On the fourth floor of the Timber Labyrinth, a blood-soaked massacre was still underway.
At close range, Vampiric Touch was already a deadly spell to begin with, but in Gauss's hands—with his 19 points of Intelligence, plus the class specialties Greater Spell Mastery and Master of Stable Casting—it became something far more terrifying.
Boom!
Gauss rampaged through the monster horde like a force of nature. If some outsider happened to witness the scene from afar, they would probably assume it was a powerful hostile "greater monster" slaughtering other monsters.
The air was thick with the stench of blood.
"Kill!"
With that towering figure leading the charge like a sharpened spear, the Red Dragon Company's members unleashed everything they had, riding the momentum and cutting down the monsters scattered by Gauss's assault.
The entire battlefield was engulfed in a blazing fighting spirit.
Everyone's eyes burned with battle lust, as if a fresh, endless source of strength had begun welling up inside them.
The white glow of sword aura around the warriors' greatswords shone brighter. Mana flowed more smoothly through the mages' bodies. Rangers slipped through the battlefield like they were being guided by fate, nimbly evading attacks from the shadows. The red dragon unleashed torrents of dragonfire to one side…
Under Gauss's command, the entire Red Dragon Company had twisted into a single rope, with Gauss himself as the unseen core at the center of that formation.
Whether by chance or inevitability, a phantom aura had formed above the entire battle formation—it looked like a dragon spreading its wings.
"Keep up with the commander!"
And at the front, Gauss—who was crushing monsters into bloody mist with Vampiric Touch—also felt a mysterious boost descend onto him.
"This is…"
Gauss frowned slightly. He knew every power in his own body well, yet this new enhancement was something he had never experienced before.
His movements never slowed as he casually smashed apart dozens of magic frogs in front of him, all while examining the strange feeling deep inside himself.
He clenched his fist.
Very quickly, he understood the source of the power.
It was the presence of the hundred-plus members of the Red Dragon Company behind him, their momentum gathering and settling onto his body.
"So this is the power of momentum…"
At that moment, he was no longer alone.
He was an army.
And now he understood why so many powerful individuals were willing to build or attach themselves to large factions. The existence of comrades and subordinates could allow a leader to unleash even greater strength.
What Gauss didn't know was that normally, this kind of "battle momentum" required years—sometimes even a decade—of adapting and shared hardship before it could fully take shape.
But in this case, Gauss's horrifying display of butchering monsters had, without him realizing it, earned the reverence of the overwhelming majority of his men. Combined with the ongoing, subtle influence of his Proof of Leadership specialty, it had been instantly forged in the furnace of battle.
A massive, surging tide of momentum had been born.
Gauss lowered his gaze toward the monsters ahead.
The moment they felt his stare, hundreds of monsters instinctively took several steps back.
Though they outnumbered his side by dozens—perhaps hundreds—to one, lacking a central figure like him meant they were ultimately still a mob.
Under the pressure of Gauss's personal aura and the momentum of his entire Company, those monsters could probably only bring out forty to fifty percent of their true strength at best.
Boom!
After a brief pause, Gauss descended again and blasted more monsters skyward.
He had no intention of stopping.
It didn't matter whether the emotions radiating from the monsters were terror, rage, or hatred. None of it meant anything to him.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
The battle was reaching its most brutal stage.
The black-red spell tendrils around Gauss tore through the monsters while draining blood and converting it into mana to sustain themselves.
And the monsters, finally recognizing just how terrifying he was, began to rally together.
A rain of magic crashed toward him from every direction.
Fireballs, ice arrows, poison, lightning, prismatic spheres, magic missiles, blades, arrows…
The attacks were almost impossible to dodge entirely, surging like a tidal wave without end.
That was the advantage of numbers. When one fought many, the attacker was naturally forced to bear pressure from countless directions.
But Gauss had no intention of dodging.
Boom!
All kinds of magical effects exploded around him and directly against his body.
Before the light from one volley even faded, another burst into life right behind it.
"Too weak!"
Gauss's voice rang out from inside the chaos of magic.
Most of the monsters couldn't understand his words, but they could clearly feel the contempt in his tone.
So even more spells and arrows were hurled at him.
After yet another round of bombardment led by a Level 6 magic frog, the monsters all stared into the lingering smoke.
Did he die?
But in the next instant, several violent tendrils burst out from within the smoke.
Splurt! Splurt! Splurt!
