A Black Market LitRPG

“So, I just sit in here and keep shooting?”

“Yes. I will continuously fight outside, you back me up.”

“I don’t have that many pellets!”

“I’m sure you can find some lying around.” The arctech handgun did not require gunpowder, merely accelerating pellets. Metal pellets performed the best, but stone pebbles could have the same effect as well, albeit at lower impact damage.

Kyle quickly stepped out of the barrier, with the swarm of rock spiders all rushing at him once more.

With the new warhammer, it was too easy for Kyle to perform a single swing, killing a few rock spiders at a time, while Feldon shot any spider that got too close.

This way, Feldon can continuously expand his arcia energy, making him more useful.

How many waves are there even? However, Kyle was not complaining. As long as he kept the rest area up and running, he could always take a breather before fighting back.

Suddenly, three blue energy beams fired towards him, all of them hitting him right in the body from multiple directions. Kyle winced as he activated the Necklace of Healing again while glancing behind him.

On the ceiling, there were multiple blue-eyed ranged rock spiders, with their eye being much bigger than the standard rock spider. Each of them did not move too much, firing straight down at Kyle as he tried to dodge. “Feldon, above!”

“On it!” Feldon fired a single shot, the pellet cracking the blue crystal eye as the ranged rock spider fell to the floor, writhing on the ground. Kyle continued to smash his way through the horde, killing yet another two dozen as he made it to where the ranged rock spider lay, smashing down hard.

All I have to do is just farm them from EXP. This is too easy! The legions of rock spiders were no match for Kyle’s new warhammer, allowing him to easily fend off any rock spider that got too close to him.

With Feldon handling the ranged spiders, Kyle simply continued clearing out the spiders, losing count of the number of rock spiders he had smashed.

Out of nowhere, a giant rock suddenly fell from the ceiling right on top of him, nearly crushing Kyle as he dodged out of the way, rolling on the floor. The giant rock unfolded to reveal eighteen long rock limbs, except instead of being spider legs, they seemed more like tentacles.

The rock tentacles whipped at Kyle, smacking right into his left arm and sending him tumbling towards the wall of the cavern. Kyle gasped for air as he struggled to stand up, using the warhammer’s handle to block and shove away a few small rock spiders who tried to attack him.

Kyle swung again, smashing the rock spiders before a rock tentacle lunged at him, his instincts screaming as he quickly raised the warhammer handle to block the attack, the blow of the force toppling him over.

Before the tentacle could strike him again, he rolled out of the way and recovered before his eyes examined the multiple tentacles, all of which seemed to aim at him. Kyle was unfazed, rushing at the nearest tentacle and leaping right onto it before it could avoid him, running along its length towards the main body.

The other tentacles swiped at him as he jumped from tentacle to tentacle, causing a few of them to twist around each other. As soon as he got close enough, he leapt down onto the main body with the warhammer held high above his head, slamming it down onto the surface of the body.

However, the impact was not strong enough, with Kyle’s hands feeling the lash back as the warhammer was knocked backwards from the reaction force. Instead of backing off, Kyle quickly swung the warhammer down again, this time activating the Pulverize skill.

A sudden jolt rippled through the entire body, cracking the surface and revealing the interior glass-like structure. Kyle noticed that it was like a honeycomb structure within, with a suspended core in the centre that pulsed red.

Kyle sidestepped three incoming tentacles, forcing him to back off before charging right back in, this time giving his all into the swing and activating the skill once again. The secondary shock impact by the engraving sent a wave of stress through the interior of the body, causing the glass structure and core to break into fragments, killing it instantly.

Good, I got some time to farm. Kyle blitzed through the remaining rock spiders, killing them by the dozens.

The EXP is diminishing the more I kill – once I’ve killed five hundred of them, they won’t be worth fighting any longer. Kyle continued his rampage, clearing out all remaining spiders in the next three minutes, earning him two minutes of rest outside of the rest area.

“Hey, come in here! The regeneration effect will heal you!” Feldon hollered, cupping his hands around his mouth.

“No, it’s fine.” Kyle didn’t want to reduce the duration he had for the rest area, unsure of how many waves there were left. As though in response to his query, an updated information table appeared in front of him.

Rewards? Kyle examined his warhammer as he sat down and rested, taking note of the engraving. While Kyle could comprehend how the engraving worked thanks to his time spent reverse engineering and modifying engravings, he still noted that the warhammer seemed to be completely mass-produced, clearly machined to perfection.

Who the hell put the warhammer in the rock spider? Or did the rock spider ingest the warhammer? Kyle found the entire existence of the dungeon extremely weird.

The subsequent waves over the next hour were of the same nature, albeit with increasing difficulty, though it was nothing Kyle could not handle.

