Chapter 385: Into the madness
The next few minutes were pure slaughter. Damon cut through the abyssal spawn like a scythe in tall grass, using his Primordial Extraction with each kill to devour their very essence.
[Ding! You have extracted +2 Strength]
[Ding! Your Abyssal Resilience has increased by +1]
[Ding! You have extracted +1 Constitution]
[Ding! Your Abyssal Affinity has increased by +1]
Every notification stacked in his vision. His body hummed with power, his veins darkening for a moment before his vampire blood burned it away. The resistance was working, slowly, but surely. He could feel his blood adapting, mutating, trying to balance the new type of essence flowing into his body.
However, the whole process was painfully slow. He needed more. A lot more abyssal spawn to satiate his hunger. He was also not going all out at the moment, which was making him slower. Damon turned around to see for a moment how the others were doing.
All of them were fighting tooth and nail to carve their place amidst the tide of abyssal spawn. Mark was the clearest force on the field after him. The titan’s golden body gleamed through the ichor, his every strike shaking the ground as he plowed through swathes of creatures.
Their claws and teeth screeched uselessly against his defense, black sparks flying as though the abyss itself couldn’t find purchase on him. If anyone here was born for the frontlines, it was Mark.
And then there was Erin. She tore through the battlefield like a living calamity, her monstrous serpentine form lashing out with claws and tail, each movement a blur of savage grace. Every kill she made seemed to exhilarate her further, her laughter chilling as she bathed in ichor. She was not fighting for survival. She was indulging.
Kaelthorn and Ghost were also equally pulling their weight, but everyone else fell back behind them pitifully.
Kate was locked in a struggle. Her staff whirled, crimson orbs of blood orbiting her like satellites before lashing out in bursts of searing energy. Each blast did significant damage and shredded parts of the spawn into mist, but her mana expenditure was heavy.
Damon could see the strain etching lines across her face. Still, her eyes burned with that same stubborn fire. She wasn’t backing down, no matter how much it cost.
Meira and Sylvara fought tooth and nail, their blows rawer, less efficient, but they pressed on. Meira’s flames cracked with desperation, sweat dripping as she forced herself past her own limits. Sylvara, steady as ice, kept her composure, arrows of ice pinning down the spawn.
The others, Phoenix, Nevin, and Blood Wraith, were also holding on and doing their part. Even if it looked like they were only barely hanging on, they kept going and racking up more and more levels. They were also getting better and better at handling the abyssal spawns.
Damon smiled. He then created a big party with everybody in it and sent a message. "I am going further in. Don’t follow me. There will be more abyssal spawn for you right here. Keep grinding and become stronger. Don’t die."
Seeing the message, many had weird expressions on their faces.
"Don’t die? You suck as a leader, idiot!" Kate was the first to respond. "Don’t you have anything else to say?"
"Dude, Big Daddy will go wherever he wants. You cannot ask me to stay back." Ghost surprisingly responded in the chat, but the next moment his message was deleted, and the guy disappeared from the battlefield. It was clear to everyone that he fucked up and sent the message to the group instead of sending it privately.
Saving the guy from embarrassment, Sylvara ignored the whole episode and sent another message. "Thank you for the warning. We will keep that in mind and fight in this zone."
Several other messages flashed in his system interface, but Damon no longer paid attention to them. Even for him, heading inside this madness was akin to committing suicide. He needed to be 100% alert.
The abyssal spawn were just the starters. The main abyss dwellers were yet to show themselves.
Damon activated Stealth and moved inside the madness.
The entire place was covered by a thick black fog, which even dulled his primordial senses. Maybe they wouldn’t have an effect if his primordial senses were at their fullest power, but he was pretty sure, just like everything in his body, these were also currently nerfed a little.
He tried to avoid the areas where the fog was densest and chose only areas that had little fog, but it still did not help. Within moments, his Stealth was undone he was exposed to another horde of Abyssal Spawn.
These guys were endless and a drain on energy and resources, but Damon welcomed it. The more they throw themselves at him, the more he can feast. Now that others were also not around him, he let loose completely without holding back.
Taking inspiration from the surroundings, he made his blood energy shoot out like tendrils. He then activated [Poison Burst], [Poison Domain], and a bunch of other poison skills. The Abyssal spawn walked into the trap, but to Damon’s surprise, they weren’t all of a sudden one-shotted like the other normal creatures. It looked like even his deadly poison had very little effect on them.
Was this because of the special nature of abyssal ichor?
Damon grinned. It was fine. So what if poison did not work? He still had other aces up his sleeve. He decided to test out a few things right here and now to determine what was the best course of attack against these abyss monsters.
After the poison, he started with divine and holy attacks. Just like he expected, these still worked against the abyssal monsters, but they were not as effective as he had hoped. They did work better than the poison attacks.
After the divine tests, Damon cycled through his elemental arsenal one by one.
His fire attacks seared chunks of their bodies, but the flames sputtered unnaturally fast, smothered by the ichor as if the spawn themselves drank fire like water.
Ice slowed them, cracking their oily limbs, but moments later, the shards dissolved into sludge that reformed again. Lightning tore through them with satisfying screams, but its arcs were muted, crawling sluggishly along their bodies as though the Abyss itself grounded the strike.
Wind shredded them in bursts, scattering ichor across the fog, but the droplets simply slithered back together like worms finding each other in the dark.
Damon’s crimson eyes narrowed. It wasn’t that his skills weren’t working. They were, but they were far less effective than they could be. A prolonged battle in this situation would only drain a normal player, but for someone like him, who had a huge ass mana reserve, it did not affect many things.
Damon exhaled slowly, black ichor steaming off his armor as the last spawn dissolved into sludge. His claws flexed, still humming with residual energy from cycling through so many elements.
Now he understood why, in his last life, even the guild titans and top-tier players had bled themselves dry fighting these things. It wasn’t that abyssal spawn were impossibly strong. They weren’t. It was that every hit cost too much, every spell drained too fast, every victory left you weaker than before.
Slowly, inevitably, the Abyss wore you down.