It was like deja vu all over again. His face was being smushed against a tidal wave of insects. He was desperately ripping apart the ants as quickly as he could. On the bright side, the explosions had calmed down. The technique must have some limitations, or the one commanding them decided it wasn’t worth it. Either way, he was grateful.

It was still chaos, though. He was eating in his mana far faster than he would have liked, but he was improving with each moment that passed. He was becoming quite experienced with getting dogpiled, which meant he figured out a few things.

For one, he created a shell of armor all around him. The constructed mana was very strong; he essentially used the process as he did when he created his weapons. The ants had an enormously hard time getting through the armor.

He also created a second layer of pure aura. His ruinous aura didn’t provide much physical protection, but it was really good at disrupting the corruption that tried to break down his mana. This meant the ants’ attacks were greatly weakened.

Then he infused it all with his authority. That seemed to do the most work. 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

If that wasn’t enough, then his flames were pretty good at protecting him. Their strategy revolved around piling on top of him and suffocating him with constant attacks from all angles. But deploying a constant field of flames around him did a lot of damage. His crown seemed to be having fun at least.

He could feel its giddiness as ants were burnt to a crisp while they tried to shove their sharpened limbs into his flesh. He didn’t give it much grief, though; it was doing a really good job and was really efficient.

It was slowly becoming his best method to deal with a large wave of enemies surrounding him. He was constantly playing with the flames to further increase their strength and potency.

His authority helped a lot due to the soldier ants' lack of authority, or rather, their lack of ability to utilize one properly.

Because of these things, he managed to survive the initial confrontation. But he was made aware of a few things. Firstly, these ants were unusually well prepared for him. He had a feeling that they had been scouting his skills during those earlier fights in the tunnels.

That was why he was trying to downplay his healing abilities. They should already know that he could heal, but they didn’t know the extent of it. Hence, he had pretended that his “healing magic” was running out. He instructed Drasil to slow it down and let some injuries be.

These ants were much smarter than he originally gave them credit for. He could already tell that they were looking to gain more information about him rather than finish him off. This type of behavior only further convinced him that there was someone stronger than Tier 4 commanding these ants.

He just wondered why they hadn’t come to finish him off directly yet.

Once again, he wasn’t able to finish off the powerful Tier 4 variant. Like the one from before, it had run off the moment Julius injured it, hiding within the large swarm of ants. He suspected it had run down one of the tunnels.

The ants were doing a good job of spreading out to avoid his kinetic energy blasts and flames. But that only helped them so much. If they wouldn’t gather up, he would simply force them to.

He created large barriers on either side and began removing certain angles from which they could attack. From there, he would collapse his barriers, forcing them to squeeze into narrower pathways. Only then would he use his more explosive abilities.

He spotted one such opportunity and quickly swung his arm out. His [Field of the Shattered Will] compressed and extended outward. The field blasted these ants from all sides, damaging their armor, and his ruinflames poured in afterward.

The barriers served another purpose. They acted as bowls that contained his flames and meant he didn’t have to be as careful with them. Whenever he fought around others, he was constantly mindful of keeping his skills in check.

However, now that he was alone and surrounded by nothing but enemies, he was able to cut loose. Control became secondary, and the destruction became his main priority. And destruction was what he got.

He let out a soft laugh when he saw the charred corpses in front of him. He was really good at destruction.

There weren’t many ants left, and the ones that were still alive, he quickly sent a spike to finish them off. Once he was sure that he was done with them, he collected their cores.

They weren’t very large; in fact, they were smaller than usual cores, but he had a feeling that this many would still be valuable. During this cleanup, he took time to recover. His healing skill slowly healed over the rest of his wounds.

He was about to clean himself of the blood, too, but decided against it. He had a feeling that he would be getting covered in gore again, and it was better to get used to it sooner rather than later. He let out a heavy sigh and began his journey through the tunnels again.

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***

He spat at the corpse of the ant. He would have been excited at finally hunting down this more powerful variant, but it had been days since he entered these tunnels, and it was only now that he finally killed one.

He had been forced to get close to it and stick a mark on it. This mark was something he had played around with in the past, but he refined it during his boring days down in the gorge. It was a mixture of mana, aura, and authority. It wasn’t anything too complicated, but simply a unique combination of those three things that he could easily sense from a distance.

The hardest part was getting the mark to stick and to have it release a specific signal that would allow him to track it. He actually utilized his spatial skills as a reference since the tunnels were so thick that any emanating mana was blocked.

In fact, he had just gotten a skill offered to him for this, and it was a bright light on his otherwise dark mood.

Would you like to learn the skill [Phoenix’s Mark]?