The lead magic frog, around challenge Level 6, was instantly skewered. Standing atop its head, Gauss looked down on the monster horde with calm, indifferent eyes.
What truly drove the monsters into despair was this:
Gauss's body and clothes were spotless.
That barrage hadn't merely failed to kill him. It hadn't even managed to leave so much as a scratch.
A layer of terrifying energy-scaled draconic armor covered his body. It looked thin, almost fragile, yet it had become an insurmountable gulf.
Gauss's defenses were monstrous.
And honestly, he felt that even without those layers of energy protection, his body—already as durable as a monster's—could probably have endured the attack anyway. Even if something had managed to break through, his body's regenerative ability would likely have repaired the damage almost immediately.
That was the confidence of someone built like a perfect all-rounder.
…
The battle between the Red Dragon Company and the fourth floor's monster army lasted far longer than expected.
Gauss himself lost track of how long he had been fighting. He only knew that even the Red Dragon Company's rotating shifts couldn't keep up with his pace.
Meanwhile, he simply continued using the imprisoned Magic Frog Lord as bait, occasionally giving it another lash to keep it screaming in agony and calling in more "reinforcements."
Once a new group of monsters gathered, he would wipe them out.
With Vampiric Touch operating at almost zero cost, he slaughtered them endlessly.
For the summoned monsters, it was like being dragged into hell itself.
They had to face a killing machine they couldn't beat, couldn't outlast, and couldn't escape from. Worse still, under the influence of the labyrinth lord, they couldn't even flee after realizing how hopeless the difference in power was.
They could only die and become nutrients for Gauss.
He had already lost count of how many waves of reinforcements he had killed.
Looking toward the deeper forest, he noticed the latest reinforcement wave was disappointingly small.
Only a few hundred.
"Did I wipe them all out?"
He frowned, then glanced at the number in his monster bestiary.
"Total Monster Kill: 57,812"
That shouldn't be enough…
He looked back at the Magic Frog Lord beside him. It was on its last breath, but still alive. He casually gave its back another lash with Vampiric Touch.
The powerful black-red spell tendril instantly tore through the Frog Lord's tough hide, leaving behind a wound that continued to rot and corrode.
"Guaahhhh!!"
Gauss locked eyes with it.
There was no more fighting spirit left in the lord's exhausted gaze.
The hatred had long since been worn away by the sheer length of the battle. By now, it fully understood the hopeless gulf between them and wanted only release.
Gauss could already guess what had happened.
The Magic Frog Lord had stopped summoning more monsters.
Maybe it had realized Gauss was using it to massacre the labyrinth's monster population and didn't want to keep helping him. Or maybe some kind of energy inside it was running dry, weakening its control over the other labyrinth monsters. Either way, the reinforcements arriving were getting fewer and fewer.
On top of that, Gauss had already killed well over ten thousand monsters on the fourth floor. That number alone was staggering.
The concentration of death hanging over the battlefield had become nearly tangible, a cloud of doom that refused to disperse. Plenty of monsters were simply too terrified to approach anymore.
The monster corpses had piled up into literal mountains of flesh and blood.
Most had died to his spells. The rest were the work of the Red Dragon Company.
The endurance granted by Threefold Source Power was simply too important.
Without it, the old him would never have been able to sustain something like this.
Even now, he still felt capable of continuing.
Aside from a little mental fatigue, both his stamina and mana remained relatively abundant.
"Fine."
Gauss let out a slow breath.
Since the Magic Frog Lord could no longer call in enough monsters, there was no point in dragging things out any longer.
"Control Water!"
The water dragons constricting the frog's body instantly tightened under Gauss's command.
In the next moment, countless needle-like water strands pierced through the giant frog's body.
In the blink of an eye, the already battered frog's body was riddled with thousands of tiny holes, and blood began pouring out like water from all its wounds.
This final strike was the last straw. It took the Frog Lord's life instantly.
The light in its eyes faded.
A monster that had once ruled the entire fourth floor of the labyrinth died soundlessly.
"Elite Magic Frog Lord Slain ×1."
"Divinity Favor gained: 0.56%."
"Current Divinity Favor: 3.28%."
Gauss felt a strange force flow out of the Magic Frog Lord's corpse and into his own body.
So it had divinity because it was the labyrinth lord?
It wasn't a huge amount, but the feeling of that beautiful force still made him feel distinctly refreshed.
He could sense that his grasp over the Precision rule had grown stronger as well.
At the same time, a sphere of light slowly drifted out of the Frog Lord's mountain-sized corpse and fell into Gauss's hands.
