Sam clenched his jaw and kept staring at the monsters on the opposite side of the gulf separating him from the outside world. If not for that canyon, then his city would have already been overrun. Perhaps it had been put there purposefully in order to facilitate this sort of struggle. The System loved conflict over all else, as it would allow people to grow stronger, and therefore presumably empower the System itself. Sam knew that the System Battery class existed, meaning that there was some sort of degree of energy that the System relied on. It seemed likely that it got most of that energy from the conquests of its users.
In any case, none of that mattered at the moment, and all that Sam could care about was the looming disaster of the Legion. He knew that he did not have a chance in hell of reaching a level at which he could compete with Hugo Mar safely before the Legion arrived, but he hopefully would be able to level up somewhat off the Legion commanders. And, if things went incredibly wrong, he always had his final skill to use. The Dao Juggernaut skill. Using it would likely result in his death, but if he managed to save his faction, then he would be happy. He knew that they had enough power to survive without him, although their standing on the world stage would probably diminish.
Sam shook his head and began to run towards the place where he had last seen one of the cyclops ghosts climbing up, a small lip of rock about a mile down the side of the canyon. He reached it in less than a minute, and found the creature surging through the trees, its ghostly form barely visible among the shadows.
Sam quickly pulsed his Elemental Sight, and found that the monster was now rendered in a stark white shade, and was quite easy to spot now. The monster lumbered through the trees like a strange blob of white, and as Sam neared, it started to pick up the pace.
He quickly reached its back leg, and repeating the strategy that he had used before, he severed its achilles tendon with a single Dao infused smash from his hammer. Or rather, he tried to. A strange tendril of white light reached up from the ground in front of him and blocked his hammer.
His attack broke the tendril, but most of its momentum had been leached away, and when it hit the monster, it barely put a dent in its skin. Sam realized that this ghost had likely been one of the cyclops mages that he had seen before, and he cursed. This would be a hard fight. Even without the advantage of its corporeal body, the monster was still incredibly powerful, and its magical abilities lent themselves well to its incorporeal nature. It did not need to use any sort of physical might, as it was able to manipulate the world around it with its magical abilities.
Sam jumped backwards as another tendril of light whipped at him, this one tipped with a long serrated blade of ectoplasm. Although it looked like a bad special effect from a movie, he knew that it would still hurt a lot if it managed to hit.
Sam ducked under the follow up blow and ran towards the monster’s leg, succeeding in reaching it before it could muster any sort of defense. Slamming his hammer into the monster’s leg, he was rewarded with a screech of pain.
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The creature jerked its foot away, and Sam almost fell as he overcompensated for his motion, trying to plant his hammer in the monster’s leg once more. A tendril wrapped around his body like a snake, and lifted him up into the air. Sam struggled, and as he saw the cyclops turning around to punch him with its ghostly hand, he quickly activated all of his enhancement abilities, managing to break out of the tendril in an explosion of red and blue as his mana and Dao energy destroyed the incorporeal construct.
A moment later, he was on the ground, running towards the monster in front of him with such speed that only the monster was visible in his field of view, with everything else merely a blur. He raised his hammer above his head as he ran, weaving around tendrils of ectoplasm as he went.
Sending his power straight into the hammer, Mjolnir began to glow with a blinding red light. The cyclops tried to back off, but Sam was already too close, and he leaped the last dozen feet, arching his back to gain maximum power. Slamming it down on the creature's foot, he blasted it apart, causing the monster to stumble forwards. This time, Sam knew what to expect, and he ran out of the way before the monster could land on him.
The creature crashed to the ground, with a loud noise but no actual physical impact. Its body was skewered by trees, but none of them seemed to do it any harm. Sam shook his head, trying not to get distracted by the nature of his opponent. It was interesting to examine different species of monsters and their abilities, but not in the middle of a fight.
As the creature started to clamber to its feet, Sam dashed around its bulk, reaching its head. The only way to kill this thing, as far as he knew, was to completely destroy its head. As Sam reached the monster’s head, he began to empower his hammer again. With the effects of all of his boosts, such as from his armor and his skills, the blow landed like a meteor, blasting apart the monster beneath it.
The cyclops roared, and swiped out with its left hand, managing to clip Sam. The area that it struck instantly went numb, and he cursed. The monster used that distraction to get up, and a forest of writhing tendrils of light began to grow from the ground. The monster grew dimmer as it did this, but it hardly mattered, seeing as Sam could not hope to evade the tendrils and fight the monster at the same time.
Sam gritted his teeth and stared up at the cyclops, surrounded by twisting towers of white. Clenching his jaw, he raced forwards, eking out every last bit of his martial ability that he could. For the first time in a while, Sam began to draw upon his natural abilities with blunt weapons, and insights that had been suppressed started to pour in like rain.He had been using his weapon for long enough to build up quite the stockpile of knowledge as well, and it had been waiting this entire time for him to merely pick it up.
He could feel himself ascending the tiers of his Weapon mastery rapidly, and he started to become one with his hammer as he dashed through the field of tendrils. Using the hammer as a counterbalance, Sam wielded the weapon with more skill than he had ever mustered before, fighting not just with the monster in front of him,but with his own limits.
As he transcended his prior boundaries, Sam began to push on the limits of what his weapon imprint could give him, and he soon discovered a wealth of information beyond anything he had ever seen before. At some point within this journey, he briefly became one with his weapon, in a way that he had never experienced before. The feeling disappeared instantly, but he was left with a profound connection to his hammer that he had been unaware of until now.