Only Wisdom Awakened - Chapter 181

Chapter 181: Caves Domino
‘Three hundred… damn that’s a lot of bats.

Well, I guess it could’ve been worse.

There seems to be a slight problem though, the mana they’re emanating… it’s not something a small beast like a bat can give off.

Something’s strange’

“Ugh”

Hans touched his head annoyed.

‘I don’t know…

How the hell do I kill them only using the sword?

I think doing it only using tier-0 spells would be easier compared to this.’

Hans had no idea how to approach those beasts, they were all gathered up in a single place, which made it difficult for him to find a situation where he could face them in different batches.

Going up against all of them at the same time was not the solution.

if he did that, he would probably be forced to use magic to get himself out of there in one piece.

‘I need to think up a strategy… and I have to do it right’

“Sigh… this is why I like magic better, I could’ve just barged in there and blown everything up.

Should I just…

Nah, forget it, I’m here to train… I ain’t a wuss that’ll drop the reins as soon as the race gets challenging.

If there’s no way to do it… I’ll just create it”

Create it… that was not a phrase Hans used carelessly, he meant it literally:

Just above the ‘cone room’ where all the bats resided, was a tunnel made of solid rock.

The young boy walked to that place, where he began hammering the wall with his fist.

“Let’s see… I’ve set myself 175 as a stat limit, I won’t increase it any more than this, but… don’t think I won’t give it my all!”

“Heup!”

Hans took a deep breath before beginning the execution of his plan.

{stengthen}

“Ha!”

As he released all the air in his lungs, he swung his fist forward with all the strength he could muster, hitting the rock-solid wall.

“Bam!”

A loud crash resounded throughout the whole cave, and many bats were woken up by it.

Chaos erupted inside the ‘cone room’ while Hans prepared himself to bash his knuckles against the wall once more.

“Bam!”

‘This… is still not enough.

Again!!”

“Bam!”

“Again!”

“Bam!”

“Again! again! again!”

For almost a whole minute, Hans’s fist made the entire cave tremble.

‘Finally…’

As Hans punched the rocky wall one last time, he saw it crack right before his eyes.

First the wall, then the ceiling, and all across the tunnel.

The whole place began to collapse.

‘I gotta get out of here fast!’

Hans turned around and ran back to another tunnel.

‘Pant.. Pant.. Almost… I almost got caught up in it’

The plan he had in mind was simple:

Apart from numbers, the biggest advantage the bats had was the territory, because the shape and height of the room made it impossible for Hans to reach the bats.

But how was such a wide room still standing even with tons and tons of dirt on top of it?

The answer wasn’t difficult to figure out:

Many little tunnels made out of stone passed above and beside the room, keeping the dirt up and avoiding a total collapse of the cave system.

But a single tunnel… if just the single tunnel on top happened to break and release all the weight it was holding onto the tunnel below it…

Then a domino effect would be unleashed upon all the caves and tunnels in the vicinities.

One after the other… they would all collapse under the unstoppable weight of the earth.

‘And now… its time to begin the hunt’

Hans touched the ground with his palm, releasing his mana just as he had previously done.

{mapping}(tier-2)

Just a couple of minutes later, he retracted his mana.

“I know… where you all are”

Hans began moving… his prey were waiting for him.

When the caves were collapsing, the bats didn’t just idly sit around waiting to be buried alive.

They perceived the collapse and took repair in smaller tunnels.

Only a few of them died under the debris, but that wasn’t what Hans aimed at anyway.

To take repair, the bats had just escaped to the nearest tunnel, diving into many different smaller colonies.

Meaning…

‘They’ve lost both their advantages, the terrain, and the numbers.

Now…

We’ll be playing my game.’

Thanks to his {mapping skill} Hans knew exactly where all the monsters had flew off to, and even where the boss was residing.

Hans stopped running all of a sudden,

“Here I am…the first batch’s location.”

{lume}

Hans lit up a little light to see the moving opponents.

There were about a dozen of them, all flying around in a chaotic manner.

Hans unsheathed his sword, preparing for the fight.

‘God dammit… bats?

They are as big as eagles.

I knew something was off when sensing their mana.’

Hans couldn’t hear it because he had covered his ears with a mana barrier, but the bats began squeaking loudly as soon as they noticed him, and a couple of those beats even directly attacked him.

Hans raised his sword and imbued it with aura before swinging it.

Like a knife on butter, his blade easily split apart one of the bats’ wings.

‘As I thought, their wings are weak as hell… and without them, they can’t really do much’

Hans evaded the other incoming monster before piercing the incapacitated body of the fallen bat with the tip of his sword.

[you have killed a {monstrous bat}]

‘As I thought, now that I don’t have to take them all on at the same time it’s easy’

Hans quickly got rid of that group and headed to the next one.

One after the other, batches of beasts perished under Hans’s blade.

Every time he encountered a new group, they all seemed to have gone mad.

They flapped their wings aimlessly and circled around the top of the caves sometimes hitting the walls.

It wasn’t just out of fear, rather than that, something was happening.

Bats use echolocation to move around and to locate targets.

It’s really efficient since it doesn’t need any light.

However, it does have a weakness:

It’s easy to mess with.

Bats are always close to each other, so one might think it would be impossible for them to use echolocation at the same time, but they can perform an action called Jamming Avoidance Response, with that, they can change their echolocation’s frequency to tell it apart from others.

However, there was something else messing their perception up…

The dust raised by the collapse.

Dust particles, like rain, disperse bats’s echolocation.

That meant those bats had to change their echolocation frequency various times a second to avoid the other three hundred all around the caves, and in the meantime, their sense was being dispersed by the dust.

They felt solid walls where there weren’t any and didn’t feel anything while running straight into the ground.

For them… More than being blind, it was like being in an extremely chaotic illusion.

They were easy prey, and in just half an hour, Hans managed to exterminate about eighty percent of them.

There were fifty or so bats left and the boss.

‘Pant… pant… running around all this time and repeatedly using {mapping} is starting to tire me out.

Fortunately, it seems like it’s about to come to an end.’

The last few bats had gathered in the second-biggest room in the cave system.

With them also resided the boss, and making things even more tricky, the dust that had been raised by the collapse of the ‘cone room’ had already settled down.

With their senses not inhibited anymore, it didn’t take long for them to notice Hans when he stepped into the room.

They all began squeaking aggressively, while Hans just stood still watching them emotionless.

‘That thing… It’s about as big as a little plane isn’t it?’

Hans’s eyes were fixated on a single beast.

That gate’s boss and the trickiest opponent to kill in that room:

The blood bat.

‘Wow… that’s some broken blessing’

Exclaimed Hans analyzing the boss’s skills.

[…

Blessings:

{blood replenishing blessing.

Description: a cruel blessing that grants its owner the power to eat one of his own kin to replenish his stamina.

Effect: when one of its species is killed by its blood draining, the beast will recover stamina based on the level of the absorbed monster.}

‘Man… that’s some shitty ability’

Hans didn’t indulge in analyzing any further, from what he understood, the beast had to directly kill the other bats to replenish its strength, meaning if he killed them before the beast found a chance to use its skill then that blessing would’ve been useless.

“I will first of all exterminate the minions, and then pass to the main course”

‘Of course, it won’t let me do it so easily…

The boss monster, which was hanging on the ceiling of the room, opened its mouth and emitted an otherworldly sound.

{shockwave dart}

Even if he couldn’t hear it, Hans surely felt it as his body was thrown against the wall of the cave after being hit by it.

‘Come at me… I’ll slaughter you all!’