As the ghost started shrieking in frenzy, Cerion and I prepared our skills in preparation. Right as we expected the ghosts to rush in, they did something strange, instead. Several of them flew into one of the blue fruits that lit up the cavern, disappearing inside. A few dozen flew into the trunk of a nearby tree, while the rest chose a similar variety of plants to be absorbed into.

I nearly lowered my guard in shock, but put it up again as one of the blue fruits detached itself from its tree and flew straight at us.

When it made impact with my spinning blades, it exploded in blue fire, creating a shockwave that threw us into the air.

Cerion activated his movement skill to regain control and created a water slide for us to get our footing again. The monsters weren’t intending on giving us any breathing room, however, because a willow branch launched itself at us like a whip, splitting us up as we dodged.

“The monsters have taken control of the plants around us!”, I shouted at my companion.

“Arthur, focus on causing havoc with your AOE skills, I’ll try and go for that suit of armor, to see if that calms the ghosts down again!”, he shouted back, as he swung a spinning ball of water at an incoming fruit, blowing it up mid-flight.

“Got it!”, I affirmed, channeling all of the available mana into my overloaded maelstrom.

I made the blades a little smaller, to deal with the wide variety of opponents, and ran around like a raging bull, letting my skill do the work for me. I kept throwing overloaded orbs and swinging my sword at incoming fruit, which I knew could interrupt my rampage.

Unfortunately, fighting these damn ghosts was trickier than expected. Some had possessed the blades of grass around the clearing, and were trying to trip me. Luckily, they weren’t strong enough to cut through my armor, at least. The willow trees I was trying to shred apart kept retaliating with whipping branches and roots, while showing surprising mobility. They had literally come to life, as their trunks danced around my sword, moving in a way I knew wood wasn’t supposed to be capable of.

The ghosts were fighting a losing battle, though. While they were difficult to kill, they couldn't hurt me at all, as long as I kept their blasting fruit away. Each time I destroyed the plant matter the ghosts possessed, they would shriek and be torn apart along with their possessed object, which limited their survivability.

Unfortunately, Cerion was having a harder time. When I looked over to see how he was doing, I found him struggling in a clash with the empty suit of armor. It seemed to be fast enough to keep up with Cerion’s swordsmanship and strong enough to overpower him. My thoughts were interrupted by more red ghosts flooding in from our surroundings, possessing more and more plants around us. The trees were using their thick roots to disrupt our footing. I couldn’t exactly fly yet, so I would have to rely on my new movement skill to shoot from tree to tree. The fortunate side effect of explosions propelling me forward is that they did more damage to my enemies than me.

Seeing how the battle was going, I decided to help Cerion with the monster that had caused a change in the ghosts. I shot up next to Cerion, who was surfing on a wide stream of water so as not to get caught up in the twisting roots down below.

“Need some help here, pal? I think we should deal with this guy first.”, I said.

“I can use the help. I can’t for the life of me find any weak spot in his armor. It seems that no matter what piece of metal I break off, he doesn’t slow down!”, he replied in frustration.

The issue with opponents that weren’t alive is that you couldn’t kill them by tearing their heads off. Sometimes they had so many redundancies that they could keep moving as long as a single piece of them was left.

“Can you use that cyclone skill to tear him in half? I’ll distract him.”

“I can. I won’t even need a minute, I’ve gotten better at it.”

I summoned Revan to hold off the frenzied ghosts and ran after the rustbucket. Cerion and I didn’t really like using summons unless necessary, because many warriors lost their edge by relying on them, but in this situation, it felt necessary.

Revan appeared and roared, only to be pulled several feet into the ground by the angry plant life. He gave a surprised cry that amused me for a moment, before pulling himself out and clawing at everything that moved.

As he did so, I shot toward the moving armor, who noticed my approach and pulled a rusty sword from his collection of weapons that he had buried in his chest. He raised it to meet me in battle, but was surprised to find out that my strength was far higher than Cerions, who focused on dexterity and intelligence. This, in combination with a wave of dark mana, was enough to push him against a nearby boulder. It recentred itself in preparation for my next attack, but once again lost the confrontation and was pushed back. Like this, we clashed for a while, neither of us making much headway.

I activated my maelstrom and started to chip away at the inside and outside of the large brute, causing it to stagger and fall down to one knee. Right as I moved to land a blow, Cerion called out to me.

“I’m done charging! Move!”

I dodged to the right with a burst of mana erupting at my feet, just in time to see a large torrent of water pass me by and crash into the suit, launching it into the air. I prepared an overloaded orb and used [Aura step] to dash right to where he was about to land, throwing the orb at his approaching form.

Cerion’s attack continued pushing the suit right into the explosion of my orb, setting off a massive explosion.

When the dust settled, a mangled heap of steel was creaking at the bottom of a crated. Despite the beating we had given it, it was somehow still moving.

With a scoff, I approached and sent another two orbs at it. This time, the scorched metal became lifeless.

Right as it stilled, the nearby plants stopped moving and started to ooze a blue haze. The ghost reformed into their blue state.

“Job’s done over here! Let’s clean up the ghosts!”, I shouted.

From there, it only took a little while for Cerion, Revan and I to kill the remainder of our opponents. While they still avoided my maelstrom, they simply didn’t have the stats or skills to contend with us.

