Max
He slipped his knuckle duster over his free left hand, adjusting his grip on the rapier in his right.
Mixing a rapier with a knuckle duster felt awkward at first—finesse in one hand, blunt trauma in the other. But as Max carved his way through Floor 22, he found a brutal rhythm. He used Hogni's teachings to parry and guide incoming strikes harmlessly past him with the blade, stepping into the openings to deliver bone-shattering, PoD-laced left hooks to ribcages and jaws.
The monsters of the Large Tree Labyrinth, however, weren't the mindless grunts of the upper floors. They were tough, coordinated, and highly opportunistic.
Max glared as a massive Sword Stag ignored him completely, dropping its head to gobble up a fallen Lizardman's magic stone. Letting mobs cannibalize drops for a free power-up was bad business.
Fortunately, Kairu was faster. The slime fired a highly compressed burst of freezing ice, locking the Stag's hooves to the floor just long enough for Max to Shunshin forward and decapitate it.
"Okay, new rule," Max panted, sidestepping a swipe from a Mad Beetle. Auto-Evade, running smoothly at fifty feet, tweaked his posture just enough to let the jagged claw whistle two inches past his shoulder plate. "I do the killing. You focus entirely on loot retrieval. Do not let these scavengers eat our money."
Ki! Kairu pulsed in agreement, extending swift, sticky pseudopods to snatch falling bodies before they even hit the ground.
Max drove his knuckled left fist squarely into the next Mad Beetle's midsection. The concussive blast of Destruction shattered the creature's carapace, turning its torso to ash.
Just as Kairu scooped up the dropping monster stone, a sharp ping echoed through the mental link.
Gojo's alarm.
Max straightened, his battle high snapping into sharp focus. The two-week timer was up. The Goliath was spawning.
"Well, that didn't take long," Max murmured. The Dungeon was nothing if not punctual; it hadn't given him even an extra hour of delay to harvest the middle floors.
A deeply reckless, gamer-fueled idea immediately surfaced in his mind: What if I teleport the Goliath down here? Fighting a Boss while subjected to the oppressive, draining environment of the Large Tree Labyrinth would undoubtedly push Lux Tenebris into absolute overdrive.
He shook his head, vetoing the thought almost as fast as it formed. The local mobs down here were already mid-Level 2s on their own. When they ganged up and coordinated, their threat easily spiked to the efficiency of a Level 3. Dropping a Level 4 Monster Rex into the middle of that specific meat grinder crossed the line between "efficient grinding" and an "active death wish." Which meant the designated boss room on Floor 17 would have to do.
But beneath the adrenaline, a logistical headache he had been chewing on since stepping onto Floor 22 demanded his immediate attention: his promise to Freya to have Hogni with him for the boss fight.
Yanking the anxiety-ridden Dark Elf through teleportation without warning was a great way to trigger a Dainsleif panic attack right in the middle of Folkvangr. Hogni needed a buffer—a polite heads-up before pulling the teleportation. Max had already decided that the most efficient route didn't involve him manually commuting all the way back up to fetch him.
A wicked grin spread across Max's face in anticipation. It was the perfect excuse for a high-stakes alpha test of their new hardware.
He didn't hesitate. Channeling his mana, Max unleashed a Radial Burst, a sphere of absolute erasure that instantly vaporized the half-dozen monsters circling his position.
In the brief quiet before the ash even settled, he executed the plan.
"Alright, Kairu, time for your solo mission," Max ordered, tapping his familiar.
Instantly, the slime melted away from his shoulder plate, slipping off his shoulders to pool on the floor before springing up into its cheerful, blob-like shape.
"Use the magic circle, get back to Folkvangr, and find our favorite dark elf. Once you are with him, pull out a comms bracelet, and just wait for me to contact you." Max told him.
Ki! Ki! The slime gave a firm nod, chirping happily. With his mission understood, Kairu vanished with a soft pop.
At the same moment, Max activated his own teleportation circle.
VWOOM.
In an instant, Floor 22 vanished, replaced by the stark, ash-grey walls of Floor 17.
As Max appeared, he took a moment to fully assess his biological drone. It had been almost two days since he'd set Gojo loose on the Dungeon. Between acting as an overpowered baggage handler, shadowing Astrea Familia, and essentially babysitting little Lili through the Middle Floors, the honored one had been busy.
Yet, looking at him now, the physical vessel was—almost—flawless.
Almost.
Though Max's eyes tracked the missing details with quiet amusement. The blindfold was immaculate, the posture relaxed, the expression radiating its usual composed, infuriating arrogance. But there—a thin tear along the left shoulder seam of his shirt. And another—a jagged rip along his right trouser leg just below the knee, the kind left by something with sharp claws.
Most tellingly, the heavy black coat was simply gone. Max remembered taking it off to wrap around Lili as protection against the middle floors' hazards, and evidently, Gojo hadn't bothered to ask for it back.
Though he didn't look worse for wear. If anything, the minor imperfections made him look exactly like what he was: a powerhouse who had just strolled casually through the dungeon. There wasn't a single scratch on the body itself, which only meant Gojo's execution was flawless, with minor wardrobe casualties.
