ShanDeRad
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Book 2: Chapter 13
🕑 Added 2024-05-13 10:48:56 +0000 UTCWhen he got to the dungeons he was surprised by the amount of people there, a lot of whom were not in the best shape. When he thought about it for a moment he realised why, everyone now knew who they were fighting in this round, that meant that they knew if the person they were fighting was weaker or stronger than they were and by how much. That pushed a lot of people to go and gain the levels they needed to close the gap between them and their opponent. And those who were fighting someone on equal level? They needed to get an edge.
“So you have come to try and take back the first spot have you?” Shaun looked over at who had spoken, Vivenne was sitting on the ground with what looked like the rest of her group. Overall she looked okay, not great, but in a better condition than some of her team.
“What do you mean?” He asked her, honestly quite confused with the question.
“We took your spot. Well she did anyway.” One of her team said. When Shaun just looked at him still looking confused the guys just sighed and pointed at the leader board for the dungeon. And right there on the wall was Vivenne's name and next to it in the number one position was the marking that she cleared the 11th wave.
They think I’m here to take back a ranking? I can’t wait to see their faces when I go into the F grade dungeon. “Well done guys! Beating those birds is a bitch! Hope you had fun though!”
Walking closer to the dungeons he didn’t make it obvious where he was going until he got closer and stood in front of the F ranked one, not at all where everyone thought he was going to go.
“What are you doing? Are you making fun of us?” Vivenne was off the floor now and walking over to him, and she was mad as hell.
“Ummm, no?” He hadn’t said anything to suggest that so why would she be losing her mind over him going to a different dungeon.
“Then why are you going into a dungeon that you could probably do in your sleep?” She asked, “You will get nothing from doing that dungeon, no where near enough experience to level up and the loot is no where near as good. So tell me, why would you go into that dungeon if it wasn’t to make fun of me?”
I guess that makes sense, in a twisted kind of way. “I have my reasons, I want to try something new but don’t want to have to deal with having to fight monsters that I will actually need to concentrate on, this dungeon is the perfect place to do it.”
She looked at him now, like really looked at him. He was being completely honest with her, he may not have told her what he was going to try but he hadn’t lied to her. “If you want to try something new, why a dungeon? Why not go to a trainer or out here?” She was mostly speaking to herself trying to figure it out, not expecting him to actually answer her. “Privacy. You want privacy.” She looked at him then, that was an actual question she expected an answer to.
“Yeah, I do. Would you want to be trying new things out, different techniques and skills, in front of all these people or against monsters that could actually hurt you if you failed?”
She gave him a considering look then and then finally started nodding. “You're smarter than you look Shaun. And honestly, that scares me a little. But you are right. It’s a good move, trying new things out in a safe environment where the monsters can’t actually hurt you. Might have to do the same one of these days.” She turned back to her team then, “We all should actually, there are skills we need to improve, not in the heat of battle but actually practice until we perfect them.” Turning back to Shaun she said “Whatever you’re trying out in there, good luck. And I really mean that.” After that she walked back and sat on the ground with her team, deep in thought.
With nothing else to do he accepted the prompt on the dungeon and was instantly transported inside. What greeted him was a large circular room, easily over a few hundred metres across, it was perfect.
*Wave 1 Commencing*
When the monsters appeared, five in total, he inspected them and found them all to be level 20 monsters called Reflecting Centipede, not that he really cared what they were. He quickly killed 4 of the 5 of them, the reflective part of the monster just slightly, reflected the attack off them, but at his strength it did next to nothing. With the final centipede he ended up trapping it taking some metal he had and forming a rod that stuck into the ground, he then forced the centipede against it and created metal bindings to effectively trap it against the rod. He watched it for a minute and when he was confident that the little bug wasn’t going anywhere, he went and sat down and thought about how he was going to accomplish his task of creating an advanced affinity. The good news was no matter how long he spent in the dungeon only 30 minutes would pass on the outside, so he wasn’t on any kind of time limit.
He knew what he wanted to start with, lightning, the formation of the element was based off of fire and air, two of his most used elements, so he thought that it was his best bet, that and it was just cool. He dropped into meditation and went to inspect his existing affinity, after he bonded with water a circuit was formed in his mana channels, earth bonded with nature, which then bonded with water on the other side, which moved into air, and followed fire which then bonded back into earth, creating the full circle of elements. He watched how they all interacted for a while before homing in on the bonds between fire and air. They were already connected inside of him but not in a way that created an affinity, so how was he to change that. In the past he had used mana motes that already held the element he wanted, this time he had no such thing, but supposedly he didn’t need it if he was to trust the book.
Lightning was supposed to be a combination of air and fire but when he had accidently hit the two together in the past it caused one hell of an explosion, the fire literally used the extra air to create a bigger explosion, so just pushing them together wasn’t how he was going to form lightning. But maybe that was what happened when the balance wasn’t right? Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be just a straight up half air and half fire, what if it needed to be that it needed more air to fire, or maybe more fire to air?
He ruled out the second one straight away, if he had a majority of fire and only a small amount of air the air aspect would quickly get taken over by the fire. But if it was mostly air and only a little fire, just enough to cause the spark, would it work? But how to test it was the real question. He peered into the dungeon and used his mana sight to see what was around, for the most part it was all just unattuned mana, not helpful in this moment.
