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Minor fix on chapter 277. Since the spiderwebs also count as traps, Adam triggered 15 on the Chaos Demon, not 12, meaning he got 1500 points and not 1200.

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Chapter Two-Hundred-and-Seventy-Eight

“Hydra goose?” Adam asked, unable to hold back his laughter, even as a fourth head and long neck broke out of the tiny doorway to the ritual chamber. The three heads squabbled with each other, while the fourth one that he’d hit was clearly dead, hanging down limply through the middle of the tower.

“How many heads does it have?”

[Seven.]

Then the other three must still be inside the chamber.

But just as he thought that, a fifth broke through the doorway, despite there ostensibly being no space to even squeeze through.

Adam dropped down, turning into metal as he fell, and punched the tangle of necks.

A loud crunch echoed through the chamber and the heads all went limp.

There was no chance to celebrate however, because the sixth head emerged from within the chamber, flying straight at Adam and triggering his dodge before he could get out of the way.

“¿Dónde está la rana?” the head screamed at him, its voice blaringly loud.

Adam immediately swung back with an empowered punch, hitting the large goose head right on the beak.

The head exploded, sending a puff of white feathers everywhere and sending the seemingly-indestructible beak frisbeeing into the opposite wall, where it lodged in firmly.

Adam lifted into the air, just before the seventh head emerged from the chamber. Instead of immediately going on the offensive, it blasted the other six heads with golden light, regenerating them in an instant.

“Goddamn it.”

As the heads roared back to life, they started flailing about, swinging their necks wildly, while their open mouths fired out beams of elemental magic.

Adam flew even higher to escape, knowing that his dodge wouldn’t save him if they all focused on him simultaneously.

“How do I kill it!?” he demanded of Parvillo, while hiding out of sight of the rampaging goose heads.

A beam of ice magic shot past him, a metre to his right, and left behind a trail of sharp white-blue crystals. Below, the other heads were firing water, poison smoke, fire, lightning, some kind of dark murky beam that made anything it hit crumble to dust, concentrated light that polished anything it struck, and a neon-green-blue beam that visibly aged whatever it touched.

[I cannot say.]

“Goddamn it, Parvillo.”

[I told you not to do it. Do not ask more of me.]

Maybe if I take out all of the heads at once, they can’t revive each other.

“Wait, I hit it with Frankie, shouldn’t that cause its spells to chaotically misfire?”

[The Hydra Goose is immune to afflictions.]

“Awesome…”

“¿Dónde está la rana?” one of the heads screamed.

[It is asking where the ‘frog’ is,] Parvillo translated unhelpfully.

“What frog?”

[I do not know.]

Adam ran through the inventory of his spidersilk sacks while trying to think of what to do. Due to how all of the heads were flailing wildly, his strategy to strike them all at once would only work if he struck the area around the door where they all emerged from.

That’ll be tricky, and if I don’t manage to kill them all, then I’m done for.

A static screaming sound came up towards him and he instinctively dodged out of the way, just in time for the dark beam to pass over the section of the wooden ramp he was hiding behind, instantly turning it to sawdust, while the bricks around it crumbled into red sand.

Adam looked back down into the sack and saw exactly what he needed.

The spidersilk string.

He wrapped one end around his balloon glove and the other around his stone hand.

The whole tower shook as the rampage roared on below him.

Now or never.

Adam leapt out from his hiding spot, turning himself into metal as he fell and activating his mask to see the future movements of the hydra goose for the next five seconds.

As soon as he was visible to the rampaging heads, they all aimed their beams up at him, but Adam triggered his boots to create a cloud that fell down alongside him, and then he kicked off from it, while using his wings to steer him through and around the beams that swung his way.

He was too fast for them to track, and before they were able to realise what he was aiming for, Adam had already reached the stuffed doorway and used his stone hand to wrap the spidersilk around the necks.

The cloud he’d used to leap from was continuing down through the centre of the tower and he flew after it while holding both ends of the spidersilk string.

Let’s hope Weaver was telling the truth about the strength of this thing.

And if she was right, let’s hope that my hands are stronger than the hydra goose’s necks.

Adam’s foresight ran out just as he reached the descending cloud, and he automatically dodged a stream of fire that tore through him, before aiming himself down with the cloud and leaping again.

With the speed of a falling comet, Adam flew down through the middle of the tower, feeling no resistance at all from the spidersilk he was pulling on.

As soon as he was able to bring himself to a halt with an aggressive counter-flapping of his moth wings, he looked up to see seven long goose necks and heads falling down after him.

“Oh shit!”

Adam dodged around the falling heads, managing to catch one with his stone hand and pull it off to the side of the tower with him.

< < Secret Stage Objective Complete > >

< Defeated the summoned Chaos Demon >

The Tower Crawler grows stronger.

Adam let out a sigh of relief.

I’m glad that worked.

Since Chaos had asked him to bring the head of the demon, he wound the spidersilk around the neck that was still attached, and with a simple tying motion the line sheared through the neck.

I should use these as more than just tripwires, Adam thought to himself.

As he went to pick up the severed head again, the mouth opened.

“¿Dónde está la rana?”

Adam jumped back a step in surprise. “Fuck! It’s still alive!”

The goose head’s eyes fixated on him.

“Listen, I don’t know where the frog is.”

“¡Pendejo!” it screamed back at him.

[It is calling you an idiot.]

“I know what that word means…” Adam replied. “But why the hell is it still alive?”

[It is not. However, Chaos Demons do not follow the rules, as I already stated.]

“So, it’s not following the rule of being dead?”

[Correct.]

“That makes no sense.”

[You are starting to understand the meaning of chaos now.]

