Chapter 35: 035. The Eye Of The Avarice King

After Ren said that, he used Thunderclap Step, tearing forward immediately and carving through the goblins.

He moved with a velocity that shattered the cavern’s stagnant air, transforming into a jagged streak of blue electricity.

Blood sprayed in wide dark arcs as his steel blade effortlessly separated goblin heads from their shoulders as the sudden, violent breach in their formation caused a ripple of panicked shrieks but the massive Orcs standing in the vanguard reacted instantly. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

One of the towering Orcs, clad in thick iron plates, stepped directly into his path and swung its massive stone baton aimed squarely at his face.

Ren didn’t bother dodging.

He pivoted his blade, catching the crushing blow on the flat of his steel. The moment the weapons collided, Ren used the monster’s own immense force to launch himself upward, bouncing off the baton and shooting high into the cavern’s dark expanse.

The jarring recoil of the block pushed the gigantic Orc staggering backward, its boots scraping deep gouges into the stone.

Suspended high above the chaotic battlefield, Ren looked down and below him, a goblin archer shrieked a command, raising its clawed hand into the air.

Along the elevated ridges of the cavern, dozens of archers released their bowstrings in perfect unison as a dense buzzing cloud of poisoned arrows blotted out the dim light of the braziers, arching directly toward Ren’s suspended form.

He just grinned.

He tapped deep into his core, bypassing the lightning and pulling forth his family’s bloodline. Pure, blinding Starfire surrounded the blade in his hand, roaring to life with a heat so intense the damp cavern air began to violently warp and distort.

He unleashed it downward, slashing the blazing sword through the air.

’Starfire Crescent!’

The mental shout echoed fiercely in his own mind as the Starfire burst downward, transmuting into a sweeping crescent of pure white flames.

The superheated projectile tore through the incoming cloud of arrows, instantly incinerating the wood and iron into a fine mist of gray ash before they could even scratch his armor.

The crescent didn’t stop... It crashed directly into the dense horde of monsters below.

The impact was utterly devastating.

The white flames carved a massive molten trench through the army immediately, melting armor, vaporizing flesh, and reducing dozens of goblins and orcs to bubbling slag in a fraction of a second.

The heat was suffocating, sucking the oxygen out of the surrounding space and though his sweeping attack didn’t meet the Commander Orc, that didn’t matter.

As gravity finally began to pull him back down, Ren forced a massive surge of electrical energy into his legs.

He activated Thunderclap Step mid-air.

A sonic boom ruptured the eardrums of the surviving monsters as Ren tore through the empty space, heading straight toward the Commander Orc like a falling meteor.

The Commander roared, raising an enormous, double-bladed battleaxe to intercept. Their weapons met each other with a blinding flash of volatile lightning, meeting brute force with enough power to send the surrounding monsters flying off their feet and tumbling across the rocky floor.

Meanwhile, a brutal struggle for survival unfolded near the cavern entrance.

Mandy was fighting for his life.

His lungs burned and his muscles screaming in protest as he desperately parried several erratic attacks from the swarming goblins.

The butler ducked under a rusted spear, bringing his sword up to deflect a crude dagger, all while archers attacked him from the distance, their stray arrows shattering against the stone near his boots.

He slashed at several goblins with his blade biting deep into green flesh but the numbers were impossible to manage.

A towering Orc broke through the goblin ranks, its bloodshot eyes locking onto the exhausted butler. The beast raised a massive wooden baton spiked with rusted iron and slammed the weapon downward with terrifying strength.

Mandy leaped back just in time.

The spiked wood struck the cavern floor, and a loud crack went through the ground, sending jagged shards of rock biting into Mandy’s legs.

He stumbled, losing his footing on the slick, blood-soaked floor and crashed onto his back. The Orc loomed over him, raising the spiked baton for the executioner’s blow.

Mandy gritted his teeth as a stray tear of pure terror leaked out of his eyes. His mana was draining and his vision blurring as he squeezed his eyes shut with his grip on his sword failing.

’Mom, I’m coming to join yo—’

A sudden chilling shadow appeared over his face.

Eternia tore past him for the umpteenth time since they entered the dungeon. It wasn’t a new thing for her to intervene and save his life, but the aura radiating from her was very different this time.

The cold swordsman was gone as she was practically vibrating with violence. Eternia didn’t use her weapon as the Orc’s baton came down.

Instead, she stepped directly into the crushing arc. Veins popped on her arm, snaking beneath her pale skin like dark purple vines as she raised her bare forearm and parried the whole thing to the side.