With that he realised that what ever he was going to need to do would have to be an internal process, and with that would come a higher amount of risk. He had blown up parts of his body before when bonding elements, usually when things when wrong, and he had no reason to believe that this time would be any different. Thankfully he had enough mana in his gauntlet to allow him to heal himself a few times over, still he would like to avoid it at all costs.
Turning back to his mana channels he decided the best place to test the mix of elements was going to be in his thigh, it had enough muscle on it that if he blew apart of it off he would be able to heal it decently easy, that and if he had to limp around for a while he would be fine, the fight against Trevor the next day shouldn’t be too difficult. The first thing he started to do was pull one of the threads that connected from the air and fire affinity, moving it slightly away from the main streams, giving it enough space that hopefully it wouldn’t cause damage to his existing affinity if he completely screwed up.
Once he thought it was far enough away without breaking the connecting thread he decided to start on the most simple combination, 2 parts air and 1 part fire. He started with the air element and directed enough of his affinity into the thread, holding it in the middle, until he was comfortable with the amount he held, after that he pulled the fire element from its stream, only enough that it equalled half the power of air. When he had the two elements right next to each other but not yet touching he gave everything one last look, hesitating just a little, knowing that what he was doing was both risky and stupid, and then committing to his plan he slammed the two elements together.
The moment the two touched he was immediately knocked out of his mediation, his thigh, where he had been working with the affinity, had been completely blown apart, covering him in blood and muscle. The pain was unbelievable, and when he looked down at his thigh he saw his bone. Not delaying he held his gauntlet on the wound and pumped the healing spell into it, doing everything he could not to lose consciousness. He didn’t know how long it took but eventually the wound had sealed, and with it he had used a decent chunk of the mana in the gem, but he was alive.
Shaun looked around and noticed he was sitting in a pool of his own blood, not to mention covered in part of his thigh. He didn’t both moving or cleaning up as he knew that this wasn’t going to be the last time this occurred. He knew what had gone wrong the moment the two elements connected, the balance wasn’t right and the fire element completely fed on the air and the result was an explosion inside of his mana channels.
Looking back inside of himself he looked to see if there was any lingering damage, but it all looked completely normal, as if the main elemental streams self-healed rather than turning into a scattered mess. Test one was a failure, but he wasn’t about to give up, test two was now going to be three parts air and one part fire. The result was the same, he again blew up his leg, this time worst than last time, and he spent time healing the wound, draining his mana into the gem and then waiting for his mana to recover back to full.
He repeated this process several more times with different results, when he hit 5 part air and 1 part fire it had become too much for the fire element and it was snuffed out immediately, thankfully the blow back from this was nowhere near as bad as having too much fire, the end result was just an ache in his leg rather than blowing it into pieces. What am I doing wrong? There has to be some missing link here.
After twelve attempts and twelve failures he stopped, going back to the drawing board and thinking of what else he could do. He was mentally exhausted at this point and his whole body hurt, he had drained most of the mana from the gem and now needed to spend time refiling it as much as he could before trying again. He did nothing but meditate, fill them gem and recover for what had to have been days, all the while trying to figure out a new plan.
He was over blowing up his body, he had changed to other leg half way through and now both of them, although looking mostly okay, felt like they wouldn’t even hold his weight. Rather than continue trying to succeed inside of his body, he shifted attack and decided to try something outside of himself. He took a thread of each element and moved it outside of his body, still connected to the main streams but also separate from him. He didn’t start this way as he was pretty confident that whatever needed to be done had to be done inside of him, not in the open environment, but he was over the pain of failure.
Taking the two elements, he started trying to combine them in the air in front of him, the results were even more abysmal, but at least he wasn’t hurting himself too much. He still got back lash from his affinity but nothing he couldn’t handle, at least for a while. The unattuned mana in the air avoided his affinity, blowing away from each resulting explosion, but that gave him an idea. What if air and fire couldn’t interact directly with each other, what if they needed a neutral environment to be able to properly combine?
With a new idea firmly planted in his mind, he quickly gathered one of the unattuned mana motes from the dungeon and pulled it in close to where he was sitting. The plan was to try and link the two elements into the mana mote, pushing both of them in from either side, starting with air and then adding only a small bit of fire and seeing what happened to the mana mote. This is either going to go well or so much worse than before. Screw it, all or nothing.
Like two striking snakes he had fire and air attach itself to the mana mote, wrestling it into submission, he hadn’t started trying to infuse the mana yet, just trap it with both of the elements. The result was better than expected, the mana was efficiently trapped and there was no resulting back lash, a success, finally.
When it came time to start trying to force his affinities into the mana he started with adding air, it was an odd experience as he could see and feel the unattuned mana slowly start to convert to air and be sucked into his own mana channel, but that wasn’t what he wanted. Before it was too late and the mana could be attuned to air fully he sent in the smallest amount of fire mana. Immediately he felt the air within the mana, as well as his affinity try and take over the fire but he kept a steady stream of it going into the mote, just the smallest amount that possible to keep its presence in the mana. The mote now had both elements inside of it, no explosions had occurred but it didn’t feel stable.
Shaun didn’t stop though, he continued applying pressure and infusion with both elements, it didn’t take long until something changed. The mote started to glow, lighter and lighter until finally he saw what he was after, a spark ignited in the mote, but before he could look further the entire thing exploded into an uncontrollable blast of lightning that spread out throughout the dungeon, hitting him and the tied up centipede in the process.
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Dylan Suomela
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