Too Stubborn to Die

Book 4: Chapter 28

Aaron quickly dismissed the dungeon rankings as he continued toward the quest marker. Knowing that Johan was under Darius’ control was problematic to say the least. And for a moment, Aaron considered the value of going straight for him and hunting the undead creature.

It would no doubt be a lot easier to quickly deal with Darius' number one, and since the necromancer wasn’t on the rankings, he couldn’t be on the dungeon floor. His planetary rankings alone would put him in the top ten at the very least.

Not only that, but Aaron already had powerful mental defenses and figured himself the perfect fighter to take Johan on. But he didn’t know where he was. The only guide he had was the map maker leading him to the boss spawn, and his own quest objective in the eighth temple.

And he wasn’t about to go charging about aimlessly, hoping he bumped into the undead spawn.

He also had another thought. If undead Johan came here to hunt people, he would likely use the boss notifications as well. Although Aaron couldn’t know if he had the map Skill, and whether or not the undead version of Johan would have kept the Skill, even if he had it in the past.

And that’s if he is even here to make enemies. If not for Ernest, we might not even know about Johan…

Even if they were mortal enemies out for human blood, there was a decent chance that Johan and Darius would enter the dungeon just for the rewards on offer.

And killing Johan didn’t necessarily weaken Darius long-term. If he was willing to risk sending such a powerful asset off into the dungeon by itself, he likely had backup plans.

Hmm, well, if I see him, I take him out. But I don’t think it makes sense to forget everything else and chase after Johan unless perhaps Darius himself enters the dungeon floor.

There was also the fact that Ernest seemed to want to kill Darius back on their world. He really should have probed him on that. But it wasn’t something he wanted to discuss over global chat.

Just as he was considering all of this, Ernest popped up on the chat, telling everyone exactly what happened to Johan and warning them to keep clear.

With Ernest’s warning, Aaron refocused on the quest. As long as people knew the threat posed by the mind controller, hopefully, they could keep clear of him.

As Aaron flew toward his objective, a smile creased his face. It seemed that perhaps this dungeon floor had proven far more useful than he had expected. He had already made new alliances and might just get the opportunity to take out a serious threat or two.

Strange that they’re not working in a party, though.

Darius was still missing from the leaderboard. If he had been partied with Johan, he would have had to join the floor by now.

But his attention shifted as he neared the third temple. Even from outside of it, he could hear battle echoing out.

Let’s go see what’s going on in here.

Spotting the nearest entrance, Aaron rushed for it and quickly made his way through the maze-like corridors as he followed the quest marker.

Within moments, he found another huge chamber like the one that was in their temple, and dozens of aliens were floating about one side of the room, trapped in bubbles.

“Huh. Oookay. Interesting.”

It wasn’t just bubbles that piqued his curiosity, though. There was a huge robotic man wielding a shield and a glowing sword. And he had four heads, one where a head usually was, one head atop each of the machine’s shoulders, and another, which was really just a face, where its belly ought to be.

The machine reminded him of a mech, with rocket launchers on its back, and a body made of sleek, shiny metal plates, lined by air intakes. Even the sword and shield it wielded had a mechanical look, and both had cables running from beneath them into the machine.

Is he… human?

All four of the heads looked human, but fused into the machine.

Lance Taylor [ Level 101 ]

Titles: [ Head of the Snake ] [ Giant Slayer ]

Wait, Lance? He’s on the leaderboard….

It wasn’t just Lance who could be inspected, either. Each head had a name, level, and one title.

What’s more, he didn’t recognize the name, and his level wasn’t particularly high. And yet, he was doing a fine job of defending against attacks coming his way.

Aaron refocused on the rest of the battle. It was very similar to the fight he and his team had fought in their temple. Just like during their boss fight, there was a barrier created by a small army of shieldbearers, but unlike their fight, the boss was different.

Instead of shooting electrified balls at them, this boss had four arms, each holding a spear that could shoot out and extend over massive distances. And these spears were extending out and shooting across the room at lightning-fast speeds.

And yet, despite being well and truly out-leveled, this Lance fellow was perfectly countering the blindly fast attacks, using his shield to block them.

And behind him was the source of the bubbles.

