Chapter 375 – Solutions
With the entrance to the tenth floor revealed, Damion headed through with Phil. It would be easier to think of a solution on a floor that did not require him to fly. The tenth floor, Damion discovered, was much like the fifth, an amalgamation of the previous floors. In the distance there was a volcano, and it was erupting. Vast rivers of lava were flowing down the slopes of the fiery mountain, but unlike the ninth floor, it was not covering nearly the entire landscape.
The lava flows split high up the mountain and carved paths similar to rivers around the area, but there were large areas of land untouched by the flows. In many of these areas Demonic Beasts had taken refuge, and Damion could see on his map that even more creatures were in the jungle that filled most of the floor.
To Damion’s surprise, the core was actually close by. So close that it was barely out of the safe area around the floor entrance. Walking over, he crushed it and the way to the eleventh floor appeared. If there was a guardian to this floor, he did not see one, but of the Demonic Beasts he could see from where he was, it appeared they were all made up of the various creatures from the last four floors.
‘Hunt,’ Phil sent to Damion through their bond. The Blizzard King was nothing if not consistent.
“Go, have fun. I will stay around here. I will call you when it is time to leave,” Damion told Phil.
The Blizzard King flew off towards the volcano and he had a feeling that Phil was off to prove its air dominance again.
Damion sat down on the ground by the passageways to the previous and next floors and began to think over the problem of the ninth floor. It was possible to build things inside a labyrinth. Unlike a dungeon, it would never fully reset. Great changes in the landscape would overtime revert themselves. Such as in the Argentum labyrinth when he was targeted by Thomas and Theodore, the team had set the entire forest on fire to drive him out of hiding. It took a few weeks, but the forest was eventually restored to its original self.
Because of the slow restorative process of the Realm Breach any changes to the native landscape would eventually be undone. This if you wanted to build something inside, you had to bring the materials yourself and it could not disrupt the natural landscape. If you brought the materials for a bridge in, it was possible to build a bridge over the lava flows, but you would not be able to anchor the bridge in the ground. It could rest upon it, but if you tried to drive pylons into the ground for a structure, eventually the labyrinth would reject the change, and the pylons would be pushed out of the dirt or perhaps even consumed by the Breach.
Best case scenario was that the bridge would be dislodged from its location and have to be reanchored. Worse case, the bridge would collapse. Since there was no way to know how long it would take for this to happen, building such a bridge and expecting people to use it as a safe way to transit the lava flows was not a workable solution.
Another temporary solution would be to alter the flow of the lava. Have an Earth mage create a path for the lava to follow or create a dam or hill to force the lava around, creating a simplified set of flows in place of the dozens of crisscrossing flows that were there now. Of course, once the labyrinth righted itself, there would be plenty of problems that would crop up with that idea.
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No matter what Damion thought of to solve the problem, aside from possibly providing everyone with a flying artifact to get around on the floor, the labyrinth’s ability to restore itself would make the solutions temporary and possibly too dangerous to attempt. After a while, he called out to Phil and the pair began heading back through all the previous floors. As much as Damion wanted to get to the higher floors to train, he knew he would need to find a solution to this particular problem before it caused issues with recruiting people to Atlantis and Avalon.
Outside the labyrinth Damion found Mage Teft waiting for him with a new attendant to manage the spoils from the Breach. This time through he had only collected ten Demonic Beast carcasses to turn in and none of them had rare affinities. The Wood core he might have been able to trade for two more common E Rank cores but given where his mind was at he did not even bring the subject of trading cores up with the attendant. He simply told the middle-aged man he would pick up the cores when he returned tomorrow.
“What has you so distracted?” Mage Teft asked Damion.
When he came out of the labyrinth he seemed to be brooding and despite not spending a lot of time fighting or collecting spoils, had only progressed five more floors.
“It’s the ninth floor,” Damion told her while pulling up his map. “These lava flows are so large and interconnecting in so many different places, most adventurers will have a hard time passing this floor. Unless they can fly.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much about it.”
“How can I not worry about it? For E Ranks and lower, sure they can stick to the earlier floors, but if C Rank and D Rank adventurers get stuck they won’t be able to reach the floors most relevant to them and they won’t want to go into the labyrinth.”
“You really think they will get stopped on that floor?” Mage Teft asked.
The way Mage Teft posed the question made Damion feel that he was missing something. He could bypass the lava flows because he could use his Ice Sword to fly, due in large part to his enormous magic regeneration. Spatial mages could probably use Blink to bypass the flows, but what would other mages do?
‘If I couldn’t fly, what would my solution be?’ Damion asked himself. A moment later he had the answer.
“Teams going in need to be prepared for the floor. If they can’t cross the lava flow or go around it, then they will just have to make it so they can.”
“Very good. Fire mages can use the Fire Walking spell if they know it. Water and Ice mages can simply douse the lava to create a crust they can cross. Earth mages can redirect the flow. There are plenty of solutions.”
“I was trapped in thinking of long-term solutions instead of what each team of adventurers could do for themselves.”
“Good. Long-term solutions are nice, but with the power of your auto-mapper adventurers will be able to go in well prepared.”
“And if they are prepared, they don’t need us creating an easy path for them.”
“Precisely. Did you find anything else new today?”
“The F Rank floors and the E Rank floors seemed to follow a sequence. Different landscapes, loosely tied together and then the final floor combining each of the different aspects together.”
“The other labyrinths follow much of the same path, though five floors for the F Rank floors and the E Rank floors is unusual. The Argentum labyrinth only had three floors for F, E and D Rank. At C Rank it rose to five floors per Rank and at B Rank it was ten floors. Hopefully, we get a good increase in the number of C Rank floors, if we do, we will really start attracting people.”