<h4>Chapter 236: Dig</h4>


    Opening his eyes Lake could tell almost no time had passed since he had fallen asleep. He had left Burst active to see if his Endurance had an effect on how long you slept. It seemed his experiment had been a sess because his body wasn''t even warm under the nket yet. He was pretty sure he had been sleeping for less than 10 minutes.


    He guessed it made sense with Burst active his Endurance was way past the level a mortal human could have and it made sense to him that gods wouldn''t really need to sleep at all once they reached a certain level. Just now he was pretty sure his exhaustion had been more of a mental thing than a physical anyway.


    It was almost like his mind had tricked his body into bing tired. He thought that sounded like what happened at least. He had never been through a fight quite that overwhelming before so he could understand if he had be overwhelmed. Either way with his break over he needed to start to think about what he should do now.


    There were a few things he could do that made sense but he wanted to keep his ns to things that didn''t put him into danger. He also wanted to make it to the surface but didn''t think he could if the barrier was still active. With these two goals Lake knew what he could do, he could just dig up to the surface around the barrier that was blocking off the top tiers of the city.


    He shouldn''t have any problems getting through the stone with Crunch and no one would try to stop him as long as he hid what he was doing. The amount of time it would take was a problem though. Even on the elevators it took a while to descend through the tiers and he wouldn''t be moving in a straight line towards the surface so he would actually be digging further than the elevators had to move to get to wherever he started digging.


    Now all he needed to do was figure out where he would start his tunnel. If he moved closer to the surface he wouldn''t have to dig as far but he would have to leave this tier which was a safe haven away from the Demon Worshipers. Thinking about it, Lake realized the Elevator shaft had been empty thest time he was there.


    He had flown up from the 41st tier and hadn''t even seen one person so if he just went up as high as he could and started digging in the elevator shaft he could get the benefits of being higher up without having to worry about any Demon Worshipers seeing what he was doing. None of them should be using the elevator shaft to get around anyway with all the secret staircases they had.


    Getting up and getting ready, Lake walked outside and was about to head for the elevator shaft when he thought he might as well look around for a while before he left. There had to be people here even if they were just normal people hiding. He wasn''t looking to save them though, he just wanted any information they might have.


    He knew they probably didn''t know what was going on on the surface but they might and he really wanted to know what the situation was like up there. It would tell him if he should leave and just head back to the Alchemist guild or stick around until the barrier came down so he could get paid.


    He guessed he could juste back at ater date to get his money but he felt not being here at the time the fighting ended would make what he did seem less important with lots of the people he had done things in front of moved on already. He also would need to be here to sing his own praises so nothing he did was attributed to anyone else. He couldn''t leave everything to other people.


    Walking towards the center of the city, Lake found the market where his quest for the Demon Worshipers started. He had spent like an hour here on the first day watching the others question people looking for anyone who acted suspicious. He had ended up marking arge number of people that were here to track them to see if any of them grouped up after they left.


    Turning on his Mana Vision Lake looked around to see if anyone was in the buildings surrounding the market. If he was hiding here he would have chosen the center of town to start his base so he felt this was the best ce to start his search. It didn''t take him long to find a group of people crouched in one of the buildings.


    Walking up to the door Lake knocked and when none of them came to answer the door he yelled. "Can you guys let me in?" He felt like if he called them out in any other way he woulde off as aggressive. Still none of them came to the door though so Lake said. "Please."


    As long as there was a single person inside that heard how pleading he sounded they should convince the others to let him in. It took around five minutes for what he predicted to happen but the person who came to the door didn''t open it. "What do you want?"


    "I wanted to know if you knew anything about what''s going on on the surface. I''m trying to get there and I wanted to know how feasible this n was."


    "I''ll answer your question but how did you know we were here?"


    "I''m a scout."


    "That''s what we figured. Sorry, but we don''t really know anything we''ve been hiding here since the first fights started." Hearing this Lake knew he was really just wasting his time and there was almost no chance of him finding any information here. If he really wanted information his best bet would be to Impersonate a Demon Worshiper near the surface for a while.


    He would rather just start digging than worry about doing that. Heading towards the elevator again Lake gathered enough mana to cast Fly and headed towards the surface. Soon after passing the 10th tier Lake could see the barrier that wouldn''t let him go all the waying up and went towards the wall while drawing his sword.


    Activating Mute so none of the stone he dug out made any sounds when it fell Lake cut into the wall using Crunch. Soon he had made enough of a space for him tond if he wanted but he kept himself in the air. He was going to try to dig at a steep enough angle that all the debris would fall into the shaft so that he wouldn''t have to stop to move the stuff out of the way and he needed to be off the ground so he wasn''t in the way of the rubble.


    After a bit of digging Lake realized just how much work he had just signed himself up for and started to try to think of a faster way to do it. He had loads of skills he could use to make himself stronger but the main thing keeping him from being able to move faster was his reach. His sword wasn''t partially long so all of his attacks on the wall were shallow and he was burning through his Stamina using Crunch after every two attacks.


    Thankfully the refresh rate for his Stamina was extremely high so it was offsetting this but he would still tire himself out after a while even if all that happened was he got bored of doing this. Thinking of a very basic way to improve his digging speed, Lake left the tunnel and set Detector to look for a long sword.


    Entering the 10th tier Lake could tell it wasn''t as peaceful as the 25th. He wasn''t here to fight though so he just ignored it and looked around until Detector lit up a sword. Sadly it was on the back of a person passing and they weren''t an enemy so he moved on to try and find one on a dead person.


    It seemed the fighting had been going on for a while because there were people on the ground almost everywhere he looked so he was sure he would be able to salvage one off of someone without having to rob anybody. He was in good guy mode right now so he didn''t want to ruin it just to save a few minutes.


    After checking a few streets, Lake realized a lot of the bodies had been picked clean of any gear or just didn''t have any to begin with and decided to look for the base of the surviving fighters on this tier. If they had been gathering gear off of bodies they should have someying around that he could take.