And now? Getting these agile monsters to double their poisonous darts made sure to fasten the spread of poison inside the bodies of bulls.

In brief, these monsters became much fiercer and deadlier than before. Just looking at their two moving tails like sensors made me feel little threat and more frustration.

If this kept up, wouldn’t I end up facing a hard to move rock or what? Would they stop me here?

No way! I still didn’t use one of my strongest weapons yet; my souls!

Should I summon these poisonous monsters? Or those bulls?

The bulls weren’t strong against those poisonous monsters, but I still didn’t like those agile monsters. They were good as far ranged attackers. But I doubted they’d do anything more than this.

“I’ll summon twenty,” I decided. Summoning these twenty would consume one hundred thousand souls. It wasn’t that big but it was enough force to dominate the fight here.

The twenty warriors summoned stood in front of me. I looked at them and thought about upgrading them.

“It’s still a waste,” but I didn’t do it. It would be a waste to spend even a few stat points over them.

“Attack!” as I brought them into life, I gave them the order to attack. At the same time, I summoned my heavy shield, deciding to use this shield and learn three skills attached to it.

I was almost passive with such a heavy shield. I had much lighter shields inside my inventory but I doubted their ability to stop the darts.

Especially after such an upgrade for the poisonous agile monsters. I held my shield and only did one task; defending my summoned warriors against all the incoming darts.

Using poison to fight poison might seem tempting, but in fact I knew this wouldn’t work. The poisonous creatures wouldn’t get easily poisoned to death with their own toxin.

But at least these darts would cause multiple wounds, ending up in weakening the enemies at least.

This took time. The two sides slept raining on each other with darts while I tried my best to defend my side. In more than half an hour, this fight was almost concluded.

The monsters were deeply wounded, showing obvious decline in attack rhythm. I didn’t hesitate to throw my shield back into my inventory, held my two swords, and then ran towards them.

It seemed with my sudden actions, I attracted their aggro. But they were already wounded, so their actions were slow and sluggish, lacking the old precision and fierceness.

As I moved closer, I didn’t hesitate to use one of the three sword skills I had…

“Sword Dance!”

I felt my body moving lightly like a feather. In a flash, I darted and hit one monster.

Then I felt the same force grabbing my body, moving me towards another monster, then another. This kept going on for half a minute before all the monsters here fell under my sword attacks.

The monsters were already this weak from the start, and I aimed directly at their heads. Also my sword gained ten times more damage power than the initial damage of the sword.

So it wasn’t that hard to kill all of them. As this battle concluded, I knew I’d take much longer time from now on than before.

“I should summon more monsters,” I knew that, but in fact just summoning those agile toxic monsters wasn’t enough.

They had to stand far from the enemy, giving the enemy time to evade their attacks. I also didn’t want to summon much more of them.

If this kept going on like this, then in five or ten more gates these monsters would be worthy of summoning.

So I decided to summon thirty of those bull monsters. I knew they would be weak against toxins, but if they were used right, then things would be fine.

“Let’s see how this tactic will do then,” I muttered to myself while burning the five zones around me.

As I watched fire burning and then the roars of monsters fighting each other, I thought about my shields.

I have a big variety of shields. But I wasn’t the type of the guy to move around holding shields.

The one I kept using was the highest graded shield I got. It was dark gold grade, so heavy as it had a very thick armour.

I hated pure defence. After all, defending wasn’t enough to kill any of my enemies. But as it was portrayed best here, I’d need sometimes to use the shield.

So I just hoped the next gate would grant me an agile bonus skill to my shield, or perhaps some sort of backlash or repenting of the attacks my shield would receive.

If this happened, then I’d be satisfied. But if I only got pure defence skills, it wouldn’t be worth the shot.

Anyway, the fire burnt to a satisfying degree. I started moving towards the next hexagonal zone.

As before, this zone was left with slightly over a hundred agile and toxic monsters.

“Come out,” I called forth my toxic warriors, leaving them to harass those bastards and attract their aggro.

Then I slowly started to move forward towards them. Last time when I tried to force my attack I grabbed their aggro. If not for them being weak and injured, I wouldn’t have got away unscathed.

So I kept slowly approaching while the two sides kept releasing their deadly darts. When I was only less than one hundred metres from them, I started my second phase of my plan.

“Come out,” I summoned the thirty bulls I summoned, “go, tear them apart with your horns.”

*Roar!*

The sudden appearance of my thirty bull monsters startled the agile monsters. Before they could react, my monsters already hit them.

Close ranged attacks from my bulls coupled with long ranged attacks from the toxic monster… This was my tactic, and it proved it was successful.

In less than five minutes, all the enemies were cleared. I lost only ten bull monsters thanks to poison. A good loss that I didn’t feel bitter about.