In Maria’s mind, the mastermind that was behind her current predicament was a complete psychopath who had an abnormal fixation with bombs and explosives. She kept on cursing the guy while she floated around. The ticking noises she heard earlier seemed to be following her because no matter how far away she moved from her previous location, the noise never went away.
She didn’t believe that the explosive traps were following her, so the only conclusion she could draw was that everywhere inside of the fog had been rigged with explosives. The only reason she hadn’t triggered them earlier was because they hadn’t been activated yet.
Maria found it extremely vexing that the person behind the traps had only been playing around with her earlier. He was now being serious about his plan to trap and kill her, but the feeling that she had been toyed with was extremely unpleasant. She had never landed herself in a situation like this before, so Maria didn’t know how to get out of it. It was the first time she learned what a Formation Master was and what formation arrays were.
In conclusion, Maria deduced that the Formation Master class was definitely a unique class that specialized in laying down large-scale traps that could be used in many different situations. She thought that if a Formation Master was utilized properly in a war, they could easily turn the tides of battle or even the entire war itself on their own.
She didn’t mean to brag, but Maria viewed herself as having the strength of an entire army, yet this ‘army’ was being toyed around with by a single person. It was certainly maddening, but she couldn’t help appreciating the person who had pushed her this far. However, this didn’t mean that she wanted to recruit the person or anything. No, it was the exact opposite. She wanted to dismember the crazy yet daring fellow who dared to put her through all of this and kill him back until he was level one if she could.
“Once I get my hands on you, don’t expect to receive an easy death, you dumb bastard.”
Maria tried attacking the ground again to see if her attacks would trigger the explosions and they unfortunately did, though it was an outcome she had expected, so just before the explosion happened, she quickly took to the air and avoided it.
When she looked back down to see how wide the explosion was, it was actually pretty small, but since there were multiple traps underneath the ground, the explosions amplified each other, causing a massive one to ensue. Whoever had trapped her really wasn’t playing around. Maria could tell that the person had meant to kill her and not only entrap her, however, they were wrong to believe that she would die from such a petty gimmick.
Naturally, Zhuge Lan didn’t think he could kill Maria with his formation array. He only did this to stall Maria until his Master arrived to finish her off. By the time Hecate arrived, he was certain that Maria would be too exhausted to fight, so it would be easy pickings for his Master.
It really was a damning ploy, but Zhuge Lan had no other choice. The power that Maria displayed in the video his colleagues had sent to him made him believe–to his displeasure–that the Dire’s Empress was already much stronger than his Master. He didn’t know how Maria could have grown so fast in the period of time that wasn’t too short or too long since her last encounter with his Master on Planet Gaia’s Realm of War battlefield.
Zhuge Lan knew that his Master, Hecate, had an incredible growth speed that was pretty hard to fathom, but it was evident enough that Maria’s growth rate trumped that completely.
“How frightening…even though she’s been hit by so many explosive dolls and faced the brunt of the chain explosions caused by them, she’s hardly even fazed at all…” Zhuge Lan mumbled to himself as he spied on Maria through a glass ball.
It was his unique class item that allowed him to control and see everything that was happening inside of his formation arrays. With this item, he had been tracking Maria’s movements from the moment she entered his Inescapable Formation Array. He had a few other arrays stacked on top of his Inescapable Formation Array, such as his Nine Gates Array and Stone Sentinel Array, but he didn’t see the need to use them just yet.
Zhuge Lan had only stacked them onto his Inescapable Formation Array just in case Maria was able to forcefully break through his first entrapment array. He had backup plans on top of his backup plans. He needed to take these drastic precautions because the person he was facing right now was none other than Maria, the Dire’s Empress and quite literally, the most famous poster girl of Unitale.
Although Maria seemed to be in a pickle right now as she had no idea how to get out of the first formation array he had set up, Zhuge Lan saw earlier how Maria had suddenly began unearthing the ground for his formation array keys and was even able to accurately pinpoint their locations before he activated the second level of his Inescapable Formation.
Despite it being sheer luck on Maria’s part when she found the first formation array key, Zhuge Lan didn’t believe that it was merely coincidence and luck that helped her realize the existence of the formation array keys. He believed that Maria had definitely found a way because, even now, after she had been distracted by the exploding dolls, she was still looking around the area for anything peculiar that could hide a formation array key.
Not many people would be able to deduce this after finding just a single formation array key. In fact, normal players wouldn’t even be able to find one because it was impossible to use [Inspect] on a formation array item and gleam its details like Maria did. All they would see is a description filled with insignificant information about a broken item.
The reason why Maria was able to gleam the details of the formation array key was because of her subclass [Blood Empress], which boosted the level of her [Inspect] skill to the maximum value. It was thanks to her subclass [Blood Empress] that Maria was able to freely inspect all of the high-grade NPCs of her territory and the extremely valuable materials and items she had either gathered, obtained, or plundered.
