After reaching the hallway between the fourth and fifth rooms, we took a break, and I discussed a plan with the Vice-Captain in order to potentially clear out the next room. I had been developing a spell, which could potentially set the entire room on fire. However, I needed some time to properly prepare it, as this was my first attempt to cast it in actual combat.
The Vice-Captain approved of my plan, and even gave me a small red bead, something she told me would make my fire spell even stronger if I used its energy. She said that was the only one she had, but this experiment would be worth it if it worked.
With her approval, I moved to the entrance of the next room, and prepared my spell. As part of our lessons on magic, the Vice-Captain had told us that associating words and phrases with spells was a good method of memorizing them. I had chosen to use this method to prepare the spell, which if it worked properly would release a sea of fire in front of me.
The phrase that I used for this spell was: “Fires from the heart of the sun, flame that burns creation, manifest and devour all in your path.” I then said the name of the spell itself “Emperor Flare”, while channeling the spell through that bead that the Vice-Captain had given me.
The little red bead shattered, and flames exploded out in front of me, with an even greater strength than I had imagined. There was an audible roar, not from the plants being burnt, but by the sudden emergence of flames scorching the air. The fire continued burning for a long time, and we could not see anything within the room for over a half hour. I was amazed by the power of my own spell, but also exhausted. That single casting had taken every bit of my mana, and for some reason it was not recovering like it should have been.
After another ten minutes, I discovered that it was not that my mana would not recover, but that the spell was still using it as fuel to continue burning. Thanks to that, I had no mana to do anything with, and my exhaustion from exerting so much energy would not fade away. However, the Vice-Captain nodded, seemingly satisfied by this experiment.
Calming down, I tried to focus, and found a small link between the flames and myself, which was constantly draining away my mana. After severing that connection, the flames finally died out roughly another fifteen minutes later. We could finally see the results of nearly an hour of burning.
As expected, most of the plants in the room had been reduced to ash, or would crumble up as soon as they were touched. However, a few plants remained untouched, as if the fire had never been there in the first place. One of these, which was also the perfect example, was a tall, three meter flower with red petals. Since it was not moving, we believed it to be safe. As such, the others began to move closer, wanting to pick it and take it back for the Captain or Officer Bradbury to put in their groves. If this was a rare plant that happened to be created here, that would only help us.
During this, I stayed back, because my mana had yet to fully replenish. However, doing so allowed me to see what happened next. Very slowly, the petals on the flower began spreading apart, as if the flower itself were blooming. I shouted out a warning to them to be careful, but they didn’t seem to notice.
The moment the flower fully bloomed, I was utterly amazed. There was an explosion of fire almost identical to the one I had just released into the room. Aside from myself and the Vice-Captain who had stayed behind with me, the rest of the team were engulfed in these flames.
The Vice-Captain next to me noted that this flower likely absorbed the essence of my fire spell, and stored it for a set amount of time before copying it. As far as she could tell, the flower was not a monster, but rather a special kind of flower able to mimic magic cast at it. After saying that, she suddenly flew into the flames.
I didn’t know if she had some method to survive in that hell, but sure enough, the flames stopped a few moments later. Where the large flower had been, the Vice-Captain was now standing with a proud smile. The flower itself was nowhere to be seen, likely meaning that she already collected it.
Looking to me, she gave me the option of continuing forward alone with her, or ending the expedition here. Although I had gained a significant amount of experience from clearing out this room, and had even gained a couple of levels, I chose to continue forward. Really, I was the best suited for this dungeon out of our previous party, and I wanted to see if there were other unique plants that we could bring back to the ship.
With only myself and the Vice-Captain here, I was forced to use my spells much more frequently. This helped to raise my skill level, as I became more accustomed to using my magic, and even managed to develop a few new spells. However, it also meant we had to take breaks much more frequently.
Thanks to our continued journey deeper into the dungeon, we encountered many strange plants. There were some that emitted pink spores that caused me to hallucinate for a short period of time, some that responded to my fire magic with sprays of water, and some that even seemed to speak. However, the voice they used were either my own or the Vice-Captain’s, and they did not say any words that we had not spoken ourselves, so we were easily able to spot them.
Now, using the method of switching between my flames and the Vice-Captain attacking the hostile plants, we managed to work our way to the boss room. This is where things really got complicated. Before we entered the room, the Vice-Captain ran an initial scan to see what we would be up against.
