Chapter 241: That’s Not Fair

Ten minutes was more than enough for him to recover all of the mana he expended.

The wave wasn’t hard, it had only taken a couple of minutes and that was with him being stingy with his mana usage.

However, one thing did bother him. Are all hard-difficulty challengers supposed to be able to beat ten Tier 3 monsters on their own?

Especially for the ones who don’t have Concepts yet, it was hard to see people like that being able to take on the wave he had just finished.

It just further assured him that there was some sort of personalized challenge for each individual. Otherwise, a wave like that last one wouldn’t make sense.

With that being said, that didn’t matter that much right now. At the moment he needed to keep focus on the next wave.

Thus he quickly finished the meat pie he was eating and got up to his feet before the ten minutes were up, making sure to dust any crumbs from his pants as he did.

Like he had expected the sixth wave was similar to the last one. There was another group of hobgoblins staring at him from below his vantage spot on the hill.

This time there was more than the previous ten, but not that much more. There were about fifteen of them this time.

That didn’t help them though. He plowed right through them just as easily as he did the last wave. He used the warrior hobgoblin’s shields to bash them into a bloodied pulp and took out the archers soon after.

It didn’t matter if they had five more hobgoblins. He wiped them out and watched as they faded into light.

Congratulations, Sixth Wave completed… Please wait ten minutes for the Seventh Wave.

Another ten minutes went by and he recovered all of his mana by the time a new crowd of monsters showed up below him.

The first thing he noticed was that the number of monsters remained the same, only fifteen of them.

But the more troubling thing he noticed after a moment was that one of the monsters had a Concept.

A monster who had a Concept versus one who didn’t showed a large difference in strength. Every Tier 3 monster he faced who had been strong, had a Concept of their own.

Thus, seeing the largest hobgoblin strutting up the hill toward him displaying signs of a Concept put him on guard. This one was slightly different not just because of its size or Concept, but because it was the first one he had seen that didn’t have an offensive weapon.

It only bore a large pavise-style shield off to the side with a single arm. The shield was practically the entire size of the monster and it looked very high quality.

A lot of the other weapons he had seen during the last wave while better than the previous ones, weren’t that impressive.

They were cheap weapons he saw all the time when he strolled down a market.

This one shield though, had a greenish-silver luster to it that pulsed with mana. The rest of the hobgoblins all had bows.

It seemed like the Challenge’s new curveball was to send a single strong frontliner to agress him while the rest of them would shoot from a safe distance.

Although, he doubted the effectiveness of this plan. He already had several ideas on how to deal with this new formation.

Hence, when he watched them stop at a relatively flat spot on the hill, he made his move before they could get in position to rain arrows at him.

He sent a volley of spikes at them, freezing the scary-looking frontliner as he did.

He did that for several reasons. For one, he wanted to test his willpower against it to see how well it would defend against it, and for two, he didn’t want the frontliner using some kind of defensive skill to protect them.

Fortunately, his technique worked and he was able to freeze the hobgoblin in its tracks and it could do nothing as his spikes soared toward the archers.

However, he was surprised to see not some sort of movement skill from them, but a barrier of mana appeared in front of them.

It appeared it came from a few archers who activated some kind of protective skill as they noticed the attack. Unluckily for them, they didn’t quite realize how strong his spikes were, even if they were only the size of a hand. Thus, the barrier was only able to hold for a few moments before the power from his constructs overwhelmed the barrier and shattered it like glass.

A few of his spikes made it through and exploded at the center of the group. Sadly, their trajectory was slightly changed due to their impedance, but he was still able to hurt a couple of them.

However, before he could send another volley, he heard a roar come from the goblin who he had pinned down. He felt a large surge of mana and then the kinetic energy he controlled around the hobgoblin seemed to break away.

He was slightly surprised by this development. The only way he had seen that technique broken was through using their willpower to prevent its influence.

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But now he was sure he had just felt the usage of a skill.

He had heard of skills like this before. In fact, Edgar had a skill just like it. In Edgar’s case, Julius believed that the older boy utilized his aura and his fire affinity to break down any obstacles in his path.

These ‘anti-debuff’ skills were usually for allowing a warrior to ignore movement control skills such as [Ice Chains] or [Earth Trap], or like Tia’s vines she used to control the battlefield.

Julius just didn’t think that this monster would have a skill like that. Not to mention something that would work on his own kinetic technique.

However, he also realized that the hobgoblin had used a lot more mana than Julius had used to immobilize it. Therefore, it was safe to say it wasn’t very mana-efficient.

That was why he did it again and made sure to send another volley at the archers while it was distracted.

This time around, the archers decided to split up among each other. Making sure he couldn’t hit multiple archers with a single attack.