Sameer wasn’t going to be stupid enough to pull out whatever treasure he had stolen in the Tier 35 dungeon from Ray. He wouldn’t risk losing it. That was alright. Ray didn’t need it in particular.

  “I know,” Ray said. “That just as the Sylvans want my treasure, they’ll desperately want what you’ve got too.”

  Eliaz shrugged. “Where’s the problem with that? You got benefited by the Tower Lord himself purchasing your winnings with way too many Mana pearls. It’s only fair that it’d be our turn.”

  “That’s all fine and good. But did you ever stop to wonder why they might want it?”

  Sameer had told Ray that they were aware of Ray’s dealings with the Sylvans. But of course, none of them were from the Tower of Forging originally. They had no idea what had happened on the lower Floors, not in a personal way. To them, all of it had been meaningless conflict.

  “And have you stopped to consider what happens after this Tower?” Eliza asked back.

  Ray blinked. He… actually hadn’t. All this time, he was focusing on climbing to the top of the Tower, while also stopping the Sylvans. What would come after if he succeeded?

  No. Not now. He wasn’t getting distracted now of all times.

  Ray turned to Sameer. “You’ve got treasures that can create Tower Nodes, don’t you?”

  The sharp intake of breath from Sameer was all the confirmation Ray needed to know he was spot on. Although, since he had the other half, Sameer wasn’t that surprised Ray knew.

  “Let’s make a deal,” Ray said. “You give up your half of the treasure from the last dungeon, and in return, you can keep all the treasures from this dungeon.”

  There was an immediate uproar. Eliza and Gritty both protested that vociferously, then glared at each other as did so. Karkatrix loudly started trying to calculate if such a deal benefited them more than it did Ray’s team.

  “We don’t have to do it now,” Ray said, trying to quell the anger. “We can decide once we get to the boss room.”

  That didn’t really help, but at a look from Sameer, it did quiet down. A look that said they had more important things to worry about at the moment. Like actually getting to the dungeon’s boss room.

  “Fine,” Sameer finally said. “We can work together. So long as none of my teammates have a problem.”

  Karkatrix referenced what he had said earlier. “No problems. So long as we all remain trustworthy.”

  Eliza sighed, side-eyeing Marcus for a second when she thought no one was looking. “I’m guessing you guys already have a plan to deal with the other teams.”

  “Yeah,” Ray said, holding his relieved breath at finally having convinced them. “I had a backup plan if you didn’t agree, but since we’re working together, we can just combine it.”

  “What backup plan?” Eliza asked.

  Ray grinned, rolled his shoulders. “We’re going to trick them.” He cast Resurrect Recollect, not caring if the Imitator construct transforming into Sameer would upset them. “Or I guess you could say that you’ll be tricking them.”

  There wasn’t much point in waiting there to discuss the finer points of everything and waste time. They still didn’t have a good idea of how far the other teams had gone through the dungeon. Moving as fast as they could remained in their best interests.

  That was something they could remedy, however. For one, Ray could send constructs to find and spy on other teams. But he wasn’t the only one. Eliza could unleash more of her weird time-orb things that had the ability to move wherever she wanted. The curious thing was that they could show what had gone on within the space occupied however far back Eliza wished.

  Honestly, that was a neat power for observation purposes. Ray wondered if his current class would allow him something like that.

  Come to think of it, he hadn’t tested whatever Project Presence had transformed into. Aeon Flow—that’s what it had become. Ray needed to see if he could use that to his advantage soon.

  Their spying paid off. They were not only able to see that a few of the teams had banded together just as Ray’s and Sameer’s teams had, they were also able to see their next obstacle approaching.

  “Some of the other teams are coming closer,” Eliza warned. One of her times orbs had clearly warned her. “We’ll need to take care of the next obstacle fast.”