"You did great," Max said quietly, stepping forward.
Gojo's lips curved into that trademark, impossibly cocky grin. He stretched his arms behind his head, leaning lazily against the rough stone of the dungeon wall.
"Well, obviously," Gojo replied, his voice carrying the exact breezy, arrogant lilt Max had programmed into the persona. "Who do you think you're talking to? I'm the strongest, after all. Though I've gotta admit, keeping a straight face around that overly serious 'Justice' squad while showing off took some actual effort."
Max snorted, shaking his head. His Independent Action really had absorbed the personality perfectly. It was almost eerie conversing with his own magical projection, but undeniably entertaining.
"I'm sure it was a real hardship," Max replied dryly. He glanced toward the far end of the corridor, where the Wall of Grief loomed in the shadows. "Our guest is going to be here any second, and you look a bit too conspicuous to explain right now. Teleport back up and keep a close eye on Lili for me."
"You deny your friend the pleasure of my striking good looks? How tragic," Gojo sighed theatrically, pushing himself off the wall. He adjusted his dark glasses, the grin never leaving his face. "But fine, fine. I'll go make sure our tiny investor stays out of trouble."
With that, Gojo raised a hand, flashing a crisp, two-fingered salute.
"Catch you later, Boss."
A purple teleportation circle bloomed brightly beneath his boots, and with a rush of displaced air, the strongest Jujutsu Sorcerer in Orario vanished.
With his secret safely hidden and the corridor clear, Max turned and made his way toward the Wall of Grief. He took up a position roughly forty meters back in the corridor—the perfect vantage point—just as the tremors began.
It started with a deep, subsonic vibration. The stone floor buzzed against Max's boots, rapidly escalating into a deafening, grinding rumble from behind the massive pale rock at the far end of the chamber.
Crack.
A spiderweb of jagged fissures snapped across the center of the Wall. The immense pressure treated the solid rock like fragile glass. Then—
BOOM!
The wall violently exploded.
Massive chunks of stone and crystal launched outward, raining across the chamber. Max raised an arm, letting a few stray pieces of debris shatter harmlessly against his armor.
Through the settling dust, two enormous, grey-brown hands punched through the remaining facade. Thick fingers gripped the shattered wall, straining as the colossal creature pulled itself into the world.
Since the ceiling wasn't infinite, the nine-meter-tall giant had to fold its massive torso to breach the opening. Max watched as broad, granite-like shoulders forced their way out, followed by a thick neck and a face chiseled from pure rage.
As it walked out, the monster rex straightened, rising to its full, terrifying height.
Before it even took a step, it threw its head back and inhaled. Max quickly channeled magic to his ears, bracing himself for impact.
ROOOOAAAAARRRR!
The opening bellow was a pressurized weapon. A visible shockwave of compressed air radiated outward, blasting the remaining rubble away from the giant's feet. The sound filled the entire floor, rattling Max's teeth in his skull.
On cue, a heavy, grinding THUD echoed from behind Max. He knew the mechanics. The entrance to the boss room had just slammed shut and the exit was behind it. It wasn't an easy escape for anyone trapped inside.
He was locked in.
Unbothered, he casually leaned back against the rough stone wall, crossed his arms, and once he got a ping from Kairu, channeled a spark of magic into the comms bracelet.
"Hey, Hogni," Max spoke normally, his voice crystal clear across the magical link. "Remember our plan to handle the Goliath together? Well, the giant is officially awake."
As if it understood, the Goliath let out a second, earth-shaking roar. The thunderous sound transmitted perfectly through the bracelet.
Back in Folkvangr, there was a beat of absolute, horrified silence over the comms.
"MAXIMUS?!" Hogni's voice exploded through the bracelet, completely abandoning his composed persona. The Dark Elf sounded like he was hyperventilating. "HOW? WHAT IS THIS TRICK?! WHERE ARE YOU?!"
Max burst out laughing. He could easily picture the executive staring in abject terror at a talking bracelet. I really need to figure out the video call feature, Max thought. I am missing a legendary reaction right now.
"I know, buddy. Magic is wild," Max chuckled, keeping his tone reassuring. "Listen carefully. Kairu's with you right now, yes?"
"Y-Yes! The void child is resting on my floor! But how are you—?!"
"Hogni, breathe," Max commanded gently. "Kairu is drawing a magic circle on your floor. When it's finished, I need you to step onto it. Just trust me."
There was a heavy pause over the comms, accompanied by the muffled sound of shifting slime.
"...I step into the circle?" Hogni asked, voice trembling with pure suspicion.
"You step into the circle," Max confirmed. He looked up, pulling his attention back to his surroundings.
It seemed in the time he had been occupied calming Hogni down, the Goliath had finally spotted him. With a guttural grunt that vibrated the very air in the cavern, the beast pivoted its massive, tree-trunk legs and charged. The ground shook with every step, the giant chewing up the forty meters between them with terrifying speed.
Realizing his window was rapidly closing, Max casually raised his free hand. "Bakudō #73. Tozanshō."
