Chapter 81: [81]: The Obsidian Slaughter, The Empathy Glitch
The Midnight Continent didn’t have a sun, but Levi didn’t need light to know exactly what he was doing. He had a scythe, an infinite teleport, and an Anomaly acting as his personal artillery cannon.
The canyon was a massive, jagged scar cutting through the obsidian landscape. Glowing blue flora clung to the black rock walls, casting a dim, eerie light over the ground. It was the perfect hunting ground. The area was absolutely crawling with Level 55 Void-Touched Hounds and the slightly weaker, but still terrifying, Level 52 Shadow-Stalkers.
Levi and Isolde quickly settled into a flawless, mechanical combat loop.
"Stay by the wall," Levi instructed, spinning the Sovereign’s Deathknell in his hands. "You are the artillery. I am the executioner. You do not stop casting until the target hits twenty percent health. If they target you, I will intercept. Got it?"
"Affirmative. Artillery protocols engaged," Isolde replied. Her untextured gray cloak didn’t even flap in the ambient wind.
Levi cracked his neck and went to work.
He didn’t pull one or two monsters at a time. The XP multiplier was capped at its maximum value for anything over a fifteen-level gap. He wanted volume.
"Hollow’s Traverse!"
Levi burned 50 Mana. His body dissolved into a tunnel of dark light. He completely bypassed the physical space of the canyon, blinking thirty meters forward and appearing right in the middle of a mixed pack of eight monsters. Four Hounds, four Stalkers.
They all snarled, turning their glowing purple eyes toward him.
"Hollow’s Ward!" Levi shouted.
The swirling, pitch-black dark-matter shield erupted around him, locking into place with exactly 1,505 HP. He didn’t use it because he planned on standing still; he used it to absorb the glancing blows. Grouping eight high-level mobs meant the hitboxes overlapped. Perfect evasion was physically impossible.
"Hollow’s Guillotine!"
The Gold-tier scythe flared with a blinding, dark-gold aura. Levi ripped the blade in a massive ten-meter-wide cone that smashed into the entire pack.
The damage itself was pathetic. The suppression penalty was sitting at 95% against the Level 55 Hounds and roughly 80% against the Level 52 Stalkers. The heavy red numbers that floated up were barely in the double digits. But the damage didn’t matter.
The Gold-tier debuff triggered perfectly. A broken shield icon popped up over all eight monsters, shredding 20% of their defense.
"Now!" Levi yelled.
Isolde didn’t hesitate. She pointed her basic wooden staff at the pack. Because she was a God-fragment, she completely ignored the suppression penalty.
[-5,000 True Damage] [-5,000 True Damage] [-5,000 True Damage]
The corrupted red text exploded over the monsters’ heads. Isolde blasted them with back-to-back Anomaly strikes, chunking massive holes into their 60,000 and 40,000 health pools.
The monsters freaked out. The massive bursts of True Damage completely scrambled their aggro tables. Two of the Void-Touched Hounds ignored Levi entirely and sprinted directly toward Isolde.
Levi didn’t let them pass. He blurred into their path, swinging a wide, horizontal basic attack.
The jagged blade of his scythe caught both hounds across the legs. The damage was practically zero, but the weapon’s passive applied instantly. The tiny bleeding teardrop icon appeared over their heads, ticking for 5 true damage per second.
In Starfall’s engine, damage-over-time effects that bypassed armor generated ridiculous amounts of threat. The hounds instantly snapped their jaws at Levi instead.
One of them lunged, its massive bone-fangs sinking into his dark-matter shield.
[-926]
The 1,505 HP shield shuddered, dropping to 579 HP. Levi just laughed it off. He had them right where he wanted them.
He herded the pack into a tight circle, acting as a human meat shield and a debuff machine, while Isolde rained down pure deletion code from the backline.
When the first Shadow-Stalker dropped to exactly 8,000 HP, Levi went into overdrive.
"Soul Harvest."
Fifty Mana vanished. The massive, pitch-black spectral guillotine materialized in the dark canyon and slammed down. The monster was instantly decapitated.
[Target Executed. Movement skill cooldowns reset.]
His Hollow’s Traverse instantly refunded the 50 Mana. He didn’t even pause. He blinked to the next weakened target.
"Soul Harvest."
Execute. Refund. Blink.
It was an absolutely terrifying dance. Levi became a glitching shadow, flashing across the canyon in a chaotic web of teleports and executions. The eight monsters shattered into massive clouds of blue polygons in less than twenty seconds.
