluda reared back on its heavy legs, its snake-like body convulsing. The dragon fired a volley of toxic needles from its spine, blanketing the air like a biological shotgun.
Auto-Evade pinged, but Kairu reacted first. The slime expanded upward, flash-freezing his outer layer into a thick shield of ice. The poisonous needles hit the frost and shattered. The venom hissed, eating into the ice, but it failed to break through. Using the momentary cover his familiar provided, Max stepped out from behind the frozen barricade, chanted a rapid Haien, and unleashed a torrent of purple-black flames that burned the pretender dragon to ash.
There was no time to breathe. Even as the Peluda disintegrated, the gaping tunnels at the edge of the crater immediately spat out replacements, the arena refusing to yield an inch of empty space.
"They really don't stop, huh," Max laughed, feeling the adrenaline finally start to sing in his veins.
Through the dissipating smoke of the fire spell, a hulking Barbarian charged him. The giant swung a massive stone axe with enough kinetic force to flatten a building. Max met the charge head-on, but instead of dodging, he threw up his left hand.
"Dankū."
An invisible wall snapped into place. The stone axe hit the barrier and shattered into gravel. Using the brute's staggered momentum against it, Max stepped inside its guard from the side and drove a knuckle duster laced with Destruction straight into its kneecap. The thick joint crumpled. As the giant dropped to eye level, Max drew his rapier in a silver flash, carving a clean crescent through its chest.
Sparks showered over the ash a second later, forcing Max into a heavy parry.
He locked blades with a Lizardman Elite. This blue-scaled creature was a completely different breed of threat compared to the Barbarians. Its scales were as hard as steel plates, and it wielded its scimitar with a disciplined swordsmanship rather than mindless aggression.
As they traded a rapid flurry of strikes, Max shifted his stance. He already heavily relied on his Kidō—using Sōren Sōkatsui for fire and Byakurai for lightning. Since he was using the Colosseum as a live-fire laboratory anyway, it was time to test his other elemental affinities.
He pushed the Lizardman back with a heavy parry and reached for his magic, attempting to conjure a high-tier water spell.
He fully expected the magic to resist him. Fire always required rigid focus to keep it from spiraling out of control, and lightning demanded precise bursts of compressed energy. But the moment his magic touched the concept of water, the response was instant.
He didn't just conjure a localized blast. He reached out to the ambient moisture in the damp cavern air, pulling an absurd amount of magic from his reserves to fuel the concept. He channeled a spell he had seen an infamous shark-man use.
"Water Style: Great Exploding Water Colliding Wave,"
Max threw his free hand forward. A massive torrent of highly pressurized water erupted from his palm. The sheer volume of liquid was staggering, instantly generating a localized tsunami that violently expanded outward in a fifteen-meter radius. The crushing wave completely swallowed the Lizardman, along with dozens of charging wolves, Spartoi, and Barbarians, sweeping them violently off their feet and submerging them in a swirling vortex.
Max didn't wait for the water to settle. Standing at the edge of the artificial lake he just created, he immediately shifted his magic back to lightning, pointing two fingers at the churning water.
"Raikōhō!"
He fired the level sixty-three Hadō point-blank into the surge. A blinding orb of yellow lightning detonated, discharging a devastating concentration of electricity directly into the highly conductive water.
The submerged monsters didn't even have a chance to scream. The voltage fried their nervous systems instantly. For a few seconds, the entire fifteen-meter radius became a blinding dome of arcing electricity, completely killing dozens of Level 4 threats at once.
As the lightning dissipated and the water began to rapidly drain away into the cracks of the floor, the corpses dissolved into ash, leaving the immediate area briefly empty.
Max lowered his hand, his chest heaving as he stared at the receding water.
He replayed the sensation of the spell in his head. The water didn't fight his control. It didn't require a rigid stance or a violent burst of thought. It simply rushed to him, moving with an eager fluency that felt almost like an extension of his own body. The fluid pressure carried a bubbling energy that perfectly mirrored the cheerful Ki! constantly echoing in his mind.
This must be Kairu's water affinity bleeding into me, Max realized, his eyes widening slightly as he looked at the slime currently freezing three Spartoi nearby. Kairu's a water-attribute monster. The contract isn't just linking our minds—it's actively granting me his innate elemental mastery.
He didn't have time to ponder the magical theory any further. The ground shuddered violently beneath his boots as the gaping holes at the edge of the crater violently expelled the next wave of reinforcements.
And just by the looks of it, the volume of the horde was becoming suffocating, pressing in from all sides in a tightening circle. Max backed up, throwing up more Dankū walls just in time to catch a stampede of Skull Sheep.
