Chapter 610

Ajax spent a couple hours using [Meditation] to regenerate his Mana and Stamina before he went hunting for the floor boss. During that entire time Ajax had tried his best to learn as much as he could from the remnants of the broken staff. 

“None of the runes work anymore.” Ajax was sure about that, the connection was broken, that wasn’t to mention the about six inch section that was shattered into fragments when he actually broke the thing. “But this is beyond valuable.” 

Ajax now had an example of runes used for runic spells from the dungeon, more than that they were runes he could take with him since they hadn’t come from a floor boss. He didn’t know runic magic well enough to tell if there were new runes or the ones already known to Gryndor but he was happy with it anyway. 

The stone at the center of the staff however was something Ajax didn’t learn anything about other than the fact it was dangerous. He did at one point move to push some of his own Mana into it wanting to see the results even without the safety of the staff but [Sense of Dread] spiked hard enough to let him know it wasn’t something he should even consider. 

Once he finally recovered Ajax started exploring the ziggurat once more looking for the floor boss. After one and half hour of charging through the place all Ajax managed to find were three more cultists that had somehow survived until now. 

“I was really hoping not to have to go into the tunnels to look for it.” Ajax cursed silently. While he might not have found the boss he did find the underground passage in the ziggurat. Seeing as he had already explored the floor as he was taking out the teams sent to kill him long after the boss should have spawned, Ajax was now left with looking for the floor boss in the underground portion of the floor. “I can’t even use the obelisk.” 

Much as he wanted to set up as much of a home field advantage as the dungeon would allow before triggering the obelisk there were two things holding Ajax back. The first was that he didn’t know what the dungeon floor boss was so it would be hard to prepare, but that was something he would have to face if he went looking in the tunnels as well. The second was much more important, so far Ajax hadn’t seen any Earth monsters that would have come from the underground. If there were some there along with the undead that had been sent after him they would also join the boss when he used the obelisk and having a bunch of level one hundred and twenty monster join with any floor boss would be suicide for him. 

Going down into the underground Ajax was assaulted by the smell of death. He was now sure the floor had started with the undead down here and called on by the necromancers to do their bidding alongside the skeletons they raised from the numerous bones in the central room. 

“At least it's not a mine shaft.” Ajax was breathing through his mouth, it wasn’t helping much but it was something. 

The underground wasn’t the usual tight mine tunnels Ajax was used to finding in the dungeons and it presented more like a dwarven city. The ceiling wasn’t all that high at twelve feet but the passages were easily fifty feet wide and even the smaller ones were twenty feet across when they branched off from the main one. 

Unlike the quick scouting job he had been able to do in the ziggurat where he knew the layout after his multiple visits Ajax was forced to take it much slower in the underground as he was mapping out the place just in case he needed to run. At a couple points Ajax went as far as to spend a half hour channeling his Earth Mana and loosening the ceiling so that he could send it crushing down without too much effort if he needed to block the passage after he ran by. 

“Crushing damage.” Ajax talked to himself as he examined the first clue he had about the floor boss.

The remains of the undead were flattened into the wall. Unfortunately whatever crushed it took out just its head in a single blow that connected with the undead’s entire skull not giving Ajax any guesses as to how big the appendage or weapon it was hit with was besides bigger than the skull it crushed.

Even just the crushing damage however was good information for Ajax to have. Another piece of information he was thankful for was that the floor boss clearly saw the undead as enemies. This thankfully meant that the boss itself wasn’t undead or if it was it was a berserk one. One of Ajax’s biggest worries was that the boss ended up being an undead that collected the other undead down here and he would find a small army when he finally ran into it. 

After hours in the underground Ajax finally found the floor boss. He didn’t even see it so much as he heard it as the entire tunnel shook slightly with every step. “So it found me.” Ajax said to himself as he heard the sounds getting closer quickly enough that he knew the floor boss was coming for him. 

Turning towards the passage the boss was coming from Ajax couldn’t help but curse as he saw what boss it was that he had coming towards him. The body looked a lot like a blue nine feet tall gorilla that had been doing steroids and hitting the gym three times a day, with a massive club in its hand and two tusks pointing out from its lower jaw.

“Why did it have to be a troll?” Ajax asked not waiting for a response as he took out his shield. 

Trolls were considered one of the best floor bosses to get. They weren’t all that powerful, they weren’t all that fast and they had no dangerous abilities that could cost someone their life at a moment's notice. Trolls only had two things going for them, their high strength and their insane regeneration.

Ajax knew better than to try blocking a swing from the trolls club head on. Strength wise the troll would probably be about the same level as the ettin Ajax faced, the ten level difference between them making up for the difference in size. In terms of speed Ajax would place it at about the same level as the werewolf from the previous floor. The problem was simply that Ajax didn’t feel like he was making any progress. 

Five minutes into the fight and Ajax knew he would need to run. Already the fight took longer than a number of other encounters with floor bosses Ajax had previously had yet despite the Mana and Stamina he spent as well as the damage to their surrounding nothing had changed from the beginning of the fight. The troll hadn’t managed to land even a glancing blow on Ajax so far, Ajax on the other hand despite landing numerous attacks with both his [Mana Augmentation] weapons as well as a few [Spell Direction] assisted spells hadn’t managed to do any damage the boss didn’t recover from in about five seconds. The fire and magma had taken the boss twenty seconds to recover from after they scraped off the magma but that was it. 

Oddly enough this wasn’t the first time Ajax had seen a troll floor boss. He had also encountered a level eighty five one in the capital on one of the many delves he did in Gryndor. The fight had seemed anticlimactic to him with twenty people simply piling on a helpless creature that once immobilised it was just used as target practice until the twenty casters finally managed to get through its regeneration and do enough damage to kill it. That had taken about twenty minutes.

Knowing this was a fight he would eventually lose, Ajax decided to run. He was actually a little faster than the floor boss going all out so it didn;t take him long to make some distance while leading the boss to one of the sections of passage he had destabilised and collapsing the roof after him forcing the boss to go another way. 

Now that he had time to think and resources to recover Ajax made his way to a spot where he wouldn’t be ambushed before he started thinking about what he knew about the boss. First things first, none of his Mana affinities besides Fire and Magma were even worth considering when it came to damage, even Vibration despite being a Legendary Mana seemed to be a particularly bad matchup with the troll. Ice and Lightning Mana could work to incapacitate the boss a little from direct hits and Earth Mana slowed him down though with his strength and Earth he moved would cost too much in Mana and would quickly shatter, likely turning into projectiles launched towards him. 

As far as he saw it Ajax had two options to damage the troll. The first was the necroting poison he had been making the entire time he had been on this floor, the troll did eventually recover from that as well but it took almost forty seconds. The other was [Curse Slash], the troll’s regeneration didn’t seem to work to get rid of the Curse Mana once applied. 

The only problem was Curse Mana wouldn’t be fatal. As much as he hated it Ajax was pretty sure he would have to go into an endurance battle against a troll hoping to inject enough Curse Mana into it that he could incapacitate it fully while also then having enough resources left over to kill it, something made easier by the dozens of flasks of poison he had amassed.