The silence that settled over the radiant geode was thick, broken only by the rhythmic, alien clicking of Shiraori's mandibles. Joseph didn't waste a single millisecond basking in his victory over the Trinity guild's scouting party. In a universe spanning nine vast, worlds, a single vein of Celestial Uranium was a localized anomaly—a microscopic goldmine that could fund an empire.
But it was only a goldmine if he could keep it.
'The remaining two fled. The Ranger logged out, but the Cleric used *Greater Teleportation* to exit the dungeon,' Joseph analyzed, his eight compound eyes scanning the floating loot data crystals left behind by BloodAxe and his companions. 'In less than ten minutes, the Cleric will reach their vanguard. Given the sheer scale of Yggdrasil's server hubs, Trinity likely has a regional fortress right here in Niðavellir. They will return with a small army.'
A cold, synthetic grin tugged at the lips of Joseph's human torso.
An entire guild vanguard was marching into a level 85 dungeon expecting a standard PvP skirmish. They had no idea they were walking into a meat grinder designed by a man who treated game mechanics like a personal playground.
Joseph opened his primary command console, waving his slender hands through the air as cascading rows of illegal, black-market green script flooded his vision.
"Recall protocols: Initiate," Joseph whispered, his feminine avatar voice echoing off the glowing crystals.
Across the boundless digital cosmos of Yggdrasil, the macro-scripted sub-routines running on his black-market neural link shifted.
In a frozen tundra world three hundred sectors away, a towering Level 46 Golem instantly ceased its mindless grinding of ice elementals, its botting script overriding its pathfinding to trigger a high-tier teleportation scroll. In a sky-realm of endless floating islands, a Level 45 Gargoyle folded its stone wings and activated a realm-gate token. One by one, Joseph's eight illegal alt accounts—his perfectly optimized, heteromorphic farming slaves—vanished from their respective worlds, routing their data packets directly to his coordinates in the Roaring Depths.
A series of bright, blinding flashes illuminated the dark basalt entrance of the geode.
Eight massive, monstrous figures materialized in a neat, symmetrical line. They didn't move. They didn't breathe. They stood completely rigid, their vacant expressions reflecting the soulless, hard-coded macros executing inside Joseph's split consciousness.
There was the Golem, an absolute wall of dark iron; the Automaton, a sleek, brass clockwork soldier built for relentless firing speeds; the Gargoyle, a grotesque statue of defense; and five other highly durable, high-stamina monstrous builds.
'Efficiency over emotion,' Joseph thought, looking at his silent army. 'They don't complain about lunch breaks. They don't sweat like Sakurai. They just mine, and they kill.'With a swift swipe of his fingers, Joseph updated their automated scripting. Six of the alts pulled massive, low-durability heavy pickaxes from their inventories—cheaply crafted items designed solely to maximize mining speed while conserving data space. They marched toward the Celestial Uranium vein in perfect, haunting unison, the rhythmic, synchronized *clink-clink-clink* of their tools instantly echoing through the cavern.
[Celestial Uranium Harvested: +8 Units]
[Celestial Uranium Harvested: +12 Units]
'Excellent. Now, for the welcoming committee.'
Joseph scuttled out of the geode and back into the winding, dark labyrinth of the dungeon's main shafts. He had less than five minutes before the vanguard arrived. It was time to turn the Roaring Depths into a graveyard.
Joseph didn't just rely on standard magic; he relied on the absolute abuse of overlapping game systems. He began to sprint through the tunnels, his absurd 60 Agility turning him into a terrifying, white-and-black blur. As he moved, his abdomen pumped furiously, secreting miles of hyper-compressed [Spider Thread] through the narrow corridors.
He didn't layer them openly. Instead, he utilized his [Thread Control] and [Invisibility] magic to weave a web of completely transparent, microscopic tripwires across the floor, walls, and ceilings.
To the naked eye, the tunnels looked completely empty. In reality, they were a dense, invisible matrix of hyper-sharp razor wires.
