Chapter 373 – Heat Resistance
*Ding*
{Spell Heat Resistance mastery increased to E Rank}
*Ding*
{Quest Completed}
[Quest: Increase a Magic Spell in Rank – Status: Complete – Reward: 100 Experience, 500 Store Credit.]
Damion watched the burned flesh of his finger become pink and then good as new as Minor Heal did its work. Aside from Poison Resistance, this was the first time one of his new resistance spells had increased in Rank and now he thought he understood why. He seldom went into extreme environments or allowed himself to get hurt.
Looking at the surface of the water and thinking of the scalding temperature he could not help but wonder why the water was not boiling or why there was no steam coming off the surface. The only answer Damion could come up with was there was magic at work. Either magic concealing the normal obvious signs of scalding water or that somehow the water was magically heated and thus did not have to follow the normal laws of thermodynamics. Damion thought the first option was more likely, that there was some concealment effect going on, since plenty of people used magic to boil water and as far as he knew the water always showed the normal signs of boiling.
He made a note of the dangerous water temperature and that no one should touch the water and then headed into the surrounding forest to check what kinds of Demonic Beasts were lurking on this floor.
Phil had flown to another part of the floor to hunt, leaving Damion to ferret out the Demonic Beasts in the trees himself. As he moved through the jungle he quickly encountered two different Demonic Beasts, both were Fire affinity, one was the same Fire Monkey Demonic Beast he had encountered on floor three, the other was a Fire Ape.
Both Demonic Beasts were dispatched by a single Ice Shard and Damion collected their carcasses. There were plenty more throughout the jungle, but he was anxious to get to the deeper floors, and these Demonic Beasts were only F Rank.
Casting Ice Sword, Damion flew across the lake and landed looking around the area near the core. To his surprise, he saw no signs of the floor guardian, but he did see what looked to be drag marks all across the sand.
Deciding to investigate a bit more, Damion flew over the jungle on this side of the lake in search for additional Demonic Beasts. What he found were a group of Lava Scutalus, leaving a flaming trail behind them, when the fire left in their wake died out it appeared similar to the drag marks he saw on the beach.
When he spotted the large snail Demonic Beasts Damion was quite happy, not because he found more creatures to kill, but because they were E Rank. These beasts at E Rank meant the floor was now E Rank and he had finally moved out of the F Rank floors. If other labyrinths were any indication, then the E Rank floors would last for five floors before the D Rank floors began. Now that he had this information, he could start to guess at how many floors he would need to clear before he reached the B Rank floors.
After killing all of the Lava Scutalus and storing their carcasses, Damion flew back to the beach and destroyed the floor core.
‘Let’s go to the next floor,’ Damion called out to Phil.
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‘Better hunting?’ Phil questioned.
‘We won’t know until we go, but everything should be stronger,’ Damion sent back.
Phil flew over a few moments later and they flew through the entrance to the next floor. On the seventh floor the pair found themselves in a jungle similar to the one surrounding the beach on the previous floor, but instead of everything gently sloping down to a central lake, in front of them there was a massive mountain with smoke rising from the top.
A volcano. It only took a moment of looking at the mountain for Damion to come to that conclusion. Sure, it was possible there was a fire up on top of the mountain, but he doubted it. Thinking back to the last floor, the lake at the center of a depression, he guessed it was a lake that formed in the caldera of an old volcano. While that might not explain why there were no typical indications of super-heated water, it still explained most of the lingering questions from the sixth floor.
The auto-mapper revealed the core to the floor was on the rim of the volcano on this floor. Seeing how the previous floor seemed to be from an old volcano and this one was an active volcano, Damion had the sinking suspicion the next floor would be down in the volcano, similar to the volcano floors in the Argentum labyrinth.
“Take a look around while I head to the core. Let me know if you find any new Demonic Beasts,” Damion told Phil.
‘New?’
“Any that are different from the last floor,” Damion clarified for his companion. Their bond was strengthening, and he felt Phil had grown in intelligence, but the Blizzard King was still a Demonic Beast and had yet to reach the level of human intelligence.
Damion flew above the trees and headed towards the peak, leaving Phil to explore. He felt there might be one or two new types of Demonic Beasts on this floor, but he was fairly confident that most be the same as every other Fire affinity Realm Breach. Even if he was wrong, it would just give future adventurers something to discover when the labyrinth opened for challengers. Right now, Damion wanted to get to the deeper floors.
If he could actually train in B Rank or A Rank floors daily he was sure he would see a jump in his growth. Outside there just was not a high enough concentration of mana to help him raise his magic power. Even with keeping Mana Absorption nearly always, it was growing harder and harder to climb the Ranks.
If Damion had been forced to climb up the mountain face of the volcano it likely would have taken him several hours. Luckily, with Ice Sword he was able to bypass the jungle and was flying over the top of the volcano in just a few minutes.
Phil was out flying around the jungle, and Damion was not sure if his companion had found new Demonic Beasts or not, but down in the caldera of the volcano he spotted a few Demonic Beasts he had not seen before.
The creatures looked like a sort of worm and were popping out of the crusted over lava and diving back in, leaving molten holes in the crust a quarter meter in diameter. Whenever one of the worms popped up, True Sight identified it as an E Rank Demonic Beast. No threat to him, but Damion still wanted to kill one to add to his growing collection of cores.
Hovering just above the holes the fire worms were going in and out of, Damion cast Frost Over and chilled the entire area. One cast was not enough to freeze the magma under the crusted rock, but after a second and a third cast the holes the fire worms had been quickly going in and out of hardened up. A moment later a larger fire worm burst through, opening up a hole that had been cooled enough to harden. The worm then made its way across the rocky surface to another hole and was about to smash through when Damion sliced it in two with an Ice Shard.
To his surprise, the head of the Demonic Beast continued on and after a few crashes of its head against a weaker area of the crust, disappeared into the magma below the surface. At the same time tail of the fire worm slithered back into the hole created when it burst through the crust.
Damion hovered there a bit at a loss on what to do. He considered trying again, but what happened if the fire worm just split again, and when it split did each section have a core? Or was there only one core? Having no idea what the answer would be, Damion decided not to waste his time figuring it out. Chances were that this was a Demonic Beast that had been seen before, he simply did not recognize it, and the answer was already figured out by someone else.