The Bull shuddered and coughed out its last breath as I returned my pistols to their holsters. A part of me was somewhat disappointed at the Bull’s death. With a little more persuasion, I might have made it into an ally of mankind. Ultimately, Hellman’s intervention was probably for the best, however. If the Bull had kept attacking us, I didn’t like our chances.
Hellman smiled widely as he jumped off the Bull’s back and landed on the bricks below. “Excellent. The Threshold Guardian’s dead. All we have to do now is find the Star Child.”
Good luck with that, Hellman.
“Thanks for the help,” I said, resisting the urge to fall to the ground. The difference between a level 5 and a level 25 was stark. Without the Esotech pistol, Carlos and I would have been lucky to deal any significant damage to the Bull, but Hellman was able to cut into the monster’s spine with a single swing.
“That was impressive,” Hellman said as he sheathed his sword. “Most Awakened at your level would have died immediately against a Tier I Boss. Usually, you need four level 10s to take out one of the initial Threshold Guardians, but you guys were able to reduce it to less than half its MDC.”
I noticed something in Hellman’s expression that caused my hair to stand on edge. He was suspicious about something.
“Half!?” Carlos interjected with an offended tone of voice.
In the excitement of persuading the Bull and witnessing Hellman fall from the sky, I had temporarily lost track of the others. I looked over and saw Liz and Carlos leaning against the wheel-well of my car. Blood had completely suffused Carlos’s shirt, turning it a dark shade of red. His face was pale, and his expression was tight with pain. For her part, Liz also seemed to be in a great amount of pain, though she looked uninjured. She must have been undergoing [Draconic Integration], I thought.
“I stabbed it through its neck and Vincent dropped a damn building on it to only take out half of its MDC!?”
“Was it an SDC building?” Hellman asked with a wry smile on his face.
“Yeah,” I answered.
“Well, that’s where you went wrong.”
“Liz, please heal him,” I said once I realized that the blood flowing from Carlos’s wounds was not stopping. Panic quickened my speech as I realized the rate of his blood loss.
“Yeah,” Liz said through gritted teeth. She placed a hand on Carlos’s shoulder and chanted the activation phrase for her ability. “Heal!”
Immediately, Carlos’s bleeding stopped, and the multiple puncture wounds marking his body began to rapidly knit closed. He quietly groaned in pain as the forceful and unnatural alteration of his flesh activated his pain receptors wherever it occurred.
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“The [Blood Loss] condition,” Hellman said sympathetically, “that’s a killer.”
“Before you go,” I said quickly, jumping on the opportunity to learn more from Hellman before he left, “I want to know more about the Revelation System.”
“Sure,” Hellman said with a shrug. “I should probably tell you guys about the level cap?”
“Level cap?” I asked.
“It takes a while for the Revelation System to become fully integrated on a planet. For now, everything, monsters and Awakened alike, are capped at level 25. This is the case everywhere except for our ship, Genesis, since that was taken from a fully-integrated planet. With the help of Genesis, this planet will be fully-integrated within a year, and the level cap will be increased to 100. Every four months, the level cap will increase by 25 levels.”
That explained why Hellman was only level 25. He was probably a much higher level, but the level cap limited him.
I asked several questions in quick succession, hoping to elicit from Hellman an answer before he left again. “But I have to wonder, what’s the end goal here? What’s the purpose of the Revelation System? Is our goal to beat the Conquering Horde, or do we just have to clear the dungeons? How many monsters are in a [Greater Dungeon]?”
“Hold on, give me a second,” Hellman said, holding up a hand to ward off my questions. “Our goal is to survive, and there’s only one way to do that. If the naskaloids - that’s what we call members of our species, by the way - are going to survive for very long, we need to kill the Elder Gods.”
I grimaced in pain as he spoke those words. Killing a group of entities that were worshiped as gods would not be easy.
Hellman continued. “At some point, somewhere between ten and sixty years in the future, the Elder Gods will appear on this planet. Last time, we didn’t even bother fighting them. Trust me, I was there. We knew we weren’t ready, so we ran. The higher-ups promised we’d fight this time, but who knows what will happen.”
He crossed his arms and looked into the sky thoughtfully for a moment before continuing. “As for the [Greater Dungeons], they’re our biggest threat until the Elder Gods show up. The [Greater Dungeons] and their lords join forces with the Elder Gods when they arrive, so the [Greater Dungeons] have to be dealt with before then. In terms of number, no one has any idea how many monsters live in a single [Greater Dungeon]. There are typically hundreds of [Greater] monsters living in the depths of a dungeon, and some predict that each [Greater Dungeon] has more than a hundred thousand [Lesser] monsters.”
The thought of a hundred thousand Uruks working as a single unit, controlled by a single lord, weighed down on my psyche. “So you’re telling me there are millions of them?”
A sardonic, mirthless smile creased Hellman’s face. “There are millions in the [Greater Dungeons] alone. If you count the monsters in the [Lesser Dungeons], those that roam the surface, and those that live in the starships above, there are billions of them. For now, they are weak because of their lack of cohesion, but the appearance of the Elder Gods will unify them. If we have any chance of winning, we’ll need to kill them all before their overlords arrive.”
“Billions,” I said, blowing air out of my mouth. “How many fighters are there in the Coalition of Light?”
“Much less than that. There are about 2.5 million naskaloids aboard Genesis. Of them, fifty thousand are soldiers.”
I tried to imagine the size difference between fifty thousand and several billion, but it was impossible. There was such a difference that I simply couldn’t visualize it.
There was one advantage to Hellman’s explanation, at least. I now understood why they were called the “Conquering Horde.”