Emmy Sharp [ Level 119 ]

Titles [ Tutorial Champion ] [ Behemoth Slayer ]

“Hey, I know that name! Yeah, I remember her for sure! That’s Emmy from the trials.”

Aaron thought back to the trials. He remembered speaking to the small girl who almost disappeared beneath the size of her cartoonishly large wizard hat.

He was impressed immediately. Neither of these two was in the top ten rankings, and yet their strategy was working perfectly.

Lance was on the defense, while Emmy waved her wand through the air, sending countless bubbles toward their enemy.

Her bubbles appeared to be the perfect counter to this foe. Similar to his Wraith Phase Skill, her bubbles seemed to exist as incorporeal entities, floating around like jellyfish. And these jellyfish-like bubbles reached the barrier, they passed straight through it.

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Perhaps it was because they weren’t real attacks, Aaron mused. There was something odd about the bubbles, and he sensed almost no energy concentrated in them at all. It was as if they were barely even there.

The bubbles weren’t particularly fast, but they didn’t need to be. The shieldbearers were fastened in place to hold up the barrier. Whenever one broke from the formation, their ability to feed energy into the barrier also seemed to break. And so the bubbles had a rather easy time gobbling up the shieldbearers.

Aaron watched for several seconds as dozens of shieldbearers were plucked off by the bubbles and began to helplessly float about.

A little unorthodox, but not bad.

As more and more shieldbearers began to float, some of the others broke formation and began popping the bubbles. It didn’t actually seem that hard to do so, but the sheer number of bubbles floating through the barrier was a problem. They just kept coming, and there was no way for the shieldbearers to save all of their comrades without breaking the barrier, and so little by little, they were being captured by Emmy’s Skill.

Meanwhile, the strange machine man with four heads continued to block the boss’ stabbing attacks with his shield, zapping about with decent speed. He wasn’t as fast as Aaron or Zero, but at least on par with Talia, which was fairly impressive, considering the level gap and the fact that he didn’t even remember seeing him in the trials.

Impressed by the display, Aaron actually felt a little bad about wanting to steal their kill. They were quickly dismantling the boss, and would soon be able to strike directly at it.

A moment later, the boss stopped attacking and seemed to order his shieldbearers to focus on defense while he popped the bubbles.

Now, Emmy alone had essentially turned the entire boss and all of its minions on the defensive, effectively putting all their efforts into trying to contain the bubbles and stop the barrier from failing, and she didn’t even look particularly worn out by it.

Dungeon Announcement!

The first boss of the Sixth Temple has spawned!

10 additional auction points rewarded to whoever gets the kill!

“Another one?” Aaron blinked at the distracting notification.

Dungeon Announcement!

The first boss of the First Temple has spawned!

10 additional auction points rewarded to whoever gets the kill!

“What, another?”

Two bosses with seconds of one another. It seemed people were really getting to work now…

Hang on a moment!

Suddenly, he had a feeling that he knew what was going on. If someone knew that there was an announcement for their temple’s boss being activated, and it made a quest marker, it made a lot of sense to wait until others started activating their boss fight before activating your own.

If anyone was waiting to take advantage of the situation and strike at a preoccupied group while they fought against their own boss, it would make perfect sense to wait until more bosses spawned before activating your own. That way, any unscrupulous dungeon divers would be preoccupied with other boss announcements.

But they wouldn’t want to wait long. The longer you took to spawn your own boss, the greater the chance that the previous one would be killed, drawing attention back to yourself.

Dungeon Announcement!

The first boss of the Fifth Temple has spawned!

10 additional auction points rewarded to whoever gets the kill!

“That has to be it.”

With a third boss spawning in less than a minute, Aaron was certain that he was onto something. Hell, they might have formalized the plan the moment Aaron and his team had activated their boss, or some might have even rushed to spawn their boss after seeing the notification for Emmy’s boss spawn.

That was fine. He didn’t really care about trying to steal everybody’s kills. It was more of an opportunistic thing, rather than something he was dead set on doing.

But the scenario did complicated things. If Johan was looking for a fight, he had a lot of places to go in search of one, and Aaron couldn’t cover all of the bases at once.