An inverted pyramid of solid blue crystal materialized over him, anchoring its edges securely into the stone walls of the corridor just as the heavy footfalls grew deafening.
"Are you ready, Hogni?" Max asked, watching the towering boss bear down on his newly formed barrier.
"The Abyss is... p-prepared," Hogni stammered bravely over the link.
"Pulling you in."
Not waiting to ensure the Dark Elf wouldn't have time to second-guess his decision, Max activated the circle.
VWOOM.
The air beside Max warped violently. With a sharp flash of light, Hogni materialized inside the blue pyramid, Kairu secured to his shoulder.
The Dark Elf stumbled forward, his momentum thrown off as the plush carpet of his suite was abruptly replaced by jagged stone. Thoroughly disoriented, he swayed, his sharp eyes frantically trying to anchor themselves—the damp walls, the ash-grey dust, the acrid smell of stone and something burning. His hand flew instinctively to Victim Abyss before he even knew why.
Then, he looked straight ahead.
Filling the entirety of his vision, roaring with a mouth large enough to swallow a horse, was a nine-meter-tall Goliath swinging a fist the size of a boulder directly at his face. Just as he braced himself for impact—
CRASH!
The massive fist slammed into the barrier right in front of Hogni's nose. The blue crystal shrieked under the immense kinetic pressure, spider-webbing with massive, glowing cracks that illuminated the sheer horror carved into the elf's eyes.
Max gritted his teeth, pouring mana into the construct to keep it from shattering instantly, but the sheer force rattled his bones. Holy shit, it hits hard.
CRASH!!
The Goliath swung its second fist. The cracked Tozanshō shattered completely, raining blue light down on them like falling glass.
The monster roared again, raising both fists high to crush the two insects left exposed in the corridor.
Max looked up at the descending mass of knuckles. The casual smirk he had been wearing evaporated, his expression hardening into a mask of cold focus. He had understood, theoretically, that a Monster Rex was strong. But feeling its power shatter a seventy-tier Kidō spell in two hits was a visceral, terrifying experience.
Okay, plan B. Stronger defense.
Glancing back to ensure Hogni and Kairu were safely behind him, Max planted his feet firmly on the cracked stone and raised his open palm toward the descending fists.
"Bakudō #81. Dankū."
The rectangular wall of energy snapped into place a split-second before impact.
BOOOOOOM!
The Goliath's fists struck the barrier with the force of a meteorite. A deafening clang echoed through the cavern, and a shockwave of dust screamed past them. The barrier held.
But Max knew a single wall wouldn't be enough. He could see the giant shifting its weight, preparing to flank them.
No blind spots.
"Dankū!" he shouted again, twisting his wrists. Another wall snapped into place behind him. "Dankū! Dankū!" He completed the box, conjuring two more shields on their left and right, creating a perfect, shimmering cube of energy around them.
The strain hit him immediately. Maintaining a single eighty-tier barrier was demanding. Maintaining four simultaneously—while still recovering from his previous excersion—was a brutal, crushing weight on his stamina and his mana reserves. Sweat beaded on his forehead, his knuckles turning white from the effort.
Hold it together, he told himself, gritting his teeth. Just for a few seconds. Just until Hogni reboots.
Meanwhile the Goliath stopped punching.
Max watched it circle the translucent box, one enormous finger dragging slowly along the surface of the nearest wall. As if it was feeling the resistance, mapping the edges, with its small eyes moving with a patience that had no business existing in a creature this size.
Then its gaze dropped.
Not to Max. Not to Hogni. Or to Kairu.
To the floor.
Max followed the look instinctively — and felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. The walls were anchored to the stone. Not fused with it. Not sealed beneath them. A direct strike on the floor outside the box, close enough to the foundation, and the shockwave would travel straight up through the ground they were standing on. No barrier face to absorb it. Nothing between them and the impact except the stone under their boots.
As if it came to the same conclusion, the Goliath's foot drew back.
The box was never going to hold.
Max let all three remaining walls die at once, making the call before the giant could act on what it had figured out. The released mana folded back into his reserves as the corridor opened back up around them — cage gone, open stone in every direction.
Better to abandon the position on his terms.
The Goliath's foot came down anyway.
BOOM.
The floor buckled exactly where the box had been standing a half-second ago. A visible shockwave rippled outward along the ground. Max was already moving, Shunshin carrying him clear of the worst of it — but the concussive ring still caught his boots, the vibration traveling up through his legs hard enough to rattle his back teeth.
Close. Too close.
He was about to check on his companions when with a flash of dark violet steel, Victim Abyss cleared its scabbard.
Hogni pivoted, his battle instincts violently overriding his shock. He stepped into the trajectory of the flying debris and swung, cleanly severing the boulder into harmless halves that crashed to the floor on either side of them. The Dark Elf exhaled sharply, his eyes locking onto the towering monster as his combat persona fully engaged.
"The Abyss... is awake," Hogni breathed, his grip tightening on his cursed blade.
"Perfect," Max smirked. "Keep Kairu safe. I'm going on the offensive."
