Artemisia M. Delgasso.
Simply known to many as the 'goddess Artemisia' or the 'goddess of Evolution'.
She was the being in the Valmone Universe's pantheon that was responsible for the 'Aspect' of Evolution.
Basically, she was the one who made sure that what needed to evolve did so, and what needed to stay primitive remained that way.
The second part was very necessary, as there were certain things in the universe that did not need to evolve; certain creatures that did not need to evolve to the point of gaining sentience and intelligence, leaving their primitive instinctive states.
However, as far as the law of evolution existed in the universe, these things would slowly but surely creep upwards on the path of evolution, so part of her duties involved dealing with those particularly dangerous ones.
Anyway, Artemisia had the 'Authority' to affect the Evolution of a being's existential aspects, though there were conditions attached to this.
When one went from the Gold level to the Master, Grandmaster and so on, one's body and soul were evolving, ascending to higher existence levels.
Artemisia was capable of reversing this evolution process, causing one to devolve instead.
And that was precisely what she did to the poor 'Lizard Lord', hence why it was losing power for 'no apparent reason'.
The Lizard Lord was originally an Epic Level existence with a Level surpassing 500. And over the years, this level had increased due to the thousands of adventurers it had killed in that boss room.
The Demonic Hand also fed it more things to kill and gain experience points from to level up even faster, as their goal was for it to be a 'Living Legend' by the time they wanted to effect their plans for Lacertilia.
By the time they wanted to carry out the 'Lizard Lord's Outbreak'.
Sadly, thanks to Artemisia's interference two years ago, that didn't go as planned.
The monster began losing power, and the power it lost in its devolution process had to be channelled somewhere.
That somewhere, was the Dungeon's Core.
Artemisia rewired the dungeon and used the monster's own power to fuel the delayed dungeon break.
Of course, she only did this in the first place because of Evan. She didn't want the boy to end up dying to the Epic Level 'Lizard Lord', given Evan could not defeat any Epic Level existence currently.
As stated before, the break happening 3 days earlier was simply the Lizard Lord's arbitrary decision.
Thus, the general reason why the Lizard Lord lost power and why there was a dungeon break in Lacertilia.
[I have told you this before, have I not?]
"Yes, you have. Years ago, I guess?"
Evan replied as he walked up to the group of 29 (spirits excluded), having changed from his bloody outfit to another one of the exact same design, but made with stronger materials.
Heaven knows how many Arachnes had suffered under Evan's hands for him to get the threads necessary for all those outfits.
He looked over to Pride and Greed who were drawing small demonic runes on their clothes, things that basically granted those normal-looking clothes more defensive power than most A Rank armours—the clothes' original defensive power taken out of the equation.
[Evan, be careful. While handling the Executive is something even you can do alone, anything can happen for what comes after.
Even that 'Lizard Lord' might do something unexpected.]
Hearing the goddess' words, Evan understood that she wasn't telling him that the boss 'Could' pull an unexpected trick.
She was telling him it 'WOULD' do something that he currently was not expecting.
'Well, thanks for the heads up.'
With that, the group of 30 kicked off towards the dungeon's entrance, and Evan felt a wave of nostalgia hit him the instant he reached it.
"To kick off the dungeon speed run. How about we have a little race?"
"Really, Evan? Now?"
Eliza gazed at him with half-lidded eyes, making her disagreement with his idea very clear, but the young hero only wordlessly turned towards the people who agreed with him.
"I'm up for it."
[Me too! Me too!]
Kayla jumped off Evan's shoulder and returned to her full body form, her height seeming a bit higher than Evan remembered it to be.
"All right then, Liz and Pride would come after us with the rest. First to get to the last floor wins."
Whilst the other adventurers were wondering how this was going to be possible given only Evan had the artifact to show the way, the other two had already agreed with his conditions.
"Ignore all monsters that 'don't matter'."
Evan added that little extra, basically telling them that fighting anything within the first 50 floors was unnecessary.
Looking at the wave of monsters that were rushing towards the dungeon entrance to break free, the young hero took a stance and called out.
"On your marks."
His golden aura surged and swirled around his legs.
"Ready."
lightsnοvεl.cοm **BZZZTT!!
Golden tendrils of lightning snaked around Kayla's form.
"Set."
Greed's muscles bulged lightly as he activated his idiosyncrasy.
"Go!" ***BOOOMMMM!!!!! x3
The trio of racers dashed off the instant the word 'Go' left Evan's lips, leaving behind deep craters in the ground with clouds of dust billowing as they vanished down the dungeon.
Eliza had created a barrier to block the dust and debris from reaching them, but even that barrier had cracks running through it after they zoomed off.
"I wanna say 'Boys would always be boys' but Kayla is a girl and she's with them."
"I would have agreed with you if one of the 'boys' wasn't my brother."
Just as Pride said that, she suddenly tilted her head to the side and turned towards Eliza, a look of slight incredulity on her face that mirrored the battle priestess'.
"We've had this exact conversation before, have we not?"
"Indeed, we have."
As they were conversing about their feelings of déjà vu, one of the other adventurers asked them if they were not going to go after Evan and the others, as with the speed the trio zoomed off with, it was gonna be hard to catch up if they didn't get moving.
"Kuro and Milena are Evan's contracted spirits. We can always find him using them."
Eliza replied as she twirled her staff and pointed towards Pride's feet with it, causing a ring of light to appear around the demon's legs.
"That would be useful."
Right after, the two ladies kicked off the ground and dashed forward, with the rest of the adventurers following closely.
Speed-wise, Eliza was one of the slowest in the group, only surpassing the other supports in speed, but she made up for that with her buffs that temporarily gave her speed somewhere around 'S- Level 10'.
With that, she was able to keep up with the combatants, and even help the other supports keep up as they moved deeper into the dungeon.
◇ ◇ ◇
Floor 5
Lair of the Lizard Lord
Dungeon City Lacertilia
May 5th
Year 1053
Two golden streaks of light side by side with a red streak of light zoomed across the nearly empty fifth floor of the dungeon, avoiding any large obstacle and leaving trails of scorched earth and carved-in soil in their wake.
Occasionally, the positions of the three changed, with the red sometimes surpassing one of the golden, whilst the other golden streak maintained consistent speed, either beside or in front of them.
Multiple sonic booms were left behind them as they traversed deeper into the dungeon's depths, ignoring all the monsters they passed.
The sonic booms did knock the monsters away and send them flying into the dungeon's walls but the three could not really care less about weak level 50 and 100 monsters.
Thanks to Artemisia, each of them had a map of the Dungeon's new layout imprinted in their heads, so they knew exactly where they were to go and where to avoid.
With how large the floors of the dungeon were (around 25-100 sq. km), and with the speed of the group, it would take them barely a minute to blitz through the shorter floors, whilst the longer ones could take up to three.
Roughly half an hour later, they had already broken past floor 50 of the dungeon, the breakpoint where the floor sizes increased and they needed close to a minute and a half to blitz through, if they ignored all the monsters present, that is.
On a normal day, the monsters which would have multiplied in number by this point would have been so many that they'd be hard-pressed to run through in 1.5 minutes, but thanks to the break, most of those monsters were outside so they could achieve this with ease.
That didn't mean that they didn't have a few obstacles though, and Evan chose to take care of them in some rather unorthodox method.
Evan was running on the left side of the dungeon walls, his right hand holding the unforged that had its blade pointed in the direction of the lizardmen monsters.
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