Hives were common at low levels but were extremely rare at high levels. All the Rank 7 monsters Jade had fought were conquerors that could use Conquerors Spawn so Jade wondered what a Conqueror Hive monster would be like since they could already create undead.
The Rank 8 Hive horde was a completely different ball game. The undead were so many they covered up the horizon. There were Rank 7 undead that had a different job; none of them had the conqueror job.
In the Hive horde he fought he first defeated a Rank 7 Hive Paladin that had the job of Knight. The job allowed it to use the Knight’s Resolve privilege, which allowed it to improve its durability and stamina by leaps and bounds if it sacrificed an amount of en-code equal to the sum of the maximum en-code of the two stats for one minute.
The Paladin was the Rank 7 form of the Rank 5 Hive Gladiator, the Rank 6 form was Hive Knight. The Paladin held a spear and a shield and could use red, blue and violet aura, it was covered in a blue metal like exoskeleton.
Jade teleported to the center of the horde where the Rank 7s were and the Paladin, seeing Jade’s false Rank, Rank 3, didn’t activate its skill and just tried to cut Jade’s head off.
During Jade’s energy control training he had practiced both expanding his energy domain and compressing it. When Jade performed surprise attacks, he would compress his energy zone to the point where it was as small as a soccer ball centered on his head.
Since Rank 7 monsters could sense and understand energy and energy domains Jade had to compress his energy zone to help complement his false low Rank since the monster would still take him seriously if his energy zone was too large for a Rank 3.
The Rank 7 Hive Paladin completely bought Jade’s weakness hoax and attacked him without caution. This resulted in it losing its head to Jade’s True dream enhanced Ouki as Jade swiftly expanded his energy zone and beheaded it.
The other Rank 7 undead came to Jade’s location when they sensed his foreign energy zone. They attacked Jade and he fought them, after killing 3 out of the 12 Rank 7 undead the Rank 8 Hive Emperor Mind came to join the fight.
The mind’s psychic attacks were on another level, If Jade couldn’t sense psychic energy with his devices he would have been toast. The attacks were quick and subtle, each one was extremely deadly, and the coordination of the Rank 7s was on point.
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Sadly for the undead Jade started teleporting every which way, they couldn’t coordinate well for a while and Jade took advantage of it before they could get used to it. He killed the mind first and killed the Rank 7s afterward.
The other species of Rank 7 Hive undead Jade killed were: Hive Berserker, every one of them used orange aura to an extreme degree and each of them could create special weapons or limbs with weird abilities from the aura. They were the Rank 7 form of the four armed Rank 5 Hive Brawler and the Rank 6 Hive Barbarian.
Jade had seen this ability in other Rank 7 monsters that only had one color of aura; he called it Aura manifestation as it reminded him of his own True dream ability.
The last Rank 7 undead species were the Hive Beasts. None of them were similar and they had weird and unique abilities that required Biomass. Jade could not relate them to any lower Rank undead species.
All the Rank 7 undead had the Knight job. Apart from the Knight’s resolve skill, the Rank 7 undead, mostly the Berserkers had the Knight’s Fury privilege, which let them increase their strength and agility to an unprecedented degree in exchange for an amount of en-code equal to the sum of the maximum en-code of the two stats for one minute.
The Beast had the 3rd Knight Privilege. It was the Knight’s Talent privilege, which improved the user’s sense and biomass in exchange for an amount of en-code equal to the sum of the maximum en-code of the two stats for one minute.
The most surprising thing for Jade was that the Hive Emperor Mind didn’t have a job. His IP told him that Hive monsters didn’t get a job until Rank 11 because of their special abilities from the start.
After the undead horde Jade went on with eliminating the remaining Rank 8 hordes. For every horde he needed a plan of attack that could get him to defeat the Rank 7s before they got used to his teleportation.
Along the way Jade discovered that the Rank 7s that were not Conquerors were all Knights.
Jade spent 2 months eliminating the Rank 8 hordes and after that he trained until the en-code he acquired was all gone. The Rank 8 hordes were fewer than the Rank 7 hordes.
Jade then began to fight Rank 9 and Rank 10 monster hordes. The hordes were similar to the Rank 8 hordes as they had monsters with jobs at Rank 7, 8 and 9, the monsters were all Knights no exceptions.
Jade spent 2 months on the Rank 9 hordes and after that trained he with the acquired en-code. Now he was sitting before the first Rank 11 horde he was to face. The monsters were the weirdest he had ever seen, they were Elementals.
They were rocks and metals of various sizes and shapes that had glowing white patterns on their surface. From the few Rank 6s he killed while scouting he learned that they had 6 stats: Sense, Intelligence, Energy, Control, Tensile Strength and Biomass. Unlike the Rank 10 and below hordes this horde had no Rank 1 – 5 members. They were smaller than the other hordes as a result.
Jade picked them as his first Rank 11 horde because their abilities seemed simple, they could control the rocks or metal they were made from. Their anatomy was also simple in that they had cores at the center of their energy zone that acted as their one vital spot. And they had a relatively low population.