Annoyed by the evasion, the Goliath drew back its arm and punched straight down. Max didn't use a shield this time. The floor was the target.
The blow detonated, buckling the corridor's base and sending jagged stone shards flying. A visible ring of concussive pressure rippled outward along the ground—a 360-degree wave that would have shattered the ankles of a lesser party.
Max's Shunshin carried him directly into the leading edge of the shockwave. As the pressure hit, he drove his left palm downward, letting a tiny, razor-thin wedge of Destruction flare at the point of contact. The erasure magic deleted the part of the shockwave directly in front of him, creating a safe slipstream. The rest of the pressure split around his body and broke uselessly against the stone behind him.
The Goliath's small eyes widened. It stopped looking at Hogni. It focused entirely on the blue-haired intruder who had just effortlessly bypassed its brute strength.
"Oh, did you finally understand who the real opponent was?" Max murmured.
The giant charged again, its movements no longer broad or wasteful. It lunged, and Max jumped backward onto a slab of broken stone just as the Goliath's fingers tore through the space he had occupied.
"Bakudō #61. Rikujōkōrō."
Max fired the six rods of light without a chant. The yellow beams slammed into the monster's torso, pinning its arms to its sides. For a second, the giant was a statue. Then, with a roar that shook the ceiling, the Goliath flexed. The rods trembled, glowing white-hot under the physical strain. Two snapped instantly. The third bent before the entire spell shattered into harmless sparks.
Three seconds, Max noted, touching down. Not enough for a lethal strike—but enough to learn something.
The Goliath's raw strength was extraordinary, but it wasn't infinite. The rods had held for three full seconds before the giant's strength overcame the binding force. That meant a higher-tier binding—something with mass rather than just energy—would hold longer.
The Goliath roared, shaking off the remains of the light, and baited a massive right hook. Max didn't dodge. He dipped inside the arc, the wind from the passing fist ruffling his hair, and planted his feet, leveling his palm at the monster's chest.
"Walls of iron sand, a priestly pagoda, glowing ironclad fireflies. Standing upright, silent to the end."
The ambient mana in the corridor curdled, thickening with the weight of the chant.
"Bakudō #75. Gochūtekkan!"
High above the Goliath, five massive, glowing iron pillars materialized in a star formation. With a sound like falling mountains, they slammed downward, pinning the giant's head, arms, and legs to the floor. The floor groaned and shattered under the supernatural weight. This wasn't energy holding the Goliath—it was mass. Sheer, crushing, physical mass, and the difference was immediately obvious. Where Rikujōkōrō had snapped under brute strength, these pillars simply sank deeper under it, converting the Goliath's own force against itself.
Seeing the Monster Rex pinned, Max capitalized on the opening, layering supplementary bindings on top of the current lock like a lethal game of Jenga.
"Bakudō #62. Hyapporankan," he chanted cleanly, sending a volley of glowing rods to nail the giant's joints to the stone.
"Bakudō #63. Sajo Sabaku," he added, wrapping thick, golden chains of energy around the pillars themselves, completely reinforcing the iron cage.
Trapped and seeing no other option, the Goliath abandoned leverage and resorted to pure, suicidal brute force. With a deafening roar that vibrated the dust off the cavern ceiling, it forced its arms and chest upward against the unyielding iron. Stone-like muscles tore with sickening pops. Its massive frame spasmed violently under the crushing weight.
Yet, driven by its primal instinct to survive, it defied the magical physics pinning it down. With a final, agonizing surge of strength, the Goliath actually managed to heave the glowing iron blocks upward, throwing the massive pillars and chains off its body and sending them crashing against the corridor walls before they dissipated into motes of light.
The sheer magnitude of the feat pushed the Monster Rex to its absolute breaking point. The Goliath staggered, its chest heaving like a broken bellows, thick grey blood weeping from its torn ligaments.
Exhausted but enraged by the humiliation, it opened its mouth wide. Max could see the back of the monster's throat glowing with pressurized force.
The Roar Blast erupted—a focused, invisible cylinder of sonic destruction aimed to turn Max into a red smear on the corridor wall.
Max thrust both hands forward, visualizing a concave lens of solidified air. A shimmering distortion rippled into existence just as the sonic column hit the curve and violently redirected, screaming past his shoulders to blow the remaining stalactites off the cavern walls.
The barrier held. But held was doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Max felt it in his teeth first. Then his chest. The sheer vibrational pressure transmitted straight through the air-construct and into his body like a bell being struck from the inside. His new armor absorbed the worst of it, but his boots still scraped back two inches across the stone as the residual force hammered through. His ears rang with a high, persistent tone that didn't fade immediately.
Level 4, Max reminded himself, working his ears to clear the ringing. Stop being surprised that it hits like a Level 4.
Behind him, he heard Hogni expertly deflecting falling stalactites away from where Kairu was pooled against the wall. At least one problem was handled.
Max didn't give the giant time to chamber another breath. He shifted his weight, felt the hum of his magic through his heels, and vanished.
