Sand Worm
How many of them are out there?
There was only one way to be certain. He would have to find them himself.
Water Barrier
Jin-soo poured mana into the water-attribute skill, and a colossal barrier of water took shape. The instant he released it, the wall crashed down upon the earth and soaked the parched sand through. Sand Worms were desert monsters, keenly sensitive to moisture.
No sooner had the ground become a sea of water than the sand on every side began to writhe. The desert monsters that lived hidden beneath it were swarming in.
They are at their most troublesome when they strike from underfoot. Even so, he had a simple answer.
"Stay up there."
"Okay."
At his word, Shin Sua sprang lightly onto the Bone Dragon's head. An ambush from within the sand would never work on Jin-soo. It would on her. If the ground gave way beneath them, even a stone golem could topple.
A Bone Dragon, though, will not be troubled by the likes of them. So long as she rode upon its head, Shin Sua was as good as safe.
Steel whispered free as Jin-soo drew Baekcheonsingeom and the Blood-Sucking Sword. Desert monsters were miserable prey for ranged fighters such as mages and archers. Buried in the sand and moving through it, they were difficult to locate, and any attack that reached them lost half its force. One had to catch the precise instant they burst free, and finish them then.
For a mage or an archer, perfect timing was still not enough. A single mistake dragged them into melee, and the matchup was simply wretched.
A sand scorpion's venom-barbed tail lashed out of the sand toward him. Jin-soo sheared it off with Baekcheonsingeom and, in the same motion, drove the Blood-Sucking Sword into the place where the scorpion's head ought to be. The shell gave with a crack, and the cursed blade drank the creature's blood in a furious rush.
That was only the beginning. Desert monsters erupted from the sand in a stream, every one of them hunting Jin-soo. With a tank's guardian skill already active, he cut them apart the moment they broke the surface.
They are converging on me.
Of course they were. Summons were not living things. They did not bleed, and so they held no moisture at all. Jin-soo, by contrast, was a man of flesh and blood. To desert monsters with a keen sense for water, he was inevitably the first target.
Not bad.
He made a bait of himself and cut down every desert monster that came. His summons were carrying their own weight just as well.
"Nyaang!"
Leo romped through the fight in high spirits, beating desert monsters to the brink of death, while the orc shaman seized control of others and set them tearing into one another. Shadow Summons, Army Summons, Dragon Tooth Soldiers, and the undead each displayed their strengths, hunting whatever leapt from the sand.
Blood from the dead dyed the sand red, and the redder it grew, the more desert monsters the scent drew in.
"Kraaauuugh!"
The Bone Dragon drove its foreclaws and wings into the sand like spearheads, and blood welled up in answer. Undead summons, the Bone Dragon foremost among them, were born with a sharp sense for living vitality. So many blood-drawn monsters had packed the ground that even a rough downward strike landed more often than not.
At this rate, it should be about time for it to show itself. There was no way a Sand Worm could miss a reek of blood this thick. I will keep hunting, for now.
Jin-soo pressed on. Then the sand underfoot began to shake, as if the earth itself were quaking.
It has come.
A deep smile touched his mouth. At last, the Sand Worm he had waited and waited for had appeared. Its greatest weapon was not the saw-toothed maw, nor the hide that was tougher than it had any right to be, nor even its high resistance to skills. It was the sheer enormity of its body.
Too large. No matter how one struck it, the blows barely showed. A blow fatal enough to end an ordinary monster in a single strike shrank to nothing more than a scratch. Not this time.
Before the regression, he had suffered miserably and only just managed to bring one down. He had earned an achievement for it, but the memory was not a pleasant one. This time, matters were different.
The moment it shows itself, I will end it.
For all its bulk, a Sand Worm threaded the sand as freely as a creature swimming and diving through water. Look away for an instant, and it could be lost.
Then the sand beneath his feet dropped away. Jin-soo, his summons, and the desert monsters around them were dragged down together.
There you are. In the sand, the Sand Worm's maw gaped wide, its teeth like the blades of a saw.
Freeze Proclamation
Bitter cold flooded the open mouth.
"Kyaaaak!"
The Sand Worm flinched, trying to curl in on itself against the sudden chill.
Eat this.
Ice Storm
Frozen Hell
Jin-soo hauled up a flood of mana and chained the cold-attribute skills without pause. The Sand Worm's head froze solid in an instant. It smashed the ice sheathing its skull and tried once more to bury itself in the sand.
"Kiiiyaaaak!"
