Chapter 244: Resonating Burst

Julius pumped his fist through the air and checked the notifications he received with a smile.

[Armaments of the Arcane lvl 8 -> lvl 9]

[Barrier of Severance lvl 16 -> lvl 17]

It also felt good taking out all of those ants. Those things were menaces, especially when they were the size of a fully grown poodle.

He took a glance at his mana to see where it stood at and winced a little bit.

That last orb had taken a good chunk out of his mana. More than he had been planning to at least. But he also thought that it was a worthwhile endeavor. He now had a new way to create his constructed bombs.

Plus, he still had a good amount left over.

At Tier 2, he had a lot of mana for his tier, but now that he had advanced to Tier 3 it had gotten even larger. And while that advantage of having more mana than other people of his tier wouldn’t be as drastic as it once had been, it was still big.

While he was about to sit down and relax, he felt something shift around him.

It was like the entire rift had gripped him and then suddenly all he saw was blackness.

Thankfully, only a few moments went by like this until he was able to see again.

He was no longer standing on top of the hill. He was now standing in a very large closed cavern. The ceiling wasn’t that high and he was placed in the center of a massive bowl.

Okay, I suspected the rift wouldn’t like how I completed that last wave, but this is going too far. I am literally being put into a death pit, he complained.

At least the hill had given him some kind of positional advantage, but now he was literally in the center of a sloped bowl where he was the main target.

With that being said, he wasn’t just going to sit in the pit and let the wave start with him totally exposed. Nope, he would at least make his way toward the taller edges of the bowl.

Or he would have if he could.

Once he started to try to walk up the slope toward the other side, he felt something grab ahold of him. It was like someone had taken control of all of his limbs and he couldn’t move a single inch.

It was as if his own kinetic technique was being used against him.

He could only sigh in amazement. Was the rift really trying so hard to handicap him? What did he do? He couldn’t even reposition himself so he was in the worst place to be.

He found that he was able to move as long as he wasn’t actively trying to go to the top part of the slope. So instead, he just sat down and meditated. He might as well recover as much mana as he could.

He had a bad feeling that this next wave is going to be much more difficult than the last one and the ones before it combined.

***

Yep, I’m in deep shit, he thought to himself as he stared at the spawned horde in front of him.

Of course, the rift couldn’t have shown him some mercy and gave him another monster to fight. Nope, it must have sensed his revulsion because once again it sent another army of ants at him.

But for every ten of the weaker ants, he sensed at least one Tier 3 ant to go along with them.

To make it even worse, there had to be around half a dozen larger insects that stood out from the rest.

He would bet every piece of food in his storage ring that they had at least one Concept.

Yep, he was sure of it. The rift was out to get him, there was no way a normal Tier 3 would be able to handle all of these monsters. It was probably only due to his performance so far that it was doing this.

Stupid hard difficultly, why did it actually have to be this hard? Just because something was labeled ‘hard’ didn’t mean it really had to be.

He cursed the rift once more in his head.

He better be getting a good reward out of this once he finishes the Challenge. If he didn’t, he would actually try and permanently destroy this rift if all it gave him was a stupid shiny sword at the end of it.

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Once again, he wasn’t worried about dying or anything. The ants were scary, but they weren’t out of his expectations.

He was just certain that he wouldn’t get out of this one without using a lot of mana. It was too many opponents and there weren’t even ways for him to safely disengage to recover his mana.

There was no sky for him to hide or any way for him to lead them around the nose while he regenerated mana. He would be swarmed by all of these monsters pretty quickly.

Speaking of which, the stupid ants didn’t wait for him to act, they went after him the moment they spawned.

Julius could only sigh as he went in.

He wouldn’t be using his newly discovered bomb unless he needed to. He would try to take out these things in close combat to conserve as much mana as he possibly could.