Chapter 369 – Depths
Standing on the shore of the lake, Damion picked up the core for the floor and considered if he just wanted to move on. The guardian of the floor appeared to be too afraid of Phil to come close enough to the shore for them to fight. Which meant he would have to fly out over the lake and there was strong chance the guardian would just dive under the water and hide once it figured out it could not win.
With True Sight Damion had been able to at least identify the guardian. The F Rank Water affinity Demonic Beast was a Quinkana. A type of crocodile that typically grew to around three meters and it could spew a Water affinity attack from its mouth similar to Torrent.
Adding a Water affinity core to his growing spoils would have been nice, but given that the Demonic Beast was avoiding him, Damion settled on destroying the core. No sense in spending a lot of time trying to fight a beast that was happy to avoid a fight. There would be plenty of magic cores available in the next floors.
The Argentum labyrinth had the first three floors being F Rank and then starting at floor four was D E Rank and at seven the D Rank floors began. Damion really wanted to at least explore up to the C Rank floors today. Which meant not wasting time hunting down weak Demonic Beasts.
Crushing the core caused the entrance to the next floor to appear and Damion headed through. He notated what they type and affinity of the guardian, if others wanted to fight the guardian in the future, they would have some information to help them.
When Damion and Phil appeared on the third floor he was a bit in awe of how much the landscape had changed. Usually, the floors grouped types of areas by Rank and slowly shifted. He had expected a lake or a river, but what he found was rather shocking and would pose an interesting challenge for adventurers when the labyrinth fully opened.
Damion and Phil appeared on a small island, roughly ten meters across with the entrance back to the second floor in the center. There were a few palm trees, and he had the distinct feeling of being trapped on a deserted island. There were no Demonic Beasts on the island, but most likely, the whole island was considered this floor’s safe area. There was a good chance that as soon as they moved off of it, the Demonic Beasts would start showing up.
Luckily, Damion could fly with his Ice Sword, the question was, where to fly. The map created by his auto-mapper revealed a number of similar size islands out in the sea, several dozen in fact, unfortunately, not a single one of them appeared to have the core to open the entrance to the next floor, despite each being filled with Demonic Beasts. He also saw that the water was filled with Demonic Beasts, hundreds, perhaps thousands, but they were deep in the water.
When Damion switched his tablet to projection mode, so he could get a three-dimensional representation of the area, he saw that each of the islands were essentially giant pillars. Just off the sandy beaches, land just ended creating a drop straight down with the seabed was a good two hundred meters beneath the water.
The majority of the Demonic Beasts were swimming around near the bottom, which was dotted with old buildings, almost as if there was a sunken city down there. To Damion’s surprise, there was a large building at the bottom, it appeared to be an ancient temple of sorts, with broken pillars and destroyed statues all around it. There, in the middle of the ruins, was the dungeon core and around it swam a school of Demonic Beasts. Damion was not sure what kind they were, but he was willing to bet they were some type of shark.
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Seeing the core on the bottom of the sea told Damion where he had to go, the problem was how was he supposed to get there. He doubted he could hold his breath and swim that far down, even if he could swim that fast or hold his breath that long, what was Phil to do and where was the entrance to the next floor going to appear? The Water Breathing spell would have been nice, but he had passed on the opportunity to learn it from the Repository that Mage Teft had given him. And it was too late to learn now, since he left the message holder behind with Elicia, so that she could study the different Wind affinity spells available.
Even if he had it, there was still a major problem, what was Phil supposed to do? The Demonic Beast was not a water bird and even if it could swim a little bit, there was no way Phil could make it to the bottom. After a few moments of thought, Damion realized he did have a spell that could work, and it would even let both of them reach the bottom without so much as getting wet. So long as Damion could maintain the spell and his focus.
Walking over to the beach, Damion cast Mater Mastery. The tier 5 spell would allow him to control all water around him, similar to his Ice Mastery spell. However, he was not trying to manipulate the water to create attacks, he simply wanted to create a bubble around him and Phil.
Focusing his will, Damion pushed the water around them, keeping it at bay. After walking all the way to the drop off and being able to hold the water back, he was sure his plan would work, he just needed a safe way to the bottom. Walking back up the beach to dry land, Damion released Water Mastery and cast Summon Ice. The spell cost a bit more than Ice Sword to maintain, but once he flattened out the block of ice, it had room for both him and Phil to stand.
Controlling the Ice, Damion flew them both over the water to directly over where the core was. He then cast Water Mastery again and started lowering himself and Phil on their ice platform. As they descended, the water flowed around them, staying a few meters away.
In less than five minutes, Damion and Phil were at the bottom and he was holding the floor core in his hand. The school of sharks that had been swimming around the core had fled, either not wanting to face a B Rank Demonic Beast or because the strange bubble that descended from above had scared them away. Either way, it did not matter. He crushed the core and then looked around, but he had no luck in finding the entrance to the fourth floor.
Perplexed, Damion took out his tablet and opened up his map. What he found was that the entrance had opened on one of the other islands. This was good news for adventurers coming to the labyrinth in the future, they would not need to figure out their own way to the bottom of the sea, but it meant he now had to fly him and Phil back to the surface.
“Going up,” Damion told Phil as he started moving them towards the surface.
Once they breached the surface, Damion shut down Water Mastery and felt relieved. Keeping such a costly spell active for so long was tiring, even if he had the mana to do it, the actual act was still tiring. Damion quickly flew him and Phil over to the island with the entrance to the fourth floor and looked at the Demonic Beasts there.
They were a type of monkey, with long arms and long tails that they were very dexterous with, making in essentially a fifth limb to use to hang and swing from the trees. To Damion’s surprise, the monkeys were Water affinity creatures and as Damion and Phil approached, the F Rank Demonic Beasts started throwing Water Blasts at them.
The magic was much too weak to hurt either one of them, but when Phil screeched at them, the monkeys simply screamed back and doubled the number of Water Blasts they were sending at the pair.
After a few moments, Phil had enough, and flew down, casting his Blizzard spell in the middle of the island. In just a few seconds of exposure, the tropical island had turned into a frozen tundra with Phil perched triumphantly on top of the entrance to the fourth floor with two dozen monkeys frozen mid Water Blast throw around the island.