The minotaur was breathing heavily.
It had cut open every one of the squishy, round enemies in the room. It figured out that their regeneration was slower near their roots than near the top of their bodies. After that, it made full use of an acceleration skill to cut down as many of the orbs as it could at once while doing its best to slice near the roots.
That did not work.
The enemies ended up regenerating anyway. There was no end to it. They would always regenerate, shoot out the body-melting liquid, and extend their tentacles to ensnare the minotaur. They would also erupt with bodily fluid whenever the minotaur cut one open, causing the minotaur’s body to melt even more.
The minotaur was in really bad shape. It had been showered by the fluid of the orbs, and its skin was melted all over. It spent some stamina to use a skill to heal its wounds, but it had no effect.
The melted parts of its body were oozing and bubbling, and they turned a sickening color after mixing with the blood flowing out of its body.
Its body was not the only thing melting. Parts of its belt that it always used had melted as well, and it could no longer stay up on the minotaur’s waist.
It reached into its storage because it felt it had no other choice, then remembered the existence of red potions. It grabbed a number of them and downed them all. But its body did not recover.
Neither skills to heal injuries nor the red juice seemed to work here. That was the only conclusion the minotaur could reach.
The minotaur took a moment to catch its breath, then sucked in a massive amount of air, activated a special skill, and blew a powerful breath against the round enemies throughout the room. The breath was violently strong and caused anything it touched to burst into flames with its intense heat.
This skill was called Burning Breath.
With just one breath, it burned a third of the orbs in the room to ash. However, they quickly regenerated.
The minotaur drew in another breath, took aim at the round enemy growing nearest it, and released Burning Breath on it relentlessly.
It burned. And it burned.
The round enemy was reduced to ash, and a hole was being gouged in the uneven rock beneath it.
The minotaur’s attack stopped when its lungs began to ache.
The regeneration started immediately. But the minotaur caught sight of something. Something that looked like thin, densely packed, and wriggling roots was buried in the slimy ground beneath the burned orb. The minotaur wondered what would happen if it destroyed them.
An idea flashed into the minotaur’s mind, and it swapped its weapon.
It stored its sword in its Bag and pulled out a crushing weapon called a barrel hammer. It looked like a crude barrel with a long skewer sticking out of it. It was an extremely sturdy and impossibly heavy weapon.
The minotaur had obtained this barrel hammer from a human adventurer.
The adventurer who had used it was slightly shorter than the minotaur but was significantly fatter and looked to be twice as heavy. His skin was dark red, the top half of his body was bare, and he was wearing baggy pants. His build made him look like he had packed flesh on top of his own flesh and then had more flesh drooping down over that. He bellowed and rolled his shining eyes in his head as he swung around his barrel hammer. He would swing at the minotaur from the side and from above, each attack housing enough destructive force to prove lethal for the minotaur at the time.
He had an endless reserve of energy, and he never stopped howling and swinging his hammer no matter how many blows the minotaur dodged. It turned into a long, hard-fought battle because of the man’s inexhaustible stamina and uncommon ability to fight on after taking damage, but the minotaur had won in the end.
The minotaur lifted the barrel hammer above its head and smashed it down onto the nearest orb. It was not aiming for the orb itself, but rather the wriggling roots located within the slimy ground beneath it. The enemy burst open, its pieces scattering across the room, and the roots were crushed together with the soft rock.
The minotaur waited, but the round enemy did not regenerate. It now understood how to kill them.
The minotaur gleefully smashed all the rest of the round enemies and their roots. Its body was rapidly melting as a result of the fluids being jettisoned from the orbs, but it did not care.
It then finished killing every enemy in the room. It looked around and bathed in the afterglow of its victory; then its body was enveloped in a soft light. It began to regenerate and be remade.
It was a level-up.
Its injuries were all healed as well.
This was the minotaur’s first level-up in a very long time. It had been ages since it had encountered a human who would give it enough experience points.
Now that the minotaur thought about it, this was weird. It always gained experience points from defeating humans, but never when it defeated monsters. Despite that, it had just leveled up from killing these monsters. It did not know the reason, but it understood that it had found a new place where it could grow stronger.
The minotaur noticed one other thing. The stones next to the flat, circular ones shining with red light had been a dull gray when it entered the room, but now they were shining blue.
The minotaur stepped onto the stones shining with blue light and then disappeared.