The impact sounded like two boulders colliding, but Eternia’s arm didn’t even bend. The baton went flying out of the monster’s hand, spinning uselessly into the darkness.

The Orc’s eyes widened in utter disbelief, staring at the smaller demi-human girl who had just deflected a blow meant to shatter stone.

Before the beast could even pull its arm back, Eternia clenched her free arm, twisting her hips to generate a terrifying amount of rotational force, and punched forward directly into the Orc’s chest.

Her fist didn’t just break the ribs; it completely caved in the monster’s insides. Her arm plunged deep into the chest cavity, tearing through muscle and lung tissue causing the heart of the orc to shoot out and fly out from the back as well as the body.

The severed, still-beating heart tore through the air like a cannonball, violently slamming into the skulls of three charging goblins behind the Orc, dropping them instantly.

The massive Orc’s body finished the job, collapsing backward and crushing two more beneath its immense weight.

Mandy opened his eyes, staring at the gaping hole in the beast’s chest. "Etern—"

However, when the Snakekin woman turned back to face him, her golden eyes were glowing with a terrifying ethereal violet light.

The skin around her jaw was tight, and the air around her felt freezing cold.

Mandy immediately stiffened, scrambling backward on his hands and knees. "Uh yeah, I’m avoiding that."

Eternia didn’t mind him... She couldn’t even hear his voice over the deafening rush of power flooding her senses.

So many souls were coming...

The battlefield was a buffet of floating white orbs, rising from the dozens of corpses Ren had just incinerated and the monsters she had butchered.

They shot into her body again and again, funneling directly into the cursed skull mark on her back. Her mana channels expanded painfully, gorging on the stolen life force.

Her eyes widened.

Among the flood of generic goblin souls, she felt a distinct crackling spark. Apparently, one of the souls that she had just swallowed had the Lightning Affinity, which meant that it was a Shaman that had perished in Ren’s initial blast.

A massive Hobgoblin, enraged by the death of its kin was rushing at her with a stolen iron baton but Eternia didn’t draw her swords.

She let out a wide grin as she pointed her fingertip at the charging Hobgoblin and the group of Orcs rallying behind the monster.

Blue lightning began building at the tip of her finger.

However, unlike the last time when she drained her reserves in seconds due to a weak soul, she remembered her Master’s exact instructions. She forcefully crushed ten standard goblin souls together, using their raw energy as pure combustible fuel for the stolen affinity.

The blue lightning instantly supercharged, becoming a blinding, pure white spark.

When it shot from her finger, it produced a deafening BOOM!

The concentrated beam of pure white electricity tore through the air, instantly disintegrating the charging Hobgoblin into a cloud of scattered ash. The beam didn’t stop there; it continued forward toward the armored Orc behind it.

All that the Orc could see was a blinding flash of white as the beam collided with its iron chest plate.

A massive explosion happened, sending a shockwave of electrical plasma ripping through the enemy ranks, wiping out the monsters around it in a terrifying dome of destruction.

Eternia let out a breathless gasp with the recoil of the spell numbing her arm but the power was intoxicating. She swallowed more souls from the fresh kills, funneling the energy outward.

Immediately, her body was covered in a visible white aura of condensed spiritual energy. She reached over her shoulders and pulled out her twin curved blades from the sheaths on her back.

’O– Oh...’

Eternia realized that by covering herself with the excess soul energy, she drained the internal reserves much slower allowing her to physically augment her muscles beyond their natural limits so she ran forward, becoming a blur of white light and silver steel.

She tore through a cluster of advancing goblins as her blades moved with grace.

She ducked a spear thrust, severed the attacker’s legs, and spun to decapitate the goblin next to it in one fluid motion.

’Master... I’m becoming faster...’ Eternia thought with her heart hammering in pure exhilaration.

And as she tore through a squad of Goblins that had crawled from the cavern dirt, an especially big Orc adorned in thick iron plates and wielding a rusted greatsword, came into her point of view.

It roared a challenge, swinging the greatsword in a wide, sweeping arc meant to cut off her approach.

Though she could use Lightning again, Eternia decided to deal with it with the new physical power she felt surging through her veins.

She didn’t stop running.

As the greatsword came sweeping toward her waist, she dropped into a slide, her knees scraping against the stone. She glided cleanly under the massive blade, slicing her right sword deep into the thick tendons of the Orc’s ankle as she passed.

The beast bellowed in pain with its leg buckling but Eternia didn’t lose her momentum.

