Chapter 178

The east gate, the monster gate, opened first. The thing that slithered out looked like the result of a jellyfish, a grizzly bear, and a python having an ecstasy-fueled orgy in a pool full of green jello. It was huge, probably twenty feet long from the tip of its snout down to the tentacle-laden tip of its tail. Its skin was a mottled blue and green pattern and hung loose on its frame, so loose in fact that great folds of it hung draped off its shoulders. It walked on six legs, each one with more tentacles on the backsides and ending in great, razor-tipped claws.

Its neck was easily six feet of its length, and the creature waved it around slowly as it surveyed the humans gathered overhead. The tentacles hanging off its face were three feet long, longer by far than the six-inchers on its legs or the foot-longs hanging from its chest. They stirred in agitation as the noise increased and started lashing back and forth like an angry cat’s tail.

“Well, that is pretty fucking ugly,” Zea said, though Luke could barely hear her over the fervor of the crowd.

[Analyze] told him it was a venomous gleesing constrictor at an impressive level 40. Its stats were all in the low 30s, except for its stamina at 51, and most of its skills seemed to revolve around either some sort of awareness the tentacles hanging all over its body granted or one of half a dozen different poisons its touch could inflict. It also sported a random skill or two that enhanced its teeth and claws, but it looked to Luke like the monster’s primary method of attack was to close the distance, engulf its prey in the flabby folds of its body, and poison it to death.

If it were him fighting, Luke expected he’d have a lot of difficulties with this one. Even with his mace, the monster’s longer tentacles gave it a better range, and its relatively low perception was balanced by the insane number of tentacles reading changes in the air around it gave it a full view in every direction, possibly at a limited range.

Melee fights definitely favored the monster, and a good strategy would revolve around finding some way to disable or destroy the tentacles hanging all over its body. Or, in Luke’s case, a [Burst Step]followed by a [Power Strike] right to its face to bring it down in one blow would likely be the optimal strategy. He’d rely on his overwhelmingly high stamina to resist any poisons he was struck with and recover from any damage. [Life Surge] would be his back up for the possibility that he couldn’t kill it in a single hit and started to get overwhelmed by the tentacles stinging him.

He was more curious how the mysterious Spectacle planned on handling it, though. The west gate had finished rising, and he heard footsteps coming from inside it.

Spectacle appeared across from the gleesing constrictor. He, and it was definitely a he, was wearing a skin-tight body suit that had to be enchanted in some way. There were no ties or buttons on it, and as far as he could tell, nobody in Aros knew what a zipper was. Spandex was another unknown concept to them, and Luke couldn’t see another way to stuff a human body into something that tight without resorting to magic.

The suit covered his entire body, right up to the crown of his head. The man’s face was the only part of his body that the suit didn’t cling to every contour. There was just enough extra material that everything between the nose and the chin appeared as one smooth plane. The eyebrows to the cheekbones were similarly flat. Luke almost wondered if there was some kind of mask built into the inside of the suit causing the effect, considering that he could count the man’s abs and had a pretty good estimate of the size of his dick.

Spectacle held a curved long sword in one hand, almost a katana, but with a regular cross guard instead of one of those all-the-way-around guards the ninjas and samurai in tv shows always had. It was unsheathed, a black blade that looked like it was carved from one solid length of obsidian with electric green veins running down its side.

[Name: Hakiro Shansaron]
[Level: 48]
[XP: 400872/411260]
[AP: 0]
[Strength: 51]
[Agility: 77]
[Stamina: 64]
[Perception: 59]
[Skills:]
[Blade Master (5)]
[Archery (4)]
[One Sword, One Mind (5)]
[Tapestry of the World (5)]
[Unbreakable Will (5)]
[Executioner (3)]
[Shining Strike (3)]
[Spirit Tap (3)]
[Ignite (2)]
[Bone Sunder (2)]
[Aura Flare (3)]
[Quick Shot (2)]
[Deadly Reach (2)]
[Empower Arrow (2)]
[War Leader (4)]
[Wind Seeker (2)]
[Eledarn (3)]
[Consortium Standard (3)]
[Animal Husbandry (3)]
[Sewing (1)]
[Carpentry (2)]
[Dancing (4)]
[Calligraphy (4)]
[Cartography (2)]
[Blacksmithing (1)]
[Hunting (3)]

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Luke breathed out. His words were drowned in the cheering of the spectators, but Zea saw the look on her face.

“What is it?” she yelled.

He shook his head. There was no way they could hold a conversation right now, not while the crowd was losing their shit over this guy. Luke was pretty sure Spectacle was even stronger than Lath, but unless someone was regularly purging him of XP Madness, he was a ticking time bomb. And a lot of those combat skills were advanced skills made by merging other base skills together, then ranked up to max again. [Tapestry of the World], for example, was something Luke himself might one day pick up, since it combined a lot of sensory abilities into one package, merged it with an analogue of his own [Tactical Foresight] skill, and then kicked the prediction power up to max.

