Chapter 71: 'Evil God' Thanatos' Attention (Patreon)

By his baseline combat strength, Renan could only be counted as a solid Lv4.

But as his physical constitution continued to develop, the number of Meditate buffs he could stack on himself had climbed from the two he'd managed back at the Pokémon Cerulean Gym to three.

A 1.5x boost to his spiritual power was enough to give Renan the burst of a Lv5 Mage for a short time.

And if he struck when the other side wasn't expecting it, he could very well kill the pink-haired woman in a single ambush.

What followed went more or less as Renan had predicted.

After agreeing to a simple partnership with Shakti over telepathy, he stacked three layers of Meditate and appeared in an instant inside the alley where several dark faction members lay in hiding. His first move was to snap their necks with Confusion, so fast they couldn't even scream.

The dark faction members in the other alley went a little later.

Last came Valletta.

Renan had Shakti draw as much of the woman's attention as he could, while he teleported into her blind spot.

Then Confusion to bind her, and a decapitating strike with fire damage added on top.

Not counting the time spent stacking Meditate, the whole thing took Renan less than ten seconds.

High in the air, the figure of a black-haired boy flickered into view, then vanished again a moment later under a Disillusionment Charm.

Renan looked down at Rivira's outer wall and saw that the fight between the adventurers and the monsters was still going.

He tossed back a spiritual power recovery potion, and then began a hunt that belonged to him alone.

For this operation, the dark factions had drawn in every monster spawned across several floors, above and below, over the past few hours.

The result was that even though Rivira had a fair number of adventurers, seven or eight hundred of them, each one still had to face the attacks of five or six monsters on average.

If an adventurer was Lv3 or higher, that was fine. They even had strength to spare to help the people around them.

But the vast majority of people living in Rivira were, in truth, middling Lv2s, not the best but far from the worst.

That they hadn't been wiped out the instant the monster horde hit was already thanks to Rivira's leader commanding well and allocating squads sensibly.

Renan sent his spiritual power down toward the ground and let his senses blanket the most desperate stretch of the battlefield.

Then a single burst of Confusion seized six Minotaurs just as they were about to bring huge axes down on the adventurer in front of them. A twist of his spiritual power followed, and their heads spun 180 degrees to face backward as easily as turning a doorknob.

Inside the ring of Minotaurs, an adventurer whose weapon had been knocked away and who had already shut his eyes to await death slowly opened them three seconds later.

And found, to his astonishment, that the monsters he'd been fighting were already dead.

He was the first lucky soul tonight to escape death thanks to Renan's interference.

He was clearly not the last.

Over the next ten-odd minutes, Renan's Confusion fired every four or five seconds, catching as few as three monsters and as many as nearly ten at a time. Then he executed them, sometimes in plain view of the adventurers and sometimes unseen.

He'd stocked up on spiritual power recovery potions before heading into the Dungeon, so he held nothing back.

On top of that, with the dark factions barging in, he didn't much feel like staying in the Dungeon any longer anyway.

Now that monsters were swarming all around Rivira, Renan naturally wasn't going to waste such a good chance to farm.

As for rescuing adventurers, it was only a convenience. If he saw someone, he'd save them. If he didn't, it was none of his business.

With Renan's help, and Shakti's too, since he arrived a little over a minute later, the Rivira adventurers who'd been pinned down by the monster horde turned the tide at once and soon began wiping out the monsters in return.

As for the true hero of this battle, once a wave of satisfied fullness rose from deep in his soul, he chose neither to stay nor to speak with anyone. A few teleports later, he was back at the temporary camp he'd set up out in the wild.

Now that he was in the Dungeon, Renan would have to be out of his mind to go charging recklessly into the shared space.

He simply sat cross-legged inside his tent, steadying his breathing and casting Meditate again and again.

…

At the same time, in a forest less than six kilometers from Renan's camp.

A man in a black cloak, or rather a god, was gazing out at the scene over Rivira.

After a moment, a member of the dark factions approached and whispered, "Lord Thanatos, Valletta's plan has failed."

Thanatos let out a giggle. "Failed, so it failed. It's not like it's the first time. Tell everyone to pull back."

The dark factions might have stirred up a pile of trouble in recent years, but that was only the result of the Zeus Familia and the Hera Familia failing their challenge against the one-eyed Black Dragon, their core members dying in droves and the rest leaving Orario.

Put more simply, when the tiger's gone from the mountain, the monkey gets to play king.

Back when Zeus and Hera were still in the Labyrinth City, the dark factions had been nothing but vermin who didn't dare show their faces.

Of course, they weren't doing much better now.

For the dark factions, failure had always been the norm.

But flip that around, and they could fail countless times and lose countless people.

All it took was one success, and all of Orario would be blown sky-high.

Yet after hearing his patron god's words, the dark faction member who'd delivered the report couldn't help but wear a strange look.

"Um…"

Thanatos closed his right eye and looked at the man with his left. Having vaguely guessed what was coming, he lost the manic edge in his voice. "What is it? Spit it out."

With his patron god's permission, the man hesitated no longer. "According to the scouts we planted in Rivira, Valletta and the others who went to hunt down 'Ganesha's Staff' have all died already. As for the killer… our people were far from the battlefield at the time. All they saw was someone in a full suit of silvery-white armor who appeared out of nowhere behind Valletta, then used a slash enchanted with fire magic to cut her head off."

Thanatos said, "Oh?" and went on, "What about the others? How did they die?"

"Without exception, their necks were snapped. And no one seems to have cried out during the process. Otherwise Valletta couldn't possibly have failed to raise even a bit of caution."

"There's more…"

"The one who killed Valletta seems to have awakened a healing magic as well. 'Ganesha's Staff' had a teammate who'd been blown into a cripple, but under that magic's effect he made a full recovery and even joined the later effort to wipe out the monsters around Rivira."