Oh, dammit. I'd better say something.

Aaron Dober: @Everyone, Look, you don’t have to trust me. But I’m extending an olive branch. If anybody is attacked by Johan, let me know. I’ll be there as quickly as I can be.

Whether anybody took him up on the offer or not, he didn’t really care. He just hoped that, at the very least, it would make Johan or Darius cautious about starting fights if they had to worry about him gate-crashing them.

With that out of the way, he glanced back at the group before him and their battle again.

He barely remembered Emmy or what she was like. But he didn’t remember having bad vibes around her, and he didn’t feel any now. He had come here to steal a kill, but he didn’t want to start making enemies with decent people, especially after what Raksha had said.

They might need allies in the future, and it was best to keep people he got good vibes from around, if possible. That way, if there were more distasteful people like Darius they needed to deal with, they could do so without weakening themselves too much.

Unfortunately, he had been standing around watching for far too long, and Emmy turned her gaze to him.

“Watch out, Lance! It looks like one of these idiots has come to steal our kill,” shouted Emmy Sharp.

“By himself?” Lance grunted. “Well, isn’t he a confident one?”

It was strange having all four heads of the machine man turn to him and glare at once. Aaron nervously looked across them all, not knowing who to look at.

“Eh, he thought we’d be easy while busy, huh? Well, I can easily keep this up. And with the boss busy, you can go all out.”

“Gotcha, “ Lance grinned, and lights started to flash across his mech body as if charging up.

“Hey, hang on! You don’t need to attack! You got it all wron—well, I mean,” Aaron swallowed as he searched for words.

They were kind of right. He had come to steal their kill. But he had a change of heart.

“Well, it’s complicate—”

“Shut that stuttering idiot up!” Emmy commanded.

“Hey! I’m not looking for enemies! I just kinda– I had a change of heart! Mate, c’mon. We don’t have to do this. I know Emmy. We met in the Shadow Trials!”

Aaron was, of course, completely ready to defend himself. But once a fight started, it wasn’t necessarily easy to end it without ending it. And he still got good vibes from these two.

“Super convenient to have a change of heart the moment we spot you. Sounds like cowardice.”

“Oh, for fuck sake. Sure, if you really wanna do this, then fine. But don’t say I didn’t try to stop you,” Aaron said, limbering up.

Lance just smiled and tilted his head back. And in an instant, a volley of missiles was launched from his back.

Aaron didn’t hesitate, dodging backward as the missiles exploded across the chamber, missing him by a decent distance. Some of them exploded into fiery destruction, but not all. A smoke screen was cast across the chamber, hiding the two dungeon divers from him.

“Huh? Not bad,” Aaron grunted approvingly. With his sight obstructed, he couldn’t make use of fate reading. Of course, that was only one tool in his arsenal, but still, he was impressed that someone he had thought far beneath him had so quickly disabled one of his powerful abilities.

He briefly considered turning to run. Just because they had attacked him didn’t necessarily mean it was wise to keep going.

But before he could follow through with his thoughts, a rain of bullets burst through the smoke, and following just behind were bubbles.

Aaron smirked. He was impressed by their tenacity, but would make short work of such an attack, and phased through the high velocity bullets, shooting his way.

But a moment later, he gasped in surprise as he looked down at his arms. Just like with the barrier, the tiny bubbles had somehow stuck him while phasing.

The attack didn’t hurt at all, but now he had little bubbles bound to his arms. And worst of all, they didn’t feel like bubbles. They felt far, far too heavy for that.

“What the fuck?”

Aaron shook his arm and smacked the bubbles, but when they popped, they just popped into smaller and smaller bubbles.

“Get off me!”

Nothing was working, and he looked up to see another barrage hurtling through the smoke very quickly.

Oh, bugger!

Aaron groaned as he dodged, not wanting to stay still and phase, worried he might pick up more bubbles. But mostly, he was annoyed that he might have accidentally made himself a new enemy.

“Hey! Quit shooting at me!” He yelled as he dodged, cursing to himself.

It was utterly frustrating. He remembered Emmy being a bit distant, but to attack him without a word?

“Emmy! It’s me! Aaron Dober! Remember? From the trials!”