Chapter 56. Inferno Pyramid (2)

At the current point in time, it was definitely a difficult matter to conquer the Inferno Pyramid. Not to mention the named monsters, even the normal mobs appearing in the dungeon was considerably strong.

Going past all of that and killing the named monster was a tiring matter even for large-scale guilds.

Currently, there were over ten guilds that were known to be challenging Inferno Pyramid.

However, despite that, they could not defeat the first named monster, Black Mummy, and that was because they didn’t know the important points regarding the named monsters.

Terrícŭlum had the highest understanding, relatively, but even they didn’t know the exact answer.

In that sense, the video that Sanghyuk revealed as the BJ Gale helped the other guilds a lot.

Perhaps due to that, the large-scale guilds who were struggling with the first named monster until now instantly killed the Black Mummy and even succeed in the 2nd raid, the Giant Fire Scorpion.

This was only possible because BJ Gale had revealed to them the core points in conquering these named monsters.

At this point, people started wishing for BJ Gale to reveal all the videos in conquering the remaining named monsters, not caring about the first kill bonuses. However, BJ Gale did not reveal anything from the 3rd named monster onwards.

Instead, he revealed Blake’s battle footages and made the people nervous. In the meanwhile, Sanghyuk killed the 3rd, 4th, 5th and eventually the 6th named monster as well.

Originally, Sanghyuk thought that two days would suffice, but it took more time than he had expected, and eventually took 3 days to take all the first kill bonuses.

In the process, he had earned a lot of karma and obtained several rare-grade titles and items, but none of these attracted his interest.

The first spoonful did not fill him, but the 3rd and 4th spoonful did not satisfy him either.

However, he did not get disappointed.

There was one reason for this – it was the final named monster and the boss monster that made Sanghyuk choose Inferno Pyramid to conquer in the first place, the Sphinx.

In his view, the first six named monsters of Inferno Pyramid were just trivial mobs.

The real deal was definitely the Sphinx.

To exaggerate a little, the only boss worth killing in the whole of Hellfire Desert was this Sphinx.

This did mean that the Hellfire Desert was that desolate, but it also meant that the Sphinx was a relatively good monster even when compared to against the top-tier bosses of other continents.

Of course, there were no other users that knew of this fact. Since the difficulty of Inferno Pyramid was so high, they could not ever know that the Sphinx contained the cream of the crop.

So, right now, a raid dungeon called ‘Mirage Palace’ was much more popular than the Inferno Pyramid.

However, in Sanghyuk’s view, the Mirage Palace was just so-so. Clearing Mirage Palace tens of times did not amount to clearing Inferno Pyramid once in his opinion.

If there is a problem with this, it was that killing the Sphinx was definitely not an easy job.

Sphinx was not a monster that could be killed just with the walkthrough. No, just discovering the walkthrough required hundreds of challenges and discussions between top-level people.

So, Sanghyuk, who could skip all that process and start conquering, was at least tens of days ahead of ordinary people.

Of course, knowing the walkthrough and putting it into action was a different story altogether – especially for Sanghyuk, since he was alone and had to take care of everything by himself. With that being the case, there were more cases where the ‘traditional’ walkthrough could not be utilized by him.

Sanghyuk used the analysis of the named monster from his vantage point and first turned the walkthrough into a more of a theoretical walkthrough, which he would then use that to challenge the named monster and change his strategy on the go.

Since he had to do all that, even he had a hard time killing the named monster on the first go. The likes of Sphinx would take especially a lot of time.

Perhaps due to that, Sanghyuk had challenged the Sphinx 16 times on a single day but failed all of them.

The Sphinx was much more tricky than he had initially thought.

Its sandstorm attack was supposed to be taken care of by ‘one person’ and agro it to a corner, but since Sanghyuk was just one man, he could not do that.

In the end, Sanghyuk could only leave those sandstorms rage all over the place, and they dragged him down.

Even Sanghyuk would not be able to hold once he was swept up in the sandstorm. In the end, the only method is to avoid them all…… but once the battle dragged out, sandstorms would fill the whole place.

The original walkthrough consisted of one member in charge of dragging all the sandstorms to one corner and stack them together. The problem was that Sanghyuk received the attention of the Sphinx itself, so it was virtually impossible to stack those sandstorms in one corner.

Honestly, once he solved this problem, he didn’t think that killing the Sphinx was a difficult matter.

Now that he knew what the problem was, he logged out of the game temporarily and slept his lacking sleep. Even while resting, he contemplated on how to efficiently bypass those sandstorms.

After quite a while.

Sanghyuk found a clue. Whether it walked or not, he would have to try out in practice, but theoretically, it did seem possible.

Having arrived at an answer, Sanghyuk quickly ate his meal and logged into the game. While he was resting, the normal monsters leading to the ‘Hall of Judgement’ where Sphinx resided, had appeared again, but to Sanghyuk, who conquered raid bosses by himself, normal monsters posed no problem to him.

Sanghyuk easily killed those normal monsters in and lit the torch at the entrance of the Hall of Judgement.

*Flicker!*

This torch had the function to call out the Sphinx at the same time preventing the normal monsters from regenerating again.

The moment the torch was lit, the Hall of Judgement started trembling. Then, the sand on the ground started rising up.

*Kroaaaaaaaar!*

[Who asked for my judgment?]