After killing the final few ghosts, Cerion and I retreated to the outskirts of the forest, where most of the blue fruits were still present to light up the environment. For me, it made no difference, but Cerion had a hard time keeping an eye on our surroundings when all of the blue fruits had blown up near the battle site.

A system notification had popped up after finishing the last one.

Ding! Combat finished. Congratulations on reaching [Overloading Death Knight] level 43!

Reach level 50 to advance to tier 3.

Stat points allocated. 5 free stat points per level up awarded.

I put the five free points I had gained into wisdom, keeping the bank of 25 that I had kept stored for later.

As I sat down to lean against a boulder, Revan laid himself down above me.

“So… that was something…”, I sighed.

Meanwhile, Cerion had sat down nearby and was scribbling in a little notebook.

“It seems that the suit of armor gives the ghosts the skill to possess objects. Prioritizing this controller will be key to clear out this dungeon.”

I hummed.

“How does that possession work, though? They didn’t possess us, or any inanimate objects for that matter… Can they only possess plants? How does that tie into their water affinity, though?”, I pondered out loud.

I stood up and drew my sword, swinging it at the bark of a nearby tree. It left a deep cut, but I felt almost no resistance once I had gotten through the outer layer of the bark. I pulled my sword out again, and widened the cut in the tree with some dark mana. The moment the cut became a little wider, water started spurting out, leaving the center of the tree trunk as it was pulled down by gravity.

I repeated my experiment on the fruits and even the grass, and, sure enough, they were all hollow and stored water on the inside.

“Cerion, come take a look at this.”

He came over and inspected my work.

“No wonder I felt that there was a lot of water around us. Beyond the constant drizzle, it seemed that the plants also grew to have a water affinity. Did they adapt to their surroundings throughout the ages?”

“Cerion… this is a dungeon. These trees haven’t exactly been here for ‘ages’...”, I replied, lowering his enthusiasm.

“You don’t get it, Arthur!”, he said excitedly, “dungeons don’t just invent their environment! They base it on reality somehow! Perhaps, somewhere out there, these trees will live and grow naturally…”

“Wherever that might be, I hope there are no ghosts there… One place full of sentient plants is more than enough for one plane of reality.”, I said.

“I’m afraid you’ll be sorely disappointed when you explore some more dungeons. You would be surprised how many…”, Cerion droned. Noticing him start another tangent, I mover quickly to cut him off.

“I’m not ready to hear the truth! Spare me!”, I said dramatically.

Cerion’s excitement wasn’t doused by my cynical attitude, because he spent the next while taking notes on our environment as Revan and I rested. I could see where he was coming from, to be honest. These plants had the same affinity as him. On some level, he would feel intrinsically familiar with them. I was a little envious. Beyond myself, I hadn’t heard of any cool dark-aligned stuff that didn’t eat people. Oh well, maybe in the future I would be the first to encounter plants like that.

A few dozen minutes later, we were rested and ready to head out again. We were determined to reach the city itself. Cerion had convinced me that we would be better off heading there first, after all.

“In any normal dungeon I would stick with your plan, Arthur.”, he had said, “But this dungeon is so large that we can’t know where the best leveling spots will be. If we head to the city and find some higher ground, we’ll be able to map the entire dungeon and plan from there. Look at that massive clock tower for example! That could work.”

Something about the height of that clocktower told me that that place would have its own guards and possibly even house the boss, but it wasn’t too late to farm monsters after killing the boss anyway, so I just informed Cerion of my observation and left it at that.

We headed back into the forest, encountering more ghosts in the denser parts. They slowed us down a lot, making us take a total of two days to approach the glowing blue city.

Luckily, no walking metal suits had appeared at that time to make them go crazy, so we had been able to exterminate them quickly.

By the time we reached the outer wall of the city, we had both gained another level from the eight packs of ghosts we had encountered, leaving me at level 44 and Cerion at level 45.

“Looks like the levels are starting to slow down again. Killing the same monster over and over doesn’t seem good for experience.”, I commented.

“We already learned that last time with the spiders. Diminishing returns, remember? We should be happy we got two levels in two days, at least. With a little luck, we’ll be done before the week ends.”, he had replied, “Now be quiet. We’re approaching the gates, and we don’t want to disturb a city full of ghosts right away.”

I nodded and kept a lookout while Cerion finished his map.

In front of us, we saw the massive city walls of the city of tears, which were almost as tall as Reito’s own wall, though they couldn’t compare to the capital’s. The large gate wasn’t settled into the wall, with an arch above it. Instead, it looked like the gate was a part of the walls that its builders had simply attached to a pair of massive hinges, allowing it to swing open. Luckily for us, they had remained open, so we didn’t need to lay siege to get inside or anything.

Unfortunately, the entrance to the city was occupied by another ghost. This one looked like the moving set of armor from before, only without actually being physical. It looked like a skeletal knight wearing his full set of equipment, only as translucent as the ghosts we had met before.

It carried a large halberd and floated around like an armored torso without legs, patrolling the entrance and keeping a lookout.

“You down for another fight, Cerion?”

“As long as it’s only one enemy, and there aren’t any minions nearby, absolutely!”, he said in his typical jovial tone.

I grinned back at him.

Time to see what these [Death Knight]s were really all about…