Chapter 460 - 460 - The Dungeon's Hidden Final Boss

A few casts, and he'd be squeezed dry, twitching on the ground with a headache fit to split his skull.

Rose swung her one-handed sword, cutting the three giant Sandstorm Venom Scorpions blocking the path in half, then kept moving without a pause, executing one monster after another as they crept in slowly from both sides of the road.

At the rear of the column, as the party advanced, the corpses of the killed monsters came level with Laurier and Aura. The two of them pulled the Magic Stones out of the bodies with clean efficiency, checked whether there were any Drop Items or materials, then hurried to catch up with the group ahead.

To Leon, the scene looked like his own people had turned farming mobs into an assembly line.

Time slipped away amid the group's mechanical, repetitive farming.

And not just time. As they pushed toward the deepest part of the 36th floor, the force of the sandstorm went beyond what an ordinary person could endure. Even with masks and goggles, the sand found every gap, stinging every inch of exposed skin.

"When we get back I'm going to have to take serious care of my skin..."

"Damn sandstorm! What kind of weather is this supposed to be? We're deep in the Dungeon!"

"An environment this brutal is on par with that desert the King of the Land, the Behemoth, turned the ground into!"

Leon had no attention to spare for Laurier's muttering. He narrowed his eyes, focused on sensing the movements of the monsters inside the Blizzard. But a strange wrongness crept up on him.

These monsters, something about the way they moved was odd.

Especially the moment they emerged from the mine zone, their facing was almost perfectly identical. No, more precisely, as the party advanced, that facing seemed to adjust by tiny degrees.

Keeping one hand raised to sustain the Blizzard against the sandstorm, Leon reached into his cloak with the other, pulled out a notebook, bit the cap off his pen, propped the notebook on his knee, dropped to one knee, and started calculating at speed.

"?"

Noticing his strange behavior, the party, already a dozen meters ahead, stopped.

They held their tight formation, not breaking apart because of his pause.

"Leon, what is it?"

Persephone, anchoring the rear, held down her hood as the wind snapped it loudly and raised her voice.

Leon's own hood had long since been blown back, his black hair whipping wildly in the sandstorm, but his half crouched figure didn't shift an inch.

He kept writing and sketching in the notebook, and shook his head as he answered, raising his voice. "By my calculations, these monsters... when they come up out of the ground, they're all facing the same direction. They only change their behavior, like waking up, after the Blizzard hits them. In other words, while they're still underground, they're already oriented toward some target. It's almost like they're worshipping something."

Persephone had a flash of insight. "Sunflowers?"

"Worshipping?"

While they were still puzzling over it, the Falna pattern on Jeanne's back lit up, Revelation flickering violently, warning after warning stabbing at her like needles. Something dangerous was building fast up ahead.

She was about to call out a warning.

"?"

A roar that seemed to tear through the shriek of the sandstorm exploded out of the deepest part of the blowing sand.

Before the others could even brace themselves, Jeanne had already blurted out, "It's that thing! The abnormal presence I felt on the 35th floor, this is the same pulse!"

Persephone lifted her face, her expression complicated. "Looks like we hit the jackpot."

Rose's expression turned grave as well. "Sand Land, the 36th floor, the birth of a king, worship... putting all that together, if I'm not wrong..."

"The ruler of Sand Land, the hidden Monster Rex. The Mirage Sand Dragon."

In Orario there was an unspoken rule everyone understood without saying it, and that was this: for low level adventurers, their understanding of the Dungeon usually stopped at the surface.

It wasn't that Guild Headquarters was deliberately blocking information. It was that some information, once made public, would set off an earthquake. At that point, forget continuing to explore the Dungeon, fear alone would probably throw the entire city into chaos.

For instance: monsters with intelligence, cunning irregular Strengthened Species, mutated Monster Rexes, even the existence of the "God's Assassin." All of it belonged to that category.

And among the information that never circulated among Lower-Class Adventurers and was only made public in the circle of High-Class Adventurers, meaning those who had leveled up at least once and were Lv.2 at minimum, there was one critical item:

Besides the Monster Rexes in the traditional sense, stationed on the 17th, 27th, 37th, 49th, 61st and other floors, the Dungeon also had beings much like Monster Rexes on certain special floors.

For example:

The one most widely known among adventurers, guarding the last floor of the Upper Floors, the final boss of the 12th floor, the Lv.2 apex dragon species: the Infant Dragon.

The final boss holding the Middle Floors, the Lv.4 apex, a strengthened rare dragon species fusing plant and dragon: the Green Dragon.

And...

The final boss presiding over the Lower Floors, the Lv.6 apex, a strengthened rare dragon species formed from the fusion of countless sandstorm type monsters: the "Mirage Sand Dragon."

The odds of running into these monsters were not high.

Even the 12th floor's Infant Dragon was next to impossible to encounter without extraordinary luck, rarer even than running into a Rare Species. For parties with the strength to subjugate them, it was like stumbling onto a hidden boss, and beating them meant overnight riches, a genuine windfall.

But for an individual or party without the strength, running into them was nothing short of a catastrophe.

A wipe was the normal outcome. One survivor, or half of one, was the strange story worth telling.

In a Monster Rex area where the power balance was supposed to be relatively even, to run into a monster you could never beat no matter how hard you fought, once an Irregular like that got out, would the people who made their living off the Dungeon still have the courage to go deeper?

Nobody knew.

But what Leon and the others did know was this.

"So did we get lucky, or unlucky?"

He pulled his hood back on, walked to the tail of the column, and spread his hands like a bear cub tilting its head.

Iri, Margaret, Rose, Kureha, every one of them heard something in his tone that sounded close to greedy excitement.

Aura's hand trembled slightly on her staff as she forced herself to sound calm. "Challenge level Lv.6, the Mirage Sand Dragon... that puts it about even with the Monster Rex of the 37th floor, the White Palace, doesn't it?"

Persephone shook her head gently. "No, Aura, you've got it wrong. It's not just even. In the right environment, it's stronger than Udaeus."

"Huh?"