But Joseph wasn't done. At every major intersection, he paused for a fraction of a second to slam his front scythe-legs into the stone, casting [Magic Mine]. He didn't just place one. Thanks to his [MP Lessened Consumption] and [MP Recovery Speed] passives, he stacked three to four mines on top of one another in the exact same coordinate—a localized glitch that the developers hadn't patched out yet, which multiplied the explosive yield exponentially.
To top it all off, he channeled his MP, infusing the invisible webs with his [Poison Aura] and [Hallucinogenic Poison] skills.
The air in the tunnels began to shimmer with a faint, undetectable, odorless toxin.
Ten minutes later, the heavy iron doors at the entrance of the dungeon—which Joseph had sliced open earlier—were violently blown off their remaining hinges by a blast of holy light.
"Forward! Secure the shafts! Don't let that spider freak escape with our ore!" a booming voice roared.
Joseph, currently upside down on the ceiling at the deepest intersection of the labyrinth, activated his [Spatial Detection] and [Vision Expansion]. In his mind, the topographical map of the dungeon lit up with dozens of aggressive red dots.
The Trinity guild hadn't just sent a party; they had sent a full raid vanguard of thirty max-level players, led by a heavily armored Paladin clad in golden plate armor, flanked by high-tier Mages, heavily shielded tanks, and tracking-specialized Rangers.
"Keep your eyes peeled!" the golden Paladin commanded, drawing a glowing broadsword. "The survivors said it uses invisibility and teleportation! Mages, cast [True Sight] continuously!"
Three Wizards in the middle of the vanguard chanted in unison, casting a wide-area detection spell that illuminated the tunnels in a soft blue light. They expected to see a hidden player. Instead, the spell revealed absolutely nothing. Joseph was completely out of their detection radius, and his traps were physical objects infused with passive skills, not active cloaking magic.
"Clear! Move in!" the Paladin shouted.
The vanguard surged forward into the first narrow bottleneck of the tunnel.
*Snap. Snap. Snap.*
The frontline tanks suddenly halted, but their momentum carried them forward. They didn't feel anything at first, but their health bars suddenly flickered.
"What the—my movement speed is capped!" a tank shouted.
They looked down. The invisible, hyper-compressed wires of [Cutting Thread] had wrapped around their heavily armored legs. The more they struggled, the deeper the razor-sharp silk sliced into their armor.
"It's a trap! Cut the threads!" the Paladin yelled.
Before a swordsman could raise a blade to hack at the silk, a rogue stepped forward and triggered the exact coordinate of Joseph's stacked [Magic Mines].
The explosion was deafening. Because Joseph had glitched multiple mines into a single square, the overlapping kinetic blast didn't just trigger once—it registered as four simultaneous, critical explosions. The narrow basalt walls of the tunnel channeled the blast radius forward and backward, turning the corridor into a literal cannon barrel.
*BOOM!*
The frontline tanks and the rogue were instantly vaporized, their HP bars dropping from 100% to zero in a single frame. The shockwave ripped backward through the vanguard, knocking the squishy Mages and Rangers off their feet and shaving off half their health.
" healers! Mass Heal, now!" the Paladin screamed, his golden armor scorched black by the blast.
But as the smoke began to clear, the air became thick with a heavy, violet miasma. Joseph's [Poison Aura], combined with [Hallucinogenic Poison], had finally saturated the air.
[Status Affliction: Deadly Poison]
[Status Affliction: Blindness]
[Status Affliction: Illusion]
"I can't see! My UI is glitching!" a Mage screamed, his screen flashing wildly as the hallucinogenic toxin disrupted his visual perception, causing the stone walls to appear as twisting, writhing monsters.
"The poison is ticking for 5% of my max HP every two seconds! Cure it! Cure it!"
The Clerics desperately began to chant purification spells, but Joseph's build was entirely optimized around poison maximization. His [Poison Enhancement] and [Poison Attack] skills pushed the toxicity past their standard passive resistances. For every spell they cast to cure one player, three more began to choke on the fumes.
