[NR] Chapter 400 - Trash Poison Yet It Works (Patreon)

At this point, Jason could tell the fight wasn’t going to be too much of a challenge. Sure, there was a good number of the Dretches running around, but they were all lower level than him and the Quasits weren’t exactly leading them. So instead, he decided to focus on something besides making this an efficient fight.

The Quasits could die first though. Not because they were a threat, but rather because of how squishy they were. Despite the lower levels, Anyone of the Dretches likely had more hp than the Quasits. That is sort of their thing, being little flesh walls the demon armies could throw endlessly at their enemies to slow them down. Sometimes quite literally.

This made them perfect for his new goal, training his last un-starred stat, Strength. So now being free of the fear effect, Jason pounces on the Quasit that had forced the fear on him and puts it down with a single flying kick that bloomed gracefully into a flower and through the demon’s neck.

The remaining three Quasits don’t fare much better, even as Jason’s war stomp starts to lose effectiveness. That just forces him to use multiple attacks to take them down. A thing that was likely to be required anyway as they had still been invisible and so a little hard to aim at even if he could see sort of where they were. It definitely wasn’t good enough for a precise attack.

That left the pitiful Dretches. Despite the sudden lack of higher rank demons, they weren’t deterred, instead the mass poured towards him with, if anything, even greater passion. For them this wasn’t a fight to win or lose. They barely had enough of a mind to even be called something besides animals. If it wasn’t for the fact that to become a Dretch they needed to capture a soul in their demonheart most would even hesitate to call them sapient.

Perfect for Jason to train against. With utmost confidence, he takes a low and stable stance to meet the mass head on with no plans to evade them. His defense wasn’t the highest, but seeing as it was provided by his Energy and comprehension of Substance, it was going to be heads and shoulders above any defense provided by external means.

Then the 19 Dretches are upon him, the ones in front slam into Jason without any intention to stop as the ones behind claw their way over and around the front line. As they begin to literally crawl all over him, he stands unmoving like a rock only for inaction to become action.

His left hand reaches out with deceptive speed and grasps the head of one of the Dretches trying to claw his thigh to shreds, though leaving only white marks. The Dretch tries to look up to see who grabbed its head, but is unable to move. Then Jason squeezes his hand and creaking can be heard.

The Dretch howls in pain as Jason sighs. He isn’t quite strong enough to burst heads yet. Still, he is satisfied with his test and defenses so releases the Dretch, only to grab the next by its throat. This time as he squeezes his hand, the Dretch is unable to survive, its neck shattering and esophagus crushed.

The other Dretches ignore this as they howl. Their attacks do basically nothing despite the fact they can tell he is less protected than some they had managed to claw up before. Jason grabs the next one by the arm and tosses it into the air to an impressive height. Still he is ignored.

In fact, it takes five more deaths before the others begin to notice. Though knowing something and actually doing something about it are completely different and so Jason continues his attack. One after another they die as Jason tests out a number of strong man tricks he had seen in the past. The only difference was that he wasn’t using the trick, instead using strength alone to accomplish them.

It wasn’t until he had literally crushed over half of the Dretches that they noticed that their normal attacks weren’t actually doing anything at all. This made some sense, they were only around level six on average and depended entirely on their claws and teeth to attack. Even a level ten tank would be able to weather their attacks unharmed as long as they just attacked their armor.

Sure, the devs did try to make sure that defense wasn’t some unbreachable wall, but they mostly did that through allowing people to attack gaps in a person or creature’s armor and making it so that attack skills would have at least a small amount of armor pierce. After all, if the Dretches could manage to deal even a single point of damage, Jason was in trouble. Good thing his Energy reinforced body didn’t have any convenient gaps to attack through and the Dretches don’t actually have a skill to improve their physical attacks.

That doesn’t mean they don’t have offensive skills of course, and in fact, now that they realize the problem the group all let off their iconic attack, fetid cloud. This was a poison attack that creates a nauseous green cloud of gas. While this poison cloud was not inherently damaging, it did weaken people.

The way it normally weakens someone would be to slow them down. Jason however isn’t that lucky and this version of it seems almost tailor made to ruin his fun as the poison instantly affects him, weakening his strength and defense. This meant someone was playing a little 4d chess as while the poison would be useful against a beast with a tough hide, they should have sent Dretches meant to target a human in armor, something this particular poison would do little against.

Sure the hit to strength wouldn’t be entirely pointless, but generally humans focus on equipment instead of personal use of strength. A sharp sword would still do a lot of damage as long as the user could still swing it and use their skills.