I stood with my back to the shimmering barrier of the traitors, watching the horizon of the Great Lawn vanish behind a surging tide of grey fur.
I knew my new strength was enough to kill anything the System could throw at me in this quest, but strength had its limits. Facing such an overwhelming, numerical disadvantage meant death for me in any traditional sense.
Even with my recent boosts, my stamina would never survive a war of attrition against two thousand enemies. I wouldn't even make it through a quarter of them before my muscles seized and I was buried under a mountain of teeth.
"Convert all the remaining coins into stat points!" I commanded. As things had reached this desperate stage, there was no longer any reason to hold back. I couldn't access the market during this localised interference anyway, and the only way to get more coins was to survive long enough to harvest them from the corpses piling up at my feet.
[Notification: You spent twenty thousand coins to obtain ten stat points to allocate at your profile.]
"Open profile," I thought. I didn't hesitate. I needed to turn my body into a perpetual motion machine of death. I placed three more points directly into Stamina, bringing it to a rich, unprecedented sixteen points.
The transformation was instantaneous. I felt a cool, refreshing wave wash through my nervous system, purging the lactic acid and the tremors from my limbs. I began to move my arms, testing the weight of the two swords in a rhythmic, left-and-right motion. I felt lighter, faster, and infinitely more durable.
"Bang!""Bang!"
The first wave of wolves hit me, and the result was grotesque. They weren't just being cut; they were being thrown through the air like they were nothing more than bothersome bugs.
My strength had reached a threshold where their mass didn't matter. After just a few minutes of this rhythmic slaughter, a tangible sense of fear began to radiate from the pack. No matter how many bodies they threw into the meat grinder, none of them managed to even touch a single hair on my body. I was a phantom of steel.
"Howl!"
However, just as the raw animal instinct inside those monsters warned them to flee from the "demon" in their midst, their Alpha howled from inside the traitors' shield. It was a roar of obvious rage, a command reinforced by the Horn of Leadership that forced the terrified wolves to charge again.
"Bang!""Bang!"
It was pathetic! They had the numbers to swallow a city, but in the end, that raw mass amounted to nothing against a focused point of overwhelming power.
"Grrr…" The Alpha paced furiously inside the transparent shield, its fur bristling, but it was powerless to intervene directly. After ten minutes of unrelenting combat, the momentum of the pack finally broke.
The wolves, once a terrifying army, couldn't take a single step forward anymore. In their eyes, the roles of the apocalypse had been reversed: I looked like the demon, the true monster, and they were the ones who felt as fragile as humans.
I watched them for a few more seconds, their snarling muzzles dripping with saliva, but their paws rooted to the ground in terror. Then, I turned my attention back toward the shield.
The Ball of Protection was truly an amazing piece of engineering. During the past ten minutes, the traitors and the Alpha inside had never stopped trying to smash the shield from their side to reach Angelica, but it was useless.
It seemed they didn't understand the fundamental mechanics of the item. It wouldn't break through cumulative damage. You couldn't "wear it down." Either you possessed enough raw Strength to smash it in a single, catastrophic hit, or you would never damage it at all.
Based on the quality, the duration for the item would last for at least ten straight hours. I couldn't just sit here and waste half a day playing with wolves. I raised my sword and tested the barrier, hitting the shield with a measured strike. My blade was instantly repelled by the innate force of the Ball of Protection, sending a vibration up my arm.
It was expected. My strength stat wasn't high enough yet. If I considered their defence stat to be the basic ten points, then I would need my Strength to reach at least twenty-five to shatter the barrier in one blow. But from what I knew about those traitors and their equipment, I was sure their defence stat was already boosted.
"Let me rest for now," I muttered. I added the rest of my unallocated points into Strength, as I had another problem to solve.
If I managed to crack open that shield right now, I would be squeezed between two hostile forces: the traitors and the remaining wolf army. That was a tactical nightmare. I had to get rid of the outside army first by forcing it to scatter.
Even the magic of the Horn of Leadership could never truly overcome the innate, primal fear of a predator that knows it is being hunted. This was the only way to ensure I could fight those inside the shield with my full attention.