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Zhuge Lan was right to trust his gut feeling because, just as he suspected, Maria was indeed flying around and searching for the formation array keys that were spread through the area where he had set up his formation arrays. Even though his gut feeling was right, he wasn't too happy because this meant Maria had figured out one of the most important aspects of his formation arrays.
“Dammit, how did she find out? The keys, if broken, should only appear as a broken item with no use to them! How was she able to find out that they were important and linked with my formation arrays?!”
Zhuge Lan cried every time he saw one of his precious items being broken by Maria. Those items were extremely expensive and hard to craft. The amount of money and effort he had spent on setting up his formation arrays was incalculable, but Maria was destroying it all in front of his eyes.
“I can’t let her keep doing this! I’m activating the Stone Sentinel Array!”
He no longer thought about it any further and immediately activated the strongest array in his arsenal. Once he activated the array, Maria immediately saw a change as the fog began to further dissipate as the earth began to rumble. Stone walls began to rise up from the ground and Maria was bewildered at everything that was happening.
“W-What the heck is going on? Is the person behind this trying to trap me in a cage?”
Once the stone walls formed, they began to wriggle as stone soldiers of varying classes and ranks began to emerge from the walls.
“!”
The stone soldiers immediately raised their weapons at Maria and charged at her in a coordinated fashion. Without a moment’s hesitation, Maria quickly woke up Cali and told her to transform. Cali had been asleep in her spiritual form since Maria couldn’t just carry her around in such a dangerous trap, but she immediately woke up when she heard her mother’s call and transformed into her battle-axe form.
Maria charged up her swing and activated [Calamity Cleave] before slashing out at the stone soldiers that were charging at her. They were quite durable, but they easily fell to Maria’s attack. She bisected all of the stone soldiers within her weapon’s reach and switched Cali into her bow-and-arrow form. She began shooting divine energy arrows at the stone wall that was trying to produce more stone soldiers and broke it down.
“Hmph, this isn’t so hard!”
With those words which were quite literally a flag that she shouldn’t have raised, the broken wall repaired itself almost instantaneously and started to produce more stone soldiers again.
“...Dammit.”
Maria immediately resumed battle and crushed any of the soldiers that appeared from the wall. Although she was busy dealing with the problem in front of her, Maria wasn’t oblivious to what was happening around her.
Other than the stone wall in front of her, more walls began to appear around Maria at an alarming rate until, finally, she was completely surrounded by them. If someone were to look down at Maria’s location, they’d notice that the walls had collectively formed into a large, complex maze with her at the center of it.
Although she wanted to try and break free from the skirmish, Maria wasn’t able to, as the stone soldiers continued to appear and with each wave, they grew stronger and stronger. Once the stone maze had been completed, the stone soldiers stopped appearing from the walls and after taking care of the last one, Maria was left by herself in the middle of an enclosure with only one way out.
“...”
Even though she knew that the exit was actually an open invitation from whoever trapped her here to go into the maze, Maria had no choice but to accept it because she wasn’t willing to stay where she was like a stubborn idiot.
“Tch, I swear to god…I’ll murder you so hard that…AGGGHHHH!!!”
Maria’s blood pressure soared through the roof and she forgot how to formulate words as anger overwhelmed her entire being. She tried destroying the walls, but just like before, they were repaired almost instantaneously. The timeframe from the wall being broken down to it repairing itself was so quick that Maria couldn’t find any precise moment to jump through the broken wall without getting herself stuck in it mid-jump.
Since it wasn’t possible to destroy the walls, she decided to look for the exit the old-fashioned way. Unfortunately for her, the ground was still rigged with explosives as the annoying ticking sound still hadn’t disappeared. She let out an exasperated sigh before she started hovering forward. Flying wasn’t an option because no matter how long she ascended, the stone wall would ‘follow’ her upwards. The trap was really thorough so Maria decided to just give up entirely on trying to fly out.
“...Okay, let’s be patient, Mary…You can do this, slow and steady. The trap can’t harm you, so let’s slowly work things out and escape!" Maria said to herself optimistically.
There was actually an incredibly simple method that Maria could use to escape the formation and that was by using one of her overpowered combination skills. Any one of them could completely decimate a portion of the array that Zhuge Lan had set, but Maria didn’t do this.
Even though she was extremely vexed, Maria didn’t go with the obvious and sure-fire way to escape the trap. The reason why she allowed herself to be trapped in the array for so long was because Maria found it interesting. This was the first time she had encountered a Formation Master and was trapped by a formation array, so she wanted to thoroughly experience it. The person was her enemy, so Maria wanted to learn all she could about the Formation Master’s skills and the full extent of the formation arrays’ abilities.
She still wasn’t satisfied with the experience yet, so Maria continued to ‘happily’ wander around the formation array, trying to learn as much as she could before the owner figured out her true intentions.