The voice of the Sphinx rang out across the Hall of Judgement. The moment its voice rang out, the risen sand formed a certain shape.

A giant monster the same shape as the real sphinx existing in Egypt appeared. This was the final boss monster Sphinx, of Inferno Pyramid.

‘Well, then. Should I start?’

Sanghyuk smiled slightly while looking at the Sphinx. Perhaps it may be tiring to challenge it for the 17th time, but Sanghyuk was taking on the challenge with glee.

Actually, compared to working like a slave or a machine in his previous life, everything he did in this life was fun since he had his own will.

The method Sanghyuk tried.

It was…… to use the prefix option ‘Sand doll’ from the special title ‘Shadow Duke of the Desert’, to ‘dribble’ the sandstorms.

It did seem possible. The sand doll’s duration was two hours, and the Sphinx’s raid allocated time was 40 minutes.

In other words, it had to be killed before it went crazy after the 40-minute mark, so 2 hours was more than enough time to conquer it.

The problem was that the sand doll would disappear once it received a certain amount of damage. If it was caught up in the sandstorm due to a mistake, then it may just be crushed just like that.

So, Sanghyuk had to put his effort in to control the sand doll.

Naturally, controlling the sand doll all the while he focused on killing the Sphinx was not an easy thing to do. So, he didn’t think that this method was easy.

However, he thought that this was just trial and error as well. What was fortunate was that if the sand doll was un-summoned without being destroyed, then it could be re-summoned during the rest of the duration.

Meaning, he could try this method three times a day.

Since the cooldown was 16 hours, he couldn’t use it that much, but it was definitely a method worth considering.

In Sanghyuk’s previous life, there was one individual that appeared in every EL-related content. Floyd, the leader of the raid team, Hell, which was acknowledged as the greatest raid team for over 10 years.

If someone asked him the trick to doing a raid, he always answered the same thing.

‘After you find your own method, it’s the same for everyone after that. You just have to madly go against the boss……. That is the greatest method.’

Of course, finding the correct method of conquering was the prerequisite for this, but once it was found, then the battle was about how fast the raid team became used to the conquering method without making mistakes.

In that sense, one advantageous thing for Sanghyuk was that he was conquering this boss alone, and could drastically reduce the time to get used to the conquering method since he didn’t have to worry about teamwork.

Since he was an individual with many experiences in his previous life, he especially didn’t make a lot of mistakes.

***

The method using the sand doll definitely did have an effect. It was extremely difficult to control the sand doll and fight the Sphinx at the same time, but eventually, he managed to stack the sandstorms to one side.

However, due to trivial mistakes, he either received a big hit, or was hit by the debuff ‘Sphinx’s riddles’ which had to be avoided no matter what, and led him to give up the raid.

Since his attention was divided, he ended up making mistakes.

Sphinx’s riddles debuff was a breath-like attack that it spat out in various ways, and just being scratched by it would lower his attack power by over 50%, so Sanghyuk definitely had to avoid this.

This was originally the easiest part of the raid since a tanker would just take those hits, but this method was impossible for Sanghyuk who had to run the raid solo.

In any case, he kept failing, but Sanghyuk could see a possibility within those failures.

Since he saw a possibility, the next thing to do was to just ‘madly go against the boss’ like what Floyd said.

Sanghyuk used a whole 3 days to go against the Sphinx.

Since the Sand doll skill required 16 hours of cooldown time, he could not challenge the boss limitlessly.

During the past 3 days, he challenged the boss around 14 times and he could finally reach the 5th phase of the Sphinx.

[‘Tis the time of Judgement! ‘Tis the time of Judgement!]

Once it entered the fifth phase, the Sphinx stopped using all of its skills and shot out green eyebeams that were called the ‘Eyebeam of Judgement’.

This Eyebeam of Judgement even looked like it could never be touched, and indeed, it was a frightening attack that would insta-kill any user with a scratch.

With that attack being shot all over the place, the ones avoiding it would definitely have a hard time.

Considering that, the fifth phase of conquering the Sphinx may look like the hardest part.

However, once the method of bypassing it was known, the fifth phase couldn’t be any easier.

The core point of passing through the fifth phase was the Sphinx’s riddles debuff.

Eyebeams of Judgement could insta-kill any life form, but there was one exception. A being that answered the Sphinx’s riddle (i.e. the one with the debuff) was not damaged in any way.

There weren’t a lot of debuffs needed either. Just one was enough. So, Sanghyuk had already received one debuff before it went over to the 5th phase.

Of course, this debuff would decrease his damage by 50% with every single riddle in a compound fashion.

Right now, Sanghyuk’s attack had decreased by half.

In this state, even considering that he did not need to care about any defense, there was only five minutes until Sphinx went berserk, so he might lack damage if he wasn’t careful.

In fact, there were numerous raid teams that were wiped out because of lacking damage during the 5th phase.

This was especially so since one of the passive skills possessed by the Sphinx was ‘Tenacious sand lion’, which decreased all damage received by half once its health was below 10%.

In other words, being careless may lead to meeting the berserk Sphinx due to lack of damage.

Since Sanghyuk knew that very well, he did not take this situation lightly.

He consumed the fusion card ‘Dark Flame Dragon’ that he saved up until now, as well as all other buff-type fusion cards he could possibly use.

There was no need for defense!

Since Sanghyuk had anticipated this situation, he started barraging attacks at the Sphinx.