Essence entered him, and he almost leveled up to level 83. He only had a small amount left. As his level approached that of the monsters, the speed at which he gained more was rapidly slowing down, and that demon kill had barely given him enough to rank up. Then again, he was sharing essence with Edgar, so that might have been some of the reason behind it.
Jonathan sat down, resting for a moment as his beleaguered stamina pool replenished itself. Punching the monster into the ground had been tough, and it had been a decent enough fight. The demon probably had been in the upper echelons of the level range in the dungeon, and it had felt as if he was punching stone some of the time. However his gauntlets were more than enough to break through, and the corpse on the ground showed just how strong he had become.
By his earlier estimation, he was about halfway through Tier 1, in terms of necessary essence, and he hoped to be able to get to about level 85 by the end of the dungeon. The wave trial was coming up next, or, if he remembered correctly, perhaps it was something else. That trial had been marked as being a rare occurrence which meant that there was likely a different test waiting for him in the next area.
When Jonathan had recovered, he headed down to the tunnel, with Edgar following him. A few minutes later, as they neared the end of the passageway, they began to hear the sounds of fighting coming from below. Jonathan frowned. Perhaps it was the arena trial again.
However, the noises were too loud, and they seemed to be far more than just a few fighters involved. It was almost as if there was a battle going on down there. They reached the end of the tunnel a few moments later, and leaped down into the cavern beyond. Hundreds of monsters battled one another on a large field, trying to break past the enemy lines to reach a tower that stood in the far corners of the cave. Each army was surrounded with a different color of light, with one colored blue and the other red. It seemed that to win, one group had to break the other one’s tower.
As they entered the cavern, Edgar and Jonathan were surrounded by a blue glow, leaving them with no doubt as to what they were supposed to do here. In order to beat this trial, they would need to support their monster allies in getting to the other side.
Jonathan cracked his knuckles, and Edgar began to summon the wind to his hands, both men eager to get to work. A few seconds later, they were in the fray, pushing their way through the hordes of monsters. The ones marked with the same color of them were passive, and did not attack.
They neared the front lines a few minutes later, having had to push their way through the ranks. The monsters were all humanoids, but a few of them were more exotic than the others, with a motley crew of random monster archetypes present here. Jonathan recognized a few goblins and more than a few demons.
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His fists crackled with power as he neared the enemies, and he broke through the final rank of his army, leaping into a war zone. Monsters fought and died all around him, their lifeblood painting the ground red, and a host of other colors besides. Jonathan got to work immediately, battering the monsters in front of him with his fists. They were surprisingly tough, but he was still stronger and soon he had cleared out a space in the enemy army, allowing his allies to come in after him.
Edgar launched a powerful wind-based attack into the ranks from the sidelines, causing explosions of razor sharp guts to rip through the monsters. They rarely killed any of them, but they still injured the monsters readily enough.
Jonathan was soon lost in a world of his own, tearing through the hordes of creatures in front of him with wild abandon. His battle trance skill came to the front, and he soon sank into its embrace, using it to guide his movements. Impact joined his roster a moment later, the damage that his skills did skyrocketing within the blink of an eye. On his own, he broke through dozens of monsters, quite literally in some cases, painting the ground behind him with blood. However, he soon lost himself in the enemy ranks, and was surrounded, his monstrous allies too weak to follow him. Jonathan only grinned.
The monsters here seemed to be giving far less essence than they should have, given that they were more highly concentrated here than they were in any other part of the dungeon. However he would gain a level by the end of this, when all was said and done.
Jonathan channeled his mana and elemental energy into his hands, causing them to light up a moment later. With a grin, he leaped into the air above the nearby monsters’ heads, and came down like a purple tinged meteor, smashing skulls with his fists. The monsters around him were starting to thin, realizing that he was not a target worth wasting their strength on. Instead, they headed towards the enemy monster lines, as they had been doing originally.
Jonathan slipped through their ranks like this, and killed dozens of monsters on the way, eventually reaching the back of the cave. The tower stood in front of him, a thirty foot tall edifice of black rock. Jonathan launched himself at it, his hands burning with purple light. He started to slam his gauntlets into the stone, cracking it. As he did so, the monsters turned in unison, racing towards him as fast as their legs could carry them. His allies harried their back lines, but they ignored the assault, too fixated on Jonathan.
Jonathan kept slamming his hands into the tower, and with one final strike, imbued with as much power as he could it into his gauntlet, he broke through, shattering the tower with an explosion of light. The building had been much tougher than it had looked, which spoke volumes about his strength. Because of his lack of projectile skills in which he could dump a lot of mana, his destructive potential was limited, but he still carried a lot of strength within him. Behind him, the monster hordes froze, and started to crack apart into fragments of light that faded away into nothingness, leaving the cavern bare, save for Jonathan and Edgar.