As always, Adam didn't let himself fall on the defensive, so he attacked first. It was slower than him, but only by a slight margin, so as Adam's sword fell on it, it was able to react.
However, Adam was surprised because it put its knee forward, but this was a weak part of the body, he didn't understand why it would do this. However, as his sword made contact with the knee, a red shield that seemed to be made of blood appeared in front of his sword, parrying it and pushing it back.
Adam's sword bounced from the shield with the same strength and speed as when he attacked. Any average player would have their sword go over their head and hit the ground behind them, leaving them open for attack, but Adam wasn't an average player.
Seeing the ghoul ready to attack, Adam jumped and used the inertia of his sword to make a back flip, dodging the bone claw of the ghoul. However, Adam thought he would get to attack the ghoul as he finished his back flip, but three flying slashes of blood left the claws, which he blocked with his attack. Had he been hit in the first place, he would have been hit by the physical attack and the three slashes, an attack not too different from his own [Lunar Smite].
However, thanks to his higher strength, Adam didn't step back, and so as soon as he had blocked the attack he was able to slash it's thigh. The ghoul didn't even try to defend, and instead threw its head forward, trying to smash Adam with a headbutt.
Adam responded by a roundhouse kick while applying [Parry] to his leg. A bluish film appeared over his leg as it clashed with the ghoul's head, stopping it's movement. Then, Adam turned the other way around, and made a roundhouse slash using both [Mighty Strike] and [Lunar Smite].
The ghoul had its head at Adam's level, and so he aimed at its throat, which it wasn't able to block or dodge.
Critical Hit! -160 000 HP!
Critical Hit! -160 000 HP!
Critical Hit! -160 000 HP!
Critical Hit! -160 000 HP!
The Ghoul let out a guttural sound as it felt its HP almost empty out in a single strike, the strike had hit one of its weak points and thus the damage had been doubled, dealing almost 650k damage to it. Only 100 000 HP was left to it, fortunately it couldn't suffer from a bleeding effect.
Although it was in pain, the ghoul didn't stay idle, waiting for Adam to finish it. It roared and suddenly exploded, sending pieces of flesh everywhere. Many hit the undeads around them, but none touched Adam.
At first, he thought it had killed itself, but discovered it hadn't. Instead, there was now a much smaller zombie standing in front of him, about his size, and it had a big gash on its throat. Moreover, it was a complete body, not just a mismatch of flesh and limbs.
Having already fought a ghoul before, even though he never saw this kind of transformation, he guessed it had to be some kind of berserk skill, although the bonus granted certainly was smaller since there was a big AOE before the berserk skill itself.
The smaller ghoul jumped toward Adam with an impressive speed, but it was only as fast as Adam now. Adam feinted an attack, making the ghoul jump to the right, and becoming defenseless for a moment, which Adam used to slash it's already injured throat.
Critical Hit! -40 000 HP!
The ghoul hurriedly moved back, but Adam activated [Wind Strike], [Mighty Strike] and [Whirlwind Slash] before chasing after the ghoul. With his new speed, he caught up with the undead in an instant, and cut off its head.
Critical Hit! -73 000 HP!
Adam stopped fourteen meters farther, and seeing there weren't any undeads surroundings him, he took the time to take the loot this time. It was always hard to pick up loot in the middle of a battle, but thankfully they had moved away to let them fight.
It was the ghoul's biggest mistake to show its weak point to him. Because of its size, attacking its weak points for double the damage would endanger himself, but that headbutt had shown its weak point to him, and becoming smaller, although it made it stronger, it also made its throat even more accessible.
Once more in the horde of undeads, Adam activated [Mighty Strike] and [Icy Stomp], killing a whole bunch of undead and filling up his armor's berserk skill's condition.
But he didn't use it right away, but waited instead. He had discovered that spamming the skill was actually wearing the armor, and the damage wasn't repairable. The max durability of his armor was getting lower and lower, he hadn't noticed it at first, but when he had repaired his equipment before the battle he finally realized.
Even though he wouldn't use the equipment for long, he would be able to earn some money by selling it, so he decided not to damage it too much.
Instead of staying among the undead, he headed for the tanks that had taken the places of the swordsmen in front and began sweeping at every undead attacking them. Now that he was closed to his allies, he focused less on dodging and instead attacked.
As he did so, he found something peculiar. Almost every close ranged unit had an attack that was long ranged. For example, the flying slash of the swordsmen.
Even the undeads used it, so it seemed to be a generic skill for Silver Class. Thus, Adam decided he would try to learn it.
He lacked means to attack enemies at a distance, and when he faced mages this would start to limit him greatly. Moreover, the attack seemed quite simple to reproduce.
Adam first tried to put his entire strength into his strike, but only reproduced a lesser version of [Mighty Strike]. He shook his head, it was probably possible to create a sword of light just by using row power, but he wasn't there yet, nor were those Silver Ranks.
Instead, he needed to think. To activate [Mighty Strike], he would need to make his Aura circulate around different meridians in his body to dig as much strength as possible.
That's why [Mighty Strike] worked with all attacks and was a great skill for combinations. However, he couldn't use [Lunar Smite] and [Crushing Blow] at the same time, because both were a skill that involved the weapon rather than the body.
That's how Adam understood, to create a flying slash, the strength didn't need to come from his body, but from the sword itself.
He had already been working on applying Aura on his sword for the past couple of days, since his [Lunar Smite] had reached level 10 he wanted to push it to perfect mastery, and to do that he had to really understand the skill.
[Lunar Smite] was quite a complicated skill, it had several effects: It strengthened the attack, turned it into ice based, created three additional blades and occasionally slowed down the enemy.
In comparison, what Adam wanted to do was much simpler. All he wanted was to create a single blade that would be a simple extension of his own blade, it didn't need to have any element or to even make the strike stronger.
If he wanted to make the skill, he had to go step by step, and only then would he be able to create the skill.
Since he didn't have to create any additional blades of aura, the only thing he wanted to do was make his strike gain range. But yet again, there were different roads.
He could try to make the air in front of his sword somehow disappear or stop exerting force on his sword, so that the wind created by the swing of his sword could create a sword light.
Or he could use pure strength to overwhelm the air in front of his sword, but he still needed to find a way to gain that distance.