Defiance of the Fall

that was just the start of his problems.
Right behind him was a massive pillar that stretched into the sky, and one warrior after another appeared around him.
The soldiers were immediately beset with attacks from a defending force that didn ’t ask any questions but rather tried to immediately kill anything that appeared.

The situation was all too familiar to him.
It was an incursion.

However, the chaos was still a bit different from the one he was used to.
It looked like he had arrived just minutes after the pillar appeared, yet an army full with peak F-Grade to powerful E-Grade warriors were already fighting back great ferocity.
The attacks he had just avoided came from the defenders who looked like a mix of humans and trolls.

They stood almost three meters tall and had pale green skin.
They seemed to favor physical combat as well, and even the strike he barely dodged had come from an explosive arrow-attack.
Zac could understand the words the humans streaming out of the pillar screamed, but the defenders spoke in an unintelligible guttural gibberish.

’

How would he find out where the Hayner Clan was? And who was the guardian in a scenario like this? He seemed to be allied with the raiders, but also not judging by the wording of the quest.
He could liken it to being an infiltrator who had joined the incursion with hidden motives, so everyone was an enemy.

Was the Incursion leader the guardian, or was it perhaps the patriarch of the Hayner Clan? As for actually finding the treasure, he had already given up on it.
He knew that even if he found the clan there would be all sorts of hurdles to jump in order to get the treasure, hurdles he didn’t have the time nor the skills to deal with.

Eventually, he could only find one solution to his situation, and Zac’s searched the area until he spotted a human radiating a sinister aura as he commanded his troops to take down the defending armies.
Zac steadied himself as he activated [Profane Seal], appearing in front of the man without warning.

The man looked extremely shocked to be attacked by one of his own, but he immediately reacted as a huge bird made from hundreds of flying daggers appeared in front of him as he flashed away.
However, the cage was already erected, and Zac steadily grew to his towering form as miasma covered the area.

The flying daggers assailed him like an angry swarm of bees, and Zac was quickly forced to actively block with [Immutable Bulwark] as he noted that the daggers were infused with a Dao fragment and could cut straight through his miasmic armor.
The fractal shield thankfully held though, and Zac saw Dao Empowered specters appear around the incursion general in an instant.

However, most of the specters ’ strikes were diffused with some sort of small shields that appeared around the leader, with only a few of them managing to land an actual blow on him.

Zac knew he had taken the strength of the potential guardian too lightly at that moment.
He hadn’t mentally adjusted due to the increased difficulty because he hadn’t fought a real floor guardian at the end of the 7th floor, but rather a bunch of cultivators.
It made him still think of his competition as roughly the same as the 62nd level, forgetting about the sharp increase that came with the final levels of a floor.

The man was also an incursion general, which Zac had ample experience in defeating without exerting any herculean effort.
It had made him confident in deflecting the small blades with his impervious armor, but he received a rude awakening as over ten daggers bore into his body and reopened some wounds.

’

If that was all that happened it would have been fine, as such small weapons weren’t any threat to Zac’s towering physique.
But a blistering pain started to radiate from the wounds in an instant, and Zac felt the world lurch for a second before he found his bearings.
He realized what was going on in an instant; the daggers were poisoned.

The only relief was that he sensed the poison being immediately contained to a pretty large degree as he activated the Fragment of the Coffin.
But it was nothing like when he fought the corroded monkeys back on the third floor.
The Coffin didn’t make him magically immune to all poisons, it only strengthened his resistance to it and allowed him to refine it.

This poison he was struck with was on a completely other level compared to what he had absorbed before, and it seemed to also be empowered by a Dao of its own.
It wasn’t life-threatening as far as Zac could tell, especially with his Draugr-body’s natural resistance against poisons as well.
But it would still take some effort to refine it all.

“You are not one of ours!” the man roared from the other side of the cage, a large festering wound having appeared on his arm.

Zac didn’t answer as he was focused on combating the poison spreading through his body, while simultaneously making sure that he wasn’t cut by any more of those small daggers.
He noted that a concerted effort to break through from the leader’s soldiers was already underway, and he knew his time was limited.

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He quickly pushed his taunting effect to the limit as he rushed toward his target, with ten of the fifteen chains targeting the general.
The other five started to take out the people who had been caught inside the cage along with their leader, and these people quickly turned into nourishment for him.
The Incursion Leader managed to stave off the chains though by allocating a large number of his flying daggers to fight them off.

A poison master was a decent counter to his build since intangible attacks like poison or illusions wouldn’t trigger [Deathwish], but that didn’t mean Zac was helpless.
He could still retaliate if the man used daggers rather than pure poison attacks like Alea, and he also had his massive bardiche to strike back.

The ground cracked beneath his feet as Zac ran straight toward the incursion leader, but the man seemed intent on stalling as he was swallowed by a hurricane of blades before he was whisked away.
Unfortunately for the man, he hadn’t realized he was under the effect of [Vanguard of Undeath], and the general suddenly appeared only five meters away from Zac.

Zac’s arm was already bulging from cramming it full of miasmic energy from [Unholy Strike] and the sounds of ghastly wails filled the cage as the massive black axe crashed into the whirlwind just when the general appeared.

The axe went straight through the general’s torso, but Zac felt no elation as the swing provided no resistance, and it looked like he had struck a pile of mud as the invader ’s body fell apart into a rotten pile on the ground.
The general had escaped his killing blow.