Kyle even managed to buy some time by clearing the waves even faster, allowing him to rest for half an hour in total. Feldon himself had already lost all sense of tension, simply shooting as though he was in a firing range. He could now fire up to three times more, meaning his arcia energy had tripled.

If I could retain this dungeon, maybe I could use this rest area as a training source. Kyle noted down the obelisk engraving, memorising its structure. The seven obelisks needed to be activated together to form the array, with Kyle spending the rest time studying the obelisks.

The obelisks were nothing like the carvings he saw in the passageway, throwing him even further off. What in the world is going on? It’s like someone merging three different alien races together.

Just as the message appeared, the obelisk’s engravings began to die down, with the regeneration effect disappearing. The prominent cluster of white luminous gemstones at the top began to crack, with fragments falling to the ground onto the rest area right on top of Feldon.

“Feldon, move!” Kyle quickly rushed towards him, grabbing Feldon by the collar and flinging him from beyond the rest area.

The cluster burst apart in a brilliant fashion, the gemstones hurtling everywhere as a large queen spider emerged from within, dropping down right onto the central stage. Kyle tumbled down the staircase as the gemstones all along the surface of the queen spider’s body began to glow green.

Kyle could hardly see the top of the queen spider’s body, the body being enormous and enough to occupy the entire rest area. Instead, there were fifteen green gemstones facing his way, charging up and firing a barrage of energy beams at him.

Kyle quickly grabbed a dead rock spider’s body and used it as a shield, blocking the incoming energy beams. The body was riddled with searing red hot marks within seconds, the intense heat from the energy collision melting it.

Scampering between the piled-up corpses of rock spiders from previous waves, Kyle used them as cover, ducking and avoiding the slew of energy beams that arced all over the cavern, bombarding every angle the queen’s body could view.

“Feldon, pass the handgun!”

The arctech handgun sailed through the air, with Kyle catching it and immediately popping off a few shots at the exposed gemstones, cracking them as the queen spider recoiled in pain. Tossing the handgun back to Feldon, Kyle picked up his warhammer and rushed in, swinging as hard as he could with the Pulverise skill.

Penchant for Violence!

The boost in strength made the swing even harder and faster, sending a fracturing wave through the armoured surface and blasting out through the other side.

Instead of the surface cracking apart, the body exploded outwards, with the stone chunks right in front of Kyle smacking right into him. Before he could recover, three humanoid golems rushed at him, swinging their scorpion tails right at him.

“Slovesa?!” Kyle exclaimed in mild shock before fending off the incoming tails. The slovesa were aliens from his quadrant, himself having fought many of them before. The carvings at the front of the passageway were theirs, but Kyle had not seen anything that looked remotely like them until now.

To his dismay, they were not as strong compared to those he fought in the liberation war of his original country in the Galactic Era, allowing him to smash through each of them in a single hit easily.

Huffing, Kyle laid the warhammer on the ground, panting heavily as he wiped the sweat of his forehead. He glanced down at the smashed slovesa, noticing their cores seemed to have been heavily modified. Someone here is using them as guinea pigs.

Slovesa were core-based lifeforms that were able to grow or shrink in size by assimilating material into their forms, the only organ being their core. Kyle had fought against them for decades as a General and as a Crime Lord too, but the three slovesas in front of him were a mockery of what a true middle-class slovesa could achieve.

“What the hell were those?” Feldon exclaimed, having seen how the humanoid golems burst out from the interior of the queen’s body.

“They were controlling the queen spider from within.” Kyle walked over to a few of the dead rock spiders, checking their innards for the glass core. The glass core seemed to be an imitation of the slovesa core, like an artificial organ.

He headed back to the dead slovesas, reaching down into their body and grabbing their core. It was the most valuable part of the slovesa, being made up of all the exotic material that the slovesa has strengthened itself with over the years. Humans had been plundering their graveyards for centuries for this very reason.

This would be perfect for crafting a defensive armour piece. If this can be combined with the current hardening arctech engravings, it will be one of the best armour out there. Kyle recalled how Nox’s armour worked, wondering if he could make a full armour set himself.

“Are we done here? Was that it?” Feldon asked.

Before Kyle could reply, however, his instincts screamed wildly again, prompting him to push Feldon away as a bolt of lightning nearly struck him from behind, forcing the two of them to dodge and hide behind the remnants of the queen spider. The bolt of lighting sparked against the far end of the cavern, the fizzle intense. Another trial? No, I didn’t get a message.

Kyle peeked his head out, noticing a lone man with two swords brandished walking to them from the passageway. Arcs of lightning ran up and down the swords as the lone man glared at them with clear recognition.

“Think you can steal my dungeon and leave? That’s not very nice of you now, is it?”