Chapter 92: Schemes and Calculations

For the first time, Grimm was driven out of the enchanted jungle in a pitiful rout by a wizard-level terror flower spirit, all while no fallen apprentice was chasing him.

That terrifying flower spirit was clearly a territorial creature with an acute sense of dominion. Once Grimm and his party had left the enchanted jungle, it ceased its relentless pursuit, and thus Grimm managed to preserve his three rock-serpent golems without suffering any irreparable loss.

Glancing back at the lush, verdant forest, Grimm’s jaw tightened. He gave the chip a grim order: “Chip, immediately establish a task file on the flower spirit and search for a viable method to defeat or annihilate it.”

“Beep. Task accepted. Task file name: Flower Spirit. Feasible solutions are being drafted.”

“Estimated attack strategies capable of inflicting substantive damage on the flower spirit include: one, sorcerous curse; two, team assault; three, activate the lightning giant project; four, destroy the flower spirit’s true body.”

Grimm frowned and spoke softly. “Explain the practicality of each of these strategies.”

“Beep. First: sorcerous curse. The target is still a living being, and common sorcerous curses can reduce part of its combat capacity, buying the rock-serpent golems more time to break through its external individual defenses.

Second: team assault. With the current squad’s combat strength, it is wholly insufficient to take down this wizard-level flower spirit. To defeat it, the team must include members of sufficient strength and engage it through coordinated division of labor. Predicted combat pattern as follows...

Third: activate the lightning giant project. To prevent the flower spirit from escaping the rock-serpent golems through sheer speed, a team member must restrain it at close range. Members estimated to achieve this effect include the Blood Queen, Mary, and the lightning giant. If Blood Queen Mary is selected, according to pre-battle assessment, the probability of Mary’s death exceeds eighty-nine percent. Priority recommendation: select the lightning giant.

Fourth: destroy the flower spirit’s true body. The flower spirit encountered this time is only a parasitic vessel; its true body has not yet appeared. According to biological analysis of this type of creature, if the true body can be infiltrated and located, then without the support of its true-body energy, the flower spirit’s combat strength will decline dramatically.”

Grimm closed his eyes and listened carefully, then after some thought kept asking questions.

“You said the lightning giant project has already been started. How far along is it? How long until completion?”

“Beep. The lightning giant’s design work is complete. At present, only the necessary sorcerous materials are lacking.”

“What materials are still missing?”

“Five high-grade wind-element cores.”

“What level of power will the completed lightning giant reach?”

“According to prior contact with apprentice-level combatants, the completed lightning giant will possess basic strength at the quasi-sorcerer mid-tier.”

“And compared to that Afo?”

“Based on extrapolation from baseline data, in one hundred fights between the completed lightning giant and Afo, it would be killed in seventy-three, severely injured in eleven, and draw in sixteen. Preliminary estimate: the completed lightning giant can only employ hit-and-run tactics, always keeping proper attack distance from Afo, and relying on continuous lightning attacks to possibly inflict adequate damage on the enemy.”

“So it cannot even beat an elite quasi-sorcerer!”

Grimm fell silent, quietly replaying in his mind Afo’s brief intervention that day.

Though the battle had been short, with the chip’s recorded replay Grimm could still clearly and vividly feel Afo’s dreadful combat power. An extraordinarily formidable body and ferocious, savage physical strength granted him a truly unmatched and miraculous might.

With a single strike, he had effortlessly shattered the rock-serpent golem’s basic defenses and driven his savage force deep into the serpent’s body. Otherwise, he would never have been able to smash the golem apart with one punch and seize the summoning core directly.

To be honest, that wizard-level flower spirit he had encountered today had been labeled as wizard-level by the scan, but if one truly placed it beside Afo, Grimm could not say with any certainty whether the flower spirit could still maintain such overwhelming suppression of force.

If there were a meat shield of Afo’s caliber holding the front line, and four or five quasi-sorcerer ranged apprentices behind him, then the odds of victory could still be kept around twenty to thirty percent. And of course, if Grimm were to send all three of his rock-serpent golems as well, the chances would rise directly to fifty or sixty percent.

So the key to battle remained how to deal sufficient damage to that flower spirit in a timely and effective manner. Otherwise, with only the three rock-serpents, they would likely be torn apart into fragments scattered across the ground with ease.

To strengthen the squad, seeking help from Afo and the others was not impossible, but if he did that, the vast majority of the gains would likely be handed over to others. From Kabi’s simple description, there were several magical treasures within that Grimm was determined to obtain, and after much deliberation he still felt he could rely only on his own strength.

If Afo could not be asked, then he would have to find something to temporarily replace Afo.

The lightning giant project was a reinforcement plan Grimm had tailored specifically for the storm giant core he had obtained last time.

Any purely elemental core, because of the limited wizard-array space it could contain, could not possibly have powerful arrays added to it without restraint. Thus, the golems currently forged from quasi-sorcerer cores were somewhat weak. They could bully low-ranking opponents well enough, but once faced with an equal-tier enemy, their performance was never satisfying.

In light of this, under Grimm’s guidance, the chip had carried out an unconventional enhancement of the golem-making process, attempting to redistribute the arrays previously etched onto a single core so that they were shared by other cores. In the end, only one core would bear the consciousness support of the golem’s main body, while the other cores would form the key branch nodes of the new golem through energy sharing and array distribution.

In this way, it would be possible to exploit the array space of each core to the fullest, etching enough enhancement arrays upon them to forge a much more powerful elemental golem.

Of course, this also meant that no single core could ever independently summon a golem again. One quasi-sorcerer storm giant core, plus six high-grade wind-element cores, would each assume partial functions, constructing the lightning giant through a composite-core, three-dimensional array structure.

However, although this plan had already been proposed half a month ago, the chip had been busy calculating the array distribution and interconnection between the core and its branch nodes, and had not yet submitted a clear design. Since the chip had now added this to the report, it meant the calculations were finally complete and the lightning giant’s design had been finalized.

This was hardly a place to linger, so Grimm simply took a short rest before hurrying back on the road.

As he departed, a few reckless gnollmen actually stepped forward to block him, which caused Grimm, already seething with suppressed fury, to fly into a rage. He commanded the three rock-serpents to smash their nest into ruin.

Against the three nearly invulnerable super-beasts, the gnollmen’s crossbows, daggers, and short spears were utterly useless. If Grimm had not been unwilling to prolong the fight, then with only a single charge, this famed Gray-Ear tribe would have lost a third of its number.

Thus, when the two quasi-sorcerers sent by Victory City, Landon and Philip, arrived in a hurry, what they found was only the Gray-Ear tribe in utter disarray, the lizardman tribe already extinct, and Grimm long gone without a trace.

Listening to the gnoll chief’s tearful account, Landon, his face dark and grim, paid no mind to whatever hidden intrigue might lie beneath it. Instead, his attention fixed upon the enchanted jungle.

In Victory City, there were plenty of strange rumors about that place, and his mentor, Blacklight, had warned him never to covet the treasures within abandoned ruins carelessly, as though there were some deeper secret hidden there. Thus his understanding of the enchanted forest was only superficial; he had never explored or studied it in depth.

“Have you been into this enchanted jungle? What is inside?” Landon impatiently cut off the gnoll chief’s sobbing and asked coldly.

He was no fool.

The exterminated lizardman tribe had many adult warriors who died from thrown elemental attacks, which reminded him of that damned boy’s earth puppet. But the rest had all perished beneath the blades of close-range weapons. He also did not believe the boy from the surface would have had the patience to delve into the lizardmen’s nest and hunt down every woman, child, and infant one by one for slaughter.

This was the nearest habitable zone to the enchanted jungle, and it was greatly beneficial to the subterranean races to control the magical materials there. So what role the gnollmen had played in the extermination of the lizardmen was self-evident.

Yet Landon had no interest in dispensing justice. He cared only about what that damned boy had done in the enchanted jungle.

Had the fellow wandered in by accident? Or had he entered with some purpose, searching for something inside?

With that faint question in mind, Landon invited Philip to search the enchanted jungle together. Thus the two fallen quasi-sorcerers, trusting in their strength, entered the magical forest. But in less than half an hour, both of them fled out in a miserable state.

As they escaped, their bodies were riddled with bloodied holes pierced by light arrows, and the blood flowing from them had been tainted green by some bizarre and troublesome foreign energy. On their way out, they had clearly also been ambushed by numerous low-tier magical beasts, leaving them with many more gashes and claw marks.

The quasi-sorcerer Philip left a teleportation marker at the forest’s edge, and only then did the two hastily return to Victory City.

Clearly, inside the enchanted jungle, they had already discovered some clues. From those clues, they concluded that the damned boy had gone straight toward the ancient wizard tower ruins deep in the forest. With such a clear purpose, he would obviously not turn back merely because a dreadful wizard-level creature guarded the place.

So the two surmised that the boy had most likely retreated in the face of a daunting challenge and gone back to bring reinforcements.

They had left the teleportation marker precisely so they could catch the enemy off guard when he returned to the jungle. If they could seal off the retreat route in time, then with the numbers on the fallen apprentice side, plus the terrifying creature in the enchanted jungle, perhaps they could wipe out an entire surface squad in one sweep.

And such a feat, even across the hundred-year history of conflict in Victory City, was exceedingly rare.