"What we do, papa?" said Tia.
Li put her down, and she fidgeted for a few seconds, adjusting her bare, scaled feet on the molten rock and magma bubbling around them. She got used to the temperatures soon enough, which was expected of her. Aside from a few dragon types, most dragons possessed an innate resistance to fla.
The living armor Li cast had infused with her dress, preventing it from just scorching up in the air, and she pranced about, dipping her toes inside a particularly deep divot of lava.
"Wow. Fire water!" said Tia.
"It's called lava. When rock gets hot enough and lts, it turns into that," said Li.
"Lava," said Tia, rolling the word around in her head and committing it to mory.
Li gave her a faint smile as he focused on what to do. He was completely cut off from the rest of the party. Even Zagan who possessed a telepathic link with him. This ant that in this dungeon, Li was likely in a completely different layer than the others, and he had no idea of his orientation, whether he was higher or lower.
One thing though, he knew well: he had to get to the bottom of the dungeon to figure out what was happening. There was an entity here transporting units, and likely, it was a boss type unit, though whether it was the dungeon of the entire boss or just one layer was up in the air.
Regardless, Li would find this entity if he traveled to the end of this layer or one of the layers beneath it. He rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck.
Looks like he was going to be clearing this dungeon, then.
Almost as if to challenge Li's decision, he felt presences invade his general vicinity. Unlike when he was in the forest, he could not accurately pinpoint every single presence, but he had sharp enough eyes to see flickers of fla dotting around the environnt, across spires of rock and cliff faces.
All high vantage points looking down on Li.
The flickers of fla ford into the shape of giants. This ti, giants with great bows of solidified fla in their hands. All of those bows were aid at Li, arrows of fire almost three ters long nocked and ready to be loosed.
These giants, Li noted with narrowed eyes, could not be saved. Bright red tentacles sprouted from their chests, wriggling and writhing as they massed around their bodies as signs of deeply embedded corruption.
They were too far gone.
Tia saw this and leaped in front of Li, her wooden shield poised in front of her. "We alone, but I protect papa!" she exclaid, her green and black eyes intensely bright.
"Don't worry, Tia," said Li. "We are not alone. With , there is never such a thing as 'alone'."
This type of environnt was the absolute worst for Li in terms of compatibility. He had various negative statuses affecting him such as constant burn damage, curse damage, and a negative modifier to all his druidic spells, for this hellscape of fla was the antithesis of his forestborne power.
Yet, a dungeon of this level was still pitiful against Li. He knelt down and slamd his hand against the molten ground beneath him.
"[Earth Shattering]," said Li, casting an A-ranked spell.
A seismic shockwave surged out from Li's palm, rippling across the molten lake and sloughing up massive waves of lava. Any solid rock it encountered, it shattered, and the earth trembled and quaked as the shockwave traveled far, completely destroying the bases of the pillars the fire giant archers rested upon.
The archers lost their balance and fell far to the ground beneath them, and Li fully intended to just finish them off with physical blows, granting Tia the experience to fight so of them.
However, Li again noted with surprise that the giants, as they fell, acted in synchronized unity, dematerializing their bows and instead creating daggers in their hands. The daggers stabbed into their necks.
Li however, was ready this ti. He casted his eldritch Druidry. Waves of black and green erupted from his hand as he pointed downwards, casting [Root of Vulthoom]. The deep purple, spiked root filled with red eyes manifested from his hand and drove into the shattered, molten ground, flowering further thorns and roots inside.
"To , Tia," said Li as he grabbed her close to his side.
It was obvious that these fire giants had sacrificed themselves again for so kind of dungeon-related ritual against Li, probably to teleport him sowhere else. However, with the [Root of Vulthoom], Li could remain rooted to this space, for the root affixed things on a spatial and temporal level.
The falling bodies of the fire giants faded away into embers, and then, Li felt trembling beneath his feet. The lake of lava around him began to glow intensely bright, the orange almost lding into white, and he realized what was happening.
The fire giants had not activated a dungeon-based teleportation trap with their deaths, but instead an ordinary environntal trap ant for dealing damage.
Li snapped his fingers and cast [Chrysalis]. The A-ranked barrier activated, and quickly, weaves of bright green circled around Li and Tia, encasing them in a cocoon of translucent, verdant energy.
The lake around them exploded, volcanic activity underneath cascading into a complete eruption that sent the cocoon surging into the ashen red sky in an enormous geyser of upturned lted rock, magma, and heat.
"We flying!" said Tia with excitent, no doubt finding the prospect of riding a volcanic eruption into the sky fun in the sa way a child on a rollercoaster would.
When Li felt the cocoon stop moving, likely high up in the air, he deactivated [Chrysalis], preventing it from taxing his magical energy too much. Successively casting so many A-ranked spells took a toll even on Li, and if he was not too careful, he could conceivably run out, especially in this dungeon layer where mana regeneration was also stunted.
Li and Tia were now high up in the air, level with the ashen clouds, and Tia unfurled her wings to hover, holding Li up with one hand as she recognized that Li did not want to spend magical energy on wings just yet.
"All these little tricks. All of them paid for with lives," said Li. He looked down below where the eruption had occurred. Where before there was a lake of lava, there was now just a gaping crater of angry molten orange.
A dungeon trap activated with the lives of its denizens.
Smart, though, Li had to admit. Because the spell was one that Li had never encountered before, he had no idea how to approach it. All he could make were inferences and observations.
The first ritual sacrifice of the fire giants had caused Li and Tia to be transported away. This made Li cautious of teleportation based effects. However, this ti, it was instead simply a frontal attack made by activating a dungeon trap.
The effect was that Li had to expend almost twice the mana to defend himself, using costly mana on casting [Root of Vulthoom].
Whoever was controlling these fire giants understood that Li did not know the nature of their spell, indicating that they too had knowledge of the Elden World spell roster, and abused that to their advantage, trying to drain him of mana.
Another player? Li furrowed a brow at this possibility. If it was, then any battle between him and a truly maxed out player, potentially one engulfed in eldritch corruption, would be quite hard fought.
But Li had too little information to act on for now. What he did know was that he could generally approximate what this ritual sacrifice spell did.
By seeing it in action twice now, he could guess that the spell sacrificed denizens of a specific dungeon layer to activate that layer's traps, with teleportation being a trap that existed across all layers of this dungeon, hence why fire giants sacrificed in the first layer of forests could still activate a trap there.
Knowing this, Li could reasonably predict what type of traps he would encounter based on the layer he was in.
"Feel bad for big fire people," said Tia as her slit pupils narrowed, showing her that none of the fire giants had survived. "They don't want to hurt themselves, but they do."
"Yes," said Li. "Whoever is controlling them is truly an eldritch entity indeed. The cruelty fits the bill."
Li knew the type of cruelty that ca from eldritch power well. It was a kind that was best described as completely cold. There was no passion of hate in there. It simply was. Eldritch cruelty reveled in pain and chaos not because of any rhy or reason, but simply because it was its inherent nature.
As simple and ordinary as breathing.
"Tia," said Li. "We're going to find whoever is controlling these fire giants and take them down. To do that, we have to go further in the dungeon. Down."
"But everyone away from us, they are up," said Tia. "All of them there. Without you, papa. And…and they weak."
Li nodded to her, acknowledging her concern. He smiled. "Don't worry about them, Tia. If I believed they were in any real danger, I would be rushing up to et them now.
But they're in capable hands."
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