This guy was literally seeing the future, at least a second or two ahead, and that was just one of his advanced skills. [Wind Seeker] put Luke’s own [Burst Step] to shame with its ability to go in any direction, make instant turns, and weave through obstacles, and Luke was willing to bet it was faster both on its own and due to Hakiro’s higher agility. Strength also played a large part in maximum speed, but Luke wouldn’t bet on himself in a race.

He got more and more nervous as he pored over the skill store and identified each ability. If Hakiro decided to kill every single person in the arena right now, there was nothing Luke or anyone else could do to stop him. It really drove home exactly what the difference was between someone like Luke who’d picked up all his skills through AP and someone who’d actually devoted their life to mastering those skills could do. Luke was only 5 levels behind, but he’d need probably 1000 AP to catch up to Hakiro.

It also drove home exactly how powerful his bloodline was. [Inflict Status] for 200 AP and [XP Reset] for another 50 were all Luke needed to crush Hakiro instantly, without any sort of difficulty whatsoever. Nobody would be able to stand up to that in a straight fight. Nobody besides a demon, anyway.

They spent the next five minutes watching Spectacle live up to his namesake. He tumbled like an acrobat and subjected the gleesing constrictor to the death of a thousand cuts. Tentacles were lopped off one at a time as Spectacle expertly danced around the edge of the monster’s range. It really was a dance, too, with the man leading the monster in a game of give and take, their positions looping around each other in a dizzying display of coordination.

Spectacle knew this monster inside and out. He knew how it thought, how it would react, and how far he could push it. He led it around by the nose, and by the time he was ready to go in for the kill, Luke was over the whole show. It was flashy as all hell, but while Spectacle might take half an hour to kill the monster, Hakiro could have done the deed with a single blow delivered so fast it would take a high-speed camera to measure the microseconds the attack took.

The fans ate it up, and Luke could see why. [Analyze]returned most of them between level 15 and 20, with only a few of the stronger ones reaching 30. The strongest person, besides Spectacle, Zea, and himself, was an enforcer at level 34 on the other side of the pit near the betting cage. To them, the whole thing was probably a dazzling show.

The noise steadily grew more deafening as the fans cheered and started pounding their heels on the stone. It was so loud, in fact, that none of them noticed the sound of the stone cracking, not until the first screams cut through the cheering at least. Things started to fall apart almost immediately as huge, writhing flat tentacles a foot wide broke through the floor all over the arena. A dozen of them shot straight up through the crowd and started flailing around wildly.

A hundred people died in those first few seconds. Each tentacle was over twenty feet tall, and all of them swept the crowds around them. People who were hit somehow stuck to the green tentacles and were dragged across the stone or slammed into the next person. Explosive showers of blood erupted all throughout the stands.

Luke recognized them immediately. Those were the tongues of one of those tongue fucker demons blown up to mammoth proportions. Each one was twenty or thirty times thicker than it was supposed to be, and there were so many of them already wreaking havoc in the cavern. More kept erupting from the stone and blindly flailing around. Anyone who got caught died in seconds.

“Time to go!” Luke yelled over the screaming. He grabbed hold of Zea, held her tight, and leaped over the heads of the panicked audience as they jostled each other in an attempt to break free of the crowd.

The tongues continued their bloody harvest, but Luke got far away before any new ones could surface near him. He managed to touch down in an empty spot near the outer edge of the crowd, but it was only empty because a new tongue was rising up there. Before it could begin its attack, he activated [Burst Step] and lunged for one of the exit tunnels.

An enforcer was there, struggling to help his partner get free from a tongue tentacle’s grasp. Whether it was some function of the slimy coating that glistened on its surface, a weird skill, or just plain magic, Luke didn’t know, but somehow anything the tongues touched just stuck to them. Worse, as they started flailing, people just turned into shivering cuts of meat that fell apart into bloody piles.

The good news was that, as strong as the tongues were, they weren’t insurmountable. The free enforcer was managing to hold the tongue still from flailing via the grip he had on his partner, though Luke could tell just from the expression on the man’s face that it was a painful experience.

Luke set a stunned Zea down and turned towards the tongue. She staggered a step, caught her balance, and muttered, “I think I’m going to throw up.”

“Not now,” Luke said. “Get down the tunnel. I’ll follow you out as soon as I take care of this.”

[Power Strike] surged down his arm and Luke blurred forward to strike the tongue at a spot about four feet off the ground. Chunks of… not meat, but something wet and gloppy that Luke didn’t have a word for, blew out the side of the tongue and it curled up on itself.

The enforcer got his friend free, and Luke shoved the two of them toward the exit, but all three froze at the same time. Zea was standing about ten feet from the mouth of the tunnel, staring in horror as six new tongues broke through the stone and shot straight up to pierce the ceiling, then flailed in place. Chunks of stone came crashing down, and Zea scrambled backward with a shriek.

“Oh fuck,” Luke said. “That’s not good.”

They were trapped.