The Dungeon Conquerors: Journey to the Peak

After the introduction was over, none of them wasted any time and entered the Ashen Barrens again for the investigation. Everyone was expecting an attack by the monsters again as soon as they returned back to the Ashen Barrens but to their surprise, nothing happened. It was just as calm as it was before the rampage.

It had only been a single day after the rampage but from the looks of it, the Ashen Barrens had returned back to normal. But that did not mean Rein and his partners would be able to relax because of this. These monsters could suddenly start attacking then any time they wanted and it was quite troublesome.

Obviously Sophia had the role of a scout in this team and Kasumi was supporting her. She also had a few scouting techniques that relied on mental wavelength to find living things. It was a little similar to Rein's own technique so he was extremely interested in learning more about it.

With those two scouting the way, the team of these five top ranking UR grades proceeded extremely smoothly. For the time being according to what Rein and Sophia had planned before, they were going to investigate the location where Rein had seen the gathering of monsters. They were really hoping to find some clues at that location.

It did not take them too long and soon they were able to find the area where Rein had seen the monster gathering. It was an underground cave and just looking at it once was enough for everyone to see that not long ago, this place was definitely crawling with monsters.

Everyone started investigating this area separately but they did not go too far away from each other. Then after about an hour, they all gathered together to discuss about the things that they were able to find out.

First it was Sophia's turn. She had investigated this whole area thoroughly and had managed to deduce that the monsters here had started gathering here almost at the same time as when the participants of the second round had entered the Ashen Barrens.

It was a swift response from this Sophia judged that the mastermind behind the whole incident did not just attack the participants on a whim and it was actually a well thought out attack which the mastermind had been preparing for a decent amount of time.

Killing a UR grade was extremely hard. Not only were their abilities powerful, UR grades also had various trump cards to save their life in dangerous situations. As they were the central pillars of any nation, those nations did not hesitate to do whatever it could to provide the best security measures for their UR grade powerhouse.

For that reason, even in the history of World Blessed Championship, a UR grade dying had almost never happened except for a few exceptions. While on the other hand, in the championship of other grades, death of a competitor was very common. So without the whole attack being extremely well planned, the deaths of so many UR grades was impossible.

After that the other four also spoke about the things that they had managed to notice. But as none of them were as proficient as Sophia in investigation and searching, they did not manage to find anything useful. But Kasumi did tell them about a speculation of hers. She did not have any proof about it but her instincts were telling her that she was on the right path of thinking.

Kasumi was able to see faint traces of mental wavelength of the monsters staying in this location. There were almost an uncountable number of such wavelengths but after trying extremely hard, Kasumi did manage to separately go through quite a few of those.

From them she noticed that almost most of the monsters had the general wavelength of a monster who did not show the sign of much intelligence. But there were only a few distinct wavelengths with considerable intelligence. It still had the ferocity inherent to a monster but at the same time, the cunning of a human was also present there.

It was extremely faint and there was a chance that Kasumi had mixed up a few human wavelengths with the monsters but because of her intuition she was sure about the truth of her assumptions. She speculated that there must be intelligent monsters who were in charge of managing this group here.

If that was true, then trying to find those intelligent monsters would be much better than to roam the whole danger zone in search of clues. Every powerhouse knew about the importance of intuition, so no one doubted what Kasumi said and decided to make their next plan on the basis that there were intelligent monsters here larking in the Ashen Barrens.

...

Now that they had an objective in mind, everyone became more excited about investigating the Ashen Barrens. As their intelligent monsters had more complex thoughts than other ones, they were easily distinguishable by Kasumi's ability. For that reason instead of slowly investigating the Barrens, this time all of them started to run faster to cover as much area of the Barrens as possible.

For the time being other than these five people, no other humans were allowed to enter this place. So any mental wavelength with complexity in it would definitely belong to that intelligent monster. And not long after they started searching with this in mind, Kasumi noticed one such mental wavelength. Rein was also using his ability and a few seconds after Kasumi, he was also able to find it.

This was a huge advantage and all five of them immediately went toward the complex mental wavelength. And very soon the monster responsible for this wavelength was before their eyes. But the monster in front of them was not what they were expecting which made all five of the bewildered.

They had thought that the intelligent monster would be quite powerful and should be able to match UR grades in strength. But that was not the case here as the monster in question was just a scorpion who was nowhere near strong enough to fight against a UR grade.

But there was no doubt about the intelligence of this monster. Actually these scorpion monsters lived in a group. All the other scorpions were staying in their group as usual and only this particular scorpion was resting at a distance.

Even after finding it, they did not immediately attack it. Letting it know that humans were targeting it would not be a good thing. So without alerting it, all of them started to investigate this scorpion to find out if anything was different about it if compared to the other scorpions. And in a very short period of time, almost everyone noticed a big difference.

Now what that difference was ?