The skeletal faces used the dark skin draped over their bones to blend into the ash, acting as stealth battering rams. They slammed against the barrier, their bone piles cracking against the defense but failing to break it.
The horde didn't just push blindly, however. Using the piled-up sheep as stepping stones, three Spartoi vaulted high into the air. They aimed their lances downward, intending to bypass the frontal barrier and strike at Max from above.
They're actually using tactics, Max realized, an honest thrill racing up his spine.
Rather than panic, he simply poured more magic into the spell. He extended the Dankū, curving the invisible wall upward and backward into a solid roof, effectively sealing himself and Kairu inside a translucent cube. The Spartoi slammed against the ceiling and slid off harmlessly to the floor.
Safe inside his temporary bunker, Max took a breath. Outside, monsters were piling over the box, their claws and weapons scraping uselessly against the barrier. Small-scale crowd control wasn't going to work here. He needed to clear the board.
Raising his rapier, Max pointed the upgraded tip at the densest cluster of monsters pressing against the front wall. He began to draw deeply from his reserves, condensing the crimson-black aura of Destruction into a volatile sphere at the end of his blade. He didn't strictly need a chant, but compressing this much magic demanded a mental focal point to keep it stable.
He used the words of his very first creation.
"Flame of will, blazing through the darkest night..."
The sphere hummed. It vibrated with so much contained force that it made the air inside the Dankū cube taste metallic.
"...Cut clean, cut true. Let this strike seal thy fate and carry all things to their end."
The pressure in his grip was agonizing. Max thrust the rapier forward.
"Final Testament!"
He dropped the front panel of the barrier. A localized shockwave of Destruction tore outward, and the violent beam of unmaking erased the front lines instantly. It left a clean trench through the sea of bodies.
But as the dust settled, Max watched in disbelief as more monsters jumped down from the upper ramps of the Colosseum and the trench he painstakingly carved quickly filled out with more wolves and Barbarians. They climbed over the dissipating ash of their dead, instantly refilling the ranks in a matter of seconds. The cycle was relentless.
So a localized beam wasn't going to cut it, Max thought, looking at the clawing monsters. If he wanted to clear the board—including the reinforcements safely tucked away on the higher ramps—he had to wipe the entire arena out of existence. And he had the perfect spell to clear everything and then some more. He smirked as he let his inner chuunibyou take the wheel, and borrowed the most ridiculous incantation he could remember to structure the sheer volume of power he was pulling.
"Darker than black, darker than darkness, combine with my intense crimson!"
The air pressure in the Colosseum physically dropped. Sensing the suffocating shift in the atmosphere, the charging monsters faltered, their primal instincts screaming at them to run.
High above the arena, a massive orange flame began to build in the dark expanse of the cavern ceiling.
"Time to wake up, descend to these borders and appear as an intangible distortion!"
As Max continued to chant, an intricate magic circle snapped into existence just below the flame. Then a second one formed beneath it. Then a third.
"Dance, dance, dance!"
The sphere of fire above them swelled massively in size, its color shifting from orange to a deep, volatile crimson-black. The ambient magic of the Dungeon began to warp around it, ripping chunks of floor from the crater walls and pulling the jagged stones directly into the flaming sphere, compounding its physical mass.
"May a destructive force flood my torrent of power, a destructive force like no other! Send all creation to its source! Come out of your abyss!"
A fourth, fifth, and sixth magic circle cascaded downward from the ceiling, forming a perfectly aligned vertical barrel of glowing runes. The sphere of fire, now sporting a massive, superheated boulder at its core, began to descend from the ceiling.
"Humanity knows no other more powerful offensive technique!"
As the meteor passed through the first magic circle, its velocity doubled. Passing through the second, the flames flared wider. By the time it tore through the sixth circle, the compounded momentum and concentrated magic reached a critical mass that easily rivaled a high level magical attack.
Max aimed his rapier at the center of the arena, his amethyst eyes glowing like dying stars in the gloom.
"It is the ultimate magical attack!"
A beat of silence engulfed the arena akin to the calm before the storm. A second later, it was shattered by Max's next word.
"EXPLOSION!"
He immediately dropped the rest of the barriers and teleported.
VWOOM.
He vanished from the Colosseum floor, reappearing on the bone-ledge he originally teleported to.
He looked down just in time to watch the impact.
BBAAANNNNGGGGG!
BBBBBOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMM!
KRA-KOOOOMMMMMM!
