The Return Of The Exiled Villain

The silence lasted another second before it broke.

”What do we do?” Reinette asked.

”Gray, if the boss breaks through—” Darya started.

”—We’ll be fighting a King Realm entity inside a closed dungeon,” Ysolde finished, her voice flat.

”That’s not an even fight, and more like a god damn funeral!”

”So what’s the plan?” Sola looked at him directly.

Gray was quiet for a moment, his eyes still locked on the corridor.

Then he turned around.

”We move now. Before the breakthrough completes.” His gaze swept across the group. ”A serpent mid-breakthrough is at its most vulnerable. Its attention is entirely inward. It can’t afford to split focus between the ascension and a direct threat.”

”A sneak attack,” Cassandra said.

”Yes.”

”And the beasts?” Wren asked. ”They all just gathered in the same place. Every single monster from the first two sections is now sitting between us and the boss room.”

”I know.”

”That’s... a lot of bodies,” Thessaly said carefully.

”I know,” Gray said again.

”So how do we get through them?” Orin asked.

Gray looked at them for a moment.

”I’ll draw them out.”

The junction went quiet again.

Then everyone started talking at once.

”Absolutely not!”

”Gray, there are hundreds of them!”

”You can’t bait an entire dungeon’s worth of!”

”That’s insane, even for you!!!”

”We go together, or we don’t go at all!”

”NOO!!!”” Maelis’ voice cut cleanly through the rest. Her eyes were fixed on him with an intensity that the others rarely saw directed at anyone.

”I’ll go with you. You’re not doing this alone.”

”Neither of us is letting you—” Cassandra began.

”—Enough.”

Gray’s cold voice interrupted Cassandra, causing every single girl who was thinking that his decision was bad to go entirely silent.

He looked at them and coldly spoke:

”Do you want to die?”

No one answered him.

”Because that’s what happens if we go in together,” he continued in the same cold tone.

”Hundreds of panicked beasts packed into a confined space, a boss mid-ascension with its minions in a heightened response state, and a class that still needs mana reserves for the fight that comes after.” He let that sit for exactly one second.

”You go in there with me right now, and half of you don’t come back out. Is that what you want?”

”....”

There was complete silence as no one dared to speak.

They knew he was the leader and needed to follow his instructions, but they also didn’t want their leader to die.

Maelis gritted her teeth as she looked at Gray.

She was looking at him with the expression of someone who had several things to say and had decided, for now, not to say any of them.

Cassandra had gone very still.

Seraph, at the back of the group, said nothing. But her eyes were on him with a quiet attention that was different from the others.

”I’ll pull them out,” Gray said, his voice returning to its normal tone.

”All of them, into the side corridors. You wait for my signal, then you move straight to the boss chamber. Clean path, no resistance.” He looked across their faces one more time.

”By the time you reach the chamber entrance, I’ll already be there.”

”And if something goes wrong?” Rue asked quietly.

”Nothing will go wrong,” he stated firmly.

Maelis looked away first, her fingers tight around the hilt of her staff, saying nothing. Cassandra looked at him for a moment longer before finally speaking again:

”...Signal us quickly,” she said.

It wasn’t an agreement, exactly.

But it was the closest thing to it she was willing to give him right now.

Gray nodded once, turned toward the deeper corridor, and walked into the dark alone.

The moment he rounded the first bend and the junction’s dim light no longer reached him, his expression changed.

The calm remained.

But something else also appeared... a less concerned emotion with the well-being of anything currently standing between him and the boss chamber.

’...Finally,’ he thought.

His fingers flexed at his side.

Crackle...!

Thunder gathered silently at his fingertips.

’Let’s see what the Nine Heavens Thunder Claw can do.’

He continued ahead, heading straight towards the third section without a single care for the world, after all, of them had rushed towards the boss’s room.

”Grrrr....!!!”

”KRIIIIIII!”

Gray could hear them before he saw them, hundreds of bodies packed into the wider cavern that bridged the second and third sections.

The combined mass of every beast that had fled past them minutes ago was now clustered in agitated, restless groups around the boss chamber’s outer approach.

He walked toward them without slowing.

The first beast noticed him at thirty meters... and almost immediately.

”GRAAAAAAAAAA!”

It growled, causing every single one of the beasts to snap their head towards him.

The cavern’s noise shifted in a single instant from chaotic agitation into something focused and singular, hundreds of sets of eyes locking onto the one human-shaped figure walking calmly toward them through the dark, and the collective sound that rose from them was low and building and enormous.

