Sinner System-Chapter 471: Thirty-Three Days
"Thank you all for coming. I know all of you must be exhausted, but the situation has taken a turn for the worst."
"It’s my fault...if I’d finished off the Monster I fought before she self-destructed, this might not have happened," Responded Jaden with a grimace, dark circles under his eyes.
"Pointing fingers and assigning blame isn’t going to change anything, so there’s no point in blaming yourself."
It was a few hours later, and all of the X-Aces had been summoned to the HUC headquarters, in Sanctuary Gamma.
The building wasn’t caught up in the destructive trail of the Monster Aria fought, it was still standing and intact, though about a fifth of the area of the Sanctuary had been devastated.
But, well...it could’ve been a hell of a lot worse. Nearly a third of Sanctuary Zeta was razed to the ground in a fiery explosion, and a bit over a third of Sanctuary Alpha was destroyed by the appearance of the massive Dungeon, a few hundred thousand killed in the process.
The rest of the citizens were evacuated to the other Sanctuaries, there isn’t a single human currently within the bounds of Sanctuary Alpha.
We have thirty-three days before the Monsters in that Dungeon, which the HUC has dubbed the Demon Lord’s Fortress, or just the Fortress for short, will emerge.
And about a week for the approximately seven thousand Dungeons across the rest of the world. Optimistically, each Sanctuary could maybe conquer about two to three hundred of the Dungeons within the week, which would still leave around five thousand.
If that many Stampedes occur all at once, things will get real ugly real fast. The domes surrounding the Sanctuaries are strong enough to withstand attacks from Critical Level Monsters and below, but it’s a different story if we have thousands of Monsters attacking all at once.
"Our best move is to target the higher level Dungeons, if we can at least conquer all the Calamity Level Dungeons and most of the Critical Level Dungeons, we’ll have at least a little bit of an easier time managing the Stampedes," I spoke up.
"That still leaves us in a dangerous situation though, and the biggest problem is the Fortress," Pointed one of the HUC members, the chair of the Sanctuary Beta branch of the Union, if I’m not mistaken.
"It’s too bad my idea didn’t work," Lachlan sighed wistfully.
A thought occurred to him when he called me earlier, he suggested that I could just blast the top of the Dungeons, taking a shortcut into the Boss Rooms, kill the Dungeon Bosses and conquer the Dungeons without going through the rest of the floors.
It definitely wasn’t a bad idea, so I tried it out...but it didn’t work. These Dungeons are different, their structures are made of a different material, one that I can break through, not with Devour, Ravage or Void, or even Obliterate, for that matter.
In other words, it’s like the Personalis Arma weapons, completely indestructible. Did the Demon Lord make that change specifically to counter me? Or is it just an unlucky coincidence?
"Yes, that certainly would have saved us a lot of trouble. Especially considering what we’ve found," Frowned one of the other HUC members.
"Right, regarding that...we formed parties of the world’s best Detectors and Teleporters, to enter the Dungeons and assess what we’re up against.
And it isn’t good. There is a much higher concentration of Monsters inside the thousands of Dungeons than usual, around triple the usual amount.
Of course, the sample size is still small, we’ve only assessed a couple dozen of so of the Dungeons, but I think it’s safe to say that all these Dungeons are going to be of a higher difficulty level than we’re used to."
"The one silver lining is that all the Dungeons that were assessed stuck to a pattern...the only difference from our established standard patterns is that the number of Monsters is higher.
The rate at which their numbers increase through the floors seems to be relatively proportionate to what we’ve seen in our standard patterns."
I see, the Teleporters must have teleported their parties from floor to floor, and once the Detectors confirmed the number of Monsters, they teleport straight up into the next floor.
"Exactly how far through the Dungeons did the parties go? Did they go all the way upto the Boss Rooms?" Inquired Iseul, sober for once.
"Yes, and none of the Dungeon Bosses deviated from the discerned patterns of their respective Dungeons. However, our investigative parties have only gone through High Level Dungeons so far, we haven’t yet checked any of the Critical and Calamity Level Dungeons."
"Hm? Ah, looks like we’ve just received another report, and it’s from the party we sent to investigate the Fortress!"
Huh?
"You already sent one into that place? I mean, I know that was only going to be a matter of time, all things considered, but don’t you think that was risky, seeing how little information we have right now," Pointed out Aria with a frown.
"The fate of humanity as a whole is at stake here, so we have no choice but to take risks and make sacrifices. And yes, we don’t have much information at the moment, which is exactly why we need to gain as much information as we can, while we can."
"Unfortunately, he’s right. We really don’t have much time on our hands here...with so many Dungeons looming around every Sanctuary, we need to conquer as many of them as possible.
Which would normally mean deploying as many parties as possible. But with the higher difficulty level, we’re going to need to deploy larger parties for each raid, the bare minimum isn’t going to be enough. And frankly, we can’t afford to lose any more Hunters, we’ve lost far too many today as it is."
"And that’s just from three Monsters, the so-called Demon Lord’s Sentinels. Yes, I know they were much more powerful than anything we’ve ever faced before, around two or three times stronger than even the Archdemons and Dragons. There could well be more of these Sentinels lurking in some of these Dungeons."
"Regarding that...it seems this report of the investigation into the Fortress addresses that. Let’s get into the details of the report, shall we?"
