SSS Awakening: Rebirth of the Strongest Vampire God novel Chapter 265

Chapter 265: How about you try to fight a little?

Ellora blinked. "Is... that thing sentient? Should we kill it before it multiplies?"

"No," Damon muttered. "That’s the quest giver."

Kaelthorn made a noise of disbelief. "That’s an alchemist?"

Riven squinted. "I’m pretty sure I saw that guy licking a mushroom in the alleyway last week."

Damon ignored them and stepped forward cautiously. "Old man."

The alchemist didn’t react.

Damon cleared his throat and tried again. "Master... It’s been a while. How are you doing?"

The old alchemist blinked slowly, as if rousing from some trance. His gaze dragged upward until it landed, barely, on Damon. His mouth opened, then closed, then opened again like a rusty hinge remembering its purpose.

"Master," he echoed, almost reverently. "Yes... Yes, I was one once. Or perhaps I was three. The details are... alchemical." His gaze narrowed slightly, as if threading its way through the fog of fragmented memory. "You... I know you. You’re the blood-soaked one. The boy with a mouth full of questions."

Kaelthorn muttered, "Yup. Definitely licked a mushroom."

The alchemist ignored them all and suddenly sprang to his feet with surprising agility, sending a cloud of dust, feathers, and something that might have been a bat wing flying from his robes. "Did the first one speak to you? The book? Did it whisper? Bite? Did it bleed?"

"It was mostly unreadable," Damon awkwardly responded. "But I’ve got it. And I’m here for the second volume."

The alchemist grinned, revealing teeth stained with something suspiciously violet. "Good, good! Then the journal hasn’t rejected you. Yet. That’s promising. Or terrible. Could go either way."

He reached into his tattered sleeve and pulled out a bone key wrapped in dried roots. "Below this dungeon," he whispered. "A place that used to breathe. The corrupted lab. You’ll know it when you hear the souls wail."

Damon accepted the key, a little puzzled. He thought he would have to comb through a lot of dungeons to get here, but this old man simply handed over the key to him? What was going on?

"But be warned," the alchemist added, suddenly grave. "You’ll need to prove yourself to the lab. It remembers Ouroboros. It remembers failure. And it does not suffer pretenders."

"Sounds lovely," Damon muttered, pocketing the key.

The alchemist turned away, already lost in a new conversation with a beetle on his shoulder. Damon stepped back to the group.

"Well?" Ellora asked, brows arched.

Seeing her kill half the mob, Kaelthorn scoffed in annoyance. "Don’t take what is mine." With a low grunt, he stepped forward and cleaved a larger spider in half with a brutal swing of his greataxe, not even bothering to activate skills.

"I hate bugs," he said simply, kicking aside a twitching limb. But that was not the only spider that got killed. Everything behind it was decimated by the shockwave from the single axe swing. However, the madman did not seem pleased with the result at all. "I am rusty from being shut in that damn prison for so long." He grumbled, walking forward.

The two no longer waited for instructions. They simply walked forward and started clearing the dungeons left and right.

Damon watched the chaos unfold with a faint smirk tugging at the corner of his lips. This was exactly what he’d planned. Let the heavy-hitters do the work, clear a path, and if anything truly interesting appeared, he’d swoop in for the prize.

Riven stayed beside Damon, flicking the occasional arrow to act like he was doing something. "They’re like murder-happy children in a candy store," he muttered. "You sure you don’t want to join in the bloodbath?"

Damon shook his head. "But how about you try to fight a little?" This seemed like a good opportunity to put some pressure on Riven and see if the coal turns into a diamond.

Riven groaned, flipping his dagger in one hand and his bow in the other. Then louder, with exaggerated reluctance, he said, "Fine, fine. I’ll shoot something that bites back. Your wish is my command, my Lord."

He scratched his head and tried shooting arrows at something in the distance, but all of his arrows missed, some even hitting Ellora and Kaelthorn. Riven winced as the two of them turned and gave him a death glare.

He picked up the bow again, pointing it in the opposite direction, and this time he ended up firing an arrow at the muddle-headed old man. "Fuck!" Damon quickly moved to block the stupid arrow from accidentally killing his key quest character.