18 hours in the event and things were starting to reach a climax.
The audience around the world was starting to heat up as the tournament was starting to get intense.
Only about 300 players were left in the event from the original 7000.
Most of them were already content with their current situation, as they only needed to be in the top thousand to proceed to the next level of the tournament.
But the other actual top rankers had at least the top 10 as their aim.
Surprisingly, no matter where one had landed at the start of the event, they were all starting to gather at one single place.
The lava river and the huge doors that were probably the entrance to the last part of the event.
Imagining that everyone was going to be in the same place, it was easy to guess that whatever laid behind those large doors wasn't something a single player or a small group could handle.
"How do we open this?"
Grant asked. As a tanker, his job was to solely protect his teammates and be a meatshield, so he wasn't as good as others in deciphering situations and solving puzzles.
The giant metal door had runes carved all over it, and there was a blue light shining through those runes.
"There must be a way."
Angelina used her eye magic to look for clues.
"Ah, there—-"
Before she could finish her sentence, she realised that a person had already found the clue before her.
'How?'
She couldn't help but question inside her brain. The monster-like guy who was sitting on one knee looking at a foot tall rock with his tail wagging behind him was way ahead of even the magician herself.
"Hmm? You got something to say?"
Shura, who was looking at the rock with an unusual amount of mana, looked at Angelina who seemed to be pointing in his direction.
"N-no. I just found out that the concentration of mana on that rock was unusually high…"
Angelina said in a low voice.
"Exactly. I noticed the same thing, this might be a clue to opening the gate."
Shura said, surprised that there was someone in the group who could find out the difference even with so many restrictions.
"Y-yes. I think we should check around the other edges too, there might be something similar."
Angelina explained. From all of Shura's actions till now, everyone had come to a conclusion that he was some kind of weird magic bladesman. But to be able to even use a proper search skill, now Angelina was slowly starting to think about what kind of monster he might be without the level restriction.
"Wow, you're really good at this, huh?"
Shura was genuinely surprised. She had skills and also the brains to back them up. He needed people like her around him so that he could learn from their companionship and grow.
"It's nothing."
Angelina felt a tingle in her nose when Shura praised her, a bit embarrassed yet proud of her abilities.
After looking around for a while, they found nothing at all like another rock with a similar amount of mana or anything suspicious.
"You know what? When you don't get answers using brains, you should use force instead."
The group's fighter, Baton, came forward while punching his knuckles. He looked small, but his body was bulky. He had veins popping up on his biceps, explaining that he wasn't just fit inside the game.
—-Punch!
He used his full power to punch the rock. Of course, if it was a normal rock, it'd have at least had a crack, but this didn't even budge.
"Fucking hell!"
Baton bit his lips, trying to suppress the cry of anguish. His whole hand was battered after a single punch, bleeding from multiple places and his bones shattered.
"It has some kind of reflection magic on it."
Baton said somehow, ignoring the horrible pain in his hand.
"Yeah? Then just don't use your body parts."
Another fighter of the team, a giant guy with a hammer harrumphed before striking the stone with his full power.
"AAAHHHH—-"
That guy turned into ashes moments later.
"To think there would be such a powerful reflection magic installed on such a simple looking rock."
Grant said. He was at a loss for words.
Someone from the team told him to try and use a skill on it, but he immediately rejected the idea. He didn't want to be another hammer dude.
"Stop being a wuss. I think there might be a much simpler solution to this."
Shura said as he touched the rock gently.
"What might that be? Injecting magic in it?"
Angelina said what Shura was thinking.
"Obviously."
"But, how can we inject magic in it without attacking it with magic?"
"Who said you need to attack it just to inject magic in it."
"Huh? It isn't possible otherwise."
"I don't agree."
It was common sense inside the game that mana only moved corresponding to the user's class and skills. Of course, there were some who defied it by mastering to use mana out of their class abilities, but nobody had been able to master it to an extent where they could use it without harming the target.