Shunshin carried him in a violet blur straight up the Goliath's extended arm. He sprinted along the stone-hard limb before the giant could recover, kicked off its granite shoulder, and hung suspended in the air directly in front of the monster's face.
"Hadō #54. Haien."
A mass of purple-black flames erupted from his palm. The fire slammed into the Goliath's jaw with the force of a wrecking ball, charring the stone hide into a ragged, smoking diagonal. The monster let out a gurgling grunt, swiping for him with an open palm. Max tracked the shadow and barely ducked cleanly under the whistling fingers.
He lunged inward, answering the swipe with a point-blank cast — then stopped.
The smoke was already clearing from the Goliath's jaw. Max watched the ragged, charred diagonal across its stone hide begin to bubble and slowly knit itself back together — the raw material of the wound pulling inward, filling, sealing. He had seen the anime. Every adventurer who had faced this Monster Rex knew they regenerated. But knowing it and watching it happen point-blank, faster than he had expected, were two different things entirely.
That's going to be a problem.
Then Auto-Evade pinged.
Not the smooth, postural correction it made for incoming attacks. Something sharper. A full-body directional alert — the sensation of threat arriving from an angle that wasn't the Goliath. Max's head snapped sideways on pure reflex.
Behind.
He caught the flicker in his peripheral vision a half-second before the sound registered — the heavy, rhythmic thunder of hooves on stone. Two Minotaurs had spawned from the dungeon wall at his back, clubs raised, charging at full speed toward the gap between him and Hogni.
Max didn't have time to turn.
He didn't need to.
Dark violet steel blurred in from his left. Victim Abyss swept through both in a single, controlled arc — precise, economical, final. The monsters dissolved into ash before their axes completed their swing.
Hogni stepped up beside him, his eyes still locked on the Goliath, but his expression carrying something that went beyond combat focus. Something quieter. More unsettled.
"Maximus." His voice was low. "Minotaurs do not spawn at this point."
"I know," Max said.
"And they do not spawn during an active Monster Rex encounter." Hogni's eyes moved slowly across the living stone of the corridor walls. "Not usually."
The silence between them said everything neither of them chose to speak aloud. The dungeon wasn't reacting anymore. It was coordinating — using the Goliath as the main threat while probing from angles they weren't watching, testing coverage, looking for the gap that the boss alone couldn't create.
Max turned back to the giant without another word. There was nothing useful to add, and Hogni didn't need to be told what to do.
Sure enough, when three Ligerfangs dropped silently from the ceiling behind them moments later, Hogni was already moving. Victim Abyss swept them from the air without ceremony, his dark aura burning at full intensity, his eyes never leaving the corridor behind them.
Max allowed himself a second of genuine appreciation for having brought him.
After a moment, he stepped back, creating a gap of fifty feet, and took stock.
The giant was slower now — the bindings had torn its ligaments, the Haien had charred its jaw, the Raikōhō had caved its ribcage. The damage was real and cumulative. But the regeneration was still working, blurring the edges of every wound faster than he could stack them. Kidō alone wasn't going to close this out. He'd proven that much.
He had also been running the fight on his own terms — pushing the Goliath with everything except the one thing that was entirely, fundamentally his. He'd wanted to see how far pure technique would take him. Now he had his answer.
The Goliath's regeneration knitting shut another wound made it definitive.
Alright. Time to stop being polite.
He reached into his coat and pulled out the first Mind Potion. He drank it without ceremony. The cold clarity moved through him, the grinding pressure behind his eyes easing as the first layer of depletion lifted. The second — a Kairu-variant — pushed his reserves up another tier. The third followed immediately. Not full. But enough.
The familiar weight of Destruction settled back into his palms like something breathing. He let it build slowly this time — not shaping it into a blast, just letting it accumulate, dense and patient, until the air around both hands shimmered with erasure magic under compression. The crimson-black energy coiled up his forearms and bled faintly into his irises, a burning tint at the edge of his vision.
The Goliath's small eyes tracked the change. Something in its posture shifted — a subtle, instinctive drawing back. It recognised the quality of the threat even if it had no name for it.
Max rolled his neck once.
He had spent the entire fight learning this creature. Its timing. Its weight distribution. The slight forward lean before an overhead strike. The way its eyes dropped before it changed targets. He knew this fight now.
Let me treat you with the respect you're due.
The Goliath charged.
Max didn't move. He watched it come, let it close the distance on its own terms, and waited until the fist came down before stepping inside the arc — close enough that the wind off the knuckles ruffled his hair. He pressed his left palm flat against the giant's torn abdomen and did something he had never attempted in a live fight before.
He didn't fire the Destruction outward.
He pushed it inward.
Tight. Dense. A concentrated point of erasure held against the wound site, sustained rather than released, grinding against the Goliath's regeneration at the most fundamental level he could reach. He could feel the resistance immediately — not as a physical push, but as pressure against the magic itself. The dungeon's biology shoving back. The wound trying to close around his palm, grey-black tissue creeping inward from the edges like slow, viscous tar, determined to seal over his hand entirely if he gave it even a fraction of an inch.