  Gritty wore an unamused expression as she stared ahead. “Doesn’t look like that’s going to happen…”

  “Don’t worry,” Ray said. It was his construct that had spied the next demon ahead of time. “I can send a little distraction for the other team like we planned. We’ll just need to focus on taking out the demon as fast as we can.”

  He did just that, casting Resurrect Recollect to create an Imitator construct. Once again, it took the form of Sameer. Eliza scowled but at least Sameer himself didn’t protest. Fake Sameer went off without a word. Ray really ought to have sent a flying eyeball after it, or perhaps embedded it in the Imitator, but his focus was captured by the demon drawing closer.

  Or rather, the demon they were drawing closer to. It was definitely a very different kind of monstrosity than the ones they had faced in the dungeon so far.

  “What the hell is that thing?” Marcus said.

  Ray would have liked to answer, but honestly, he was struggling to tell too. It looked like a giant blob, one covered with many, many mouths of various shapes and kinds and sizes. A gunk of oozing, purplish black that shivered like it was alive, covered with gaping maws.

  [Eternal Pulse—Dungeon Obstacle]

  Demon of Gluttony

  Nothing is enough. Whatever exists in the world, exists purely to be used, to be devoured, to be consumed. Thus go the thoughts of the gluttonous. The world is for theirs to consume. Limitless and unending. When overstuffing does not even exist as a concept, what other way can a glutton be truly overcome?

  Ray stared at the notification for a while. Really? It was going to leave him with an opened-ended question instead of actually telling him anything useful? He got the fleeting impression to beat whoever had written it over the head.

  Sameer went ahead as the first one to tackle the monster. Ray had to wonder if he had received the same notification.

  The demon roused up as Sameer got closer. Its gooey body shivered harder, its maws opening wide as though the human approaching was a meal about to fly into its mouths. Sameer wasn’t so compromising. He called up a couple of portals and fired lightning bolts. The demon simply ate them.

  Ray blinked. It had been a little hard to see—they were bright lightning bolts, after all—but Sameer hadn’t thrown those bolts at the mouths. Well, not all of them. He had spread them out, some striking at the demon’s body, others striking the maws.

  But the mouths had moved. They had flashed across the demon’s body with incredible speed, different maws appearing closer and yawning wide so that all the bolts entered a mouth.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  The demon had the audacity to actually burp. They all stared.

  “That thing…” Gritty shook her head, amusement almost making her laugh. “I think we’re all going to have to hit it together.”

  “Or maybe not hit it at all,” Eliza said. “You read the Dungeon Obstacle, right? It said it can’t be killed by hitting it. At least, that’s how I interpret the whole can’t stop it by overstuffing it.”

  That was a valid interpretation. The demon was clearly eating up whatever they threw at it. Gritty had followed Sameer and summoned her spiky bones to strike it from beneath. But those mouths were still fast. One giant maw had swooped in as the demon’s slimy flesh moulded around at blinking speed and crunched away the bones.

  “Eliza’s right,” Ray said. “We need to find out some other way of taking that thing down. Even if we attack altogether, you can see how many mouths that thing has. It can probably eat anything and everything.”

  A part of Ray was sorely tempted to test if it really couldn’t be stopped by attacking it. Could it really take a dozen different blasts of chaotic, flaming lasers from his Windbane summons? But…

  “Is it me,” Marcus said. “Or did that thing grow a little when it ate our attacks?”

  Ray nodded slowly. “I thought I noticed that too. But it keeps shifting and moving around, and its body is so… shapeless, I wasn’t sure.”

  Of course, the demon wasn’t content to let them plan and theorize to their heart’s content. Its meals were here. No way was it going to wait.

  So, its maws opened wide and started sucking them all in.

  Ray spread his wings wide, willing them to act like parachutes against the demon’s vacuum suction. “Great, now it wants us too.”

  The others had their own ways of holding themselves in place. Gritty had her spiky bones, Marcus had the golden shielding aura around him. Sameer’s team were similarly not affected either. For now. The wind was growing stronger. Ray’s wings were folding inwards, his feet were scrabbling against the ground.

