The fight did not last long.
Though each of the creatures stood firmly at Rank Three, they were never a serious threat to Michael. Their numbers ant nothing against the gap in raw strength and speed between them. One by one, their movents slowed, their attacks grew desperate, and their coordination broke apart entirely.
Within monts, the swamp fell quiet again.
Broken bodies lay scattered across the mud, chitin shattered, limbs torn free, dark ichor seeping into the water and staining the ground an even deeper shade of purple. The ripples slowly faded.
Michael stood among the wreckage.
He glanced around at the destruction and paused.
For a brief mont, he wondered if he should have been more careful. A few of the bodies could have been usable.
Michael frowned, then shook his head.
There was no point forcing it.
He did need more Rank Three undead, that much was true, but he was not desperate enough to raise just anything to fill numbers. Undead without potential were little more than liabilities once battles escalated. Quantity mattered, but quality mattered more.
These creatures, at best, would serve another purpose.
Materials.
Their bodies still held value. Through his talent, they could be broken down into evolution points, points he could later invest into undead with far better growth prospects. In that sense, their deaths were not wasted at all.
Still, before storing anything away, there was sothing he needed to
do first.
Michael crouched beside the nearest corpse and extended his perception inward. His will pressed gently into the remains, searching for sothing familiar.
A law seed.
Normally, extracting one was straightforward. Unlike intelligent races that condensed their law seed in their soul, most Rank Three monsters carried them physically in clearly condensed fragnts of law ford into translucent, seed like objects, each containing faint internal colors that reflected the nature of the creature's power.
However, Michael frowned.
There was nothing there.
Or rather, there was sothing, but it was wrong.
Instead of a complete seed, he found only a broken fragnt. An incomplete structure, hazy and unstable, barely holding together before dissolving entirely under scrutiny.
Michael straightened slowly and moved to another body.
The result was the sa.
No complete law seed. Only incomplete remnants that could not be extracted or stored in any aningful way.
"That's strange," he muttered.
He paused, thinking.
Was it because they were creatures of Hell. Or was it sothing else.
Michael's gaze drifted over the bodies again, then settled as understanding slowly took shape.
This was not the first ti he had seen sothing like this.
His undead ants ca to mind. Individually, they did not possess complete law seeds either. Their law was shared, distributed across
the entire species rather than condensed within a single individual. Each one carried only a fragnt, aningless on its own.
Michael exhaled quietly.
"So it's a species thing," he said to himself.
That explanation made far more sense than Hell itself being the cause. These creatures were likely part of a collective existence, their laws spread thin across many bodies instead of crystallizing within one.
In that case, reviving them would have been pointless anyway. Michael glanced once more at the swamp, then began gathering the remains.
After storing the remains, Michael finally had enough space to breathe.
The swamp was quiet again, broken only by distant bubbling and the slow fall of violet spores. Michael wiped the dark fluid from his hand with a grimace, then reached into his storage and pulled out the map he had acquired at the Federation settlent on the first floor. This map contained details on the first thirty floors of Hell.
Michael's eyes sharpened.
He started from what he knew.
Floor One, the frozen land.
Floor Two, the desert.
He moved steadily through the map's records.
He did not rush.
Soon, he reached the fifteenth floor.
That was where he had been last.
Michael frowned and continued.
Sixteen.
Seventeen.
Twenty.
Twenty five.
Thirty.
None of them matched.
Not even slightly.
The swamp he stood in now was not on the map.
The violet sky, the pulsing veins in the mud, the strange flora, the
Rank Three swarm insects, none of it appeared in any description,
any sketch, any recorded warning.
Only one conclusion remained.
He had been thrown beyond the first thirty floors.
The realization hit like cold water.
Michael's shoulders tensed, his senses stretching outward
instinctively.
His breathing stayed controlled, but his mind began to work faster.
It was not that being on a higher floor terrified him.
This was sothing else.
Wariness.
A higher floor ant higher rules. Different suppression. Different
thresholds of power. It ant that beings who could not exist freely in the early floors might walk openly here.
And Michael had been unlucky since the mont he entered this
realm. Rank Four supernaturals had appeared around him again and again.
If he had landed in a floor where Rank Four were not suppressed like they were in the earlier floors, and one of them took interest in him, then it would not matter how many tricks he had, how fast he could move, or how many undead he carried.
Michael knew he would be done for.
He slowly slid the map back into his storage space.
Michael's eyes narrowed as he forced himself to stay calm.
First priority.
Confirm the floor.
Second priority.
Find a safe route back down, or at least a safe place to camp at.
And third.
If Caelum and Arven could still trace him, then he needed to move before the swamp beca a trap with no exit.
Michael had only just settled on a direction when a low, continuous
hum rolled through the air.
It was faint at first, almost easy to miss against the bubbling swamp,
but it grew rapidly, layering over itself until it beca impossible to ignore. The sound ca from multiple sources, moving fast. Michael's head snapped up.
The violet clouds parted slightly, and shapes erged from the sky.
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