Chapter 266 | Survival Guide for a Doomed Villain in the Academy Dungeon

The Floor Boss room on the first layer of the Empire Dungeon.

Boom!

The massive body of a monster crashed to the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust.

With a flick of Allie's wrist, the blood on her longsword splattered onto the ground, leaving the blade gleaming with a pristine luster once more.

She glanced at the lifeless corpse of the Floor Boss on the ground and pouted in boredom.

“That idiot young master is way too cautious. The monsters here aren't even that strong. How could there be any danger?”

She muttered dismissively,

“He kept telling me, ‘Whatever you do, don't go deep in there alone.’ I think he's just worrying over nothing. Even if he didn't show up, I could handle all of this by myself.”

After sheathing her sword, Allie continued down the passage that opened up behind the Boss room.

The floor of this passage was covered in a fine, grayish-white powder, leaving clear footprints with every step she took.

The air carried a faint scent of dust, mixed with the dry aroma characteristic of certain ores, making one feel as though they had stepped into a wasteland forgotten by time.

The walls on both sides of the passage were made of stone that gleamed with a dull yellow luster. Their surfaces were smooth and cold, covered in various reliefs—some depicted interlocking gears, others showed tilted hourglasses, and some were abstract spiral patterns, as if portraying something related to time.

But these reliefs didn't slow Allie down in the slightest, mostly because she couldn't understand them, and she even found the carvings a bit ugly.

Allie quickly emerged from the passage, and the ruins of several damaged buildings appeared before her.

Giant gears lay half-buried in the sand, their teeth worn down beyond recognition and their surfaces covered in rust.

The face of a sundial had shattered into several pieces, scattered in a corner, its gnomon pointing crookedly into the empty air.

“I wonder if these count as antiques. Can I take them back to the surface and sell them for money?”

The thought crossed Allie's mind.

Although the Dark Night Order was currently thriving, she, as the Vice Bishop, didn't actually have much pocket money.

This was because Wendy had said, “Aside from maintaining a necessary facade, money should be spent where it counts, not on the luxury of the higher-ups.”

So no matter how much work Allie did, she was always stuck with the same fixed salary. Sometimes she even felt that the corrupt nobles she had killed weren't as stingy as Wendy.

However, after a couple of glances, Allie quickly looked away. She still had to prioritize the task her young master had assigned to her.

She began to venture deeper into the dungeon.

Allie was in a very relaxed mood, perhaps even a little bored.

The Floor Boss on the first layer hadn't even lasted five minutes against her, and the ordinary monsters didn't even get a chance to approach her.

Just as Allie was feeling sleepy enough to yawn, a rustling sound suddenly came from ahead, and several monsters the size of wild dogs darted out from the shadows.

They looked like a fusion of a lizard and an insect, covered in dark brown shells. Tiny, sharp teeth lined their mouthparts, and their six legs moved in rapid succession, scraping against the ground with a harsh, grating sound.

Their levels were around thirty. While they might pose a threat to ordinary adventurers, to Allie—

She didn't even halt her steps.

With a flash of sword light, before the foremost monster could even screech, it was sliced clean in half by a sharp sword aura.

With a slight flick of her wrist, Allie followed up with a horizontal slash. The second monster's head flew off, its body stumbling forward a few more steps before crashing down.

The third monster finally realized the danger and tried to turn and run, but the tip of Allie's sword was already pressed against the back of its neck. With a gentle thrust, she pierced its vitals.

Three monsters, dealt with in less than three breaths.

“How boring. They're not even as entertaining as those people with food poisoning back in the mountains.”

Allie sheathed her longsword, not even sparing a glance at the corpses on the ground, and continued forward.

A battle of this level didn't even count as a warm-up. It was as trivial as swatting a few flies.

She even began to think that once she conquered this dungeon all by herself and met up with Greg again, she would definitely tease that idiot young master, showing him that his worries were completely unnecessary.

As she went deeper, the passage gradually widened, and the remnants of hourglasses on both sides became more numerous. Some of them even had fine sand slowly flowing inside, as if still fulfilling their duty in the torrent of time.

The reliefs on the walls grew more intricate, depicting abstract designs that seemed to represent time and fate.

Allie passed through an archway and stepped into a relatively spacious hall.

The ceiling of the hall was high. In the center stood a massive hourglass sculpture, as thick as two men embracing. The fine sand inside had stopped flowing, accumulating into a flat mound at the bottom.

Several crystal lamps emitting a faint blue light were embedded in the walls around the hall, illuminating the entire space as bright as day.

Allie stood in the center of the hall, looking around, but she didn't find any trace of monsters.

She frowned, a faint sense of unease creeping into her heart.

The number of monsters along the way had been too low. The deeper she went, the scarcer they became, as if they were deliberately avoiding this area.

This didn't quite fit her classic logic that the closer one got to the final goal, the more obstacles there would be.

She slowed her pace, her gaze becoming more alert.

Though she claimed Greg was overly cautious, she was, after all, an experienced swordswoman. She knew that in certain situations, silence was far more dangerous than noise.

Just as she walked up to the giant hourglass sculpture in the center of the hall—

Her foot suddenly stepped on a stone slab that sank slightly.

At that instant, a pale golden light lit up from the patterns on the floor, rapidly spreading across the entire hall.

Allie's pupils dilated. She immediately tried to leap backward, but her body felt as if it were submerged in a viscous liquid, and her every movement became extremely sluggish.

She could clearly feel her muscles exerting force, but the resulting displacement was outrageously slow, like watching a slow-motion video played at a fraction of its speed.

Yet her thoughts remained clear; only her physical reaction speed was tightly bound by some invisible force.

This was undoubtedly a trap, and a terrifying one she had never seen before!

“I got careless...”

A wave of annoyance washed over Allie.

Greg had explicitly warned her not to go deep alone, but she had let her guard down because of the continuous, one-sided battles. As a result, she had stepped right into this insidious trap.

And just as she was pinned down by the trap, three figures silently emerged from the shadows of the hall.

They were three small but extremely bizarre-looking monsters.

Their bodies looked as if they were pieced together from broken clock parts, with metallic gears exposed at their joints. Every step they took produced a clicking, mechanical sound.

Their heads were translucent glass domes, inside of which floated a tiny, constantly rotating hourglass. The grains of sand cycled endlessly within the glass domes.

The trap restricting Allie had no effect on them.

The three monsters closed in on Allie at an extremely rapid pace, their sharp metal claws glinting coldly in the dim light.

Allie gritted her teeth and desperately channeled her mana, trying to break free from the time-deceleration restriction, but the viscous, sluggish feeling still tightly bound her limbs.

She needed at least ten seconds to break free, but the three monsters were already upon her. The foremost one had already raised its claws, aiming straight for her throat.