Chapter 172: Chapter 172: The Golden Chamber
Garrick leaned heavily against his rusted kite shield. He caught his breath as the dust from the pulverized iron bolts settled on the marble floor.
"Is everyone okay?" Garrick asked, his voice wavering slightly.
"We are fine, Garrick," Sera said and placed a reassuring hand on his silver-plated shoulder. "That was incredible. You saved the entire party."
Dante didn’t linger on the close call.
He knew the dungeon architecture of the Zenith Protocol intimately.
A massive raid-wiping trap usually preceded a major localized loot cache or a significant boss encounter.
He walked past the piles of shattered iron and pushed open the massive golden double doors at the end of the hallway.
The doors swung inward silently on perfectly oiled hinges.
The room beyond was absolutely blinding.
It was a sprawling circular chamber constructed entirely from polished immaculate gold.
The walls, the floor, and the towering vaulted ceiling gleamed under the light of massive floating crystal chandeliers.
But it wasn’t the architecture that made the squad stop and stare.
The chamber was filled with coffins.
Unlike the heavy rusted iron boxes in the first room, these coffins were forged from solid flawless gold.
They were heavily adorned with precious gems and intricate localized carvings depicting ancient celestial battles.
"Oh my god," Casanova whispered. He pulled off his pink feathered hat in genuine reverence. "We hit the jackpot. This is the motherlode."
Pip darted out of the tunic of Mei, his tiny red eyes completely dialated.
"So much gold," Pip shrieked and practically vibrated in the air. "We can buy an entire continent! We can buy the moon!"
"Pip, wait!" Dante ordered sharply. He grabbed the tiny dragon by the tail before he could dive-bomb the closest coffin.
The Intuition stat of Dante was pinging violently.
The sheer volume of localized wealth in the room was a massive blatant trap.
The system didn’t just leave millions of credits worth of raw gold sitting unguarded.
"Do not touch anything," Dante warned the squad and stepped carefully onto the polished gold floor.
Before he could even fully enter the room, the system interface flashed a hard aggressive red.
The heavy golden lids on twenty of the largest and most ornate coffins simultaneously blasted open.
They didn’t slide or creak. They were violently thrown across the room and crashed heavily against the gold walls.
Massive figures rose from the dark interiors of the coffins.
They weren’t agile spear-wielding guards.
They were towering hulking behemoths clad head-to-toe in incredibly thick impenetrable gold armor.
They carried massive rectangular golden tower shields that completely covered their bodies.
They wielded short brutally spiked maces that pulsed with localized heavy kinetic energy.
[Monster Spawn: Undead Shield Guard Soul]
[Tier: Gold (Elite)]
[Level: 32]
[HP: 85,000 / 85,000]
"Twenty elite Gold-tier bosses," Nyx analyzed rapidly, her fingers flying across her datapad.
"Dante, their physical defense scaling is astronomical. They are literally designed to completely wall off physical damage. Their shields possess a passive that reflects concussive force."
Dante looked at the twenty massive golden tanks forming a perfectly synchronized overlapping shield wall blocking the path through the chamber.
"They are a localized brick wall," Dante murmured.
"I can hold them!" Garrick volunteered immediately. He raised his rusty shield perfectly ready to channel his marital frustration again.
"No," Dante said flatly.
"You hold the aggro, but we cannot burst them down. If we try to chip away at 85,000 health while dealing with reflection damage, we will be stuck in this room for hours. We do not have time for a war of attrition."
Dante knew the other major guilds, Vanguard’s Legacy, the Legion of Blades, and the Apex Coalition, were right behind them in the dungeon instance.
If they got bogged down in this room, Silas might catch up and try to backstab them while they were engaged with the bosses.
He needed to clear the room instantly.
He needed to break the damage cap again.
"Everyone stand back," Dante ordered. His voice dropped into a cold absolute register. "Do not engage."
The squad immediately backed away and gave Dante the entire floor.
Dante didn’t draw the [Dawn-Breaker Blade]. He didn’t want to use a standard weapon.
He held out his right hand.
