Chapter 42: Intense Competition
On different islands, scattered across the crimson-veined void like seeds of golden destruction, each clone went about their work. They did not speak. They simply smiled—the same serene, unsettling smile that graced the original Gabriel’s lips—and raised their hands toward the trembling earth below them.
The first clone hovered above an island of jagged peaks and deep, shadowed valleys. The trees here were twisted, their bark black as charcoal, their branches reaching toward the sky like the claws of buried sinners. Mutated cyclopes roamed the slopes in large numbers—fifty, maybe sixty of them, their gray skins blending with the rocks.
The clone observed them for a moment. His three pairs of golden wings beat slowly, stirring the thick, mana-laden air. The runes on his feathers glowed faintly, pulsing in rhythm with his heartbeat. His cross-shaped pupils narrowed.
Wind, he thought. Let them taste the sky.
He extended both arms, palms facing downward. His smile widened—not cruel, not merciful, simply certain. He did not need grand gestures or shouted incantations. He simply willed it.
The wind answered his call.
At first, nothing seemed to happen. The air grew still—so still that the leaves on the twisted trees stopped rustling, so still that the cyclopes below paused in their labors, their single eyes scanning the sky with growing unease having sensed that something was unnatural. A few grunted to each other, pointing at the golden figure above. One raised a stone axe and roared a challenge.
Then the wind moved.
It did not blow. It tore. From all directions at once, razor-sharp currents converged on the island’s center, spiraling upward, faster and faster, until they formed a cyclone of pure, cutting fury. The clone watched as the vortex grew—ten meters wide, then fifty, then a hundred. Its edges shimmered with a pale green glow, the visible manifestation of wind mana compressed to its breaking point.
The cyclopes tried to run. They scattered in every direction, their massive feet pounding the rocky ground, their arms pumping. Some leaped into ravines. Others huddled behind boulders. A few—the bravest or the most foolish—charged directly at the clone, leaping into the air with stone swords raised.
The cyclone swallowed them all.
The first monster to touch the vortex did not scream. Its body was simply unmade—skin peeled from muscle, muscle stripped from bone, bone ground to dust, all in the span of a single heartbeat. The wind did not cut; it flayed, each microscopic current acting like a thousand invisible blades working in unison.
The clone watched this, while his smile never wavering.
One by one, the cyclopes were drawn into the maelstrom. Their roars turned to shrieks, their shrieks turned to gurgles, their gurgles turned to silence. The cyclone turned crimson as it drank their blood, then gray as it pulverized their bones, then finally clear again as even the dust was scattered to the void.
When the wind finally subsided, the island was unrecognizable.
The jagged peaks had been sanded down to gentle hills. The deep valleys had been filled with debris. The twisted trees were gone—not broken, but eroded, as if centuries of weathering had been compressed into minutes. Everything that had once lived on that island was dead.
The clone raised his wrist and glanced at the golden bracelet.
47.
He nodded, satisfied. Then he turned and flew toward the next island, his wings leaving trails of golden light in the crimson sky.
On an adjacent island, the second clone prepared his own masterpiece.
This island was different from the others. It was low and flat, more marsh than mountain, with shallow lakes dotting its surface and thick reeds growing in dense clusters. The cyclopes here had adapted to the wet environment—their gray skin was slick with moisture, their feet were broad and webbed, and they moved through the water with surprising speed.
The clone counted at least fifty of them, maybe more, hidden among the reeds and submerged in the murky lakes.
Water, he thought. While not use then.
He raised one hand toward the sky. Golden mana gathered around his palm, not as fire or lightning, but as something gentler—something that shimmered like morning dew, something that smelled of rain and rivers.
Water Deluge. His spell name.
He did not summon rain. Rain would have been too slow, too merciful. Instead, he reached into the very fabric of the dungeon and pulled. From the ambient mana that saturated every floating island, from the moisture that hung heavy in the crimson air, from sources beyond mortal comprehension—water flowed.
It erupted from the ground beneath the island, geysers bursting through the earth, fountains spraying from every crevice. It poured from the sky above, not in droplets but in sheets, as if an invisible ocean had been overturned. Within seconds, the shallow lakes became deep. Within minutes, the deep lakes became a single, unified sea.