He understood the sensation intimately. His own PoD Healing worked on the same axis. He knew exactly what that felt like from the inside: the heat, the consuming urgency of it, the way his body threw everything it had at a wound because stopping wasn't an option.
The Goliath was doing the same thing. Just at a different scale.
The difference was that his healing ran on mana. The Goliath's ran on the Dungeon itself.
Max pushed harder.
For one long second, the two forces held each other in a dead stall — erasure consuming, biology closing, neither giving ground. He could feel the contest in his forearm, the compression demanding more and more of his magic, the crimson-black energy at his palm flickering at the boundary as the wound fought to smother it.
Then the tissue began to blacken.
Not from fire. Not from impact. The grey-black hide at the contact point simply stopped answering — cells stripped down to nothing before the regeneration signal could reach them, the radius of dead matter spreading outward in slow, silent increments. The wound couldn't close over nothing. It kept trying, kept throwing fresh tissue at the boundary, and the erasure kept consuming it on arrival. The Goliath's own healing became fuel for the process, every desperate attempt to regenerate feeding the erasure deeper.
The giant let out a sound that had nothing of rage in it — a low, shuddering bellow that resonated from somewhere beneath its ribcage. Not pain, exactly. Something older and more disorienting than pain. Its own body refusing to answer. Its own architecture working against it, turned inward, eating itself at his direction.
Max held the compression for a few seconds, letting the erasure saturate thoroughly, until he could feel the cavity it had carved — a hollow silence where the wound had been, clean and absolute. Then he drew his fist back, gathered everything that remained in his reserves into a single dense pulse, and drove his fist forward into the ruined site.
The hit detonated without sound.
A silent, violent flash of black-red light. The Goliath's entire torso from the sternum down ceased to exist.
The upper half of the nine-meter giant hung suspended for one impossible moment — then toppled backward like a felled redwood, the remaining mass already dissolving at the edges.
Before it hit the bedrock, a blur of blue shot from the wall. Ki! Kairu launched himself forward, his gelatinous body expanding rapidly, enveloping the falling remains and swallowing the colossal corpse — and the pristine magic stone secured inside it — in one triumphant gulp.
Max exhaled slowly, letting the dark energy fade from his hands. His boots touched down on the cleared stone floor and he stood there for a moment, doing nothing.
The dungeon settled around him. The ambient hum of the crystals returned. Dust drifted down from the cracked ceiling in lazy spirals, catching the pale light.
He rolled his shoulder where the Goliath's backhand had clipped him, feeling the deep, satisfying ache of a hit absorbed rather than taken. His mana reserves sat at the floor — the potions had fuelled the finale and left nothing behind. His breathing was harder than he wanted to admit.
But none of it mattered. Not against the thrill and quiet pride of finally defeating his first Monster Rex, solo.
--> Devil in a Dungeon <--
AN:
Finally scrapped the idea of fighting the Goliath on Floor 22. And managed to fit the whole combat in one chapter. Yay!! Though half the chapter went in making the arrangements and smoothly teleporting Hogni :)
Just so you know, the dive wasn't over yet. Kairu was just waiting to drag his master deeper, he is not going to Folkvangr after waiting patiently for all the experiments to conclude. Max also officially revealed his teleportation to Hogni and we will see the consequences of that in the next chapter. Though I'm sure now Hogni is more surprised about Kido than his teleportation. And I hope this chapter gave a good clarity on how the Kido spells stack up to the Adventurer levels.
Coming to Kairu Poll, the opinion was unanimous about making him another Rimuru, though it won't be a pure rip off. Though I would like to clarify one thing, Kairu won't get a Human form himself. He would help in making a Bio Drone, but won't get a human body himself.
Don't forget to read the Omake below and share your thoughts on the story in a review/comment.
If you'd like to read 8 chapters ahead(around 40k words), support my work, or commission a story idea, visit p.a.t.r.e.o.n.c.o.m/b3smash.
Please note that the chapters are early access only, they will be eventually released here as well.
Next update will be on Friday.
Ben, Out.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything.
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Omake: True Art is an Explosion
Hogni
In his room at Folkvangr, he stared down at the sleek metallic bracelet Kairu had just deposited into his palm.
"Hey, Hogni," Max's voice crackled to life through the artifact.
Before Hogni could even stammer a greeting, a thunderous, earth-shattering roar echoed through the background of the transmission. The sheer acoustic pressure of it made the bracelet vibrate in his hand. Hogni's blood ran instantly cold. He knew that sound. It was the distinct, pressurized bellow of a Monster Rex. The Goliath had spawned.
"M-MAXIMUS?!" Hogni yelled, his hand flying toward his weapon rack. "Hold on! I am coming! I will—"
"Kairu is drawing a magic circle on your floor," Max interrupted, his voice entirely too calm for someone in a boss room. "When it's finished, I need you to step onto it. Just trust me."
Hogni froze mid-step. He looked down. The little slime was indeed tracing magical lines directly into his carpet.
Step onto it?
