The Giant's Cave (Part 2)

Another Double Plus... I've been seeing plus modifiers so often lately that it's starting to feel like every piece of gear ought to have one. That could become a bad habit.

Sanghyuk could not help but chuckle as he appraised the Shadow Cloak. Getting a plus modifier on an item was always a welcome surprise, but in reality, elevating an item into a masterwork or a transcendent masterpiece through consecutive plus grades was an extraordinarily rare phenomenon. Lately, his haul had been stacked with Double and even Triple Pluses, yet he knew better than anyone that such treasures were never handed out lightly.

No wonder Thunderbolt threw such a tantrum over losing it. Shadow Curse was once considered among the premier item skills by high-ranking players. To think it was attached to this cloak all along.

Sanghyuk was thoroughly pleased with the find.

Nothing else in the pile really stands out. Which means... time to liquidate the rest.

The moment he listed the surplus equipment on the auction house, the players who had fallen inside the inner castle would immediately realize that someone had looted their corpses. Even if they caught on, however, there was not a single thing they could do about it. Tracking currency trails across the auction system was functionally impossible, and not a soul had witnessed his handiwork that night. Everything was clean.

Well, the wealthy ones will just buy their own gear back.

He felt not an ounce of guilt. Their misfortune had been entirely self-inflicted, born of unchecked greed. Perhaps he might have felt differently in his naive past life, but the present Sanghyuk possessed neither the boundless sympathy nor the charity to mourn fools who dug their own graves.

After casually dumping the bulk of the loot onto the consignment exchange, Sanghyuk turned his full attention toward preparing for his final milestone in the Twilight Lands: conquering the Giant's Cave.

The Giant's Cave was a public transition dungeon that doubled as the sole gateway to the next continent.

The Giant's Cave is no walk in the park. Clearing it and breaking through completely solo... is on an entirely different level of difficulty.

In his past life, Sanghyuk had tackled the cave as part of a full seven-man party alongside the top-level operators from his gold-farming sweatshop. Seven was the absolute maximum capacity permitted for the instance, and despite assembling the seven most capable players their workshop had to offer, they had ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠suffered tremendously before scraping through. Because the ordeal had been so grueling, his memories of the dungeon remained crystal clear.

The old me wouldn't have dared dream of attempting this alone. But now? I can definitely pull it off.

While other players could not even muster the courage to challenge the depths with a full seven-man squad, Sanghyuk was about to conquer it entirely unassisted. He draped the Shadow Cloak across his shoulders and rose to his feet. Preparations were complete. All that remained was the trial itself.

The Giant's Cave was structured across four distinct subterranean levels.

The first basement floor was the ogre domain, teeming with various strains of the brutish beasts. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠While ogres were not quite on the level of wyverns, they were still widely regarded as formidable foes, easily ranking among the second or third strongest normal monsters in the entire Twilight Lands.

Worse still, guarding the threshold between the first and second floors was the Twin-Head Ogre—a semi-named monster boasting ferocious offensive power capable of turning even a minor slip-up into a total party wipe. Even for a standard party of seven Level 45 players, poor coordination, a flawed team composition, or lackluster gear would spell instant doom at the hands of the two-headed brute.

Once past the ogre and down ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠on the second basement floor, players were greeted by towering Stone Golems. These behemoths were roughly on par with wyverns in combat potency, yet their astronomical physical defense made them far more suffocating; without sufficient damage output, an expedition would grind to an agonizing halt. Guarding the exit of the second floor was the Mithril Golem, another semi-named boss possessing armor vastly superior even to the standard Stone Golems. In Sanghyuk's recollection, an overwhelming majority of failed expeditions in the past had hit a wall right here, lacking the raw firepower to chip through the Mithril Golem's plating.

If a party managed to muscle through the second floor, the third presented an entirely different breed of misery. Monsters were no longer the primary threat; instead, an insidious maze riddled with lethal traps blocked the path. In truth, this floor became manageable once veteran reconnaissance began leaking to the public, especially since the resident Skeleton Giant Soldiers were noticeably weaker than ogres. There was not even a semi-named monster barring the descent to the fourth floor.

Beyond the labyrinth lay the long-awaited fourth basement floor.

Unlike the sprawling paths of the upper levels, the fourth floor featured a remarkably short, straightforward corridor devoid of standard monster spawns, dotted with only a handful of rudimentary traps. In exchange, however, the monstrosity stationed at the final exit was a true terror: the special named boss, the Sky Giant.

True giant-type named monsters were exceptionally rare across the world of Eternal Life. The only other prominent examples were the Magma Giant residing in the Continent of Heroes and the Radiant Giant of the Continent of the Sun. Both were legendary monstrosities of astronomical difficulty, requiring at least two more years of global player progression before anyone could realistically hope to bring them down.

The absurd difficulty common to all giant-type bosses stemmed from a single universal racial trait:

Giant's Endurance.

