SPURT!
The centipede's head was evenly sliced off, with the rest of its long body tumbling off the side of one of the buildings before crashing to the cobblestone road, leaving a number of cracks.
[Ding! |Shadow Moon Wolf| killed a Lvl 34 Razor Centipede and received 40,000 EXP!]
[Ding! |Shadow Moon Wolf| leveled up!]
[Ding! You received 20,000 EXP!]
"Woof!" The wolf returned to its master with a look that was just begging for praise. Luckily, Romulus was in a good mood, so he patted it while using his S-Rank Devour Skill to eat up both the corpse and the C-Rank Magic Core.
[Ding! You devoured a Lvl 34 Razor Centipede and received 0.1 Stat Points in Strength, 0.2 in Agility, 0.1 on Defense, and 0.1 in Intelligence!]
[Ding! S-Rank |Devour| has increased from Lvl 4 → Lvl 5]
[Ding! You devoured a Mid-C-Rank Dark-Element Magic Core!]
[Your Affinity with the Dark-Element slightly improved!]
Romulus's face drooped a little in disappointment. "It seems like the gains I get from anything below the A-Rank might as well not even be there," he said. "Still, something is better than nothing, and with hundreds of shadow summons at my beck and call, the chance of that nothing turning into something extraordinary becomes a lot higher."
Without wasting any more time on idle monologue, Romulus instructed his 150 shadow summons to split up into groups of ten and conquer every area in the Inner Circle. As the monsters would constantly keep respawning due to the effects of the Immortal Witch, there was plenty of farming to be had. Moreover, it didn't seem like the Witch could personally interfere herself, or even send out stronger monsters to interfere with his plans, which meant it was nothing but smooth sailing for the near future.
After 4 hours had passed since the expansion of the Shadow Legion, the entire Outer and Inner Circles had been completely explored and farmed to the limits. From these individual farming sessions, Romulus saw variation appear among the ranks of his army. Those like Uno and Dos were already at Lvl 49, putting them near the peak of the B-Rank. Whereas the newer or less hard-working members were still in the 30s range, or early 40s. Ultimately, this led to a strict military hierarchy being placed down, which had Uno, Dos, and Wolfy, the Shadow Moon Wolf, at the top of the military chain. This put them at the level of Generals.
Below them in Rank were the Captains, of which there were around a dozen. Even lower would be the Squad Leaders, who led groups of 5-10. And then, finally, there were the soldiers, who, although the weakest, still had their parts to play in the grand scheme of things.
The Soldiers or Grunts were of the Grand Knight Rank, which made them far more intimidating and powerful than their military ranks would suggest. They numbered close to a thousand and had high variation in power. On the other hand, the Squad Leaders were Supreme Knights, but of the lowest levels of that category. Captains were in the Mid to Late part of the Supreme Knight Rank, while the Three Generals were at the very limit of the Supreme Knight Rank, verging on the Legendary Knight Rank that comes after, also signifying the A-Rank.
Watching from the sidelines, Romulus focused on three separate battles that were destroying dozens of buildings. 'All three of my self-proclaimed Generals are fighting different A-Rank Monsters in the very beginning of the Center Circle,' he thought. 'How they fare against them will all be dependent on fate.'
SHING! SHING!
BOOM! BOOM!
The buildings of Ghost Town were being decimated left and right, with giant monsters and intimidating shadow people jumping all over the place. On more than one occasion, Romulus had to slightly turn his head out of the way of a stray beam of energy. Yet, with the battles increasing in intensity, the amount of dodging he had to do increased a few fold.
Eventually, he decided it to be too troublesome, so he just tanked the hits with his ridiculous amount of rapidly restoring MP.
Many a times the three Generals had fallen in Battle, but with the Shadow Immortality Skill, they just kept coming back to life. Moreover, the MP expenditure from these revivals was almost negligible at this current stage. However, when the battles reached a turning point in ferocity, Romulus definitely noticed his MP deplete by far larger margins, although still not very much either way.
[Ding! |Uno (Lvl 49)| died due to a blunt force impact!]
[Shadow Immortality is being applied!]
[|Uno (Lvl 49)| received a fatal wound and survived! It has thus received 5 BP!]
[Ding! You received 2.5 BP!]
Something else that Romulus noticed while spectating his Shadow Legion was that, just like how he obtained BP from getting beat up, they also obtained BP in the same way. Furthermore, he would receive half of every BP they obtained. Yet, this only had noticeable gains for his higher-level Shadows. Anything below the Captain rank would not even alott him 0.1 BP each time they succumbed to a fatal wound, and that number would be reduced with each death at that certain rank. For example, if a Squad Leader Shadow died 100 times while in the Low Supreme Knight Rank, then both it and Romulus would receive virtually nothing. However, when it breaks through to the Mid Supreme Knight Rank, the BP gainer would be reset, and they could both continue seeing the gains.
So far, his Shadow Summon Skill has advanced to the Level 5 B-Rank. Hence, it was only natural that the upper limit of the Shadow Legion had been tremendously improved. From the original 150, it skyrocketed straight to 1300!
However, with there being a daily summon limit on the number of Shadow Summons that could be summoned from the Shadow Realm, Romulus leaned more toward the Shadow Rebirth Skill. All the Shadow-related skills were at Level 5 of the B-Rank, and as such, their utilizations had tremendously improved. One of these improvements pertained to the number of times that the Shadow Rebirth Skill could be used when it came to individuals. The attempt limit was still at 5, but the number of Shadows that could be added to the Shadow Legion had already surpassed the upper limit of Shadows.
In other words, Romulus could use the skill all day long. Which was exactly what he did…
.....