The cyclopes thrashed and struggled. Some could swim—their webbed feet paddling frantically—but even the strongest swimmer cannot outlast a rising tide with no shore. The water climbed past their knees, their waists, their chests. They grabbed onto reeds, onto each other, onto anything that might keep their heads above the surface.
The clone watched. His smile remained, serene and patient.
Now, he thought. Let them freeze.
He raised his other hand.
Frozen World.
The temperature dropped.
Not gradually, not with warning chills or creeping frost. It plummeted, a vertical fall from warm humidity to arctic cold in the span of a single breath. The water that had risen so quickly now froze even faster. Ice crystals exploded outward from every drop, spreading like wildfire, linking together, forming a solid sheet that stretched from one end of the island to the other.
The cyclopes did not have time to scream. Their bodies were encased mid-struggle—arms reaching, mouths open, eyes wide with terror. The ice preserved them exactly as they had been in their final moment: a gallery of frozen agony, each statue a testament to the clone’s merciless efficiency.
Then the clone clenched his fist.
The ice shattered.
Not into large chunks, but into fine, glittering dust—a blizzard of frozen particles that sparkled in the crimson light. And within that dust were the remains of the cyclopes, their bodies ground to fragments no larger than snowflakes.
The clone lowered his hands. The temperature began to rise again, but it would be hours, perhaps days, before the island thawed.
He looked at his bracelet.
52.
He smiled, turned, and flew to rejoin his original.
Rapidly, Gabriel’s total tally had surpassed the 200 mark.
204.
He hovered in the void between islands, his twelve golden wings spread wide, his clones returning to his side like obedient falcons. They did not speak. They did not need to. Through their shared bond, he had witnessed every kill—every cyclone, every frozen shatter, every silent smile.
Lilith was somewhere out there, building her shadow army, raising her own tally.
But for now, Gabriel was winning. He allowed himself a small, satisfied smile.
"I wonder how you’re doing, babe. Knowing you, you must be having fun while not far from my score—or maybe you have surpassed it."
°°°°°
On the other side of the dungeon, Lilith floated above a burning island, her crimson robe billowing in the heat.
Her shadow undeads had become a tide. What had started as sixty-nine had grown to over a hundred, then two hundred. They swept across island after island, slaughtering everything in their path, and each kill became a new shadow, and each new shadow joined the hunt. It was exponential. It was unstoppable.
Lilith herself did not merely watch. On the islands she passed, she unleashed Hell flame—black fire that consumed flesh and stone alike. She called down Purple lightning—bolts that split the sky and turned cyclopes to ash before they could scream. She savored each destruction with a smile, her crimson eyes gleaming.
At the end of her rampage, her golden bracelet flickered.
206.
Gabriel’s score: 204.
She had surpassed him by two kills.
"Fufufu," she chuckled. "Sorry, my love. Victory is mine."
’’!!!"
As if in response to their carnage, the dungeon shuddered.
A deep, resonant groan echoed through the void—not from any island, but from the very core of this Red-level labyrinth. The air grew heavy. The crimson sky churned faster, clouds twisting into a spiral above the couple’s locations.
Then, without warning, a portal tore open before each of them.
It was not of their making. It was the dungeon’s own desperate response—a forced evacuation, a surrender. The first floor had been cleansed. Every monster, every shadow, every living thing had been erased. And the dungeon, in its primitive awareness, knew it could not hold them.
Somewhere deep below, in the heart of the labyrinth, the dungeon’s core pulsed weakly.
It was afraid.
For the first time in its existence, the spirit of the dungeon—a formless, consciousness that had never known fear—trembled. These two were not adventurers. They were not simple at all. They were annihilators. They had reduced an entire floor to nothing in hours. And now they were coming deeper.
The core reached out with its will, trying to calculate, trying to adapt. But there was no adaptation for this. No countermeasure. No trap.
Only terror.
The portal swallowed Gabriel. The portal swallowed Lilith.
On the next floor, they would reunite.
And the dungeon had preparing a nice surprise for them.