Gray smiled, and then... he turned and ran.

”COME CATCH ME, LOSERS!”

He even shouted in a mocking tone.

Beasts at the Grandmaster realm and above had a considerable amount of intelligence, so yeah... they probably understood his shout.

”GRAAAAAAAAAAAA!”

”KRIIIIIIIIIII!”

”ROAAAAAARRRRR!”

TWACK, TWACK!

’Perfect.’

Knowing that they were following him, Gray increased his speed slighly and headed sideways, into the left branching corridor, deep into the section’s narrower passages.

BOOM!!!

BAAAM!

The floor shook beneath the collective weight of their steps.

Gray ran for exactly forty seconds.

Then he found what he wanted.

A wide, vaulted intersection where four corridors met, the ceiling rising sharply to nearly twenty meters above the floor, the space broad enough that nothing would be able to claim it was cramped.

He stopped in the center of it, and slowly turned around.

The first wave of beasts rounded the corner at full sprint and flooded into the intersection like water through a broken dam.

Gray raised his right hand.

CRACKLE!!

The thunder at his fingertips, which had been gathering since he left the junction, stopped being patient.

The air around his hand split open.

The ambient mana in the immediate space around his raised arm physically fractured under the pressure of what was building there.

Visible distortion lines spread outward from his fingers like cracks in glass as nine distinct currents of lightning coiled around each other in a rotating, compressed formation that climbed from his wrist to his elbow and kept climbing.

The beasts in the front of the horde slowed.

Their instincts, which had overridden everything else moments ago, were now receiving a different signal entirely.

Something that predated pack behavior, territorial aggression, and every other learned response they carried.

It was engraved on their instincts...

Run, or you’ll die.

Unfortunately, they didn’t get the chance.

”[Nine Thunders Thunder Claw].”

He brought his hand down.

CRACK!

The technique left his palm and hit the ceiling of the intersection first, and for a single suspended moment, it simply existed there above them, a colossal claw shape rendered entirely in compressed lightning with nine interwoven columns of thunder forming each of its five fingers.

Each column had a different frequency, a different pitch, the whole structure radiating a pressure that made the stone walls of the intersection vibrate at their foundations.

Then it came down.

KRAAAABOOOOOM—!!!

The sound wasn’t an explosion as it was too large and too total to be called that.

It was the sound of nine simultaneous thunderstrikes compressed into a single point of impact.

The shockwave alone threw the outer edge of the horde backward into the corridors they had come from, bodies slamming against stone walls and hitting the floor hard.

The inner mass, the several dozen beasts directly beneath the claw’s impact zone, were driven into the ground by a force that cracked the intersection’s floor in deep, branching lines radiating outward from the center like a shattered mirror.

BOOM.

CRASH.

Thud, thud, thud, thud, thud!

Bodies everywhere.

Most of them were dead...

But the ones that were still conscious were not moving, pinned beneath the claw’s residual pressure field, their mana circulation systems shocked into temporary paralysis by the technique’s electrical saturation.

The ones at the edges were already trying to crawl back into the corridors.

Gray lowered his arm as the thunder faded away from his fingertips.

The intersection settled into a ringing, smoke-thick silence broken only by the sounds of several hundred deeply unhappy monsters trying to remember how their legs worked.

He looked at them for a moment, and then hen he reached into his coat, retrieved a small communication crystal, and pressed it once.

The signal pulsed outward.

”Now.”

Crack!

He turned toward the boss chamber’s direction, stepping over a Grandmaster-class beast that made a weak, reflexive snap at his ankle as he passed, and kept walking.

Behind him, somewhere in the direction of the junction, he heard the Phoenix Class begin to move.

’...That should keep them occupied for a while,’ he thought, his eyes already fixed on the direction of the distant pulse of the serpent’s mana, still mid-ascension.

[Proficiency +24%]

’Oh? That’s also a pleasant surprise.’ Gray added inwardly.

If he used that technique one more time, it would finally reach it’s finally level of mastery, meaning that he had perfected it!

Then, he could probably move into another technique, albeit not necessary for now, as he still had the Soul Chasing Extremities to train.

’That aside... I really need that Serpent’s Core. That way, I can feed my Sword Spirit.’

Thinking of that, he silently stroked the rapier on his waist.

Of course, he hadn’t forgotten about the Nine-Colored Attributeless Snake that he had gotten in the hidden section of that dungeon.