'Damn... It's a lot easier than I thought...' Noah thought to himself as he looked at where he was already.
Initially their small group of Noah, a snake demon, and a Boss bird thought that breaking into a Fortress solo would be more difficult, but with the skill set they currently had, it was very easy. Noah simply teleported over the monster's holes, Lilith would trap them for 2 seconds, until Noah's flames hit most of them until the monster died and gave him a lot of extra experience and energy to replenish what he had spent.
This started to repeat itself with increasing speed when Terrence learned the patterns of the hole positions as he flew over and watched the terrain, always telling Noah where the next possible hole would be, before Noah went over there and confirmed it with Pyakugan.
The intelligence that Terrence displayed did not fail to surprise Noah, which made him even more curious to know if the monster's intelligence would rise the higher his level became.
Thus, the terrain that was once just a mountain, almost entirely white with snow and ice, now had several holes where the ice had been melted by Noah's flames, with tunnels under the earth where corpses should have been, but only ashes remained to remember the monsters that died.
With each teleportation by Noah, a strong monster died. What was once the strength of the monsters, which made the Fortress difficult to invade, in fact became their greatest weakness, trapping them in a cage of earth, waiting for their own slaughter.
With the ease he had exhibited in killing the monsters, Noah let Terrence continue analyzing the terrain with the holes dotted across it so that they would kill as many monsters as possible. Even if it would delay the time to clear the Fortress, he doubted anyone would complain, since even the time they'd be delayed would still be much shorter than if it were someone else attempting it themselves, perhaps even going faster than complete groups of Blessed Ones, as groups needed to stop to rest often, Noah just teleported freely, killing without stopping.
Until now, Noah had not needed to use the [Healing Flames] ability once on himself. He found that this ability aided in energy recovery, so from time to time he used it on Lilith, so she wouldn't run out of energy until the Boss's fight, which helped further increase their speed of completion, since Noah was able to recover the energy used they could kill more monsters.
'Damn, this is very easy. Why didn't I get these skills before?' Noah thought, as he was happy to have such powerful abilities.
'Don't say it's too easy... You're going to curse us!' Lilith said through their mental link in a concerned tone.
'Don't worry, Lilly. The Fortress is being completed very easily. What could go wrong?' Noah thought happily, not yet having learned from his past mistakes.
And now, just like last time, Noah was assigned a system mission to make things difficult once again.
Follow on NovᴇlEnglish.nᴇt[Congratulations, the user received a mission!
Apparently the user needs more challenge for his own life, so to stimulate the user's personal development, a mission has been issued.
Mission: Eliminate all monsters from the Fortress and be overloaded by the energy absorbed by each monster, including the Boss, in less than 15 minutes.
Reward: +2 mana points.
Failure: -1 point in all statistics.]
When the notification of him having received a mission appeared to Noah again, he was ecstatic, thinking that the system had felt the divine energy of another nearby statue, but unfortunately for him, it was not a mission for him to improve his wings; it was actually a very disadvantageous mission for him.
He had killed 15 monsters in 8 minutes since he entered the Fortress, but the screen said the Fortress had more than 50 monsters in total, so he would need to kill 35 more monsters and the Boss in 15 minutes... that was almost impossible.
'Shit, this is very unfair. If I win, my reward will be just 2 points of statistics, but if I can't complete it, I will lose 4 points??? It is double what I would gain; the potential risk is not worth it...' Noah thought, as he stared at the mission screen that floated in front of him, just waiting for him to accept the mission to disappear.
Fortunately the option to reject the mission was still active, otherwise he would be very angry to be forced to do something, but even thinking that this mission was disadvantageous, only the statistical points he would receive would be enough to increase his energy by another 18% of what it was today... which was a significantly high increase, after all. In situations where he couldn't burn someone and needed to escape, having extra energy would always be good, not to mention that it would be almost 1/5 more energy. Putting it into numbers, it would look like he had 10,000 energy, and by completing the quest it would go up to almost 12,000.