I resumed the slaughter. Every time my stamina was fully replenished, I dove back into the sea of grey. My current stamina allowed me to fight in a state of "controlled frenzy" for ten minutes straight. After that, I would step back, resting for exactly two minutes before resuming the massacre.
The wolves were now visibly terrified. I didn't wait for them to charge; I had to run toward them and hunt them down like sheep. If not for the constant, nagging howling of their Alpha from behind the safety of the shield, they would have scattered into the park long ago.
"Anytime now," I whispered. I could feel their collective fear piling up to a breaking point—the point where they wouldn't listen to any order, not even from their Alpha. I sat down beside the shield, resting my back against the shimmering wall, waiting for the final refresh of my stamina.
"Roar!"
I looked up as a new sound joined the cacophony. From the edges of the Great Lawn, a new wave of monsters began to emerge.
"They surely took their time," I said with a grim smile. I had been anticipating this. The Angels weren't going to let me dismantle their plans this easily. They had summoned the stupid hyenas to try and stop me.
After all, hyenas didn't know fear like wolves. They weren't smart and only followed the orders blindly, even if it led to their deaths.
But they were easier to handle. At least I wouldn't need to squeeze my power every time I swung my sword.
"Bang!"
"Bang!"
As expected, they didn't pose any challenge for me. They only bought some time for the wolves to recover from their fear and gave me more coins from their dead bodies.
"C'mon, send more f*cking monsters to me. I'll be a millionaire in one night thanks to you," I shouted in mockery while taunting my hidden enemies.
My words weren't just for show. I would really gather a considerable amount of coins if this continued. But I didn't really want this pointless fight to go on.
After all the more time I gave to those bastards, the more variables appeared in my face. The best option here was to rapidly solve this problem and save Angelica before running back to the museum.
After that, I would consider hunting these monsters or going towards my goal.
But one thing was for certain: I had to listen to what Angelica had to say.
"Bang!"
"Bang!"
The worst thing about these hyenas was their constant advancement towards me. Unlike wolves, they have no leader and feel no fear. So even when I fought for twenty minutes straight, killing hundreds of them, they didn't stop coming at me.
"Convert twenty thousand coins into stat points." I had no other option here but to replenish my stamina with points. If this kept going, then my highest stat would be, ironically, my stamina.
[Twenty thousand coins are converted into ten stat points to allocate]
I added the ten points to the stamina without hesitation. Now my stamina was freakishly higher, reaching twenty-six points.
That was two and a half times the basic stat I was given here.
The next moment, I felt refreshed again, while the speed of my stamina recovery increased by a good margin. I started to kill the hyenas while trying to watch out for any foolish attempts of the wolves.
"Howl!"
Just after ten more minutes, the alpha finally decided it was time to open the gates of hell on me. I knew if the wolves were given time, they would recover from their fear, but that wasn't a big of a problem to me.
After all, how could I get away from that siege of crazy hyenas all around? Plus, there was something the alpha even missed here.
No matter how the wolves tried to recover, I had already instilled fear deep down in their souls.
It wasn't a surprise that after a few minutes of combined attack between the two races, the wolves couldn't handle it any longer.
The old fear towards me resurfaced again, and they only ran, ran as far away from me as possible. And that just bought me some time to recover and catch my breath here.
"Now the main bulk of your army is gone; only weak flies remain," I snorted while watching the few hundred hyenas getting into disarray under the brutal escape of the wolves.
And I didn't miss such a chance to walk calmly and kill anything that fell on the ground. Be it a wolf or a hyena, both were killed by the sharp edges of my swords.
Just before the hyenas would recover from this sudden twist in events, I killed almost a hundred of them on the ground without breaking a sweat.
"Roar!"
They felt more anger when they saw me doing all this. "Come, come to papa," I taunted them while holding my ground. This time, I was confident in killing all of them in this one round before finally getting freed to rescue Angelica.
"Bang!""Bang!"
I didn't rush the process. I retreated slowly and steadily, my twin blades moving in an efficient arc that silenced anything attempting to close the distance. It was a cold, rhythmic performance of slaughter.
