Chapter 82: Obsidian Slaughter, A Crack in the Code

The realization that they could actively farm a Level 50+ quarantine zone completely changed the trajectory of the day. Levi didn’t just want to survive the trek to the Midnight Spire. He wanted to drain the entire continent of its experience points.

They pushed deeper inland, navigating the twisting, jagged canyons of black obsidian.

The Midnight Continent was swarming with high-level patrols. Levi and Isolde quickly established a ruthless, mechanical combat loop. They didn’t pull one or two mobs at a time. Levi used his massive 361 Speed to sprint ahead, intentionally drawing the aggro of entire swarms.

He dragged massive packs of Level 55 Void-Touched Hounds and Level 52 Shadow-Stalkers into tight clusters.

The choreography was flawless.

Levi would cast **[Hollow’s Traverse]** to instantly teleport to the edge of the mob swarm, grouping them into a tight circle. He would drop **[Hollow’s Ward]** to absorb the random glancing blows that slipped past his evasion. Then, he would burn 100 Mana for **[Hollow’s Guillotine]**, completely shredding the defense of twenty monsters at once with the massive gold-tier cone attack.

"Now!" Levi would shout.

Isolde would step out from behind an obsidian pillar and unleash an absolute barrage of Anomaly blasts. The red *[-5,000 True Damage]* texts would flood the air, rapidly deleting chunks of 5,000 HP from the entire group.

As soon as their health bars dipped into the red 20% zone, Levi went to work. He chained **[Soul Harvest]** endlessly. *Execute. Refund Mana. Blink. Execute. Refund Mana. Blink.*

It was a mesmerizing, violent dance.

They ground for twelve uninterrupted hours. The sky above the Midnight Continent remained an eternal, sickly purple, making time completely lose its meaning. The sensory feedback inside the NerveDive helmet was grueling. Levi’s virtual lungs burned, and the simulated sweat stung his eyes. His real-world shoulders ached furiously from forcing his arms to swing the heavy scythe hundreds of times an hour.

But the XP multiplier was just too good to stop.

During the ninth hour of the marathon, fatigue finally forced a mistake.

Levi pulled a massive pack of eight Void-Touched Hounds. He grouped them up and cast Guillotine. Isolde started blasting.

Levi moved to herd a Hound that was trying to flank Isolde. He triggered Phantom Step, but his boot caught on a jagged piece of obsidian sticking out of the floor. The teleport animation fired a fraction of a second late.

The massive black wolf lunged, its jaws snapping shut right as Levi materialized.

The wolf’s teeth bypassed his scythe entirely and clamped directly onto his ribcage.

The VR pain engine didn’t just simulate a dull ache this time. It sent a sharp, agonizing crack straight through Levi’s chest. He actually gagged, his breath hitching inside the helmet as the kinetic force threw him backward onto the glass-like floor.

The math processed the brutal hit. The Hound’s 2,200 Attack slammed into Levi’s 349 Defense.

2,200 minus 349 equaled 1,851. The Diamond-tier necklace cut it in half, meaning Levi took 925 damage.

[-925]

His health bar dropped to 5,555. It wasn’t a lethal hit. He had plenty of health. But the simulated physical trauma of the bite actually caused his avatar to forcefully stagger.

Isolde had just raised her wooden staff to fire a True Damage blast at the Hound that bit him.

But she didn’t cast the spell.

Isolde froze.

Her blank, robotic eyes snapped from the monster directly to Levi’s health bar. For exactly 0.5 seconds, her entire character model completely stopped moving.

In a perfectly optimized AI script, that half-second hesitation didn’t exist. An AI wouldn’t care that Levi took 925 damage when he still had over five thousand health left. It would just fire the spell.

But Isolde didn’t fire. She looked at his HP bar. She looked at Levi holding his ribs on the ground.

Her gray cloak violently glitched. A wave of harsh green static rippled across her face, distorting her features.

"Warning," Isolde’s voice stuttered, the audio feed completely corrupted with static. "Anchor... integrity... compromised."

Levi pushed himself up off the ground, ignoring the simulated pain. "I’m fine! Keep shooting!"

Isolde blinked. The static vanished from her face. Her robotic demeanor snapped instantly back into place. She raised her staff and deleted 5,000 HP from the Hound’s health bar.

Levi scrambled forward, hacked the Hound down to 20%, and executed it with Soul Harvest. He wiped out the rest of the pack in ten seconds.

When the last polygon dissolved, Levi turned to look at Isolde. She was staring blankly ahead, completely neutral.

"Anchor integrity compromised?" Levi asked, walking up to her. "You paused. You actually checked my health bar before attacking."

"Negative," Isolde stated flatly. "I experienced a localized latency spike due to server load. I did not alter my combat parameters."

Levi just stared at her. He knew what a lag spike looked like. That wasn’t lag. That was the human Isolde fighting the God-fragment, actively prioritizing his safety over maximum DPS efficiency.

"Sure," Levi smirked. "Server lag. Let’s go with that."

They didn’t stop to rest. Levi popped a health potion to clear the missing 925 HP and went right back to pulling mobs.

The twelve-hour grind finally reached its mathematical climax. Levi slaughtered over a hundred high-level monsters during the massive session. The experience points stacked up so fast that the game’s UI couldn’t even process the notifications individually.

A blinding, glorious golden pillar of light crashed down from the purple sky.

[System Notification: Level Up! You are now Level 37.]

Two seconds later, the pillar crashed down again.

[System Notification: Level Up! You are now Level 38.]

Levi dropped his scythe onto the obsidian floor. The heavy weapon clanged loudly against the stone. He let out a massive, exhausted breath. The level-up light instantly cleared away twelve hours of built-up digital fatigue, restoring his stamina and completely refilling his mana pool.

He pulled up his status menu. He had 10 unassigned free stat points sitting in his interface.

The Level Suppression penalty against the Level 50 mobs was starting to shrink. He needed his raw physical damage to scale higher so he wasn’t entirely dependent on Isolde’s True Damage.

He assigned all 10 stat points directly into Strength.

His Strength jumped from 380 to exactly 390.

He ran the derived math instantly. 390 Strength multiplied by two gave him a base unarmed attack of 780. He added the 140 Attack from his Gold-tier Sovereign’s Deathknell scythe, bringing it to 920.

Finally, the 20% class passive multiplier kicked in. 920 multiplied by 1.2 pushed his permanent, unbuffed Total Attack to exactly 1,104.

"Over eleven hundred attack," Levi noted, swiping the menu away.

He picked his scythe back up. They were deep inside the Midnight Continent now. The massive, towering black structure of the Midnight Spire was clearly visible in the distance, pulsing with dark energy.

Levi looked at Isolde. Her cloak wasn’t glitching anymore.

"Ready to go to the tower?" Levi asked.

"Affirmative," Isolde replied.

Levi smiled, spinning the heavy scythe in his hand. The true slaughter was just getting started.