She kicked off the ground, launching herself up the Orc’s massive, falling back then she used its spiked armor as stepping stones, vaulting herself high into the air above its shoulders.

The Orc blindly swung its greatsword upward, trying to swat her out of the sky but Eternia twisted her body, entering a rapid spinning dive.

She deflected the flat of the greatsword with her left blade, throwing the beast’s arm wide open. With her right hand, she drove her curved sword straight down through the gap in the Orc’s iron collar.

The high-carbon steel pierced its spine and buried itself deep into its chest cavity.

Using the falling weight of her own body, she ripped the blade violently forward, tearing through bone and thick muscle as the massive Orc collapsed face-first onto the cavern floor, utterly destroyed.

Eternia landed gracefully on the beast’s back, flicking the dark blood from her steel.

"A blade... I am my Master’s blade."

The battle raged for several more grueling minutes, but the outcome had been decided the moment Ren stepped through the barrier.

The last goblin fell, its throat opened by Mandy’s desperate trembling sword.

Immediately as that happened, the oppressive atmosphere of the Hidden Floor shifted. All of the monsters disappeared into wisps of gray smoke, including their spilled blood, leaving only their glittering cores resting on the dry stone.

Only then could Eternia as well as the others see exactly how many monsters they had faced. The cavern floor was practically carpeted with glowing gems.

Monsters were differentiated into ranks depending on their strength, and that varied with the size of the cores they left behind.

Naturally, D-rank cores would be significantly bigger than E-rank monster cores, but there were C-rank cores here, too, which Eternia could guess came from the big Orcs and the Commander Ren had slaughtered.

Both her and Mandy collapsed to their knees, their chests heaving as they dragged ragged breaths into their lungs.

They were covered in sweat and grime, physically exhausted to their limits as they awaited the dungeon’s reward.

Ren was still standing near the center of the room. His breathing was completely even, though his posture was slightly relaxed.

His steel blade lay discarded on the stone to his side; it had been burned through completely, the metal warped and slagged from him using Starfire continuously against the Commander.

Standard steel simply couldn’t handle the Flame of Eradication for prolonged periods.

Suddenly, a brilliant golden glow descended from the dark ceiling, floating gently down like a falling star, and landed directly into Ren’s outstretched hand.

The light faded, revealing a breathtaking artifact.

It was a multifaceted golden ocular gem.

The jewel was roughly the size of a large coin and possessed a deep swirling amber center that uncannily resembled the slitted eye of an ancient reptile.

’This... this is it,’ Ren thought as he held it in his palm, feeling the smooth cold surface of the stone.

This was the classic luck and perception cheat.

In the original novel, Jace had embedded this exact gem into Caliburn’s hilt, and it passively highlighted hidden traps, secret passages, and the physical weak points of boss monsters, as well as humans. It was an overpowered crutch meant to keep a foolish hero alive.

’This is the Eye Of The Avarice King... whoever that was...’ Ren mused, admiring the craftsmanship.

But this wasn’t what Ren was interested in.

Embedding a glowing rock into a sword was a stupid vulnerable way to utilize such a powerful artifact. A sword could be dropped, disarmed, or shattered.

A true villain didn’t rely on external trinkets that could be stolen back.

He poured Starfire into his palm and. Ren tightened his grip with his muscles bulging as he crushed the ocular gem with a sickening crack.

The golden stone shattered into a dozen fragments, letting pure divine energy seep out. The golden light shot into the dark air, swirling around Ren in a mesmerizing vortex.

A crystalline chime echoed in his mind, accompanied by a glowing blue interface that illuminated his face.

『 You have received Divine Authority: Eye Of The Unseen 』

『 This Divine Authority will permanently rest in your right eye and will allow you to perfectly perceive the flow of mana, highlight hidden traps, reveal obscured pathways and expose the biological and magical weak points of any target within your line of sight. 』

『 Will you take it? Y / N 』

"Yes of course," Ren said aloud.

Immediately, the swirling vortex of golden light collapsed inward. It shot directly into his right eye with a searing flash.

Ren closed his eyes for a fraction of a second as the magic forcefully fused with his optic nerve and his mana channels.

When he opened them again, the world was completely different. His left eye remained its natural, dark color, but his right eye now glowed with a faint mesmerizing golden hue with the pupil subtly slitted like a predator’s.

His perception lit up completely.

The dark cavern was no longer just shadows and rock; it was a vibrant tapestry of residual mana trails, structural weak points in the ceiling and the precise glowing circulatory systems of his two subordinates resting nearby.

He could see everything and with this, there was nowhere left in this world for his enemies to hide.