Chapter 135 Meeting Another Party

"Did this guy seriously try to interfere with another group?!"

She heard an unfamiliar voice as a group of five consisting of two men and three women ran towards her location from the corridor behind her.

Upon seeing Eliza's wary expression, one of the men heaved a sigh and gestured for the others to stop before stepping forward with both hands raised high.

Seeing this, Eliza lowered her staff a bit but the buffs she applied to herself increased as she still did not let down her guard.

After all, she knew fully well that the thing to be most wary of in a dungeon was not the monsters but other adventurers.

Before she could speak, she heard Pride's voice from beside her, causing her to flinch in surprise as she didn't notice when Pride got that close.

"Who are you?"

Unlike Eliza, Pride did not make any show of lowering her guard, talking to them with her sword pointed forward.

The man who stepped forward glanced at the ominous-looking blade that was giving him chills before taking a deep breath and speaking.

"We're an adventurer party who came to explore the dungeon like you two but our team's scout has a bad habit of poking his nose into other people's business and we came over to stop him..."

He then glanced at the man who fell out of the wall while rubbing his arms with a pained expression on his face and continued.

"...But looking at that, we might have been too late."

"No shit."

Another one of his teammates retorted but before Pride could even guess who spoke, there was a bright flash of orange light behind them, followed by a sudden explosion that made the ground tremble.

"This guy..."

Eliza facepalmed as she thought about Evan who was still killing blade wraiths without a care in the world.

'Even though it is completely logical for him to continue attacking the monsters while Pride and I deal with this unknown group, it still infuriates me how he does it.'

"Finally!! I don't recall it being so hard to advance two levels."

Evan's loud voice was heard as he walked out of the middle of the explosion with a satisfied smile on his face.

Beside him, his sword was floating in mid-air as he casually walked over to where Pride and Eliza were.

"So, who the heck are these?"

Evan glanced at the group of six before asking Pride, however, the voice of the adventurer Eliza sent flying earlier rang out before she could reply.

"Damn girl! I just wanted to scare you a bit but you hit me like you wanted me dead!"

Hearing this, Evan did not understand what he was talking about but Kuro who had been paying attention to the situation filled him in.

Before his teammates could even begin to reprimand him for interfering with others, he suddenly felt something cold on his neck and looked down to see a black blade under his chin.

"So, if I did this to you when you were fighting, you won't attack me with the intent to kill?"

He then heard a voice coming from right beside his ear, causing him to flinch as he didn't even notice when someone got close to him.

His party members were even more surprised as not one of them could comprehend how Evan had suddenly appeared beside the party member who was just a few feet away from them while Evan was supposed to be a good five metres away.

Seeing Evan's reaction, Eliza raised an eyebrow in surprise while Pride only glanced at Eliza and then at Evan before heaving an exasperated sigh.

'His reaction means he knows that she was that man's intended target.'

"Whoa! Bro, Chill!"

The man who spoke up earlier, perhaps the party leader, was the first to recover from his shock as he instantly stepped forward and tried to get Evan's blade off his party scout's neck.

Evan only gave him a cold look before removing his sword and kicking the scout toward his party members.

"Keep him in line."

After saying that, he turned around and moved toward Pride and Eliza.

"Let's get out of here, shall we?"

He ignored the complaints of the other party members as he dragged the two females away from the area and into a different pathway of the dungeon.

The moment that Eliza was sure that the party was out of earshot, she turned her gaze to Evan and asked.

"So, mind telling me why you overreacted just now?"

"Overreacted? Me? How?"

"There was no need to do all that, you even revealed one of your skills to them. What if we encounter them later on and they're hostile? They're sure to be on guard against you because of your teleportation."

Eliza's words made Evan stop in his tracks, he understood what she just said and understood it was true.

'I would not normally react like that, at most a light warning would have been okay but the moment Kuro told me he tried to sneak up on her, I got pissed.

Who the heck does he think he is to mess with my party member like that?'

Evan shook his head to get rid of his thoughts before replying to Eliza.

"My reaction was indeed over the top but it was more than necessary considering the situation, that scout guy has a concealment skill that's even better than mine, after all."

He then walked forward before continuing.

"Besides, that's not the main order of business for today, we have a monster room to find after all."

The young hero forcefully changed the topic, drawing the group's attention to the monster room they were supposed to look for.

"Do you know exactly where it is?"

"Nope. But there are more than one so if we wander about enough we are bound to run into one."

"Again, you should say things like these earlier!"

Eliza couldn't help but retort after hearing Evan's reply to Pride's question, but in the next moment, she wished she didn't retort so loudly as a bunch of blade wraiths, perhaps having heard her loud voice, were speedily making their way over to the group's position.

Sensing them, Evan pulled out his sword and tossed it into the air, making it float with his weapon control skill before calling out to his newly contracted spirit.

"Kuro, you're up this time."

The moment he spoke, a black cat jumped out of his shadow and walked in the direction of the incoming enemies.

"Test out your new magic first, then your skill."

The spirit nodded as his black eyes locked onto the first group of incoming enemies. The next moment, he twirled his tail around and a black two-ringed magic circle formed at the tip.

Each of the rings in the magic circle had a thin layer of white light bordering it, signifying the light properties that the spell possessed.

Multiple shards of black light, with each having four shards going through them appeared mid-air and pointed in the direction of the sword-wielding enemies.

[Go.]

The cat spoke one word as he flicked his tail, the shards of light being launched towards the incoming enemies at barely perceptible speeds, impaling each one of the enemies with relative ease and sending them to their deaths.

The next moment, the cat turned his dark gaze in a certain direction and melted into his shadow, reappearing a few feet away through the shadow of a blade wraith that was able to block the incoming shards of light.

[Shadow Claw.]

Calling out softly, the cat swiped its paw, releasing a three-pronged slash of magic towards the blade wraith, messily splitting its body into three pieces and splattering blood everywhere.

However, the blood never reached the cat as he had already dived back into the shadow of the falling corpse and reappeared right next to the feet of another blade wraith.

The cat's shadow suddenly glitched and a long tendril arm-like appendage rose up from within it and sliced off the legs of the blade wraith beside him.

Before the cat could finish off the monster, it suddenly caught sight of a crude glass bottle flying in the air from the corner of its eyes, melding back into the shadows in the next moment to avoid it.

That decision proved to be correct as the bottle crashed just where the cat was seconds later and exploded, releasing a cloud of green smoke that couldn't be anything but poison.

As for the creature responsible for throwing the bottle, it titled its head in question when it saw that the cat it had thrown the bottle towards reappeared at the feet of one of the humans a few metres away.

Its yellow eyes narrowed as it was about to throw out two more bottles, only to realise that the cat had disappeared once more.

Perhaps learning from what happened to the blade wraiths, the monster turned around, hoping to catch the cat, however, it suddenly felt pain in its chest and looked down to see a forked tail sticking out through its chest.

[Turning around was futile. I never intended to move into your shadow in the first place.]