The black brand on his wrist flared violently with a deep pulsating crimson light bleeding through the dark ink.
Thick light-absorbing smoke erupted from his palm. It instantly condensed into the massive jagged shape of [Voidsever].
The primordial greatsword actively devoured the ambient golden light in the room and created a localized shadow that stretched across the polished floor.
"Aura," Dante called out softly.
The Mystic Sovereign materialized above his head, and her starlight tails wove gently.
"Give me the buff," Dante instructed.
Aura chimed and pulsed a concentrated burst of pure celestial energy directly into the avatar of Dante.
It wasn’t her massive AoE shield. It was a targeted high-tier supportive buff she had retained from her previous evolution.
[Skill Activated: Holy Moment]
[Effect: Grants a temporary flat 50% boost to Base Attack Power. Duration: 10 seconds.]
Dante felt the immediate localized surge of raw strength. But it wasn’t enough.
He needed overwhelming mathematical absurdity to crack twenty elite tanks simultaneously.
He triggered his [Asura Vanguard] class skills.
[Skill Activated: Blood Sacrifice]
He voluntarily burned 90% of his massive 25,500 health pool.
The agonizing localized drain ripped through his avatar and dropped him to a terrifying 2,550 HP.
The trade-off was instantaneous.
[Attack Power increased by 900%.]
Dante wasn’t finished. He chained the final buff in his rotation.
[Skill Executed: Asura’s Heart]
The burst of pure combat adrenaline flooded his neural link. His movement speed doubled, but he cared entirely about the secondary passive.
[Critical Hit Damage increased to 300%.]
The raw unmitigated attack power of Dante, combined with the [Holy Moment] buff, the 900% [Blood Sacrifice] multiplier, and his massive base stats, spiked to an absolutely terrifying system-breaking number.
[Current Attack Power: 36,720]
He was holding the raw destructive capacity of an orbital strike in his hands.
The twenty Undead Shield Guards didn’t care about his stats. Their Gold-tier AI didn’t possess fear.
They raised their massive golden tower shields, locked them together, and began their slow methodical unstoppable march forward.
Dante gripped the dark bone hilt of [Voidsever] with both hands.
He didn’t use a flashy mobility skill. He didn’t use a ranged projection.
He just waited for them to step into his effective range.
The wall of gold closed the distance. The jagged maces were raised ready to crush him.
Dante swung the primordial greatsword.
[Skill Executed: Abyssal Cleave]
[Talent Activated: 10,000x Multiplier.]
The spatial fracture condensed along the edge of the black blade and tore a literal hole in the localized reality of the golden chamber.
The void energy actively shrieked. It struggled to contain the sheer overwhelming volume of mathematical damage Dante was forcing into the animation.
He unleashed a fully charged perfectly horizontal sweep directly into the center of the overlapping golden shield wall.
[Passive Activated: Absolute Severance. 100% Armor Ignored.]
[Passive Activated: Predator’s Eye (100% Critical Hit Chance).]
The Zenith-tier spatial fracture erupted outward.
It didn’t hit the massive golden tower shields and stop. It didn’t trigger the concussive reflection passives of the bosses.
Because [Voidsever] ignored all physical mitigation, the system treated the heavy golden shields exactly the same as empty air.
The black shockwave sliced cleanly through the absolute center of the formation.
It passed entirely through the first row of Shield Guards, sheared through the second row, and continued perfectly horizontally until it carved a deep jagged black trench into the far golden wall of the chamber.
The combat engine of the Zenith Protocol completely utterly froze.
The game was trying to calculate 36,720 base attack power, multiplied by the 5,000% scaling of [Abyssal Cleave], multiplied again by the guaranteed 300% critical hit damage modifier.
It applied simultaneously to twenty elite Gold-tier bosses while actively ignoring their primary defense stats.
The math resolved.
Above the heads of the twenty massive tanks, the damage numbers didn’t pop up in a frantic string of digits.
The numbers overlapped and glitched in bright aggressive red static that completely overflowed the visual parameters of the interface to render the text completely illegible.
[-OVERFLOW ERROR! OVERKILL!]
