Chapter 73 - Powerful Mix

"I can assume you are more than eager to test your skills out," Claudia pointed out with a slight smile. 

"And how did you came to such realization?" Tom asked, turning his head around. With an already bloodied spear in his hand, he didn't seem to notice the battered carcass of a goblin still hanging from his spear's blade. 

"Just a feeling," Claudia grinned, ultimately not keeping the topic up. 

For Tom, the tenth floor was a liberation. After struggling to kill the monsters with the rifles and often wasting way more ammunition than he expected, his thoughts about the rest of the mission were pretty grim. With the rate at which they were using up their supplies, the furthest they could go was somewhere around the fifteenth floor. 

But now, it didn't matter any longer. 

Just the skills of his main avatar, the one that died at the very bottom of the dungeon, were more than enough to get him through the current floors.

All the proficiency and stacked bonuses from his skills were gone. But that didn't matter. Given how proficiency could be easily leveled up by just using the skill while the Casino passive would grow all on its own, it was only a matter of time before Layn would become as powerful as his strongest avatar was. 

Or even stronger. 

Back in his first playthrough, Tom's avatar was oriented at quick and stealthy play. With the Casino skills making massive fights a breeze and his haste skill giving him the speed necessary to go through the early stage of the fight, Tom could use any weapon he would like to just slash the monsters dead. 

But that was the situation back when he still used his old avatar. Now, with the spear-related skill tree from his most recent avatar and several skills that he couldn't even recall from all the other avatars he made in the past, Tom was more than capable of conquering the dungeon. 

Just a single floor prior, what was a challenge now turned into a feeding ground for Tom's appetite for power. 

"Pack of goblins ahead..." Claudia shouted in an attempt to warn Tom against the new group of monsters. But by the time the girl moved her eyes to where her partner stood, Tom was already nowhere to be seen.

This state of things didn't last long either. 

Tom rushed right into the group of goblins as soon as he sensed them. Using the momentum of his charge, he pushed his spear forward. 

'Hate,' Tom thought right as he was about to crash into the goblins. 

When compared to the same kind of monster that they encountered on the early floors, the local monsters were no longer as sympathetically weak. Rather than going against Tom barehanded, each of the roughly seventeen monsters held some kind of weapon. They ranged from simple maces through clubs all the way to improvised spears and axes. 

'I don't see any swords,' Tom thought, pushing his spear through the nearest goblin. With his haste going on, he felt as if he was swimming in the air while everyone else was simply frozen in place. 

Once the blade penetrated the monster's body, Tom squinted his eyes. 

'Incinerate,' he thought, invoking yet another of his abilities... Or rather, an entire chain of them.

While it was only a guess, Tom was quite sure that his spear's material somehow morphed into mithril. With its magic conductivity that every geek across the world knew about mixed with Tom's spearmage and energymancer's abilities, Tom's attack spell changed. 

Incinerate was originally quite a versatile, offensive fire spell. Depending on the attribute, it allowed Tom to cover a huge area with a weak fire or just concentrate all the might of the spell on a single target. It was its versatility that made this skill so useful, not the raw power itself. 

But now, mixed with all the other abilities, Tom unknowingly turned the tip of his spear into a damned cannon!

BOOM!

The shock of the soundwave almost threw Tom out of his haste spell. Thankfully, he somehow managed to hold on to his focus, even when his body was thrown several steps away from where he dealt his attack. 

'Beautiful,' Tom thought when he got to experience the explosion of his making in slow motion. The fires spread out from when his spear released them. With the 'incinerate' attribute, the spell was aimed to reach the highest possible temperature and use the natural forces for the rest. 

But as Tom continued to fly back from the shockwave and observe the events, he realized that he overdid it... by a tiny little bit. 

At the moment where he released the spells, the monsters ahead no longer posed any problem. Even before the actual fire could reach them, the sheer energy contained in the heatwave that followed the shockwave was enough to turn them into ash. But what appeared to be problematic was how the walls of the dungeon itself started to melt!

'End the haste,' Tom thought, escaping from the world of slowed-down time. 

Only to crash into the wall, roughly thirty steps away from where he executed his attack. 

"Fuck!" Tom shouted when a wave of pain exploded outwards from his solar plexus. 

"Hold on!" Claudia shouted, prompted by Tom's curse. She rushed forward, grabbing him before his body could fall off to the ground. "Are you okay?" she asked. Her face was filled with worry. 

"I should be," Tom calmed the girl down, although he used her help to regain his footing. "But I guess I should focus more on limiting the power of my attack," Tom said before smiling shyly. 

In the dungeon, the power of one's skills was the absolute measurement of how strong one really was. Given how it took only ten to twenty floors for the monster to reach levels above anything that a human could ever fight with on his own, there was no use in relying on one's own abilities when facing powerful monsters here. 

That's why a normal Dungeons Online player would consider Tom's worry to be a strange one. After all, what was the point of limiting how strong one was?

But just as the situation before proved, Tom's body was nowhere near powerful to withstand the combined power of all his skills. While he could offset this problem by a certain degree with his Casino passive, but it would take a long while before he could bring it up to that point. 

After all, Casino stole a part of the power from the monsters that Tom defeated and used it to permanently reinforce the skill's user. The problem was, he only started using it on the tenth floor. 

'Even if I went through every single monster spawn on all the floors that we still have to conquer...' Tom thought, putting his mind into calculation mode for a bit. 'Nah, it won't work,' he quickly arrived at a conclusion. 'Even if I were to ignore the time restraints, there are simply not enough monsters for me to kill here. Not before I would become too strong for them to...' Tom thought, only to suddenly silence his thoughts.

An idea struck his head. 

"What if..." he asked, only to cut his words just like he cut his line of thought a moment earlier. 

"What's going through your mind?" Claudia asked. She was more than capable of noticing the fine details of Tom's disposition. As such, she had enough clues to figure out when he was struck by an idea and when he was simply absent-minded. 

"I think I just found a way not to rely on harvesting the stones at all," Tom said, looking around the place. In the distance, at the far-off corner of the main corridor, he spotted a monster. 

'It's likely within a pack as well,' Tom thought. He already anticipated the rest of the group to be hiding behind the corner. After all, they were on the tenth floor of the dungeon, a special place where its difficulty spiked for real for the first time. 

"Can you give me a moment?" Tom asked the girl, turning his head around to face her. "I think I know how I can get stronger pretty quickly," he added in hopes of explaining the source of his idea. 

"Even stronger than you are right now?" Claudia asked, opening her eyes wide. "Do you want to kill yourself just by swinging your spear?" She asked out of nowhere, squinting her eyes. "Because that's what's going to happen if you raise your strenght even further!" Claudia explained, clearly anxious about such a possibility. 

"Ah, that's not what I meant," Tom instantly replied and shook his head. "Right now, I'm powerful because of how well does my old skills mix together," he explained before looking towards the monsters in the distance once again. 

As this was the tenth floor, there was no longer just one kind of monster on the entire floor. And even though Tom just dealt with a pack of goblins, it appeared that the monsters in the distance belonged to some animal, four-legged kind. 

"What I want to do, is to raise my level," Tom said. He then lowered his upper body down and lunged forward.