The meteor slammed into the arena floor, and the gathered fire disintegrated everything it touched. Then the shockwave swept across the sunken crater, expanding in a terrifying dome of annihilation, atomizing the monsters at ground zero in a blinding flash of destructive light.
But the sheer kinetic force of the Level 6 impact carried the devastation further. A secondary physical shockwave ripped through the crater, carrying superheated rubble and jagged rock that acted like massive shrapnel. The blast radius violently swept up the first three stepped ramps of the Colosseum walls, crushing, impaling, and outright erasing over three hundred Spartoi, Peludas, Lizardmen, and Barbarians in an apocalyptic strike.
The deafening roar was delayed by a fraction of a second, followed by a violent tremor that shook the very foundation of Floor 37. The quake ripped through the cavern, nearly knocking Max off his feet.
He stood there on the ledge, his chest heaving heavily as he gasped for air. He was genuinely winded, the massive mana expenditure and the sheer scale of the spell leaving him physically drained for a few moments. He leaned slightly on his rapier, watching the dust clear.
A smoking crater now sat in the center of the Colosseum. The vast majority of the arena floor, and the two lowest tiers of the walls, were completely glassed, wiped clean of over three hundred monsters in a single blow.
"...Holy shit," Max breathed between ragged pants, a manic smile spreading across his face.
But as the ringing in his ears slowly subsided, the smile faded.
He looked down at the smoking crater, then back at his own boots. He was standing on a ledge fifty meters above ground zero, and the second shockwave was still strong enough to nearly throw him off. He definitely overdid it.
For the first time since he arrived, the Colosseum was quiet. Truly quiet.
The surviving dark holes along the upper walls weren't spewing out fresh waves of fur and bone. The permanent war actually halted.
Instead, a deep, agonizing groan echoed from the floor itself. It sounded as though the Dungeon was screaming from the pain. Max watched, a cold knot forming in his stomach, as the Dungeon's focus immediately shifted from replacing the monsters to frantically repairing the catastrophic damage. Jagged veins of ambient energy pulsed and writhed beneath the ash, attempting to stitch together the glassed gouge Max just tore into its floor.
A sudden chill washed over the back of Max's neck.
The lingering exhilaration evaporated, instantly replaced by an icy spike of genuine dread.
He just inflicted catastrophic structural damage to the dungeon floor. He knew exactly what the Dungeon did when adventurers destroyed its walls or floors beyond a certain threshold. It panicked and deployed its immune system to eradicate the anomaly.
A Juggernaut.
Max didn't hesitate. He immediately banished his rapier to storage bag and pulled a Superior Mind and Recovery Potion in its place and chugged both vials simultaneously, ignoring the burning taste as the potent liquids flooded his depleted system and forcefully kickstarted his recovery.
He tossed the empty vials aside and summoned his rapier back, his grip tightening on the hilt until his knuckles turned white.
"Kairu," Max whispered, his voice dead serious. "Hold position and be on high alert."
Kairu sensed the immediate shift in his master's tone and pulled his mass inward, flattening defensively against the bone-ledge, his blue core dimming to a silent pulse.
Max closed his eyes, expanding Auto-Evade beyond the 50-meter radius, blanketing the cavern in an invisible net as he waited in the unnatural silence of the smoking Colosseum, listening to the eerie silence. Then—
Ping.
A presence flickered on the other side of the Colosseum wall.
--> Devil in a Dungeon <--
AN:
Well, well, well, how the tables have turned! Max felt Floor 27 monsters are too easy and willingly jumped into the Colosseum meat grinder and how he might have gone overboard a bit. Don't you agree??
Did Max really screw up and summon the Juggernaut? IF he did, do you think he is ready to face it alone. I mean, defeating it would definetely give him a level up, no? ;)
Also that Explosion wasn't the strongest/longest chanted one he remembers as Megumin's first explosion was even longer and would have even higher level of destruction. And just to be clear, though the narration showed Max's chant and the magic building simultaneously, it didn't begin to descend till he uttered Explosion and teleported away.
We have officially entered Arc 6 with this chapter. Arc 6: Hell's Crucible.
So please do share how you felt the chapter was. Was it good or did you feel it was a bit forced? Please share your feedback/suggestions on how to improve the chapter in a comment/review. Thank you to all those who react and share their suggestions!!
If you'd like to read 9 chapters ahead(around 45k words), support my work, or commission a story idea, visit my p.a.t.r.e.o.n.c.o.m/b3smash
Please note that the chapters are early access only, they will be eventually released here as well.
Next update will be on Friday. As I will be busy on Tuesday. Let me know if you want a make up update or not. ;)
Ben, Out.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything.