Chapter 79: The Lifesteal Marathon, Fighting the Fog

The purple fog of the Midnight Continent felt thick and oily, sticking to Levi’s avatar like liquid poison. His health bar was dropping at a terrifying speed.

[-100]

Another massive red number floated above his head.

[-100]

Levi stared at his UI in sheer panic. The *[Curse of the Long Night]* debuff was completely suffocating him. He had his *[Siphon Aura]* toggled on, but the zone’s curse chopped all healing in half. Instead of getting his normal 15 HP a second, he was only getting 7.5.

With the fog eating 100 HP a second, he was taking a net loss of 92.5 health every single second he stood on this beach. His maximum health was 5,480.

"You are currently taking fatal environmental damage," Isolde stated. She stood right next to him on the black ash, completely unaffected. The curse didn’t even register on her Anomaly code. Her blank, robotic eyes processed his rapidly dropping health bar. "Calculations indicate you will expire in fifty-seven seconds. The logical choice is to return to the ship and abort the objective."

"I just paid ten thousand gold for this boat ride," Levi snapped, ripping his Sovereign’s Deathknell scythe off his back. "I am not leaving."

"That is mathematically irrational," Isolde replied, her voice totally flat.

"Watch me," Levi grunted.

He couldn’t just stand here and argue with a broken AI. If he didn’t find something to hit immediately, he was going to die. He needed to trigger his weapon’s 10% Lifesteal to counteract the fog.

About forty yards down the black, sandy beach, a massive patrol of monsters wandered out of the dead, petrified treeline. They were terrifying. They looked like twisted, humanoid wolves walking on their hind legs, gripping jagged obsidian daggers in their claws. They practically blended into the purple mist.

[Shadow-Stalker]

[Level: 50]

[HP: 40,000 | ATK: 1,500 | DEF: 500]

"I need to hit them. Right now."

Levi dumped 50 Mana from his pool. "Hollow’s Traverse!"

His body dissolved into a tunnel of dark, pitch-black light. He completely bypassed the forty yards of open beach and instantly materialized dead in the center of the Shadow-Stalker patrol. There were exactly four of them.

He ran the offensive math in a fraction of a second while coming out of the teleport animation.

He was Level 35. The monsters were Level 50. That was a fifteen-level gap. The game wasn’t going to hold back. It slammed him with a brutal 75% Level Suppression penalty.

’Their Defense is 500,’ Levi calculated rapidly, his eyes tracking the wolves as they raised their daggers. ’My scythe ignores 20%. That drops them to 400 effective Defense.’

His Total Attack was sitting at 1,080.

1,080 minus 400 left 680 raw damage. Now, he had to apply that suffocating 75% suppression penalty. He was only going to deal 25% of his actual damage.

680 multiplied by 0.25 equaled exactly 170 Final Damage per basic strike.

’A hundred and seventy damage per hit is complete trash,’ Levi thought, gritting his teeth. ’Let’s check the skill.’

"Hollow’s Guillotine!"

He dumped 100 Mana. The heavy Gold-tier scythe erupted in a blinding, dark-gold aura.

Math processed instantly. 1,080 Attack multiplied by the 3.5 skill modifier gave 3,780 raw damage. Minus the 400 Defense left 3,380. Apply the 75% penalty, and the final skill damage was exactly 845.

He swung the scythe in a massive ten-meter cone, hitting all four Shadow-Stalkers simultaneously.

[-845] [-845] [-845] [-845]

The damage was incredibly low compared to their 40,000 HP health pools, but Levi didn’t care about killing them fast. He cared about the Lifesteal math.

His Gold-tier scythe granted 10% Lifesteal on all physical damage dealt. He had just hit four targets for 845 damage each. That was a total of 3,380 damage dealt in a single swing.

Ten percent of 3,380 was exactly 338.

But the Curse of the Long Night was still active. It cut all incoming healing directly in half.

338 divided by 2 meant he actually healed for exactly 169 HP.

A bright green [+169] popped up over his head. It completely erased the 100 HP environmental damage for that specific second, pushing his health bar up just a tiny bit.

"Okay, I can live," Levi yelled, his virtual lungs burning as he gasped for air. "But I can’t stop swinging!"

The fight instantly turned into a desperate, frantic marathon of survival. If Levi stopped attacking for even a single second, the 92.5 net health drain from the fog would start eating his health bar alive. He had to maintain a constant, aggressive flurry of attacks just to stay above water.

The Shadow-Stalkers snarled and lunged at him, thrusting their obsidian daggers.

Levi used his 341 Speed to physically weave between the massive monsters. He couldn’t afford to get hit by their 1,500 Attack. He just dashed around their hairy legs, spinning his scythe like a complete madman.

Because his swing timer was so incredibly fast, he was landing four basic strikes every single second.

170 damage times four hits meant he was dealing 680 DPS to a single target. Ten percent Lifesteal of 680 was 68. Cut in half by the toxic fog, he was only healing 34 HP per second from his basic attacks.

Combined with his Siphon Aura’s pathetic 7.5 HP, he was only healing 41.5 HP a second. The fog was still draining 100.

He was slowly dying.

His health dropped from 4,500 down to 4,200. Then down to 3,900.

"Isolde!" Levi roared, ducking under a jagged dagger.

Isolde stepped up from the black shoreline. She didn’t use any flashy animations or shout any spells. She just raised her basic wooden staff and pointed it directly at the nearest Shadow-Stalker.

[-5,000 True Damage]

The corrupted, glitched red text floated into the air. The monster’s health bar took a massive chunk. Because Isolde was dealing True Damage, she didn’t trigger Levi’s Lifesteal, but she was rapidly pushing the mobs toward his execution threshold.

"I need more targets to hit!" Levi shouted. He couldn’t sustain off just four wolves. The AoE healing wasn’t enough.

He used Hollow’s Traverse to blink thirty meters across the black sand, intentionally pulling another pack of four Shadow-Stalkers into the cluster. The wolves howled and chased him, grouping up into a massive, eight-monster pile.

With eight targets surrounding him, his Hollow’s Guillotine hit eight times. The sheer volume of AoE Lifesteal finally overpowered the fog’s drain.

[+338]

His health violently spiked back up every time he dropped his Gold-tier skill.

"Keep blasting them!" Levi yelled, spinning his scythe through the massive pack.

The combat loop was absolutely exhausting. The VR stamina engine was screaming at him. His real-world shoulders burned like they were on fire, but he couldn’t take a single break. He had to treat the entire coastline as one massive, continuous combat encounter.

Isolde systematically blasted the Stalkers with 5,000 True Damage hits, her blank eyes tracking their health bars perfectly.

When a Shadow-Stalker’s health hit exactly 8,000 HP—which was exactly 20% of its maximum—Levi dumped 50 Mana.

"Soul Harvest."

The massive, pitch-black spectral guillotine dropped from the foggy sky, instantly executing the beast and refunding his teleport. He immediately blinked to the next mob to keep his basic attack momentum going. He didn’t even pause to watch them shatter into blue polygons.

He slaughtered the first eight mobs.

He didn’t have time to stop and pick up the loot properly. He just ran directly over their dissolving pixels, letting the game’s auto-loot system vacuum up whatever they dropped while he actively sprinted toward the next pack of monsters down the beach.

The system notifications pinged his UI over the sound of the howling wolves.

[Item Acquired: Uncommon Cloak of Shadows]

Levi remembered this item clearly from his past life. It was the entire reason players bothered farming this miserable shoreline. If you combined enough of these specific cloaks, you could forge a piece of gear that permanently negated the zone’s toxic curse.

He needed exactly 27 of them to push the rarity up to Platinum.

"Alright," Levi grunted, chugging a mana potion on the run to keep his fuel tank topped off. "Twenty-seven cloaks. That means a lot of dead wolves."

For the next two hours, Levi did not stop swinging.

He dragged massive packs of Level 50 Shadow-Stalkers together, relying entirely on his AoE Lifesteal to survive the brutal -100 HP/sec environmental drain. The 75% suppression penalty made his scythe feel like a pool noodle, but Isolde’s artillery support carried the DPS check perfectly.

He executed target after target. The massive XP multiplier for the fifteen-level gap was completely flooding his progression bar. Every wolf was a goldmine of experience.

After slaughtering exactly eighty Shadow-Stalkers and watching the auto-loot system grab his twenty-seventh cloak, his XP bar finally overflowed.

The blinding golden pillar of progression light crashed down from the dark sky, completely illuminating the purple-fogged beach. His health and mana snapped back to a perfect 100%, and the burning exhaustion in his arms was instantly erased.

[System Notification: Level Up! You are now Level 36.]

Levi finally stopped swinging. He backed out of the aggro radius of the remaining mobs, staring at the system prompt. He had survived the beach landing.

He quickly opened his menu. He had 5 new free stat points to assign. He needed to swing his scythe even faster to increase his Lifesteal frequency in this cursed zone.

He dumped all 5 points directly into Agility.

His Agility bumped from 321 to 326. His derived Speed stat jumped from 341 to exactly 346.

He closed the menu, his virtual lungs heaving as he stood in the toxic fog. He couldn’t stay still for long. The environmental damage was already eating away at his freshly healed health bar. But he had the materials he needed. It was time to fix this stupid hazard permanently.