  Sameer decided to carry out the first thought that had burst into Ray’s mind. A storm of portals popped to life around the demon. Ray lost count after fifteen. There were a lot. And every single portal belched out an attack to take down the Demon of Gluttony.

  None of them did anything. As they had predicted, the demon had too many mouths, all of which moved far too quickly. In no time at all, every fireball, lightning bolt, chunk of rock and everything else Sameer threw at the monster were gobbled up. Worse yet, the demon did indeed grow bigger as it swallowed up more attacks.

  “Can’t you drop your cliff on it?” Eliza asked, struggling not to be vacuumed in.

  “It’s…” Sameer’s face twisted distastefully. “It’s bigger than my cliff now…”

  Ray tried to ignore the goings-on and think about how to solve the problem the demon presented, not on how it was sucking them all in. A demon that couldn’t be beaten by attacking. Because it ate their attacks. But how was it consuming everything they threw at it?

  Ray focused Mana into his eyes to see properly, casting Eternal Pulse. Resurrect Recollect created a flying Windbane head construct that was sucked in quickly. But even as it flew in closer, it threw out a stream of compressed flames.

  Which the demon ate, of course. But this time, it did so under Ray’s critical eye.

  Mana. He should have figured. Somehow, the demon’s mouths were capable of eating Mana itself. By doing so, it completely erased whatever the Mana was trying to accomplish via the spell or skill.

  He couldn’t see deeper. That Mana had to go somewhere, and logic dictated that it was being used to balloon the demon up whenever it ate something. Ray was wondering if it had some kind of core, but it didn’t matter. The weakness was clear. What he had to do was clear.

  If the demon ate Mana, then their goal was extracting that Mana.

  “I think I know what we have to do to beat that thing,” Ray said. He de-summoned his wings to let himself be drawn closer, raising his voice so he could be heard by his teammates, new and old. “It’s eating everything we throw at it by eating the Mana. So we just need to pull the Mana out.”

  He was expecting them to call it a wild plan, that it was an insane idea. But then again, they were all in insane times now. They had to get with the program.

  Which was probably why he didn’t hear any complaints. Instead, Ray got help.

  As he shot towards the Demon of Gluttony, he cast Resurrect Recollect again. This time, he summoned up Impervious Shell. He made sure to add extra Aeon Mana to revert the Soul Aspect back to the original monster he had taken it from. A Duskshell rumbled low as it formed before him.

  It appeared just in time to block the dozens of mouths shooting at Ray even faster than he was moving at the demon.

  That was also the moment he got all the help he needed. Despite earlier stating that the Demon of Pride had grown far too huge, Sameer still summoned his cliff. The massive edifice appeared with a flash and sank down on the demon. Its crashing landing squashed a huge chunk of the demon’s centre, even as the rest of the maws started eating away at the rocks.

  Thankfully, the construct Ray had called forth and given greater temporal life to was huge. All the mouths shooting at him were now busy eating through the spectral form of the Duskshell instead.

  This gave Ray just the opportunity he needed to create a sneakier construct. Not that he generally considered his flying Windbane heads stealthy by any means. It was just relative in this case. Where one humongous monster was busy chomping and chewing on another, the comparatively smaller draconic head could swoop in almost undetected.

  Almost.

  Several mouths farther behind on the demon’s body shot at it. They were fast, aimed with unerring accuracy. Ray couldn’t control his construct directly. He could only command it, give it the barest orders that it would attempt to follow to the best of its ability.

  The Windbane maw swerved and dodged past several of the gaping maws rushing for it. But it was forced to jerk upwards and fly off its original target.

  No problem. It had gotten far enough. Ray used Temporal Passage at the moment it reached its closest position to the Demon of Gluttony. He appeared high above the monster, dropping immediately, his Soaring Wings slowing his fall just enough to make sure it wasn’t fatal.