He was tempted to accept the skill right away just to make him feel better, but he held back. Instead, he took a deep breath and walked away from the gore-stained battlefield.

He created some furniture made of mana, doing his best to make it as soft as possible. He sagged in the cushions as he reviewed the past several days.

He actually didn’t know how long it had been. For all he knew, it had been more than several days. Time was hard to keep track of here, and the timekeeper he bought a while ago wasn’t able to work in these tunnels. Its enchantments were being interfered with, including the communication token he had with Cassandra.

During these “several” days, he learned some important things. For one, he was confident that the leader or controller of these ants was fucking with him. Ever since he had taken out that first ambush, they had been way more tentative in how they interacted with him.

For the most part, they would leave him alone. They allowed him to wander these massive tunnels by himself all day, and he was baffled by their size. He had been moving through these tunnels quickly, even flying through them at times, but he hadn’t found an end to them.

He was almost convinced he was wandering in circles. Running around in a complex maze of interconnecting tunnels. The frequency of attacks also lessened dramatically. For an entire day, they didn’t attack him, leaving him be.

At first, he thought they were going to leave him and let him starve in here alone, but the moment he fell asleep, they decided to attack. Tunnels opened up from all sides, and ants poured onto his makeshift camp.

He spat at the ant again. This particular Tier 4 even had the gall to ambush him when he was taking a shit. He didn’t have the same bodily requirements now that he was Tier 4, but he still needed to relieve himself sometimes.

How shameless could you be? Trying to kill a guy when he was taking a shit? Absolutely diabolical.

All of this shit made him moody, and he had a weird feeling this was the ants’ strategy. Deprive him of rest and constantly keep him stressed. It was a different kind of battle of attrition, and one he hated with a passion.

He swore to himself he would kick the little shit who was behind this in the throat.

He took out a cookie, warmed it in his hand a little, and bit into it aggressively. He munched on it, and despite his annoyance at his situation, he found himself smiling upon tasting the gooey cookie melt in his mouth. It was like magic, and he felt his irritation bleed away slowly.

He was actually seriously thinking about taking that [Phoenix’s Mark] skill. It wasn’t like his usual skills, and he had a feeling that it would be very useful, especially in this environment. He had tried to place marks all around the tunnels to ensure that he wasn’t going around in circles, but he wasn’t able to focus on more than one. The effort was too much for his mind to handle, and they dissipated into motes of mana.

He stared at the skill notification once again. He really didn’t know if he should pick it up. He hadn’t chosen [Harmonic Circulation] because he had only two more skill slots left and because he felt it would help his overall control of it if he didn’t rely on a skill.

But this was a different thing. A mark wasn’t something he felt like he could concentrate on the entire time. It would basically give him a tracking skill, something that he felt was missing from his repertoire.

Additionally, the skill had some other potential uses. Imagine if he could keep track of Lily or his friends across the continent? That would be something he would like a lot. There were other ways it could help him as a healer. He knew that Freya used some kind of skill to heal people without direct contact, and she could heal Cain no matter the distance between them.

At the moment, he was limited by that constraint, and it would be very helpful if he addressed it sooner rather than later.

He contemplated it for a few moments before he cursed and decided to bite the bullet.

Congratulations, you have learned the skill [Phoenix’s Mark] (Epic+).

As the skill settled into his soul space, information about the skill flooded into his mind. The skill itself was shockingly complicated, much more complicated than what he’d been doing manually. He didn’t even understand half of what the skill was telling him. He supposed that was a good thing, at least that meant it was a skill that he couldn’t just mimic with sheer mana control.

He immediately tried it out. He placed it on the little crumb of cookie he had left. Mana and aura swirled into a complicated web. He was barely able to keep track of the swirling energies and watched as his authority extended out. It encapsulated the swirling web of energies, then sealed itself onto the cookie in one swift motion.

It was actually quite subtle if you didn’t know what to look for. He had only noticed it due to his knowledge of the skill, but he could easily imagine someone not recognizing what was happening if they were distracted.

His manual mark was the complete opposite. It was bright and really loud. He might as well have stuck a screaming toddler on the back of the ant. The only thing the manual mark had going for it was that it worked, and it was really hard to get off.

He formed a strong bond with his willpower, which served as a kind of superglue. He supposed that was why the ant had been left alone at the end. Perhaps the other ants didn’t want it to lead him to their hideout.

Speaking of their hideout, he still hadn’t come across anything that resembled that. But with this mark, he felt like he had a better chance at gaining information, or at least a reference point to use.

He held his fist up, cookie still in hand. He wasn’t going to die in this hole. He would escape and get those fancy rewards he’d been offered.