A long spear of pure-white aura lanced from Baekcheonsingeom and punched into the Sand Worm's head.
"Kyarrrk!"
The giant's life snapped. The pure-white aura had shattered its brain with perfect precision.
It worked. For a creature of that size, a Sand Worm was remarkably agile, and its resistance to flame ran high. That was why he had bound its movement with cold before going for the kill. He had taken a Sand Worm this way before the regression as well.
Back then, success had been a very near thing. The odds had been so poor that the slightest break in coordination with his companions would have meant failure. Now it had succeeded almost too easily, which meant he had grown that much stronger.
"Kyaaaak!"
In an instant, a black-and-white pair of Sand Worms came into being.
Hunt the monsters.
The order had barely fallen before both Sand Worms burrowed into the sand. Amid the wet crunch of biting and chewing, his experience climbed at a rapid pace.
They seem to have retained the original's traits. They were summons now, yet the power to hide in the sand and move through it at will remained intact. For the desert monsters that had been attacking him, that was as good as a death sentence.
Inferior in every other respect, their single weapon had been the freedom to conceal themselves in the sand and move as they pleased. Now even that weapon was lost.
Drawn by the scent of blood, the desert monsters were struck first from within the sand by the two Sand Worms. Those that barely survived and fled to the surface were struck a second time by the summons waiting above. From their perspective, neither above the sand nor beneath it offered any promise of survival.
In desert terrain, a Sand Worm is certainly more efficient than the Bone Dragon. Breath poured at monsters buried deep only wasted mana, and killed few of them. Physical attacks fared better, but they could reach only what lay near the surface. Once a desert monster felt its life threatened and fled deep, there was no way to catch it. Dig the sand out after it, and it would simply slip away somewhere else in the meantime.
So long as the task was hunting desert monsters across desert ground, two Sand Worms that could move freely underground outclassed the Bone Dragon.
Nor are they useless on other terrain. To move at will beneath the earth was a tremendous weapon in itself. Beyond sand—in forest, across barren earth, through swamp and snowfield—a Sand Worm could still dig. Slower than in sand, and far more obvious when it moves. Even so, for collapsing the ground beneath an enemy, or ignoring a formation and a defensive wall to strike from below, it was as fine an ability as he could ask for.
I cannot end this with a mere two. He had slain one Sand Worm and made two summons of it, but he had no intention of being satisfied with so little. The pace of my level-ups is falling. That meant the number of desert monsters rushing in was thinning as well. The survival grounds of Tower Floor 199 were a desert so vast that its end could not be seen.
Before the regression, the wisest course had been to remain in one place and devote himself to surviving. He had hoped the monsters elsewhere would not come this way, and even a mouthful of water had been drunk with care. Not now.
Survival was no longer Jin-soo's goal. He meant to conquer the whole of Tower Floor 199's sprawling survival grounds.
Shall we go, then?
He called one of the Sand Worms to him. A maw crowded with saw-blade teeth broke the surface of the sand, and Jin-soo stepped up onto its head.
Move.
At his command, the Sand Worm surged forward at a frightening speed. Swift, even outside the sand. The rest of the summons followed behind him as he rode.
"Leo."
"Nyaaaang! Nyaaaang! Nyaaaang!"
At the call, Leo kept unleashing wide-area taunt roars. Desert monsters, stirred by the roar and by the tremor of so many summons on the move, charged in without end. Even so, there were still not as many as he wanted.
Water Barrier
From atop the Sand Worm's head, Jin-soo gathered his mana and raised another colossal barrier of water. When he released the skill, the worm's huge body was drenched through. Come, then. Swarm in greater numbers.
As they traveled, he kept creating great volumes of water and scattering it evenly across the bodies of his summons.
"Kyaaaak!"
"Kyiiiik!"
Sand lizards, sand moles, sand rattlesnakes, sand scorpions, sand toads, sand spiders, and more besides. An immense host of desert monsters, too many in number and kind to count, came running at Jin-soo and his summons.
This is far easier. What they sought above all else were the only two living humans among them, Jin-soo and Shin Sua. But he rode upon a Sand Worm's head, and she upon the Bone Dragon's. However fiercely they charged, all they could do was die.
Hunt the monsters from within the sand.
He sent the Sand Worm he was riding back underground and dropped to the sand himself.
"Kyaaaang!"
"Kyiiiik!"
The moment his feet touched the ground, the desert monsters flew into a frenzy and rushed him like things gone mad.