Certain things defined a dungeon, one of them being the Return Stone. Usually, it would drop from the first monster killed or from the first group if the monsters were many. It would allow an adventure to leave the dungeon at any time.


    ‘There was no such thing.’


    He destroyed many machines, but there was no such thing as a Return Stone falling from them. It was odd when only a cog appeared from the first machine, but he dismissed it as an anomaly.


    ‘If anomalies repeat themselves, then I don’t know the rules. The question is: how do I return?’


    He still hasn’t finished his quest, which included finding the entity that possessed the dwarf. He looked at the destroyed machine and sighed.


    “Who created you lot?”


    He suspected the creator of these machines to be the being who possessed the dwarves. Niki stood up and decided that he can only go forward.


    Since he kept traveling from one tform to the next, Niki saw a giant statue on one of them. However, there was a tform separating him from the statue.


    He took out one of Sergio’s Mana Restore potions and drank it. There weren’t many left, only one. His mana began regenerating, and Niki ran toward the next tform.


    This time, there was only a single machine on the giant tform. However, Niki looked like an ant in front of it. It was several meters tall and looked like a small mountain.


    When Nikinded on the tform, it lit up with myriad lights and began to move. The tform split into smaller pieces that rose, dived, slid to the side, or turned upside down.


    “Woah,”


    Niki almost lost his footing. As he stabilized himself, the machine began its attack. Machine guns appeared on its shoulders and started spinning.


    “Give me a moment to stand, man…”


    Niki sprinted away as the bullets began raining behind him. The trail they left was one of destruction, and they gave him no chance to flee.


    He jumped into the stealth dimension to lose the machine. However, it seemed to predict his movements. The bullets followed Niki as he climbed the raised piece of the tform, hoping to dodge the bullets.


    One of the bulletsnded on his body, breaking his stealth and making him grunt. He pulled himself up to climb the tform as the machine’s rockets arrived.


    Theynded on the tform, creating a series of explosions. mes engulfed the tform, with Niki at the center. His darkness rose to his call and surrounded him like a cocoon, protecting him from the fire.


    Stealth, Bane, and Pocket Dimension. These were the three characters of his Dark Element. The second one showed its might against the mes and protected Niki from the explosion.


    However, the explosion’s force made him expand mana to prevent it from pushing him off the tform. When the mes died down, only smoke that obstructed his sight remained.


    His ears twitched.


    Niki’s eyes snapped open as a bright light appeared from behind the smoke. The smoke cleared when the beam was fired from the machine’s head toward Niki.


    The darkness struck the ground while covering his left side. The force propelled him to the right, allowing him to dodge the beam of destruction in time.


    “TSSSS!”


    The beam destroyed his darkness as the heat reached unprecedented levels. Niki felt pain in his dantian as the cube began spinning to create more darkness, consuming his mana.


    He went into stealth as he rolled to the side. Niki sprinted and jumped as arge explosion destroyed the tform behind him despite his wound bleeding a lot.


    This amount of power made Niki greedy. If he can find a flying core for Alias in this ce, he might have one of the fastest ships in the world.


    Hended on a different tform and rolled on it before darting toward the machine. He took out his gun and infused it with darkness before firing at the legs of the machine, hoping to make it fall off the central tform.


    “Ding! Ding! Ding!”


    The sound of his bullets striking the giant machine’s legs rang loudly, but that was the only evidence that they even existed. Infusing the shots with darkness gave Niki the ability to hide his attacks, making them impossible to dodge.


    However, his darkness was the bane of elements, but that didn’t enhance the physical damage of his bullets. It did make them more effective, as the machine had an earth barrier around them.


    The Earth Element had the strongest barriers, so the creator utilized it to his advantage. However, it was futile in front of Niki’s bullets.


    The machine was intelligent, as it predicted his location from the direction the bullets came. It began shooting bullets his way while he rushed to get closer.


    Compared to humans, the machine’s shooting technique was rtively simple, and its attacks could be dodged as long as one kept looking at the machine guns.


    Niki dodged its attack and jumped from one tform to the other until he reached the central one. With his stealth, the machine couldn’t see him.


    Niki took out his Darkmoon Longbow and infused it with mana. He pulled the bow’s string as hard as he could while infusing the arrow with all of his darkness.


    The arrow turnedrger as the darkness weaved itself around it. Niki felt the bow grow bigger as it drank his darkness, increasing the destruction it could fire. He released the arrow, and the power sent him sliding to the edge.


    The arrow pierced the machine in the chest before exploding. The darkness engulfed the machine and seeped into its tiniest gap until the giant looked like a mountain of coal.


    “Unknown element has reached the core… self-destruction protocol…”


    The machine’s voice stopped before it could finish, and it fell to the ground. The tform shook and the impact, making Niki almost fall off.


    [The machine dropped a reward. Do you want to keep it in your pocket dimension?]


    [Key Blueprint: a blueprint to assemble a key.]