"This… What is this?!"
At the edge of the mushroom garden, 120 Puji stood neatly arranged in 6 rows.
40 Artillery Puji: [Magic Power Storage LV4] + [Mushroom Cannon LV6] + [Precision LV4] 40 Slime Puji: [Magic Power Storage LV4] + [Mushroom Cannon LV6] + [Digestive Slime LV3] 20 Hallucinogenic Puji: [Hallucinogenic Spores LV4] + [Chitin Shell LV4] 20 Tentacle Puji: [Storage Sac LV4] + [Entangling LV3]
This was the formation of Lin Jun's 14th expeditionary force.
It wasn't that Lin Jun didn't want to stuff every skill into a single Puji, but the more skills a Puji had, the more magic power and time it consumed to produce.
The consumption increased exponentially, so keeping the number of skills to four or fewer was a balanced choice between cost-effectiveness and practicality.
"So there are so many different types of Puji!"
Inanna felt she had seen too little of the world—she hadn't even known there were so many subspecies of Puji.
Some had mushroom caps shaped like pots.
Some were covered in full-body shells, but unlike the miner Puji in the mining area, theirs had many pores on the shell.
And there were even some with tentacles!
How nice… If she had tentacles too, she wouldn't need to tie magic crystals to her head…
"Lin Jun, you said they're an expeditionary force. What are they going to do?"
"This is a dungeon, of course they're going to subjugate monsters."
"E-earthworms…?"
Inanna looked like she was ready to say "If it's earthworms, I'm not going."
She really didn't think earthworms were something that could be killed just by throwing numbers of Puji at them.
"I already told you it's not earthworms. The target this time is fire mosquitoes—those parasitic pests that do nothing but fly over to the mushroom garden every few days to plunder and never produce anything themselves! This time we're going to wipe out their entire nest in one go!"
Lin Jun was also fed up with being harassed from the sky every few days. He had discovered the fire mosquitoes' nest long ago. The reason he hadn't eliminated them earlier was to sustainably farm the Heat Resistance skill.
Now that Heat Resistance had reached LV6, wiping out the fire mosquitoes in one go would probably push it to LV7, which was more than enough.
Besides, his top priority escape plan had already changed to using Inanna to hunt earthworms instead of trying to sneak past the Flame Demon's eyes. There was even less reason to keep these annoying insects around.
Let them contribute one last bit of value and become the whetstone for the team.
"Inanna, stay in the middle of the formation and follow my commands."
"Understood, understood."
Hearing that they were just going to fight mosquitoes, Inanna immediately relaxed.
She knew fire mosquitoes well. On average they were LV20. Their attacks were straightforward and not particularly difficult to deal with.
The troublesome part was that they could fly, had evasion skills, making them hard to hit, and they liked to appear in large swarms.
Still, with her magic, even if she couldn't defeat them, she could at least protect herself.
Speaking of which, this counted as war, even if it was a war between monsters.
The old man had never allowed her to get involved with military or adventurous matters before. Facing it for the first time, she actually felt a little excited inside!
However, these Puji marched with perfectly synchronized steps— even a real army couldn't compare.
Was it because they were all under Lin Jun's control?
————
Indeed, that was the reason.
Thanks to skills like Kin Control, Mycelial Network, and Mental Integration, Lin Jun could command these Puji like an RTS game, though it consumed quite a bit of mental energy.
It was precisely because he could coordinate them uniformly that he had been able to establish a foothold in the dungeon with Puji that had all attributes at only 1.
After all, using tactics like luring the enemy in deep or feinting against a group of nearly brainless monsters was basically dimensional superiority.
But this time, no elaborate tactics were needed.
Tactics were only necessary when the weak fought the strong.
Right now, compared to the fire mosquitoes…
He was the strong one!
Wasn't it satisfying to just press F1 and F3 and charge straight in?
He could also take this opportunity to show off his strength and boost the confidence of the newly joined little pink.
————
The so-called "deep layers" of the dungeon referred to everything from the 10th floor downward. From this point on, there were no longer clearly defined passages connecting different strata.
The entire deep layer area consisted of countless intertwining three-dimensional tunnels. These tunnels connected one massive cavern to another—just like how the fire mosquitoes' nest and Lin Jun's mushroom garden were linked by a passage more than fifty meters in diameter.
Along the way, sparse mushrooms grew hidden in the rock crevices. These served both as Lin Jun's extended eyes and as relay stations that helped him expand his mycelial network beyond the mushroom garden.
The Mycelial Network allowed Lin Jun to command his Puji army in a semi-autonomous manner.
Otherwise, relying solely on [Kin Control] to manually micromanage them would have been far too mentally taxing.
The "puji puji" sounds of the Puji's short legs stepping on the ground echoed through the tunnel. Suddenly, several crimson glowing spots appeared three hundred meters ahead—several fire mosquitoes had spotted the expeditionary force.
"Ice Blade!"
A two-meter-long ice blade shot forward, but it had zero accuracy. The fire mosquitoes didn't even need to use their evasion skill; the ice blade simply slammed into the rock wall above.
"Rookie, don't waste your mana."
"S-sorry."
Only then did Inanna notice that the surrounding Puji continued advancing at a steady pace, completely unaffected by the appearance of the fire mosquitoes.
The few fire mosquitoes didn't approach either. Instead, they watched the steadily approaching force and chose to flee, quickly disappearing from sight.
Looking at the vanishing fire mosquitoes, Inanna asked worriedly, "Won't they go back to report?"
"Of course they'll report."
"Even if they're low-intelligence monsters, they still have the instinct to protect their nest. I'm sure we'll be facing a swarm of fire mosquitoes soon."
Inanna really wanted to say, "You're a monster too, you know…"
"Then why did you let them go?"
Because they were still out of range.
"Of course, so we can wipe them all out at once."
————
Beneath a steam-filled dome, hundreds of fire mosquitoes flew up and down around a large central water pool, producing a deafening buzzing sound.
Fire mosquitoes required high-temperature water pools similar to hot springs for reproduction. Their entire larval stage was spent in these pools, waiting to be fed by adults. As long as this water pool was destroyed, the fire mosquitoes in this area would naturally die out.
The fire mosquitoes would naturally fight with all their might to defend their nest.
So when Inanna followed the Puji to the end of the tunnel, every fire mosquito's abdominal luminescent gland glowed orange—the color of danger.
Several nearby fire mosquitoes flapped their wings and flew toward them first.
"Water Serpent Technique!"
It was Inanna again. Facing the incoming monsters, she couldn't help but cast her spell first.
It was a bit better than last time—at least she used Water Serpent Technique, which allowed some directional control, instead of the straight-line Ice Blade. But not by much.
Unfortunately, the targets had evasion skills. The water serpent grazed one fire mosquito, but it only dropped a few meters before regaining balance.
Lin Jun could only shake his head.
"Sigh… Rookie."