The dim canyon had once been lit up by the flashes of battle and filled with the clamor of fighting, but as Zero Wing's members stood atop the summit, the various factions battling below in the gorge fell silent one after another.
"Seriously? That actually worked?"
Everyone stared at the Zero Wing members on the mountaintop, momentarily at a loss for words.
They had gone through tremendous effort to find the optimal route, suffering significant casualties along the way before finally reaching the safety of the summit.
Yet Zero Wing had gone from start to finish without even glancing aside, charging straight through. Not only had they spent far less time, but their casualties numbered only a few dozen—a figure that was practically negligible.
"Zero Wing really is something else," Qi Lian murmured, her beautiful eyes blinking repeatedly as she watched Shi Feng commanding the Zero Wing forces.
Such a bold maneuver was something no other guild could have pulled off—probably only Zero Wing could manage it.
Especially those two magic skills Ke Le's group had used when they were on the verge of collapsing. They weren't invincibility skills, but when combined, neither ghost attacks nor heavy crossbows posed any real threat anymore.
"They're just riding high stats and strong skills," Huanghai said with a slight curl of his lip. "The road ahead won't be so easy. The difficulty of the next few floors keeps climbing, and the reliance on player stats keeps dropping. If they try the same thing then, they'll just be digging their own graves."
"That's true," Qi Lian conceded, not bothering to argue.
Because what Huanghai said wasn't wrong.
The deeper one ventured into the Ancient Divine Relic, the more difficult each floor became. Traps and mechanisms grew increasingly numerous, and progression depended more and more on players' own abilities.
A brute-force approach like the one Zero Wing had used could work on the first floor, but it simply wouldn't fly beyond that.
Of course, the deeper one went, the greater the chances of finding opportunities and treasures. The first floor of the Ancient Divine Relic was practically barren—if you spotted a Bronze Rank chest, you were incredibly lucky. You'd honestly get more from running a team dungeon. The only unique thing the Relic offered was Combat Techniques.
To make real gains inside the Ancient Divine Relic, you had to reach at least the third floor, where you could obtain top-tier equipment for level fifty and above, with a high likelihood of scoring Combat Techniques and various other treasures.
Atop the canyon's summit, Shi Feng didn't rush anyone forward. Instead, he ordered the group to rest in the safe zone.
Inside the Ancient Divine Relic, players' stamina and mental energy drained far faster than in the outside world. Without proper rest and recovery, places that should have been passable became impossible. And the only place to rest in the entire Relic was the safe zone—everywhere else was crawling with monsters and magical traps, where a single lapse in concentration could mean death.
During the break Shi Feng had called, the various factions' surviving members also filtered into the safe zone to recuperate.
Compared to Zero Wing, the other factions had taken far heavier losses. Out of roughly fifteen hundred people, only about eighty percent had made it to the summit's safe zone. The rest would have to wait for the system to revive them before organizing new teams to seek their fortunes on that floor.
Once everyone had rested enough, they began filtering one by one into the second floor of the Ancient Divine Relic.
The second floor was a primeval forest with equally terrible visibility. Even for Tier 2 class players, sight range was less than seventy or eighty yards. Magic attacks of various kinds struck without warning, making them nearly impossible to guard against, and their power was devastating. A direct hit on even a Tier 2 tank would only be survivable three or four times at most—for a Tier 1 player, two hits would be the limit.
Surviving the trek to the safe zone depended largely on each player's individual reaction speed—blocking incoming attacks immediately so that healers had a chance to cast. If a magic attack landed directly, even healers wouldn't have time to react before the target was dead.
And the second floor was noticeably larger than the first—that was one of the Ancient Divine Relic's unique traits. The deeper underground you went, the larger the map grew, forcing players to cover more distance and face more dangers.