The twenty Undead Shield Guards didn’t stagger. They didn’t fall to their knees.
They were instantaneously flawlessly vaporized.
The massive heavy golden tower shields and the impenetrable armor simply turned into gray ash.
The bosses shattered into millions of brilliant glowing blue polygons. They were completely unmade by a single casual swing of a cursed sword.
Dante stood perfectly balanced and slowly lowered [Voidsever].
The black blade hummed softly completely satisfied.
Aura immediately pulsed her [Resurgence Wave] and fully healed the critically low health bar of Dante back to maximum to completely negate the massive risk he had just taken.
The golden chamber was entirely silent save for the soft chiming of the falling digital ash.
[Target Eliminated: Undead Shield Guard Soul x20]
[Experience Gained.]
Dante dismissed his sword back into his wrist and rolled his shoulders to shed the lingering adrenaline from [Asura’s Heart].
He turned around to look at his squad.
Lila, Mei, Casanova, Sera, and Nyx were staring at the empty space where the impenetrable shield wall had just been standing.
They had watched him execute bosses before, but deleting twenty elite heavily armored tanks in a single frame was a completely different level of localized absurdity.
Garrick slowly lowered his rusty shield and blinked his eyes.
"Well," Garrick said to break the silence. "I guess I did not need the aggro."
"No, Garrick," Dante smiled slightly. "You did not."
He turned back to the massive pile of glowing loot resting on the polished gold floor.
Because of the 100% drop rate, the twenty elite bosses had dropped a staggering amount of high-tier gear and crafting materials.
Pip didn’t wait for permission.
The tiny red dragon shot out of the tunic of Mei, flew frantically over the loot, and stuffed everything he could grab into his localized inventory.
Dante vacuumed up the rest and ensured nothing was left behind for the guilds following them.
"Let us move," Dante ordered and pointed toward the heavy golden doors at the far end of the chamber. "We are almost at the end."
***
Thirty minutes later, in the long obsidian hallway leading up to the golden chamber.
The combined forces of Vanguard’s Legacy, the Legion of Blades, and the Apex Coalition were carefully marching through the dungeon instance.
They hadn’t engaged in open PvP since entering the portal.
The localized threat of the SSS-Rank event dungeon had forced them into a fragile temporary truce.
Silas, Kaelus, and Leonidas walked near the front of the massive formation.
"The anomaly is fast, but he lacks the raw numbers to clear a twelve-man raid environment efficiently," Kaelus stated, his voice tight.
He was still wearing a spare set of un-customized armor after his humiliating incident in the first hallway.
"He will inevitably bog down on the elite mob checks."
"We just have to catch him while he is engaged," Silas agreed, his eyes burning with intense desperation.
"If we pin him between a boss and our combined vanguard, he will not be able to teleport away without taking fatal damage."
The massive army rounded the corner and stepped into the hallway lined with the towering golden statues.
"What is this?" Leonidas grunted and rested his golden warhammer on his shoulder. "It looks like a royal procession."
None of the Guild Masters had the maxed-out Intuition stat of Dante.
None of them had an analyst like Nyx warning them about localized pressure plates.
A heavy fully armored paladin from the Apex Coalition stepped carelessly onto the slightly raised marble tile directly beneath one of the golden statues.
Click.
The glowing green runes lining the ceiling instantly flashed a violent aggressive red.
[System Alert: Intruder Detected.]
[Executing Defensive Protocol: Rain of Iron.]
The three Guild Masters looked up, completely baffled.
The walls behind the golden statues violently slid open to reveal hundreds of heavy iron ballistas.
There was no casting time.
The localized storm of hundreds of heavy armor-piercing iron bolts shot across the hallway and completely filled the airspace with jagged lethal metal.
Silas, Kaelus, and Leonidas didn’t have a middle-aged man with a [Spiteful Bulwark] to completely negate the incoming artillery.
They didn’t have localized invulnerability frames.
The un-blockable raid-wiping trap slammed directly into the massive densely packed formation of the allied guilds.
The sound of shattering armor and screaming players echoed endlessly down the corridor.
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