Chapter 49: Kaiten
In Orario, roughly half of all registered adventurers were level 1, and most of them formed parties to safely farm floors 1 through 6.
Each floor brought exponentially greater danger. Many adventurers didn't have a thirst for risk or glory. They treated their adventure merely as a secure high paying job.
As a result, they comfortably coasted by bullying weak monsters on the floors closest to the surface.
This was exactly why, even though the world had entered the age of gods and the total number of adventurers had skyrocketed, the actual quality of heroes had not improved.
Sion certainly would not stoop so low as to compete with these weak unmotivated adventurers for their meager scraps.
Rushing rapidly down into the depths of the dungeon, Sion arrived at the 10th floor.
"Let's stop here."
Sion halted his forward momentum and slowly drifted down from the ceiling.
The Orcs that spawned on the 10th floor were excellent test subjects. While the Infant dragons on the 12th floor were technically better for testing, their spawn rates were far too low.
As for the Orcs, Sion could kill them in bulk for quite a while.
"I've used up one third of my Mind capacity. That's quite a lot just for travel," Sion murmured.
He entered a state of active focus to rapidly restore his Mind.
Besides standard concentration, Sion had also developed a Mind spell, an advanced application of his physical regulation theories.
Mind was fundamentally tied to the physical body. It was an energy produced by an active brain and a healthy physiology.
Therefore, physical stamina and mental energy could theoretically be converted into each other.
The Mind spell was a brute force method to restore Mind by overdrawing physical stamina.
Armed with this emergency failsafe, Sion was much bolder than he had been during his first trip into the dungeon.
Standard concentration could restore his depleted Mind in ten minutes, while Mind spell could do it in thirty seconds at the cost of physical exhaustion.
He focused his gaze on the Orcs slowly appearing from the dungeon walls. With a single thought, his weapons floated into the air compressed of wind elemental magic.
Then the monster had its neck severed...
With Sion's current Mind output, his elemental attacks were more than enough to effortlessly kill Orcs.
He estimated he would only face slight resistance against an infant dragon's scales.
"Not enough."
Sion pulled a monster attracting item from his pouch and smashed it on the stone floor.
Before long, more than thirty Orcs swarmed the cavern, completely surrounding him.
"Let's conduct the elemental magic experiments first."
Lightning sparked around Sion's hand, the energy rapidly compressing until it sounded like a thousand birds screaming in unison.
"Chidori."
Sion dashed forward and effortlessly put his hand straight through the monsters heart.
"Chidori spear!"
He killed three more monsters in the blink of an eye.
At that moment, two monsters leaped up from below, raising their massive clubs to smash him out of the air.
"Kaiten."
Sion simply willed his magic to generate a hyper dense, spherical rotation of kinetic force around his body.
The rapidly grinding barrier deflected the Orcs crushing blows, though the sheer kinetic impact caused Sion's hovering body to sink slightly in the air.
It seems that with my current base output, a pure kinetic barrier is already at its structural limit against an Orc's strength, Sion analyzed calmly.
"Wind shield: kaiten."
Faced with the follow up attack of another Orc, Sion activated the barrier once again, but this time, he infused it with elemental changes.
Compared to the previous defense, this enhanced barrier deflected the weapon cleanly.
Not only that, but as the blow was deflected, the violently rotating outer layer of the barrier transformed into sharp wind blades, instantly decapitating the two monsters closest to him.
If a basic magic bullet was low tier magic, then a spell that could maintain a complex form and move dynamically was intermediate magic.
By fully integrating a highly compressed elemental attribute into that dynamic form, it crossed the threshold into high tier magic.
The base kaiten, which only involved a change in structural form, was an intermediate spell.
While the wind shield: kaiten was an high tier spell.
It was perfectly adequate for conventional dungeon combat, but it was still lightyears away from being enough to block a strike from a cataclysmic entity like that dragon.
"Shockwave barrier provides reactionary protection, while the Kaiten is a more sustained defense."
"It offers a slightly longer protection window and lower total Mind consumption, and integrating elementalization vastly enhances its defensive ceiling. It's far more well-rounded than a simple blunt shockwave."
Sion pondered the areas that needed improvement and ultimately realized that this specific rotational formula had reached its conceptual limit.
He needed something structurally denser.
Fortunately, Sion had also been developing a long lasting shield spell.
"Breastplate of the Earth."
A translucent, golden shield came to life around him. Sion deliberately lowered himself to the floor and stood perfectly still, staring blankly as the remaining Orcs surrounded him and relentlessly swung their massive weapon.
The Breastplate spell compressed raw earth element into hyper dense crystalline particles, resulting in a qualitative change in their state.
He used his spells once more. Soo, The remaining horde of Orcs were killed.
"Such a sense of security," Sion sighed, admiring the lingering light of his shield.
Although it was essentially just a standard, high density application of earth elements, the sheer durability it offered placed it firmly in the high tier.
The conceptual prototype for this absolute defense came from Noelle, a combat maid from Genshin Impact.
"To summarize~"
With the experiment completed, Sion began to mentally catalogue the defensive capabilities he had just tested.
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