Crystals shattered and parted in a rainfall of sunlight-colored shards as the elite crashed into the tusk-shaped crystals.

Meanwhile, the daemon girl continued to fire projectiles down on the lord, preventing the other elite from aiding. Her lips quivered and sweat formed at her forehead. Her skin grew even paler.

She was straining herself, but the Collector calculated she possessed enough mana reserves to hold on.

The Collector pointed its right hand at the elite and used Force Push, driving the elite even further and deeper into the ceiling. With a crushing motion of its fingers, the Collector finally used both push and pull to compact the crystals surrounding the elite into a ball to imprison and crush it.

This would not hold it long, however.

The Collector calculated that this temporary prison would not last even more than a second.

Not enough time for the Collector to deal with the elite guarding the lord below, even when it was distracted against the daemon female's constant barrages of projectiles. Not for a lack of combat capacity on the female specimen's part.

These projectiles might have been less powerful than the Collector's, but they were no less accurate – a testament to the daemon's mastery in perceiving the flow of magic.

The Collector could sense the lurker's psionic profile close to it now and determined that the lurker was two seconds from warping in.

The elite would be delayed enough for the Collector's method of attack to work.

The Collector flew down towards the lord and the elite guarding him, but did not land right on top of them.

Instead, it hovered in the air above them with Sapian force.

At this moment, the crystals above shattered as the imprisoned elite broke free with a burst of strength, ready to leap back down to defend its lord.

The Collector opened its maw and engaged the biotrigger for its pyrocatalytic glands.

The trigger clicked into place at the back of its mouth, and a moment later, the reactive chemicals shot forth, scraping against the trigger into a torrent of blue-white flame that washed over the throne, completely enshrouding the elite and lord in blazing chemical fire.

First, an initial attempt to end this battle now.

'Assist me in utilizing Sapia to encase the targets within the flames,' said the Collector to the daemon.

The daemon nodded weakly but bit her lip and roused strength to herself. Her whole body trembled at this point, nearing the limits of her stamina.

Both their bodies flashed purple, and then the raging swirl of flames surrounding the goblin lord glowed with a purple outline before their chaotic flow came under control, swirling in controlled manner in a spherical formation encased around the lord and his guarding elite in an attempt to maximize heat exposure, chemical damage, oxygen loss, and, if this did not work, remove visibility and overwhelm the senses.

The elite from the ceiling slammed down towards the Collector, but the Collector predicted the movement and flapped its wings once, sending itself backwards and evading the elite's downward punch.

The elite crashed into the ground on a knee, cracking the stone before it aimed itself again at the Collector.

The Sapia sphere containing the flames shattered as the elite guarding the lord broke it apart with a powerful punch, and the flames escaped outwards, revealing the elite with flames wrapped all around it, flesh melting from it and regenerating together in a continual cycle of destruction and growth.

The throne was covered in fire, and though the stone melted, the mana-infused roots in its structure did not decay with the stone. The roots still floated in the air, releasing mana that continued to empower the lord.

As for the lord himself, he was wrapped up in his cloak, his hunched form coughing.

When he exposed his face, it showed severe signs of burning. Blisters, charred flesh, and red eyes blinded from exposure to the flame.

But the robes around it had provided just heat resistant enough to allow it to survive.

The lord staggered to a stand behind his elite, his breathing raspy and rattling due to chemical burns, but he was sturdy enough keep himself alive.

Or, rather, as the Collector observed with mana-infused ocular systems, the lord was essentially on life support granted by the remnants of the throne. The mana in the area flowed into him, granting him a moderate regenerative factor.

And now, as the elite from the ceiling charged the Collector again, there would be no chance to unleash another barrage of flame.

But that did not matter. The lurker had entered this layer and burrowed unnoticed due to the flames cutting off the goblin lord's vision and senses.

This was all the Collector needed, and it had precisely timed its flame attack just so that the lurker could enter at the right time.

All the Collector would have to do now would be to knock down the incoming elite for just 1.55 seconds: the amount of time for the lurker to get into position and finalize the Collector's battle plans.

The elite sprinted towards the Collector, its legs blurring with speed as its four arms cocked back for a series of punches. It would be difficult to quickly disable this elite without also taking a hit, noted the Collector.

A necessary sacrifice and a calculated risk. A single strike should not severely damage the Collector.

But what if the hit it had to take did not have to compromise its functions at all?

The Collector evaded the first three punches but delayed itself to get struck by the fourth blow.

The fourth punch slammed horizontally right into the Collector's face with an initial crack of severe impact. Had the blow been properly applied, the Collector calculated it would have faced a sixty eight percent chance of near death with concussive force applied to its brain.

Yet, the Collector had calculated the trajectory and speed of this blow and thought to utilize it to its advantage.

The elite had used its full body weight to land that blow, falling for the Collector's feint and mistakenly believing the Collector slow enough to fully strike with a lethal head blow.

This in turn left the elite wide open to a counter.

The Collector utilized the technique the four-star adventurer used to disperse shockwaves from his body but modified it with its processing power.

In applying that technique to a smaller and more focused scale, the Collector essentially diverted the impact of the blow to its face.

Approximately 70% of the damage was mitigated, and the punch's formidable force, instead of hammering right into the Collector's face and damaging its brain, flowed freely throughout its entire body without harming it.

Instead, the Collector simply followed the currents of this powerful force traveling across its body, spinning around rapidly in a complete one-hundred-and-eighty-degree arc and smashing the elite's skull with a powerful backhand that was essentially comprised of the force of the elite's own hit with the Collector's strength added on to it.

A perfect counter, essentially. A counter that started the very moment the hostile party's own strike ended without a single fraction of a second's worth of delay.

The Collector did not know it, but had any trained martial artist witnessed its movements, they would have most certainly marveled at an almost perfect performance of a Heavenly Technique known as the {Returning Wind}, the performance of which would have granted any normal humanoid more than enough recognition to start their own school of martial arts.

The elite's skull caved in with a deep fist imprint as it flew back almost a dozen meters in the air, landing flat on its back as a limp mess while its mangled brain scrambled to regenerate, pieces of skull and pulped pink brain matter growing back.

The regeneration was quick, however, fast enough that the Collector would not have enough time to reach the lord and deal with the elite guarding it.

But the Collector did not need to. All it needed was time for this. It leaped into the air unopposed, pre-emptively getting a head start.

The lord's blinded eyes went wide as it coughed up blood. A lurker spine protruded from its chest, skewering its heart out of its body. That heart, the core, was what interfaced with this dungeon, and it would now be the Collector's.

The spine rapidly extended outwards into the air towards the Collector's general direction. The elite guarding the lord jumped to try and retrieve the heart, but it could not beat the Collector's head start.

The Collector met the extended spine in the air, opened its maw, and gobbled up the lord's heart.

Had either elite not been disabled, one of them would have certainly intercepted it.

But now, the Collector watched as the elites crumbled away into dust in a sudden instant, twin clouds of ash flowing back into the lord's greatsword and building back up into the two tusks decorating its pommel.

The Collector reveled in its victory as it landed beside the burning and melting throne.

The magical energy swirling around the broken symbol of authority flowed into the Collector, restoring its wounds and recognizing it as the new 'boss' of this lair.