Assimilate All Talents

One day later, on the 26th floor, a cloaked creature with a hunched back, a clearly malformed figure beneath, and a glowing purple skull mask wandered the passage, unaware of the two humans stalking it nearby.

“So that's a Zomest,” Sol quietly said to Amber, who was next to him. They were both using [Invisibility] to avoid detection as they made their way through the dungeon when they finally encountered a Zomest on the 26th floor.

Race: Zomest

Talent Skills:

[Zombeast Maker], [Commander], [Ring Master]

Level: 114

Skimming through its abilities, Sol didn’t find anything out of the ordinary, but he didn’t rely on [Analysis] to show him what he truly needed. With a flicker in his eyes, colorful but mostly brown and black lines sprung from the Zomest as he quickly identified its incomplete law technique within two seconds.

“[Combine Zombeast] is its incomplete law technique. Should I go ahead and disable it, or do we try taking it head on?”

Amber shook her head. “No, good practice.”

Sol asked for Amber's opinion because facing it at full power was riskier, given that they had never fought it before. Even though they knew all its skills and which one was an incomplete law technique, they couldn't predict what it actually did until they fought it. Most adventurers and dungeon explorers would immediately say yes to disabling it. After all, why take such a risk just challenge oneself? But they had something most adventurers could only dream of: a legendary weapon.

They weren’t afraid. If the battle ever went south and Sol was unable to disable the skill afterward, he could take out his Tynamo Cannon and blast away. So far he was only forced to use it three times, once with the Laughing Skull and Tomb Hulk duo, another where they stumbled into five Nether Wraiths at once and most recently when they encountered another group of six consisting of all three undeads.

“Alright.” Seeing they were both in agreement, they prepared to quietly approach the Zomest and launch their first attack. But before they could do so, something truly odd happened. The Zomest’s eyes widened in some sort of revelation, and it nodded. The next moment, its body sank into the ground and completely disappeared.

Sol reacted quickly and tried to harden the ground with [Terra Manipulation], but nothing happened. The one meter ground around the Zomest was completely immune to his influence. The two could only watch helplessly as it disappeared into the ground.

By the time they reached the spot where the Zomest had stood, Sol was unable to see its mana signature anymore with [True Sight].

“Where did it go?” Sol asked as he tapped the ground where the Zomest had previously stood with his foot, thinking it could be some kind of trap. But all that resulted was the sound of his foot tapping the hard floor.

“Skill?” Amber questioned, offering a possible explanation, but Sol shook his head. He knew it wasn’t possible.

The Zomest didn’t have any skills capable of such a feat, and based on the type of skill that was the origin of its incomplete law technique, it didn’t appear related. Sol was able to track its mana signature going downward until it passed 60 meters, where it left his range—it was completely gone.

It was the first time he had seen such a thing happen, and the dungeon guide made no mention of such a phenomenon. After a moment of waiting vigilantly for anything to change, he could only sigh at their misfortune.

“When we finally see one, it gets magically whisked away… What crappy luck.”

There was little they could do but continue onward and hope to encounter another Zomest.

…

It wasn’t until the 27th floor that they luckily stumbled upon another Zomest. Only this time, it wasn’t alone; it was accompanied by two Tomb Hulks that followed it around like servants.

“Incomplete law technique with [Symbiotic Command],” Sol succinctly said.

He didn’t even ask whether to disable it or not; he knew the answer would be the same as before. He would disable the incomplete law techniques of the two hulks, which would be much less impactful once they couldn’t access their strongest skills.

In ten seconds, Sol disabled the two skills of the hulks, with them unaware it even occurred. With the preparations complete, the two rushed out to launch a surprise attack.

The two hulks, which had been obediently following the Zomest, roared, alerting their leader to the incoming enemies, and rushed to meet them.

Sol charged forward as well, wielding his light element Lipon, which was the bane of undead, while Amber stayed back and created large sand blades that flew towards the giant hulks.

As the four were fighting, the Zomest stayed behind and watched for a moment before extending tendrils out of its body and latching them onto the two hulks. Greenish energy flowed through the tendrils into the hulks, causing their muscles to suddenly double in size as they were filled with incredible and seemingly endless power.

The hulks’ sudden rise in power was so significant that a single swing from one of its fists sent Sol flying backward. While soaring midair, he extended his hand and instantly chanted three light spears that flew toward the tendrils empowering the hulks.

The Zomest saw these light spears coming from far away and reacted by twisting its tendrils to dodge the incoming attack. Two of the light spears missed, while one cut straight through, severing the connection to one of the hulks. The hulk’s muscles shrank back down to their original size, but they didn’t stay that way for long as another tendril extended from the Zomest and empowered it once more.

Seeing its strength lay in its tendrils, Sol only had to give one look at Amber for her to understand what to do.

The sand blades she was creating began targeting only the tendrils, cutting them down every time they connected to the hulks, while Sol kept the two hulks at bay. As she cut down the tendrils, multiple new ones appeared and took their place, quickly turning the fight into a contest of whether she could cut them down faster than they appeared. The hulks rapidly fluctuated between empowered and normal states as they fought Sol with his light sword and the four hands he had summoned for support.

Two hands combined the red and orange chromas to create duochrome red and orange large beams, while the other two formed [Spectral Claws] and unleashed [Phantasmal Rip and Tear] on one of the hulks while they were in a non-empowered state.

The fight began to tilt in their favor as Amber started using her developing law technique to cut down the tendrils the instant they appeared, giving Sol an opening to take down the first hulk.

[You have slain a Lv 118 Tomb Hulk! Gained 40,037,361 Exp (380%)]

As the first slain hulk collapsed onto the cold ground, the Zomest behind it paused and seemingly looked into the far distance as if seeing something beyond the dungeon’s walls. After a brief moment, it nodded its head and retracted its tendrils.

Sol was surprised by its actions, and because he was still entangled with the remaining hulk, he was unable to stop it from escaping. However, Amber, who was free from her tendril cutting duties, launched multiple distorted slashes and sand blades at it.

Having faced her attacks before, the Zomest released a bundle of tendrils that braided into one massive tendril that blocked all her frontal attacks. Even the distorted slashes were blocked as it continued to sink into the ground. Amber was, unfortunately, still unable to make the distorted slashes attack from different directions, which made them easy to block if the enemy knew they were coming. She still didn’t relent and continued to unleash attack after attack in hopes of breaking through the tendrils, but it wasn’t enough as the Zomest fully submerged into the ground and escaped.

[You have slain a Lv 118 Tomb Hulk! Gained 40,037,361 Exp (380%)]

By the time Sol defeated the final hulk, he saw that the Zomest had completely disappeared like the last one.

Seeing this once more, Sol remembered an old saying. “Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times it's a pattern. But I don’t need a third occurrence to know something is up.”