Looking around the destroyed camp, Noah calculated it was actually possible to complete. Terrence had already located 4 more holes, leaving only 31 more and the Boss, but given the speed with which Terrence was locating these holes, Noah thought that it might be possible to complete this mission, so with regret he clicked [Accept].
'I warned you,' Lilith said in a winning voice. 'You cursed us to have misfortune, and the misfortune is that maybe you lose the statistics equivalent to a level?'
'Please, Lilly, no. Let's change that view to something more positive, something like, , you know?' Noah responded to it, as he immediately teleported to one of the four holes Terrence had located.
Now with a time limit and urgently, their speed when killing the monsters had almost doubled, but that was still not enough. They were killing 15 monsters every 5 minutes, which meant 1 monster every 20 seconds, but that had to increase. It would require even more dedication from Terrence, who was trying his best to locate the hole patterns and pinpoint where the other monsters were with the aerial view he had.
Noah would just teleport to where Terrence indicated and set the place on fire.
Little by little, their speed was increasing, and with the speed, their exp was also rising rapidly.
Noah had observed a pattern: 100% of the exp they received, 50% went to Noah, 25% to Lilith, and 25% to Terrence. Noah thought this was a good division, since he was the one who most needed Exp.
And receiving 50% of the exp from each monster was much better than receiving 6%, which was how much he received when sharing the exp with 14 other people. Of course, with the other group, they killed monsters much more powerful than the ones they were killing in this Fortress, which consequently gave him more exp, increasing this number from 6% to something around 20%. But still, it was as if for each monster he killed now, he received the equivalent exp of 2.5 monsters that he might have killed with the team, which greatly increased his efficiency.
Not to mention that Noah was excited to receive the $7,000 at the end of the fortress. 'Hehe ...' He laughed as he remembered the money.
Thus, by increasing their speed of killing monsters, they finally managed to kill all 35 remaining monsters in less than 10 minutes, which left only 5 minutes with which to fight the Boss.
If someone had told a team of Blessed that they would only have 5 minutes to deal with a Boss, they would probably feel angry at that person and would spit on them until they drowned. Trying to kill a Boss in such a short time would only increase the difficulty of everything, causing them to make more mistakes, not to mention that they might not even do enough damage to the Boss to try to accomplish this feat.
But Noah was the other way around, seeing on the mission time counter that he still had 5 minutes left, and that at the moment he had so much energy that, just as the system had said, he was starting to overwhelm himself, Noah was confident in trying to drown that Boss in fire, and make this battle much faster than it would normally be.
Terrence had already found the exact location of the Boss's lair on the mountain a few minutes ago while he was looking for other monster holes, so the only thing Noah needed to do was go to that place. What he, of course, was going to do now was try his hardest to kill the Boss quickly and get the maximum benefits from it.
Even more, seeing that he had completed almost 30% of the exp bar, Noah felt that leveling up was not so far away now.
[User: Noah Stern
Level: 03, 431/1600 exp
HP: 14/14
Follow on Novᴇl-Onlinᴇ.cᴏmStrength: 20
Agility: 14
Stamina: 15
Mana: 11
Skills:
(Hell Flames Lv 04, 300/12500 exp.
[Fireball] [Fire Dagger] [Temporary name: Incredibly Handsome Flaming Explosion Spider Web of Hell] [Healing Flames])
(Hell Tunneling Lv 02, 79/1500 exp.)]
[User: Lilith ????
Level: 02, 146/1000 exp.]
[User: Terrence
Level: 01, 146/200 exp.]
Please read the author's notes down here! hehe :3 ↓↓↓
We reach 6k votes this week, so we will have 6 extra chapters!
[4/6 Extra chapters this week.] [2/2 Daily Chapter]
Every 900 power stones will be +1 extra chapter for next week beside the 2 daily chapter :)