Much like the scorplings, the monsters that the system called stone leg centipedes attacked with the strength of numbers and a venomous bite on their side. Unlike the scorplings, however, they were easily able to cling to the walls and ceiling while skittering around at full speed.

Velik’s limbs were a blur as he lashed out with his spear, slicing through the reinforced hides of the monsters with every blow. Guts and gore splattered to the ground along with long, twitching bodies, hundreds of legs kicking blindly against each other as the bodies twisted up on themselves. He pushed system notifications off to the side of his mind and focused on his work, knowing that if any of the monsters managed to get past him that the whole assault would become much, much harder to deal with.

He could hold this tunnel with a spear enchanted with [Shape Shifting] and sheer speed. The problem, which quickly became apparent, was that he couldn’t stop more monsters from pouring in behind him from other tunnels. Much like the upper portions of the dungeon, everything was an interconnected maze that he hadn’t even begun to figure out.

It was the sound of them crawling up behind him that gave their game away. Shit, I knew it. All of a sudden, he had to work more than twice as hard, spinning wildly and laying into centipedes coming from every direction. Hundreds of bodies built up into piles, which actually made things harder since centipedes didn’t have any compunction about slithering through a mound of corpses to reach him.

Maybe if the dying and dead ones had the decency to lay still, it would have been easier to pick out the movement of the live ones, but that wasn’t the case. It didn’t really become a problem until the bodies were heaped up so thick that he was dancing atop the still-twitching corpses while he fought.

He saw the pincers closing around his ankle a fraction of a second before they actually made contact. That was all the time he needed with [Savage Rhythm] enhancing his speed, but even though his spear flashed down and cleanly beheaded the centipede, that didn’t stop it from locking onto him. Then there was an unfamiliar weight shackled to one leg and the pincers were cutting through the leather of his boot into his skin.

That was the moment things started to fall apart. A few seconds later, when six centipedes came at him at once from different directions, one of the ones on the ceiling got through his defenses. Its entire eight-foot-long body slammed into him, legs scrabbling against his chest and shoulders and coils of its midsection blinding him as it tried to wrap itself around his head. He felt its pincers clamp down on his forearm and tighten.

The centipedes were no match for his raw physical strength, however. Even against the constricting body and sharp-tipped feet trying to cut his skin into ribbons, Velik merely pushed back and forced the centipede off him. The danger was never in being crushed, but in the time it took him to get free.

Working in a frenzy, he shrugged off the centipede and forced the other ones back. More and more kills piled up, and [Savage Rhythm] quickly reached its maximum potency. Even that wasn’t enough to keep all the monsters back, and the next time they reached him, it was three at once. Velik was knocked from his feet into a squirming, writhing pile of living and dead centipedes.

I can’t believe I’m doing this again not five minutes later.

[Dread Lance] surged down his spear and into the nearest target. Energy expanded outward, destroying the body—Velik wasn’t sure that particular monster had been alive before being targeted or not—and catching a few dozen more monsters in its radius. He managed to point his spear mostly in the direction of the tunnel, so the backlash was minimal this time.

Minimal didn’t mean ‘nonexistent,’ unfortunately, and it felt like a giant had smacked his whole body with an open palm perfectly contoured for maximum contact. He staggered backward a step into the swarm of centipedes behind him, but with the pressure taken off one flank for a few seconds, he was quickly able to reestablish some clearance around his body.

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How many of these monsters are there?

He had no idea how many he’d killed over the last few minutes – hundreds, at minimum. His whole world had become nothing but movement, each strike deadly and each twitch steering his body past a set of pincers or grasping legs. Twice more, he used [Dread Lance] to clear some space, though he was almost positive the skill was actually destroying more dead bodies than live monsters.

And then, just as suddenly as it began, it was over.

The whole tunnel still crawled with movement, of course, but none of it was directed at him. He atop a shifting pile of corpses, one of several dozen he’d left as he’d ranged up and down the tunnel to keep from being buried under monster flesh, his chest heaving for breath and his spear heavy in his hands.

[Mending] is the best enchantment ever invented, he thought to himself as he regarded his clothing. He’d be naked without the self-repairing nature of his wardrobe, not that he’d want to wear such stained and foul-smelling clothes to begin with. Luckily, [Mending] fixed that, too. Eventually.

He carefully climbed free of the remnants of the slaughter, a tricky task given how long it took the bodies to stop wriggling even after he’d decapitated or eviscerated them. Presumably, the dungeon would reclaim them all eventually, but he wasn’t going to stand around and wait for the corpses to dissolve and the way forward to be clear.

Once, he thought a living centipede had gotten trapped under the weight of bodies, only to wriggle free and attack him as he was climbing by, but it turned out to just be some sort of nerve response to the corpse being shifted around as he walked on it that caused the pincers to snap closed. He realized that a few seconds after his spear went through its skull when he didn’t get a kill notification.

It was only after he’d fully cleared the site of the slaughter that he got to looking through his notifications. Most were easily dismissed, just messages of decarmas gained and centipedes of up to level 33 slain. Three stood out though – all of them skill rank increases.

He’d pushed [Savage Rhythm] up to rank 2 early in the fight, which didn’t really surprise him. It had been instrumental to his victory, helping him keep up with what would have otherwise been an overwhelming tide of monsters. [Spear Warden] had also gone up a rank, which he attributed more to it being an inevitable fact of it being such a core skill than due to the specific nature of the previous fight. As long as he kept fighting with a spear, [Spear Warden] was going to get stronger.

The last rank up was to [Apex Hunter], surprisingly. At first, he couldn’t figure out what it was about the encounter that had caused the skill to rank up, but eventually he decided it was the perception-based skills that had gone into its mix. Velik hadn’t had time to consciously process what he was seeing during the fight. There were too many bodies, but somehow, he’d kept his spear moving while defending himself from every direction.

They were excellent gains, but he wasn’t sure he’d want to go through another battle like that again. He’d never had a fight where individual monsters were easily slain, but overwhelming numbers and tight confines conspired against him. Even when fighting packs of worgs, he’d always been able to string them along into a running battle through the woods if necessary. This type of fighting in a place where he was severely limited in how he could use his weapon was a new type of difficulty for him.

Only thing to do about it is finish my business so I can get the hell out of here, he decided, his face set into a grim mask as he straightened his back and strode purposefully away from the mounds of dead monsters.

* * *

Monsters grew powerful in the same way people did: through killing. He knew the truth of this, which was why thousands upon thousands of his creations had died at the hands of each other. Only the strongest deserved the gift of life. Only the strongest were fit to serve as the canvas he worked on.

The intruder would make for a marvelous canvas. He’d been tested over and over again, and he still survived. Even against the most powerful champions, he’d found a way to grow in his power. It was like watching a master chef prepare the most decadent meal.

His mind twinged at that memory and he wondered who it had come from. There were too many personas feeding into the amalgamation to narrow it down, usually, but lately, one particular mind was coming to the forefront. He knew the intruder, and that familiarity bred purpose and resolve.

He wanted to be there to speak to the intruder when he made it to the end of the path. Until then, he had to hold on to his sense of self, to keep from being swept away in the current. The intruder would have to hurry, though, else it would be too late.

Then again, did it really matter who was at the forefront? They were all one, in the end.