Hogni's mind raced. True spatial teleportation was considered an absolute myth in Orario, a lost miracle of the age of heroes. It wasn't that Hogni didn't trust Max—he considered the boy a true friend and a brother-in-arms. He trusted Max with his life.
What he didn't trust was the experimental, mythical spell itself.
What if the arcane matrix destabilizes? Hogni's normal self panicked, his imagination supplying horrifying images. What if I materialize inside a wall? What if my legs arrive in the dungeon but my torso stays in my bedroom? I won't be able to serve the mistress as a pile of disconnected limbs!
He swallowed hard, his hands trembling. But then, a desperate, comforting thought pierced through his anxiety.
No. Even if I am catastrophically spliced across dimensions, Heith's healing magic is exceptional. And if reassembling a spatially shredded dark elf proves too complex for her, the Dea Saint's magic is peerless. As long as Maximus gathers all my scattered pieces, Airmid should be able to stitch me back together. Probably.
He winced at the potential cost of such an operation, but he was more determined to answer his friend's call. Hogni gripped the hilt of Victim Abyss, squeezed his eyes shut, and bravely stepped into the glowing magic.
VWOOM.
The air pressure violently shifted. Hogni braced himself for the agonizing tear of spatial dismemberment. Instead, he opened his eyes to find himself completely intact—standing in absolute, pitch-black darkness. He was first surprised by the complete darkness, but soon he realised the ambient luminescent crystals were snuffed out by a spell.
CHA-CHING.
A single, brilliant pillar of white light pierced the darkness. Max stood perfectly centered in the beam, turned sideways, his rapier held parallel to his face in pure, tragic solemnity.
CHA-CHING.
A second, identical pillar of light struck the ground right beside him.
Hogni blinked. Standing beside Max was a towering stranger with gravity-defying white hair, wearing a sleek, high-collared black uniform and a black blindfold. A bizarre, uncanny shiver ran down Hogni's spine. Something about the stranger's presence felt incredibly weird — like looking at an eerie, distorted reflection of something familiar. Like a shadow cast by a person who wasn't quite there.
He almost reached for the feeling to examine it further.
Then the stranger leaned back at an impossible angle, slipped one hand into his pocket, and struck a breathtakingly dramatic pose right alongside Max — perfectly synchronized, perfectly committed, not a single trace of mirth on his face.
The uncanny feeling dissolved completely, washed away by something far louder. For his entire life, Hogni had lived trapped inside his own head. His peers found him exhausting, Hedin constantly scolded him for his delusions, and even his Goddess merely tolerated his eccentricities with patient, goddess-level forbearance. But here, in the darkest depths of the dungeon, Max had gone out of his way to arrange lighting, sensory spells, a fully choreographed entrance, and apparently recruited a blindfolded stranger to complete the ensemble — just to make him feel welcome. Max hadn't just invited him. He was speaking his language.
Slowly, in eerie, flawless synchronization, Max and the blindfolded man turned their heads to face the trembling Dark Elf.
"Welcome, Lord of the Abyss," they said in unison. "To the Arena of Despair."
The crippling, stuttering anxiety redlining Hogni's nervous system completely evaporated. He wasn't the weird one. He wasn't an outcast. Not any more. He had found his people. A single, beautiful tear of genuine joy rolled down his dark cheek.
"I… I acknowledge your welcome, my kin." Hogni whispered, his voice thick with emotion. His posture shifted, dropping low into a perfect, deadly battle stance. With a hiss of dark violet steel, he drew Victim Abyss, his dark aura flaring to life. "The Abyss answers your call... my brethren of the dark! Let us paint this canvas with the blood of our enemies!"
Right on cue, the Goliath bellowed.
It had been out there the entire time, Hogni realized. Silent. Still. The Wall of Grief had already fallen before his arrival and yet the Monster Rex had not charged. Had not roared. Had simply... waited.
As if it understood the weight of what was unfolding before it.
And now, at the precise moment Hogni raised his blade and answered the call, the ancient guardian of Floor 17 threw its massive head back and shook the entire corridor with a bellow that felt less like a battle cry and more like a proclamation.
Hogni's breath caught.
In his years of adventuring, he had never once entertained the notion that a Monster Rex was capable of recognizing a moment of significance. But the evidence was right there, reverberating through the rock beneath his feet. It hadn't attacked. It had waited. And now it roared not at them, but with them.
The Goliath had chosen to join them.
A second tear genuinely threatened the corner of Hogni's eye. He straightened, raising Victim Abyss toward the towering silhouette with the solemn gravity of a man receiving a new sworn comrade into his ranks.
"...Even the ancient guardian of the dungeon answers the call of the abyss," Hogni breathed reverently. "We accept your allegiance, titan of stone."
Max's eyes widened — not in alarm, but in the quiet, genuine recognition of a man watching something click together perfectly that he had not planned for. He turned his head toward Hogni and gave a single, slow, deliberate nod. An acknowledgment. A silent yes, exactly that.
Beside him, the blindfolded stranger tilted his head toward the distant Goliath, his smirk curling into something razor-edged and theatrical.
