Dante panted heavily, falling to his ass immediately. If you asked him what exactly just happened and why, he would be hard-pressed to answer. Not only did he not know where he was, but he was suddenly attacked before he could even get his bearings.

The sad part was that he would very much love to increase his stats to 250,000 in Intelligence and send his spirit sense out for the full range, which would be an amazing 250 kilometers, but it did not work like that.

Only his Eyes of Illusion were directly affected by enhancements to stats. The two physical and magical methods, though, did not because they had their own realms and rules. This was why they were selected in the first place, so that they would be useful in the Zero Gate where the tech enhancements would be disabled.

Speaking of his eyes, they were currently aching as Dante rubbed them gently, his throbbing veins calming down as the strain on his mind relaxed. He had pushed himself hard in order to try and trap the vulture creature and interrogate it for information about where he was, but it escaped in the end.

Thinking about future dangers, Dante decided to return to the home universe to recuperate then link up with Beatrice to find out what the heck just happened. However, the moment he tried to teleport away, he got a very severe warning from his superpower.

He COULD teleport away, but it kept… beeping?… that he absolutely SHOULD not.

Dante was confused and tried to make sense of the signals. It was hard to communicate when both parties were speaking entirely different languages and resorted to painting on the sand to convey what they wanted to say.

After a while, Dante seemed to understand the gist of it. While he did not know what this land was, it was definitely not the Zero Gate, but it was something far better. The danger was extremely high for the current him but the rewards were even higher if he did… something.

What that something was, no matter how they tried to alternate the message, Dante could not grasp it. As such, he looked at his current scenario and gauged that it must be one of four things.

1. Survive

2. Kill

3. Acquire

4. Escape

These were the four possible objectives he would have to achieve here based on the little he knew so far.

Survival was straightforward to maybe make it to the end of a certain period of time? The Zero Gate thing was supposed to last 30 days, so maybe it was that?

lightsnοvεl.cοm Killing might be another thing. Maybe he had to kill one or ten monsters like the vulture to qualify for rewards or to leave?

Acquisition was based on his knowledge of the Zero Gate. Since one could acquire fruits there, maybe there was something that he needed to acquire here to be able to progress?

Escape… maybe travel would be a better term. Maybe he was supposed to leave the area of this wasteland and reach a city or something?

Funny enough when Dante thought this, there was a strong feedback from his superpower, which he could barely interpret to mean that it was… all of the above?

Interesting.

He also noticed that ever since he appeared here, his connection to his superpower – specifically to the cosmic tree – had been inexplicably strengthened, as if the distance between then had been shortened by a huge amount.

He kept note of this and looked around. Dante decided that he would move in the same direction that the vulture creature left since that was his only real lead, dangerous as it was.

Rather than run or fly, Dante decided to hover over the earth using his exosuit’s jet thrusters as that would save his bodily energy and make the least noise. Also, he felt it would be best to not only set up spatial shields but also to enter sub-space so that nothing on this plane could touch him.

With that in mind, Dante cast the 3rd Rank spell, Ethereal Passage.

The moment his body faded and became translucent, he had entered the sub-space. However, after just a split second of being within, Dante’s head snapped to the side and his expression changed to one of primordial horror.

He roared and canceled the spell before activating his Bionics to the max then bolting away as fast as he could towards the north, where the vulture creature left. In the nanosecond that he had to flee, he covered an impressive distance, but he was soon knocked to his feet as the entire world seemed to tremble and shake.

Huge cracks appeared on the space where he had been standing previously when he entered sub-space, like someone had quite literally turned space into glass and was trying to smash through it.

The world shook multiple times as the cracks widened and expanded, showing that something on the other side was trying to breakthrough to this side. Having seen what that thing was, Dante was in full-on panic mode as he scrambled to his feet and continued to flee without caring about energy consumption.

There was now a microsecond of silence before the biggest tremor occurred, causing space to shatter and a hole to form that was the size of the Empire State Building that displayed a dark and formless void on the other side.

From that hole, a mound of tentacles appeared that was dark black and spiked, with hundreds of eyeballs on them from top to bottom. The eyeballs circled and around, looked in all directions like country bumpkins that had never seen the world before.

The tentacles gripped either side of the portal as if it was a flat surface and pulled a giant head that was shaped like a chimera from the Resistance series through. The head sucked in once and almost everything within a 100 kilometers was dragged over.

Dante himself forcibly locked himself in space using another spatial spell but did not dare enter sub-space once more. However, his usage of the space element caused the giant head to zero in on him.

Immediately, the tentacles surged towards him at a horrifying speed, as if air pressure and friction were a joke to them. Dante could only grit his teeth and continually blink to dodge them because even with his stats boosted, he was not fast enough to avoid these things.

He did not dare bring his blood battle halberd out to fight this thing because it was exuding the pure power of void space. That element could destroy and cut through everything in normal space, which was why typical physics did not seem to work on this monster.

Only space could fight space at this level, so Dante activated his 3rd Rank Cosmic Nova spell which was the most powerful offensive space spell he had. Cosmic Nova was far superior to its 1st Rank Astral Flare and 2nd Rank Celestial Rift in that the star projectiles it summoned were as large as space rockets and contained intense power within.

Coupled with the fact that Dante was now at the 5th Rank, and his space element boost of 750%, its output was truly monstrous. A giant void filled with spots like stars appeared behind Dante.

This was in contrast to the monster’s void which was a dark mass of nothingness; Dante’s own seemed more vibrant and lively, similar to the typical view of space we have at night from the planet.

The light spots brightened rapidly and then began to fire out like explosive bullets, soaring towards the target with no hesitation. When they struck the coiling tentacles of the beast, there were huge explosions that sent the tentacles flying back and even damaged them somewhat.

The beast roared in pain and glared at Dante with a mixture of hatred and greed. Clearly, it had gone through all this not because the tiny Dante was a worthwhile morsel, but because he had something that it wanted.

Seeing that its greed intensified the more he used his spatial abilities, Dante understood why with a dark expression. It was clearly lusting after his spiritual cores full of purified space elements!

To it, Dante while tiny, was like a giant steak to a starving lion. It would do anything to get a bite!

Knowing this, Dante burned his space elements to infuse more power into his spell, unleashing even more potent starlight projectiles. Dante was sure that he could have completely turned an entire continent into rubble with the level of bombardment he was unleashing.

In fact, he could irreparably change an entire planet’s atmosphere and ecosystem if he sustained this, but the mental energy consumption was not small. He immediately had to release his 2.5 km Gluttonous Inferno to replenish what he could in real-time.

The tentacles fought with the projectiles and caused great explosions of energy and force in the center, causing the ground below their feet to shake and tremor crazily.

Any living thing within a 100 kilometers of this could likely feel and hear the conflict going on here and were likely **ting their pants.