Chapter 739: Fighting Their Way Down, Level by Level

With the stone coffin secured, everyone works together to drag the heavy sarcophagus into the church hall.

The Lady of Calamity chants an incantation and releases the seal on the sarcophagus.

Steve splits the coffin open with a longsword, revealing a jade-like object inside.

Steve may fight like a spellcaster, but his close-combat skills are respectable as well.

His martial ability alone is worthy of the Iron Rank.

Even with the Anti-Magic Formation suppressing his extraordinary power, he remains a capable fighter.

Thunderous crashes shake the church. The others can scarcely imagine how fierce Henwell's battle must be.

The giant's size makes it difficult for it to enter the church, but the group still needs to hurry.

Under the Lady of Calamity's direction, they hurry to assemble a spell formation.

More than ten minutes pass before the Lady of Calamity can begin the idol-restoration incantation.

As the stones slowly merge, the fighting outside grows even more violent.

Against the berserk two-headed giant, Henwell looks battered and hard-pressed.

Appearances are deceiving. Henwell is still holding back.

Neither side trusts the other. Keeping a few cards hidden is only sensible.

When Henwell finally senses fluctuations in the laws from inside the church, he knows that the others have finished.

He dodges the stone giant's hammer and seizes the opportunity to dart into the church.

Some restriction keeps the two-headed giant from approaching the church passage. It can only hammer the ground outside in frustrated rage.

Feeling the violent tremors, Daisy cannot help asking anxiously, "Could it smash through the floor of this level?"

The Lady of Calamity replies, "No. Fendicasa was a powerful floating city, further reinforced by the gods."

"Even after falling, losing its power core, and decaying over the ages, it remains incredibly strong."

Henwell can attest to that. He has already tried to destroy several things here.

The structures within the city are extraordinarily sturdy. Apart from a few special areas, most of them are harder than steel.

When they first entered, Miller and the others would never have managed to drive anchor bolts into the stone if the city's covered bridge had not been built in a later era.

The two-headed stone giant outside may look ferocious.

Even so, smashing through nearly twenty meters of material comparable to high-quality steel is beyond it.

At that moment, the idol returns to its original form, and a new passage opens in the floor.

Abbas asks worriedly, "Alex still hasn't returned. Has the monster trapped her outside?"

Henwell puts on a grief-stricken expression. "She has sacrificed herself. We cannot wait any longer, nor can we waste the chance she won for us."

"She was a brave warrior and a righteous person."

"We must carry on her virtues, bear her will with us, and do our utmost to survive..."

Before he can finish, another roar from the stone giant comes from outside.

A small figure then rushes into the church passage.

Alex glares at Henwell. She heard every word he said.

Seeing her return, Henwell shrugs, mutters, "What a shame," and heads for the passage to the next level.

The beastkin woman had played that rather cleverly.

She had made it back already, yet remained hidden and watched Henwell contend with the stone giant alone.

Before descending, Henwell glances back at the idol's still-blurred face with a knowing smile.

The next level traps Henwell and Alex in a long battle against an entire swarm while the others restore the idol.

They are huge spiders with scorpion tails, capable of spitting petrifying webbing to hinder their targets' movements.

Their tails can also fire petrifying rays that slow their victims. They are numerous and agile.

Worse, the creatures excel at hiding. They can blend into the ground or the walls of buildings before launching sudden ambushes.

Worst of all, killing one releases a swarm of smaller scorpion spiders, each the size of a washbasin.

The miniature scorpion spiders are extremely fast. Once they reach a person, they self-destruct, filling an area several meters wide with a dust cloud that slows and petrifies.

Henwell and Alex must gradually clear every scorpion spider from the city and recover the idol-core fragments inside their bodies.

Killing the compact-car-sized monsters is not particularly difficult.

They are numerous, and almost every one possesses the strength of a Battle Knight.

Finding them is the real challenge. The scorpion spiders possess extraordinary concealment ability.

They are not alive, but more akin to inanimate objects, and they possess no spiritual power.

With no hostile mental fluctuations to give them away, their concealment is almost flawless.

Even Henwell cannot detect anything unusual until he actually touches one.

Searching every inch of the level could take several days.

The longer they waste here, the more dangerous the rest of the expedition will become.

Henwell therefore sets a trap of his own.

He uses the idol-core fragments to lure the scorpion spiders out.

Miller and Doyle each carry a fragment and wander through separate parts of the city.

Henwell and Alex follow separately behind the two men.

Henwell and Alex cannot serve as bait themselves. After losing so many of their kind, the scorpion spiders seem to have developed a group-linked recognition system.

They have already learned to avoid Henwell and Alex.

Sometimes the two pass directly through a trap without provoking an attack; the creature simply remains concealed.

Several hours later, even the remaining scorpion spiders stop taking the bait.

Even sending Abbas out fails to draw them out.

With no other choice, Henwell and Alex move through the city, striking walls and floors in search of hidden scorpion spiders.

After they finally kill several more, the Lady of Calamity brings welcome news.

They now have enough core fragments. Once she temporarily fuses them, she will be able to sense every remaining scorpion spider.

Henwell rests for two hours before the Lady of Calamity announces that the work is complete.

From there, the hunt moves quickly. Within half an hour, every remaining scorpion spider is dead.

When the idol is restored this time, a mouth appears on the face of the robed statue.

The others do not dwell on it and continue to the next level.

Fendicasa consists of eleven levels in total.

The eleventh level held the statue knights, the tenth held the two-headed stone giant, and the ninth held the scorpion-spider colony.

On the eighth level, they encounter gargoyles capable of fighting both on the ground and in the air.

These gargoyles are, of course, unusual beings and differ from gargoyles in the conventional sense.

On the seventh level, they face the charge of centaur knights.

On the sixth, dark elves hidden within the walls and floor ambush them. Miller and the others nearly die in the opening assault.

Because of the idol core, these petrified dark elves still retain their deadly venomous attacks.

Even the slightest exposure to their venom would cause serious trouble.

On the fifth level, they are attacked by a colony of petrified orcs.

The orcs strike with crushing force and possess equally formidable defenses, forcing Henwell and Alex into a grueling fight.

On the fourth level, they encounter a petrified dwarven rifle squad.

After so many ages, the squad naturally does not use gunpowder weapons.

Instead, the idol core has formed single-shot stone rifles capable of firing earth magic.

Henwell trades shots with them for a while, then charges in and smashes the entire squad to pieces.

Strangely, the third level has no floor guardian. The Lady of Calamity simply retrieves its idol core from a hidden chamber.