"Even the ancient ones bow before the convergence of true darkness," he intoned gravely, his deep voice carrying the absolute conviction of a man who had never once questioned his own narrative. "It was inevitable. Monsters and men alike — all roads lead to the abyss eventually."
He let that hang in the air.
Then he raised his free hand toward the Wall of Grief in a single, elegant, beckoning gesture.
"Come then, old guardian. Let us show you what despair truly looks like."
The Goliath, as if personally invited, answered with another earth-splitting roar and charged.
BOOOOOOM!
Nine meters of living granite ripped through the corridor, the shockwave alone sending hairline fractures racing up the dungeon walls. The floor cracked beneath its first step. The ceiling groaned.
But Max didn't break character. Instead, he raised his free hand high into the air.
Suddenly, from somewhere hidden in the shadows — likely Kairu vibrating at a highly specific, magical frequency — a swelling, high-octane orchestral track began to play. It featured frantic violins, a blaring electric guitar, and a dramatic choir. It literally sounded as if the opening theme of a legendary saga had decided to manifest itself into reality.
Hogni's eyes widened. They even brought background music?!
Beside Max, the tall man smirked and stepped forward, acting as the grand orchestrator. He began waving his hands like a maestro conducting the music. As he did, massive, glowing geometric magic circles began to manifest and layer themselves in the air, forming a glowing, cylindrical tunnel aimed directly at the charging Goliath.
Max's voice echoed through the cavern, vibrating with raw, theatrical power over the blaring music.
"Darker than black, darker than darkness, combine with my intense crimson!"
The ambient mana in the room spiked so violently the Goliath actually stuttered mid-charge, its massive feet gouging deep furrows into the stone floor as primal instinct screamed at it to stop.
"Time to wake up, descend to these borders and appear as an intangible distortion. Dance, dance, dance!"
The layered magic circles began to spin, glowing with a terrifying, blinding red light. Hogni watched in absolute awe, his grip on Victim Abyss trembling. Somewhere deep in his chest, something that had been quietly waiting his entire life finally recognized what it was looking at.
"May a destructive force flood my torrent of power, a destructive force like no other!" Max chanted, his eyes snapping open to reveal glowing amethyst irises. "Send all creation to its source! Come out of your abyss! Humanity knows no other more powerful offensive technique! It is the ultimate magical attack!"
Max thrust his hand forward, perfectly aligning with the orchestrated circles as the music hit its absolute peak.
"EXPLOSION!"
A catastrophic beam of crimson and orange screamed through the magic circles like a shooting star tearing through the ceiling, magnifying exponentially with each ring it passed through, until it hit the Goliath.
The resulting explosion defied the laws of physics.
The floor didn't just shake; Floor 17 genuinely felt like it was breaking off from the rest of the dungeon. A blinding dome of searing light consumed the boss room, followed by a concussive shockwave that vaporized the falling debris into pure atoms.
When the blinding light finally faded, the epic background music slowly died out, leaving only the ringing in Hogni's ears. He slowly opened his eyes.
The Goliath was gone. Not killed. Not turned to ash. Simply gone.
In fact, the entire Wall of Grief was gone. Where the massive boss room once stood, there was now a colossal, perfectly smooth, smoking crater at least fifty meters wide, punched clean through the dungeon.
Hogni walked to the edge of the crater and looked down in quiet reverence. Through the massive hole Max had just carved, he could clearly see the glowing crystals, vast lakes, and the sprawling canopy of the giant tree of Rivira on Floor 18 directly below them.
Absolute silence fell over the trio.
-◈ -
Max
He lowered his hand, his dramatic persona suddenly breaking as he stared at the smoking, fifty-meter hole and listened to the terrified screams beginning to echo up from Rivira below them.
Then, a horrifying realization washed over Max's face.
If word got out that he had blown a fifty-meter crater through the dungeon floor for theatrical reasons, he was going to get a title. He was going to be known as the Orario's Explosion Freak. A male Megumin. He would be an eternal meme.
"Nope," Max said flatly, his face paling with dread. "Absolutely not. I refuse to be another explosion freak."
Before Hogni could ask what he meant, Max had already turned toward the crater. His magic flared — but not into destruction this time. A massive, violent surge of Water Magic erupted from both palms simultaneously, flooding the entire boss room in seconds. The raging rapids washed over the scorched bedrock with methodical efficiency, erasing the blast marks, cooling the glowing rock, and cascading down the fifty-meter hole in a devastating, perfectly natural-looking waterfall directly onto Rivira.
Max watched the water flow for a few seconds, making sure the scorch marks were fully obscured.
Then he dusted his hands off, his expression the picture of a man who had absolutely no idea what anyone was talking about and could prove it.
Without another word, Max grabbed Hogni's wrist and yanked him backward. Gojo casually stepped into the glowing teleportation circle under them, whistling innocently, while Kairu launched himself from the shadows to splat safely onto Max's shoulder.
VWOOM.
With a flash of crimson light, the four of them vanished from Floor 17, completely abandoning the scene of the crime and leaving a catastrophic, raging waterfall pouring into the Under Resort for the Guild to figure out.
To be continued...