Gauss closed his fingers around it.
When the glow faded, what appeared in his palm was a fragile-looking crystal like colored glass.
The moment he held it, he understood its purpose.
It was the key to open the fifth floor of the labyrinth. If he crushed it, the passage would refresh directly in front of him. That passage would remain fixed for seven days before returning to its random location cycle on the fourth floor.
Gauss had no intention of opening the fifth floor immediately, so he stored the opening stone away for now.
Then he looked toward the other thing that had appeared beside the Frog Lord's corpse—a loot chest shimmering with flowing light.
The chest had appeared after a brief spatial distortion. It was clearly the reward for clearing the fourth floor lord.
Gauss opened it with Mage Hand.
The instant the lid lifted, blinding golden light burst out from within.
Gauss narrowed his eyes.
Gold.
A lot of gold.
He estimated there were several thousand coins, all of excellent quality.
He reached in and scooped up a handful. As the gold coins slipped through his fingers, they rang together in a crisp, intoxicating sound.
Aside from the coins, there were other rewards at the bottom of the chest.
Several dozen medium-grade mana stones of different elements, and one perfectly smooth, gleaming high-grade mana stone.
The moment Gauss saw the high-grade mana stone, his eyes lit up.
The medium-grade stones were nice, but those could at least be bought with money. High-grade mana stones were a different story. They were far rarer, and even with his channels, very hard to obtain.
He had asked around in Falim before and learned that high-grade mana stones were produced in extremely small numbers, and the noble houses that controlled major mana mines hoarded them jealously.
They already made absurd profits just selling low- and mid-grade mana stones, so they had no reason to put truly valuable high-grade stones on the market.
For any spellcaster, a high-grade mana stone was a dream item. Its mana quality was incredibly high, and it was said that simply meditating beside one could produce extraordinary results.
And unlike low- and mid-grade stones, a high-grade one could also rapidly replenish itself by absorbing ambient natural mana, even after being drained completely.
Gauss immediately stored it away.
Besides those rewards, there was also a black one-handed crossbow.
After identifying it, he found that it was a purple-grade wonder that could load mana itself as ammunition.
Since Gauss had no use for it, he figured it could probably go to Alia or Serandur.
Once the rewards were counted, the others started approaching. Looking over the mountains of corpses, many of them still wore dazed expressions, clearly unable to believe that so many enemies had died here.
The way they looked at Gauss had also become even more reverent. Every member of the Red Dragon Company felt like what they had just witnessed was beyond reason.
After all, the later phase of the battle had been fought almost entirely by Gauss alone, while the rest of them rotated back to rest.
How did he do it? How could one person kill ten thousand monsters?
"Start cleaning the battlefield."
"Only collect the high-value materials."
Gauss looked out over the sea of corpses and knew full well just how massive the workload would be. So he loosened the requirements.
Otherwise, processing the materials from more than ten thousand monsters would take forever.
"Maybe we can contract out the low-value bodies and materials to the other adventuring teams," Shadow suggested.
After thinking it over, Gauss found the idea reasonable.
There were simply too many. There was no way the Red Dragon Company's hundred or so people could harvest everything in a short time. Packaging up the low-value monster corpses and selling the rights to other adventuring companies would probably attract plenty of takers.
Those other companies had larger headcounts on-site, and the local ones could pull in even more support staff quickly to process all that material.
"Let's negotiate after I come out of meditation."
The pressure to break through inside him was already becoming impossible to suppress.
Truthfully, he could have advanced to Level 8 during the fight itself, but the timing had been wrong.
Now the floor lord was dead, and the surrounding area had been practically cleared of monsters. Nothing would dare approach this place for a while.
That was when he finally intended to break through.
Maybe because so much experience had already overflowed, and because advancing from 7 to 8 didn't involve crossing a full stage, he could tell this breakthrough wouldn't be difficult.
And it wasn't just him.
Most of his close teammates could feel signs of advancement too.
For both Gauss and the Red Dragon Company, this battle had been an absolute windfall.
Still, before breaking through, he first made a full round of the surrounding area, making sure there was no danger nearby. Only then did he inform Alia and the others, along with the Red Dragon Company's main officers, and find a relatively level patch of ground to sit cross-legged.
The moment he sat down, mana surged through his body like boiling magma, running wild and violent through his limbs.
"Finally. Time to level up."
Gauss muttered softly, then gathered his mind and sank his full awareness inward.
~~~
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