Level 1 to Infinity: My Bloodline Is the Ultimate Cheat!-Chapter 840: Beneath the Floorboards

Ethan arrived at the Mad Engineer’s hideout with a faint smile tugging at his lips. During the flight over, he had passed the time imagining all the ways he might scare the reclusive lunatic half to death when he showed up unannounced. The man was brilliant, unstable, and endlessly entertaining. Ethan almost felt fond of him.

The so-called root cellar was not a cellar at all. It was a crude pit dug straight beneath a loose floorboard in the middle of the living room, reinforced just enough to keep the house from collapsing in on itself. Ethan stared at it during his earlier scan and shook his head.

Was this guy a mole in a past life? The place was stocked with crates of fruits and vegetables, enough supplies to last through a small apocalypse. There was only one light source down there, a single old bulb filmed over with dust. Ethan had briefly considered cutting the power just to hear the inevitable scream.

Chuckling at the thought, he touched down in the overgrown backyard. His Mech armor folded back into itself as the optical camouflage disengaged, leaving him standing quietly among waist-high weeds.

The amusement vanished.

Something was wrong.

His Soul Sense, kept at a low but constant hum, swept through the house again. The interior was a mess, far worse than it had appeared during his orbital scan. Furniture was overturned. Shelves lay shattered. The front door hung at an angle, half torn from its hinges, splintered wood scattered across the entryway.

Ethan stopped caring about subtlety. He crossed the threshold and moved quickly through the wrecked living room, eyes snapping toward the spot beneath the coffee table. Or where the table should have been. It had been smashed to pieces and shoved aside. The rug was gone, tossed into a corner, and the one-meter square floor tile that concealed the entrance below was broken into jagged fragments.

His Sense dove into the darkness beneath the floor.

Two presences.

One was the Engineer. Familiar, frantic, and flickering with panic.

The other presence was wrong. Feral. Dense with aggression, like a snarling knot of instinct and hunger. A Mutant. Not a simple beast, but something warped into one. Wolf, if the reeking aura of musk and bloodlust rising through the tunnel was any indication.

Of course. A beast-type Mutant. A sense of smell sharp enough to peel paint. The mad engineer never stood a chance.

Ethan dropped into the hole without hesitation.

His boots hit packed earth two meters down, barely stirring dust. The tunnel widened as it sloped deeper, clearly expanded by obsessive late-night digging. Now he knew how the Engineer had managed to drag an entire VR capsule underground. Ethan followed the passage another four meters in a single fluid motion, landing at the mouth of the chamber.

The scene matched his Sense perfectly.

The Mutant was a grotesque hybrid, its head fully lupine, jaws stretched wide to reveal rows of yellowed fangs slick with saliva. One massively muscled arm ended in clawed fingers that were wrapped around the Mad Engineer’s throat, lifting the scrawny man off the ground like a broken doll. The Engineer’s legs kicked uselessly, his face purple and bulging.

Ethan surged into the room.

His hand lashed out in a silent, open-palmed strike aimed squarely at the back of the wolf-man’s skull.

The Mutant reacted instantly. Animal instincts screamed a warning, and it spun with shocking speed. Ethan’s strike slammed into a raised forearm instead of its head.

THUMP.

Heavy Strike flowed into the blow.

The impact reverberated through the cramped chamber, a dull concussion that rattled dirt from the ceiling. The Mutant stumbled back two steps, still clutching the choking Engineer, while a faint vibration ran up Ethan’s arm.

To Ethan’s surprise, the wolf-man merely shook its head and snarled. It looked hurt, but not truly injured. It had taken the hit.

’Finally, something worthwhile.’

The Mutant’s yellow eyes locked onto Ethan, blazing with primal fury. The strike had challenged it, wounded its pride more than its body. Higher reasoning faded from its gaze, swallowed by instinct and rage.

As expected, the challenge became everything.

The Mutant released the Engineer, who collapsed to the dirt floor in a coughing heap. The beast turned fully toward Ethan, lips peeling back to expose its fangs as its claws extended.

"Get in the pod. Now," Ethan snapped, never taking his eyes off the Mutant. He had already observed the VR capsule during his descent. It was not any simple version, but a reinforced, almost military-grade unit.

The Engineer did not argue. Scrambling on hands and knees, he rasped out a breathless thanks and lunged for the capsule’s open hatch. His survival instinct screamed at him to disappear and let the monsters settle things.

The Mutant noticed the movement. Its head twitched toward the fleeing man.

Ethan moved first.

He had shifted into Bear Form the moment his boots hit the ground, power coiled tightly through his muscles. Now he released it.

Stepping forward, he turned his body into a living battering ram and drove his fist straight at the Mutant’s snarling muzzle.

The wolf-man crossed its arms in a defensive guard just in time.

BOOM.

The impact slammed through the chamber. This time the Mutant was hurled back three full steps, its broad back crashing into the earthen wall hard enough to leave a shallow impression.

The shock ran up Ethan’s arm, his knuckles throbbing faintly. Iron skin, maybe. Since returning from the Sea of Death, nothing had endured his empowered strikes like this. The discovery sparked a flicker of genuine excitement.

Behind him, the Engineer dove headfirst into the capsule and slapped the controls. With a hiss of hydraulics, the hatch sealed shut.

’Good.’

Now Ethan could stop holding back.

The chamber was barely five meters across, with the bulky capsule devouring half the space. There was no room for elaborate maneuvers or wide swings. This would be ugly, close, and fast.

’Perfect.’

The wolf-man was fully lost to its frenzy now. Its eyes burned red as it crouched low, muscles bunching, then launched itself forward in a blur of claws and teeth. One hand slashed for Ethan’s face while the other drove straight toward his chest.

Ethan did not retreat.

He met it head-on.

His hands rose, not as claws, but as hardened fists. He poured raw force into them, channeling the foundational Slam technique and amplifying it with the full might of Bear Form.

CRACK. CRACK.

The blows intercepted the attack midair. The Mutant was blasted backward as if it had slammed into an invisible wall.

Ethan was on it before it could recover.

He fell into a ruthless rhythm, abandoning flashy techniques in favor of brutal efficiency. The close-quarters combat drills Celeste had thought into him years ago resurfaced, stripped to their essentials. These were movements designed to break bodies in confined spaces.

Back then, his human frame would have failed after a handful of exchanges. Now, fueled by vast reserves of Energy and wrapped in the metallic sheen of Iron Hide, he became a relentless engine of destruction.

He ignored defense entirely. His armor and raw toughness would endure.

Punch. Elbow. Knee. Slam.

Each strike detonated through the chamber, each impact rocking the Mutant’s body. At first, the beast tried to block and counter, snapping and swiping with brutal precision. But under the relentless assault, its animal mind unraveled. Strategy vanished. It abandoned defense and chose to trade blow for blow, claws raking across Ethan’s arms and torso, jaws snapping in savage attempts to tear flesh.

It was a deafening, vicious dance of violence, fought in a cramped hole beneath the earth.