Adam pointed at the severed goose head. “Don’t go anywhere, I’ll be back for you later.”

The head honked loudly.

Getting it to the cliff with the painting before the time runs out is going to be a fucking nightmare…

Adam went over to the edge of the ramp to look down at where the other heads had fallen. Two were stuck on the smouldering remains of the library floor, another seemed to be on the lab floor, and the last three had to have fallen all the way down to the bottom of the tower.

The Tower Crawler was already making its way back up from the bottom, and it seemed like it was moving faster than before, probably because it was empowered.

Meanwhile, all of the heads were saying stuff in Spanish, and their screaming voices echoed through the tower.

Fucking hell…

Adam flew back up to the ritual chamber, where the doorway was completely stuffed with the severed remains of the hydra goose’s main body and neck stumps. He fortunately didn’t have to enter to get his reward chest, since it awaited him on the floor outside. But he did need to get his traps, so with a series of acidic punches, he slowly broke away enough of the feathered corpse to grab the four bear traps in the chamber’s doorway.

With his relics back on his belt, he went over and opened the relic chest. It was covered in white goose feathers, and contained a single hologram, which depicted a full-body suit made of rubbery dark-green frog skin with white feathers on the back.

< < Relic Available > >

< Body of Chaos (Epic) — All of your attacks have a 50% chance to miss | Activate to chaotically reflect all attacks that hit you for the next 2 seconds. 30-minute cooldown >

“What is a chaotic reflection?” Adam asked.

[It is a reflection that may take on strange qualities.]

“Like what?”

[There are too many possibilities to list.]

“Are any of those possibilities harmful to me?”

[Potentially.]

Great…

Adam threw the armour relic in his spidersilk bag. He figured that the chance to miss would disappear with a flawless fusion, so it was at least a potential option for something he could fuse with his body of sloth, in order to get rid of its terrible weakness that caused him to lose all speed if he was struck.

And it’s not like I have to use the reflect power.

He put the spidersilk sack into his body and looked over towards the hole in the centre of the floor.

Just the cell warden left now before I take on the crawler.

But no sooner had Adam thought that, than he saw the unmistakable shape of the crawler’s bony hands gripping onto the edge of the floor he was on.

Okay, it’s way faster than before.

Adam quickly transformed into shadow to hide himself, while the crawler slowly pulled its body up through the middle of the floor.

Besides the speed, I wonder how else it will be ‘empowered’. Beck never mentioned that part.

As soon as it had passed, Adam slinked his body down through the middle of the floor, letting himself fall and transforming into metal mid-air to speed up his descent.

He fell past the severed head he’d left behind, before reaching the library floor. The two heads that had landed here were completely crushed, leaving just their beaks untouched.

I can’t leave the head, Adam realised and flew back up to retrieve it, before bringing it all the way down to the bottom of the tower, where he put it in the doorway of the large gate. Three other heads and their attached necks had indeed landed down here, but they had all been gripped and crushed by the crawler’s hand, making it clear that the head Adam had severed had been lucky to avoid the same fate.

“¿Dónde está la rana?” the head asked him.

“Shut up or you’ll turn into paste like your friends,” Adam told it.

“No quiero pasta.”

Adam decided to put the head completely outside the tower, since it clearly didn’t want to stay silent.

Then he went down the steps into the basement he’d opened earlier, arriving at the end of the jail cell hallway full of monsters. Since the cells were protected, he just walked past them, ignoring the cacophony they produced and entering the large arena-like chamber at the end.

The portcullis gate shut behind him as soon as he crossed the threshold, and then squelching sounds emerged from the large hole in the ceiling. Directly below it were two chests.

Adam didn’t waste any time and shot spiderwebs onto the ground where the boss would arrive and then threw his traps onto them.

In the hole above, a large yellow eye suffused with blue energy appeared, followed by the rest of its body as it entered the chamber.

< < Optional Stage Objective > >

< Defeat the Cell Warden >

The boss landed directly on Adam’s traps, all of which went off, releasing an enormous amount of air, alongside overlapping shockwaves, which briefly sent the octopus monster airborne. The middle of its body was missing, the eye broken like a runny egg yolk.

[Fifteen traps triggered. 1500 Points rewarded.]

Holy shit.

Adam didn’t waste a moment and shot himself at the boss with a flap of his wings, swinging his balloon glove into one tentacle after the next as it fell back down, exploding the gelatinous flesh with ease. Despite being a slime, he still made sure not to let it touch him, since he vividly remembered how James had been paralysed by it.

Only a few seconds after it had arrived, the boss was nothing but scattered blubbery detritus.

< < Optional Stage Objective Complete > >

< Defeated the Cell Warden >

The Tower Crawler reaches its full power.

The two chests in the centre of the room were uncovered by the mess, which was fortunate, since otherwise he’d have had to move it with his hands. Adam went over and opened the upgrade chest, grabbing a legendary force upgrade from it, since there was nothing better from the selection. He decided to leave the relic chest until after he’d killed the tower crawler, just in case the other chest from the lab floor didn’t give him the legendary that would appear once the crawler was dead.

In order to be able to leave, Adam pulled down the levers on the podium behind the dais that the chests had been on, and immediately all of the monsters outside in the hallway screamed and roared twice as loud as their cells were opened along with the portcullis to the chamber.

Adam stepped into the chaos of the all-out brawl, swinging, kicking, and dodging his way around the monsters, until not a single one was left intact and the way to the exit was clear.

Normal enemies feel so easy to kill at this point. It’s like they’re moving in slow-motion.

As he climbed the stairs out of the basement facility, he looked up through the middle of the tower.

Time to see if the Tower Crawler is any worse than the chaos demon.

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