The vanguard was in absolute, unadulterated chaos. They were blind, poisoned, trapped in invisible webs, and completely unable to see their enemy.
And that was when Joseph decided to join the party.
From the shadows of the ceiling, Shiraori dropped like a silent ghost directly into the center of the panicked backline.
"Let's dance," Joseph's chillingly sweet voice hissed.
He didn't even draw his Divine scythe. He pulled out a fresh stack of his custom-made, 1-stat trash scythes. Utilizing his terrifying Agility, he blurred through the blinded Mages.
*Slash. Slash. Slash.*
Every single microscopic scratch from the flimsy scythes delivered a payload of [Rot Attack]. Mages and Clerics turned to grey ash before they could even utter a syllable of a spell. Because Joseph was killing them so quickly, the influx of massive EXP from high-level players continuously triggered his level-up sequences.
[You have leveled up.]
[HP and MP fully restored.]
[You have leveled up.]
[HP and MP fully restored.]
Every time the blowback of [Rot Attack] was supposed to kill Joseph, the sheer volume of experience points from the slaughter instantly forced a level-up via his [n%I=W] skill, completely wiping away his damage and rendering him an immortal, unkillable god of death in the middle of their ranks.
"Behind us! It's in the backline!" the golden Paladin roared, spinning around and charging through the mist, his sword glowing with holy fire.
"[Justice Strike]!"
The Paladin slammed his sword down where Joseph had been standing a millisecond prior. Joseph simply used a short-range [Greater Teleportation], appearing right behind the Paladin's shoulder.
"Justice?" Joseph purred into the Paladin's ear. "I already told your friend BloodAxe... I can't see it anywhere."
Joseph grazed the back of the Paladin's neck with a trash scythe.
The golden armor turned to rust. The Paladin's eyes widened in sheer, helpless terror as his avatar dissolved into a cloud of grey dust, leaving behind nothing but his legendary-grade glowing broadsword.
With their leader gone, the remaining ten players completely broke. They didn't care about the Celestial Uranium. They didn't care about the guild's honor. They just wanted to escape the white spider demon.
"Run! Just teleport out! Use the scrolls!" a Ranger screamed, frantically pulling a scroll from her menu.
But Joseph had already anticipated it. He raised a slender hand, casting [Darkness Wave] across the entire corridor. The wave of pure dark energy didn't just deal damage—it caused a heavy micro-stagger effect that interrupted every single active spell casting and scroll activation in the room.
"Nobody leaves," Joseph whispered.
What followed was not a battle.
It was a systematic execution. Joseph methodically hunted down the remaining survivors, his invisible threads slicing their limbs while his scythes turned their bodies to ash.
When the last player finally burst into a shower of data crystals, the dungeon fell dead silent once more. The air was still thick with purple mist, and the floor was literally paved with mountains of high-tier armor, weapons, and glowing loot bags left behind by thirty max-level players.
Joseph stood in the center of the carnage, his white spider body completely pristine, his crimson eyes reflecting the glowing loot.
He opened his main menu. His level had jumped significantly, and his inventory space was completely overflowing with the stolen wealth of an entire vanguard.
Turning back toward the geode, he looked at his eight macro-driven alts, who were still mindlessly, efficiently striking the Celestial Uranium vein in perfect, unblinking rhythm.
[Celestial Uranium Total: 1,200 Units]
Joseph let out a low, dark chuckle that echoed off the blood-red basalt walls. The Trinity guild would never return to this dungeon. He hadn't just defeated them; he had thoroughly traumatized them. The Roaring Depths belonged to him now.
'With this much ore, and the sheer volume of high-tier materials I just plundered,' Joseph thought, tossing the Paladin's golden sword into his storage void, 'the Caloric Stone is practically in my hands. And once I have it... the Hydra will be nothing more than a footnote in my grand design.'