[System Notification: Slain 4x Level 55 Void-Touched Hounds. Gained 3,000,000 XP.]
[System Notification: Slain 4x Level 52 Shadow-Stalkers. Gained 1,800,000 XP.]
"Almost five million experience in under a minute," Levi grinned, pulling a top-tier mana potion from his belt and chugging it. "Keep this pace up, Isolde. We’re clearing the whole canyon."
They pushed deeper into the obsidian rocks.
The grind turned into a twelve-hour marathon. In the real world, Levi’s physical body was pushed to its absolute limits. His shoulders burned with lactic acid. The VR stamina engine made every single scythe swing feel like lifting a concrete block. But he refused to log out.
The XP was just too good.
Around the eighth hour, the combat loop hit a snag.
Levi was currently kiting a massive swarm of twelve hounds. He cast his Guillotine to shred their armor, and Isolde started firing. But the terrain in the canyon was uneven. Levi stepped backward to avoid a leaping hound, and his boot caught on a jagged piece of blue flora.
He stumbled. It was only for a fraction of a second, but it was enough.
A Level 55 Void-Touched Hound slipped past his guard and lunged.
Levi’s Hollow’s Ward was currently on cooldown. The massive beast slammed its paws into Levi’s chest, knocking him flat onto the hard stone.
The VR pain engine flared violently. It simulated the brutal sensation of a cracked ribcage. Levi actually gasped, the digital air forced out of his lungs.
[-926]
Levi’s health bar dropped from 6,480 down to 5,554. It wasn’t a lethal hit, but the kinetic force of being pinned to the ground meant he couldn’t swing his scythe to trigger his lifesteal.
Isolde was currently midway through a casting animation for her True Damage blast. She was aiming at a different hound on the other side of the pack.
But then, she stopped.
Her gray cloak flickered. Her casting animation abruptly canceled. Her blank, robotic eyes snapped directly to Levi on the ground. She just stared at his dropping health bar. She didn’t move. She didn’t cast another spell. She completely froze.
"Isolde! Keep firing!" Levi roared from the ground, kicking the hound in the face to create space.
Isolde didn’t respond. For exactly half a second, her character model violently glitched. Green static ran across her face. The Anomaly’s logic circuits were conflicting entirely with the human emulation inside her. The God-fragment was telling her to ignore the damage because his survival probability was still high. But the human Isolde was panicking because she saw him get hurt.
"I said shoot!" Levi yelled, rolling out from under the beast.
Isolde snapped out of it. The green static vanished. She raised her wooden staff, pointed it directly at the hound standing over Levi, and fired.
[-5,000 True Damage]
The hound shrieked and staggered. Levi instantly popped up, swung his scythe to trigger his bleed, and backed away.
"What was that?" Levi grunted, checking his health as his Lifesteal patched the damage.
"Error," Isolde stated, her voice shaking slightly in his audio feed. It wasn’t flat anymore. It sounded stressed. "Conflicting operational parameters. Prioritization protocols failed for zero-point-five seconds."
Levi looked at her. He realized exactly what just happened. The robotic Anomaly was finally starting to crack. The human Isolde was fighting back against the system code.
"Just focus on the 20% thresholds," Levi said, his voice softening just a bit. "I’m not going to die to a dog."
They resumed the grind. The twelve-hour mark finally arrived.
Levi executed his final Shadow-Stalker. The monster shattered into polygons.
The massive backlog of experience points completely flooded his progression bar.
A blinding, glorious golden pillar of light crashed down through the dark canyon. The light washed over his avatar, instantly clearing away twelve hours of agonizing physical fatigue. His lungs stopped burning, and his real-world shoulders finally relaxed.
[System Notification: Level Up! You are now Level 37.]
[System Notification: Level Up! You are now Level 38.]
Levi dropped the Sovereign’s Deathknell onto the obsidian rock. The heavy scythe clattered loudly. He toggled off his Siphon Aura to stop the mana drain and just let his head hang back.
"Double level-up," Levi wheezed, entirely out of breath. "I am absolutely starving in the real world right now."
He opened his status menu. The massive XP multiplier from fighting mobs sixteen to nineteen levels higher than him had literally broken the progression curve. He had completely filled the 38,000,000 and 41,000,000 XP requirements in a single, ungodly grinding session. He now needed 45,000,000 XP to hit Level 39.
He had 10 new free stat points sitting in his menu.