By the time my boots touched the grass near the shimmering perimeter of the protective barrier, there wasn't a single monster left standing on the Great Lawn. The silence that followed was heavy, broken only by the rasp of my breath.
The only monsters remaining were the ones trapped inside that translucent dome. It was finally time to crush that damn shield on their heads.
"How high is the defence stat of the one who used that item?" I asked myself. I needed an exact calculation. I didn't want to waste force on a strike that would only result in a recoil.
I accessed my interface and added two more stat points to Strength. My strength now sat at twenty-five—a formidable number, though still nowhere near the freakish heights of my stamina. I
could have easily poured every remaining point into raw power, but experience had taught me a bitter lesson: strength wasn't everything. In the apocalypse, speed and agility were the true arbiters of life and death. If I faced an opponent with a higher speed stat, all the strength in the world was useless if I couldn't land a blow while they picked me apart.
"Clang!"
I tested the shield with a measured strike. My sword was instantly repelled, the kinetic energy vibrating through my shoulder.
"So, the user has over eleven points in defence..." I narrowed my eyes, scanning the fifty traitors inside. "Does he excel in defence, or is he just dumping points to stay alive?"
I kept my eyes on the traitors as I prepared for a massive investment. "System, convert thirty-six thousand coins into stat points." I needed to replenish my pool of points before the real fight began.
[Notification: Thirty-six thousand coins are converted into eighteen stat points to allocate.]
"So I have forty thousand coins left in reserve... good," I muttered.
I looked at my Strength stat and added five more points. It climbed to thirty. In the mathematics of the Ball of Protection, a Strength of thirty was the hard threshold needed to shatter the barrier if the user's Defence was fifteen or lower.
"Clang!"
Again, my sword was repelled by the stubborn, shimmering wall.
"What the f*ck!!" I hissed. "Is he adding more points to Defence in real-time, or what?"
I looked closer through the semi-transparent surface. I could see five of the fifty traitors standing in the front line, each holding a heavy shield. One of them had to be the anchor for the item, and his stats were higher than I had anticipated.
"If he has up to twenty points in Defence, then I have to add ten more points to Strength," I thought, my brow furrowing. I knew I was approaching a dangerous ceiling.
[ATTENTION! You have reached the limit of the Quest Strength.]
The red warning text flashed across my vision, stinging my eyes. I knew this message would eventually pop up.
As long as a player hadn't unlocked a specific Class, the System enforced "soft caps" on primary attributes to prevent people from turning into gods too early. One couldn't just turn themselves into a Hercules before the first month was even over.
"I hope this will be enough," I prayed silently. I felt a rare spark of helplessness. If forty Strength wasn't enough to break the shield, I would be stuck on the outside while the barrier timed out, and I had no way to go beyond that cap.
I took a deep breath, centred my weight, and swung with everything my forty points of Strength could provide.
"Crack!""Boom!"
The air itself seemed to shudder as the impact connected. The shimmering hemi-sphere didn't just fade; it fractured like a giant glass bowl under a hammer before exploding into thousands of dissipating light fragments. Luckily, that bastard hadn't managed to push his Defence beyond twenty.
"How dare you…" one of the traitors screamed in a mixture of rage and shock.
The fifty of them whirled around to face me, their focus finally ripped away from the girl in the centre. All this time, they had been engaged in a long, boring, and one-sided conversation with Angelica.
While I had been slaughtering wolves, I had caught snatches of their dialogue. It could all be summed up in one recurring, accusatory sentence: Why did you betray us?
That single sentence was a revelation. It was the key that turned the lock on everything I had wondered about her. She wasn't some random "Great Witch" or an accidental hero.
She was this special, this protected, and this hunted because she was once one of them. She was a traitor who had turned her back on the darkness and sided with the survivors.
"Interesting," I said, a dark, evil grin spreading across my face as the barrier's dust settled. I raised both my swords, the steel glinting in the pale light of the park.
"Now," I added, my voice cold and final, "it's time for me to kill you all."