Chương 79: Chapter 80: The Chamber Camp

The silence that followed the collapse of the Heilel Shade was heavy, thick, and caked in the ancient stench of three-hundred-year-old mortuary soot. Ethan didn't rush forward to check the lower tunnel. The moment the sub-boss's data parameters flatlined, he tapped his interface line, setting the lumbering mud scarab beetle to a dead stop. He didn't play the reckless gambler. He knelt in the dark next to his torch, his 85 Perception immediately auditing the damage reports flashing across his visual matrix.

The front wedge of his single golem construct was a mess—the pristine layer of brittle cast-iron plating had fulfilled its sacrificial purpose, but the blunt force of the shadow-king's curved blade had shattered the shell away completely, leaving the golem's structural Durability Index sitting at a critical fifty percent. Ethan ran the mathematical cost-benefit calculus through his head.

If he hiked all the way back out of the wadi pass to his open-air trail camp, the un-rendered instance would reset, causing the sub-boss to instantly respawn and forcing him to waste another precious wave of his iron-oxide ammunition just to reclaim this clearing. But if he pushed deeper into the dark with a half-broken meat-shield, a single high-level lunge would chew straight through the soft, un-fired core underneath, leaving his thin 37 Constitution entirely exposed to a mauling.

Ethan reached down into the dark ash pool where the phantom's corpse lay. In this game world, elite items didn't just spawn as floating chest drops; they had to be manually stripped from the target. He unbuckled the dark, oil-treated rawhide cloak— [The Shroud of Athtar] —throwing the agile leather mantle over his own shoulders and cinching the ties tight beneath his corslet. The effect was immediate.

His movement felt lighter, the restrictive friction of his heavy load layout relaxing as his baseline Agility compressed upward to 56. But his eyes were entirely locked on the rest of the body. The phantom king was clad in heavy, overlapping sheets of polished bronze scale-armor. In a server where the global trade lanes were collapsing and tin imports were hitting zero percent, raw bronze had become a hyper-inflated commodity—literally worth more than gold shekels to the weapon foundries of Megiddo.

Ethan unslung his bronze scrapper trowel, his [Structural Analysis] passive multiplier kicking into its blistering three hundred percent extraction speed. His hands became a blur of clinical, industrial precision. He didn't care about the aesthetic beauty of the royal armor; he forcefully pried, sliced, and strip-harvested every single bronze scale straight off the phantom's chest plates, packing the heavy, high-value metal sheets tightly into the bottom of his rawhide scout pack.

He wasn't leaving a single pixel of copper behind. Once the salvage was cached, he waded over to a fresh vein of dark-red Terra Rossa mud running along the cavern's drainage line. Driving his trowel into the silt, he executed a cold, mechanical repair. He didn't have the charcoal fuel reserves or the ventilation to run a hot firing furnace down here—the toxic carbon monoxide would choke his lungs within minutes.

Instead, he manually slapped and pressed large, high-density blocks of wet red clay straight over the scarab's fractured carapace, forcefully smoothing out the deep structural fissures until the un-fired mud core was insulated under a fresh, thick three-inch layer of sacrificial silt. Golem durability 288/384. About seventy-five percent. He checked the leather pouch at his hip—two hundred and seventeen iron-oxide sling stones remaining.

Ethan nudged the iron beetle toward the narrow limestone cracks leading down to the second terrace.