This notorious passive was the exact reason players bitterly referred to them as "filthy giants." It flatly reduced all incoming damage by 30%, while instantly restoring health equal to half of the absorbed value. In practical terms, it amounted to an effective damage mitigation of roughly 45%.

Because of this passive, raid teams perpetually ran out of steam and failed damage checks against giant-type bosses. As if that were not enough, giants naturally possessed terrifying attack power and gargantuan health pools. While their baseline armor was noticeably lower than other named monsters of comparable level, Giant's Endurance rendered that vulnerability entirely moot. For players, facing a giant with such a trait was the ultimate worst-case scenario, making them universally feared as the single most obnoxious monster family to hunt.

Back in Sanghyuk's past life, whenever community polls were held on the most difficult named monsters to subjugate, giant-types invariably clinched first place. While laymen assumed dragons would be the hardest, any veteran with actual raid experience would vehemently argue that dragons were far easier. Dragon-type bosses almost always possessed clear elemental affinities that could be exploited through counter-attributes. Giants, however, possessed no attribute whatsoever—purely non-elemental—making it impossible to cheese the encounter through elemental advantages.

Yet as Sanghyuk stood before this mission of astronomical difficulty, his expression brimmed with cool confidence. Having thrown himself against the Giant's Cave nearly a thousand times in his previous life, he had every right to be confident.

The simplest method to dismantle the Twin-Head Ogre was to concentrate all fire on the two eyes of its right head, blinding that side temporarily before cleanly severing the left head's neck. Blinding the right head created a massive blind spot—far wider than blinding the left—allowing an agile combatant to sever the opposing head with minimal resistance. While far easier said than done in practice, Sanghyuk was hardly weak enough to be tripped up by a mere Twin-Head Ogre.

He carved through the first floor in the blink of an eye and descended to the second. The golem floor fell behind him at a comparable pace.

Then came the Mithril Golem.

Under normal circumstances, an expedition would stall here to grind down its colossal defenses, but Sanghyuk already knew the construct's fatal weakness: lightning. Drawing upon the 3-cost combination card Zeus's Spear that he had prepared in advance, he dismantled the Mithril Golem with absurd ease. Burning through fourteen copies of a 3-cost card was an expensive toll, but what mattered was securing a flawless, rapid clear.

The third floor proved even simpler. Having wandered through its winding passages hundreds of times in his past life, neither the labyrinthine layout nor the mechanical traps posed the slightest threat. Though he had temporarily committed one of his generic skill slots to learn Trap Technique (Comprehensive) for disarming mechanisms, he could easily purge the slot later by expending a negligible amount of Karma.

Bypassing every hazard with effortless grace, Sanghyuk finally stepped onto the fourth floor.

Because each floor's threshold featured an environmental coordinate node, Sanghyuk promptly retrieved his Marking Book and synchronized his position at the fourth floor's entrance. In the distant future, high-level players would run lucrative "Marking Bus" services, escorting novices deep into the dungeon for hefty fees just so they could record the waypoint. For now, however, that era was miles away; not a single other player had even breached the first floor, let alone reached the fourth.

Fzzzt—flash!

Closing the glowing grimoire, Sanghyuk peered down the corridor ahead. Stretching into the gloom was a straight stone passage he had traversed so many times in his previous life that the mere sight of it once made him nauseous.

I wonder how many attempts it'll take this time... At least ten, surely.

Fortunately, death penalties in Eternal Life varied significantly depending on location and circumstance. Dying to a monster out in the open fields imposed a two-hour login restriction and stripped 1% of total accumulated Karma. Falling to another player inflicted a severe twelve-hour lockout, though no Karma was lost. Inside a registered dungeon, however, so long as one was not murdered by a player, the death penalty was drastically reduced to a mere ten-minute lockout with zero Karma penalty. This generous leniency was precisely what allowed raid groups to throw themselves repeatedly at devastating boss encounters. The system balanced crushing instance difficulty by lightening the cost of failure. Of course, designated outlaws and chaotic killers operated under entirely different rules—reaping Karma from slaying innocents at the steep risk of losing 20% of their Black Karma upon death, anywhere, anytime.

Twenty tries. I'll take it down within twenty attempts!

Even for someone of Sanghyuk's caliber, conquering the Sky Giant solo would demand up to twenty serious engagements. At this point in the timeline, the behemoth was an insurmountable mountain.

With his coordinates safely marked, Sanghyuk teleported back to Falcon City to restock the combination cards he had burned through against the Mithril Golem. His maximum deck capacity currently capped out at 55 points. Meticulously calculating their tactical utility against the giant, he assembled four specific varieties of combination cards to saturate his 55-cost limit, while packing a generous reserve of 0-cost utility cards as well.

All that remained was to throw himself into the meat grinder.

If one were to ask seasoned raid veterans for the secret to toppling an impossible named monster, every single one would offer the exact same answer: there was no magic shortcut—only the resolve to keep throwing yourself against the wall until it crumbled.

Trial, error, and relentless persistence.

That was the only true trick to raiding.