The invaders might have managed to maintain their discipline thus far, even with all that he’d thrown at them, but he could tell they were slowly cracking. Going at it a little harder, a little faster, and often edging into levels of overkill that slightly went beyond what was prudent, thereby using up mana they likely couldn’t afford to waste.

  As people grew stronger, their physical stamina tended to skyrocket well past the point where one could reasonably spend it all over the course of a single fight, even an entire battle or dungeon dive might be conducted without needing a single second of rest.

  But the only living invader who was a melee combattant was the tank, and even he was likely a mage with an unusual set of powers, which would still see him needing to use mana to power his abilities. They all had limits that they had be running up against.

  They’d marched into the next room after Cheshire’s, which contained giant sloths and saber-tooth tigers, and immediately started blasting. The whole affair was the cleanest, most coordinated thing he’d seen out of them yet, sheets of ice covering the ground to render the footing slippery, crystal spears summoned to form “pike lines” meant to catch anything that slipped and careened towards them.

  At the same time, the fire and air elementalists would be unleashing their powers offensively, clearing the dungeon monsters at a rapid pace.

  And anything that did get past the whole affair would be intercepted by the group’s tank.

  Monster after monster died, saber-tooth tigers without physical boosting powers ripped appart while the sloths were the primary target, gutted by windblades or set on fire before they could use their ability to stretch their limbs to ludicrous lengths to strike over the pikes.

  Yes, the invaders were “winning” this fight, and there was a slight chance they’d be perfectly capable of repeating this performance in the next room, but what about the one after it? Or the eight rooms that would remain after that, each stuffed with the only D-Rank beasts that weren’t also bosses he had in the Natural History Museum?

  They marched through the room amidst the rapidly disappearing corpses of the dungeon monsters, and into the next room, which was filled with modern creatures.

  Fat hippos whose skin acted as “bouncy” armor, tigers with strength powers, jaguars whose teeth had become infinitely more lethal, wolverines whose jaws specialized in vibrating apart the bones in any limb they managed to chomp down on even the odd hyrax clambering across the ceiling, ready to drop down whenever the opportunity presented itself.

  All in all, while these creatures were at the same rank as their prehistoric cousins, they were actually quite a bit weaker simply due to being smaller. But there were oh so many more of them …

  As per usual, the jungle plants decorating the walls, floor, and ceiling were the first casualties, ripped to shreds in an instant, casually destroying the various snakes he’d hidden there.

  Yeah, it was a smart move, but Thomas still would have loved them to land at least one hit. Just to justify all the energy he’d spent creating and command limit used controlling them.

  Bit by bit, they advanced deeper into the room, not a single one of the modern creatures having managed to land a single hit, piles of corpses rapidly building only to disappear just as quickly as he automatically reclaimed them.

  Things were going well for the invaders. Too well. And they knew it, scanning the room more often than was necessary, heads bobbing from side at a pace more reminiscent of a teenager on a sugar rush than a trained soldier, almost panicked in how they tried to keep the entire room in view rather than trusting their comrades to cover their backs.

  Eventually, Thomas lit off his big surprise as Dexter lurched out of his boss room, arm already cocked back and ready to throw hands.

  And “throw hands” he did, launching his right arm at the crystal shell user, the combination of an elongating limb and a power that increased the mass of his fists turning it into a pseudo-projectile that could crush a tank like a tin can with a single blow … if it hit.

  It didn’t.

  The massive flying fist whiffed, passing within a mere meter of the target, who still jumped to the side in shock only to glare at the giant sloth. That was when he realized that the monster was rapidly getting closer.

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  Because the initial strike hadn’t missed, it had simply been aimed at a different target than expected, a stone pillar that Dexter’s third power had raised from the ground behind the group. One the giant sloth had grabbed and was now using to reel himself in.

  Of course, unlike the boss room with its extra-slippery floor, the monster’s feet were tearing through the ground here and causing huge sprays of dirt to fountain into the air, but with his strength, Dexter was more than capable of pulling himself forward with his right arm while he readied his left arm for a punch.

  It didn’t take long for the invaders to try and cut the arm he was using as an anchor, but they weren’t quite fast enough.