"It's dangerous, don't try it."
The olive haired beauty said. Angelina was a magician who loved her class, and had experimented a lot to be where she was. She was one of the key members of Warriors of the North after all.
She was worried that Shura might harm himself from the stone's damage reflection, so she couldn't help but disagree.
"Well then, let me try it on you. Here an HP potion just in case you feel that you're losing your HP."
Shura threw a potion bottle at Angelina as he came towards her and held out his monstrous hand.
Angelina hesitated for a bit before giving her hands.
She could feel Shura's rough yet somehow gentle hands, his claws touching her skin but not damaging it at all.
Shura focused his mana and started transferring a small stream of mana inside her mana veins. The veins he could see clearly due to his eyes of Arcana that traced all mana.
"Ahh~~!!!"
Angelina let out an unconscious moan before she immediately let go of Shura's hands, surprised. The stream of gentle mana entered her body as fast as a warm current, passing through her veins like a bolt of electricity.
The sensation that she felt was nothing short of heavenly, and she couldn't even control her pleasure leaking out of her mouth.
"Ahem!"
Grant and the others coughed and cleared their throats as they looked around here and there, trying to avoid Angelina's voice.
[Dexterity raised by +10.]
'Huh?'
Shura couldn't understand how transferring a bit of mana in someone else's body raised his dexterity. Even if there was supposed to be a stat rise, shouldn't it be intelligence or wisdom?
He was confused, but if Angelina knew of his question, she'd definitely be able to give him the answer.
"So? What do you think?"
"Yeah, go ahead….."
'I'm sure the stone would be more than happy to receive your mana.'
Angelina said, only muttering her last sentence to herself.
Shura channelled his mana inside the stone and soon the stone started shining, its light activating a rune on the metal door, which kept activating one rune after the other on the door.
Soon, the runes started shining and started rearranging themselves, converting into weird texts shining with blue light on the metal door.
"Great, who knows literature here?"
Grant scowled in sarcasm. At this point, he felt like the developers were just trolling the players.
"I don't think you need a literature study to decipher that. It's just Ethra's language spelled backwards."
Angelina said as she looked at the texts. When the others heard her words, they started noticing the similarities and started deciphering the texts.
"Gather…. the warriors…."
"together…to…"
"...open the doors…"
"And to…."
".....fight the legion…"
"...of millions?"
"With an army of….hundreds…."
"....because doom awaits….."
"For those who…. Want glory alone….?"
Everyone slowly completed what the puzzle-like sentence said, but it just created another puzzle for everyone.
"What does it mean?"
Baton, who had just drank a potion asked.
"Gather the warriors together to open the doors and to fight the legion of millions with an army of hundreds. Because doom awaits for those who want glory alone."
Grant repeated the words that everyone had put together and everyone tried to think what it could mean.
There were clearly some things hinting at opening the door together and such, but the rest of the things didn't make sense.
"So what? Can we open the door now if we all push it together?"
Angelina said as she touched the metal door.
"Well, it wouldn't hurt to try, would it? But isn't there an army of millions waiting behind the doors?"
The archer, Yurika, laughed. Of course, just like the others, she didn't believe there would actually be an army of millions behind the door. Games always liked exaggerating situations, so it was pretty much impossible for the game developers to task a few players against an army of millions.
Even if those were just a million simple goblins, it'd still be impossible to defeat them all.
"Well, it said it was millions versus hundreds, we aren't hundreds, are we?"
Shura questioned the group as he looked at both his sides. The others could see it too, the various different doors a bit far away from them.
It was probably where the other players would come from, and that too from all sides. If they combined the numbers, then it'd easily cross a hundred.
"You still want to try opening it?"
Shura asked, and the others gulped in cold sweat. If the number of players told in the text were true, then there was a good chance that the exaggeration of a million wasn't really an exaggeration anymore.
***
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