  The way the Windbane maw shot upwards immediately afterwards dragged away the majority of the rising demonic maws’ attention. Most of them arose in hot pursuit of Ray’s construct. Giving him all the freedom to sink into the ruins of the cliff that Sameer had dropped.

  As soon as Ray was close enough, he cast Aetheric Trace. The Petrified Vines burst off his back, shooting out in every direction to attack the Demon of Gluttony.

  Not all of the demon’s mouths were done. Even if Ray had distracted the majority via various means, there were still several around him. Enough to crunch into and destroy a bunch of the Petrified Vines.

  But Ray was still able to hook and shoot several through the demon’s slimy, gelatinous body. As soon as they were in, they ripped the demon apart. It wasn’t a direct attack. No, the vines were sucking out the Mana that made up the monster’s mass, which destroyed chunk after chunk of the demon.

  The monster countered quickly. Mouth after mouth ripped through Ray’s vines. The ones that had gone after the summoned Windbane and the Duskshell now returned to devour the danger trying to kill it.

  Ray summoned more vines using Aetheric Trace, but it wasn’t going to be enough. He swallowed. No matter how many of the Petrified Vines he called up, there were just too many—

  Gritty bashed into the demon with a shattering yell. A hundred bones burst bloodily from her body before being drawn back inside with a sudden snap, leaving not a single wound. The ability had changed something about her. Even in the middle of the battle, Ray didn’t fail to note how her skin looked harder, how her muscles were far more pronounced.

  When she slammed in, the demon simply tore apart. She moved so fast, Ray’s eyes almost had trouble catching her motion. But her attacks were now tearing apart the monster in record time.

  It took Ray a second to realize what she had done.

  “This thing might be able to eat any Mana we throw at it,” Gritty said, confirming Ray’s suspicions with her next words. “But it can’t eat the Mana I used on myself.”

  Rather than relying on skills that crafted her Mana into damaging abilities, she used a skill that refocused her Mana onto herself as some sort of superpowered buff. And now she was ripping apart the demon with her bare hands.

  That might have been a bad idea normally. The demon was still powerful. Even at the rate she was destroying everything she could touch, it would have overpowered her and then devoured her.

  Except, all the mouths that might have given her troubles were preoccupied. A majority were trying to overcome the vines that Ray was using to tear away the demon’s Mana. And then there were the rest of their allies. Karkatrix had joined the battle like Gritty, using his weapons directly to attack a wide swathe of the monster. Marcus had buffed himself to attack as well.

  That helped the relieve the pressure on Ray’s constructs. The demon yelled out, screamed with its many mouths, tried desperately to fight back in the only way it knew how.

  It all failed. Before long, the demon was reduced to a mere puddle of goo.

  [Enemy Defeated—Demon of Gluttony]

  Tier 36 Monster: Demon of Gluttony [Level 75] x1

  Essence: +27,000

  Knowledge: +3

  Aeon Mana Restored: +2,700

  Essence to Level 56: 80,800/312,000

  Knowledge to next Threshold: 2,551/3,500

  Ray heaved out a sigh. “Alright, that takes care of that.”

  Sameer looked like he wanted to spit. “Took you all long enough…”

  “You couldn’t even do anything, you ass,” Gritty said. She raised both hands and waved them around comically. “Oh look at me, fancy portal man. But I can’t do a thing cause all my portals get eaten! Weh!”

  “Well, they won’t be eaten now,” Sameer said. Then he called up a portal, right underneath Gritty.

  She screamed as she fell through, her voice dwindling. “You bastaaaaa…”

  “Dude, not cool.” Marcus glared at the short-tempered ass of a man who was supposed to be their ally. “Bring her back.”

  Sameer just harrumphed and looked away.

  Ray was about to back up his teammate when he froze. “Yeah Sameer, bring her back, please.” The way his tone changed made them all look at him for a second. “I think we’re going to need her. The clone of you I went out to distract the other teams is coming back. And it’s not alone.”