  Thomas’ champion slammed his left fist into the crystal shield, the force of one of his tremendously powerful punches stacked on top of his momentum shattering the shell like glass, barely slowing before it plowed into the man himself with enough force to fold him in half, to wrap his body around the tremendous flesh and bone battering ram while the air around him detonated with the force of the deflected and displaced impact.

  Normally, that would have been where it ended.

  Except Dexter was still pulling himself onward, now with an unwilling passenger, completely ignoring the spears he was driving into his lower body as he plowed through the enemy group.

  Once again, that was where it should have ended. He should have reached the pillar, stopped, and inertia should have carried the invaders’ tank off his fist … except that Dexter had raised a second pillar, directly in the path of his left hand.

  It was the back of his captive invader that struck the stone first, crushed between a near-irresistible force and a fairly durable wall … which promptly shattered into a million pieces as the full momentum of a multi-ton giant sloth smashed into it.

  However, by that point, the invader’s torso had already been reduced to paste.

  While Dexter’s fists let him unleash powerful impacts, hammers only hit so hard without an appropriate anvil to brace a target against.

  The giant sloth wore the same placid expression he always did as he turned around to face the rest, blood dripping from his left hand and painting the entirety of the arm it was attached to red.

  Five delvers at the same rank as a boss was a fairly fair fight, all things considered … except these guys were exhausted, had just lost their final defender, and the boss was currently far too close for comfort.

  They broke.

  Threw everything at the giant sloth’s face and ran, fire, wind, and ice forcing Dexter to close his eyes and raise one arm to shield himself even as massive crystal spears were hurled into his guts, but his other arm was blindly swept across the floor, bowling over both the air and already injured ice elementalist, leaving them easy prey for the still-incoming regular monsters.

  Blinking the ash that used to be his eyelashes out of his eyes, Thomas’ champion began loping after the fleeing invaders, though it was more to keep the pressure up than anything else. If he ran at full tilt with how many crystal caltrops and barricades the fleeing attackers were leaving behind.

  Cheshire appeared at that point, leaping from the exit of the room and ripping into the Crystal mage, killing him in seconds, though that slowed her down enough that the rest would likely be all the way through the next room before she caught up, injured as she was.

  The second mage suddenly stumbled as he tripped over a hyrax that had leaped at his face from the ceiling but missed, though he was almost immediatley swarmed by a horde of critters.

  That just left the final invader, the air elementalist, running like a bat out of hell, increasing his speed with a self-generated wind at his back.

  But all that speed didn’t make it easy to spot the saber-tooth tiger Thomas had hidden and kept alive just in case he saw a use for it.

  The big cat launched itself at the man, chomped down on his side, and then just sort of … flopped onto the ground behind him, lazily staring after the fleeing invader while its teeth regrew in a matter of seconds.

  Because Thomas’ use for the regular saber-tooths had been slightly different than how he employed Cheshire.

  They were designed to snap off in whatever they bit, and come apart inside the victim while the monster’s first power near-instantly regrew the broken chompers.

  As for the second power … well, there were a few variations, but all of them could infuse their teeth with one specific kind of venom. Neurotoxins for rapid loss of motor control, hemotoxins to interfere with healing and pose significant long-term issues, and cytotoxins for just obliterating the tissue around the bite.

  Though with the location of the “bite” technically being the entirety of someone’s circulatory system, everywhere the razor-sharp tooth fragments had already reached.

  This particular variant was laced with the venom of the fer de lance, a form of infamous viper from South America that, despite having hemotoxic venom, was actually quite destructive to tissue, often costing the victim limbs even if an antivenin was applied early.

  The air mage only managed a few more steps before toppling over, which Thomas took as his cue to make his move, sending in a capuchin with a healing potion in one hand, and a contract in the other.

  “Well, I’m guessing that didn’t go according to plan, did it?” he asked through the monkey. “So, what I have here is a healing potion, one that can fix everything that’s wrong with you, all you have to do is sign this contract that makes you spill the beans on your emplo- …”

  He didn’t even get to finish his spiel before the elementalist absorbed all the air in the vast hall, all damage vanishing in an instant before returning with a vengeance a split-second later.

  Veins bulged, the nose bled, both eyeballs popped like firecrackers, all overloaded with energy.

  “They can absorb energy, to a point,” Elias commented smugly, then grinned up at Thomas’ core. “So, what’d we get?”