Divine Luck: SSS-Rank Battle Maid Harem

Zach and Yanael walked at a relaxed pace, following the havoc the others had wreaked as they tore through the forest to return to the Academy as soon as possible. Zach had been a little worried about staying behind on his own since he might not find his way back.

It had been necessary since he had to drop the anti-underworld potion in the hole and minimize the number of monsters coming for them. All the others had needed to accompany Violina and Nessa to ensure as smooth a journey as possible.

But that didn't take Zach's poor sense of direction into account.

However, he wasn't alone, and while Yanael's sense of direction wasn't anything to write home about, either, she was at least capable of following breadcrumbs, not to mention the loaves of traces the others left in their wake.

In due time, they would find their way back.

But Zach couldn't stop glancing back at the hole, or where he thought the hole was, to be precise.

It had been a while since he dropped the potion–fifteen minutes to half an hour at least. Yet, nothing had happened.

Zach wasn't sure what was supposed to have happened. It just felt like a potion as powerful as that one should have been would have caused a commotion wherever it was dropped.

The potion Zach gave to Nessa's Millipede had been diluted six or seven times. It was like water, compared to the original. But it had still done a lot of damage to the Millipede and chased out all of the underworld energy without even giving it room to fight back.

Zach felt like he could figure out the difference in potency.

One drop from the original potion had been diluted into another. One drop from that had been diluted into the third, and so on, until there was a bottle weak enough that Zach dared give it to the Millipede.

With a few hundred drops in each bottle, each diluted version carried a few hundredths of the previous version's strength. Round it to an equal hundred and reverse it to find out the original's strength in relation to the weakest one gave him something like one hundred times one hundred six times…

The original was a lot stronger than Nessa's. Period.

A potion that powerful should have done something to the well of underworld energy.

But nothing happened for a long while. Zach was suspicious. Did it not break?

There was no way it hadn't hit the bottom yet. It had been falling for half an hour straight.

Unfortunately, Zach didn't have the formula to calculate how deep that would make the hole. He felt lucky. He didn't want to know how deep that hole was if the bottle had been falling continuously.

Of course, there was no way Zach could know that the underworld energy deeper down the hole was so dense that it slowed down the bottle's descent, due to it refusing to touch underworld energy. It had a passive effect of trying to make the underworld energy part for it. But if the underworld energy didn't have anywhere to go, it became a slow descent.

The bottle floated down slowly in a bubble of clean air, gently pushing underworld energy away from it.

And finally, it reached the next layer.

The underworld energy in the hole had been dense because there wasn't enough space, but on the other side of the hole was a vast space. Immediately, the underworld energy was a lot less dense, and the potion picked up speed as it sailed toward the ground.

As it did so, numerous eyes picked up on its existence.

Right beneath the hole was one underworlder who turned its attention upward.

How could they not notice it? The potion was the greatest threat to them. Its sole purpose was to eradicate the source of their existence.

The underworlder that looked more like a hill than a sentient being let out a loud groan. The craters on its flabby body opened up and spewed out underworld energy in several thick streams straight at the glass bottle.

They did nothing. The underworld energy curved around the potion and shot into the hole again.

In another place in the vast underground space, Julius' eyes widened, and he limpingly hurried toward a door made for underworlders closer to a human's size. He dragged the Mannequin with him.

The other hill-like underworlders looked at the potion with the beady eyes on their disproportionately small heads. They couldn't do anything but watch it tumble through the air.

They existed to refine and redirect underworld energy. Their bodies weren't made to move. They were living factories. They lived so deep in the Underworld that there was no need for security.

By the time someone infiltrated, they would have already adapted to the underworld energy and would no longer be an enemy, and that was if they survived.

Julius was lucky. The door was open. He closed it behind himself and the Mannequin right as the bottle hit the solid body of the largest living factory in the vast space. A Named underworlder. Hjugor.

It was the underworlder responsible for all the underworld energy coming to the surface. It was one of the few living factories with the incredibly rare talent to increase the amount of underworld energy. A rare asset to the underworld and the Great Ugor. A great threat to the surface. A technically powerful underworlder.

Due to its size, which made Julius look like an ant, Hjugor's body was very solid. Otherwise, it would break tear from its own weight and all it had to go through when refining thin, gaseous underworld energy into more powerful versions.

Although it looked soft and flabby from a distance, it was hard—hard enough for the glass bottle to shatter on impact.
Find adventures at M-V-L

Julius' fate wouldn't have been very different, despite the dense underworld energy in the hole slowing his fall, if it weren't for the now flat wolf's corpse.

Instantly, the air exploded.