From her information, all of the plants in the next room would actually be a single, massive entity. As such, it would be entirely possible that an attack could come from any direction. And since some of the plant bodies were naturally underground, I could not even use my ‘Emperor Flare’ to destroy the boss in one go.
At this point, the Vice-Captain chose to explain something to me regarding my magic, as she deemed it would help us in our coming fight. Until now, I thought that Fire Magic was all about unleashing fire to damage the enemy, like how the Captain or Officer Bradbury fought. However, she explained that that was only the druid method. The mage method of Fire Magic was able to create any effects conceptually associated with fire, based on the user’s imagination.
After that, she told me to take all the time I needed to prepare a new spell before we fight the boss. Though, I did not know what I wanted to create. If I was not limited by just blasting fire around, then what would I make?
I spent a little over an hour sitting down and thinking of the perfect spell that could burn away a massive plant all at once. In the end, I did come up with something, but had to focus for a little while to figure out how to make it work. My plan was to create a spell with all of my mana, which embeds itself in my target and spreads throughout the entire thing before activating, burning every scrap of it together.
The idea for this spell came to me because I thought about cooking. When cooking, it is often best to make sure to evenly heat the entire meal as you prepare it, so that no part is left uncooked. Naturally, this kind of spell fit me the best. The Vice-Captain also seemed to agree with this method, and offered me a reassuring smile.
Before we entered the boss room, I went ahead and prepared my spell. Again, I used the method of associating it with a phrase to memorize it properly. This time’s phrase was: “Fires that can burn the world, solar flares of pure destruction, spread, defy, destroy.” As I said the name of the spell, which I decided to call “Kitchen Fire”, a red ball of light formed in my hand. I pushed every ounce of mana I had into it before moving with the Vice-Captain to enter the next room.
This room seemed almost identical to the last few, with a variety of plants scattered throughout the area. However, the ones here were even more densely packed, which only served to make them a better target. I randomly tossed the red sphere in my hand at one of the plants, and watched as it sank into it without leaving a trace. I could feel as the magic spread throughout the room, and waited to watch it engulf everything in fire.
I wasn’t sure if the Vice-Captain had already considered the weakness of my spell, but I only learned about it after casting. Appar
ently, the size of the target determines how powerful the flames are. Since this one had to spread throughout the entire room before activating… there was only a small puff of smoke as the spell activated its final step.
Before I could even react, I had been pierced through by over a dozen sharp roots that shot out from the ground, and felt as they quickly ripped me apart for my attempted attack. Well, at least this wasn’t a total loss. I managed to learn a good spell for cooking, and got quite a few levels.
End of Report.
Chapter 40 - Beat Me To It
So, I’m sure everyone is tired about hearing about my gradual recovery. I’ll try to keep this short. There really wasn’t a whole lot for me to do while we were at Hydra anyways. For the first three weeks, I was still fidgety, and could only occupy my time by playing with either Chrome or Jasmine, or by reading reports on the dungeons. After that, I started to get better. I was still not allowed, or interested in going down to the dungeons myself, but at least I could go five minutes by myself without screaming at the air.
We made a nice little bamboo fountain out of one of the arrow vines from my grove. Not only did it help with a constant background noise, it even made my room look a little nicer. After the fifth week, I was almost all the way better. I mean, I still had nightmares, and would get twitchy if I was by myself too long, but my only real panic came at the most embarrassing moment. Because I’m such a nice guy, naturally I’ll tell you all about it.
After a long night of dungeon diving, Sharon and Yin decided to watch a holo-movie with me in my room. About halfway through it, Sharon suddenly hit the pause button so that she could go to the bathroom. However, she didn’t say so before hand, so all I saw was the movie suddenly freezing. Although it was only a mild panic attack, they did have to calm me down for a couple minutes. I swear, I’m getting better, honest.
After two months had passed, the boredom started to settle in. I wanted to go do something productive, instead of just reading reports on the different dungeons. So, that’s exactly what I did. Well, sort of. I didn’t go down and fight monsters or anything, I just got to work on enchanting items. I wanted to make sure that everyone in the crew had at least one enchanted accessory to boost stats.
Of course, half of these accessories were lost in the following month, due to people taking them down to boost their abilities in the dungeon. But still, it gave me something to do, and helped me to practice something I’ve been needing practice with. At first, they were just metal rings formed from the ores in my grove. However, Yang began making rings from bones she collected in her dungeon runs, so I would work on those as well.
Speaking of Yang, she has been coping quite well with going down to the dungeon. Since she is a crafting class, she was unable to get experience from it, but she was still able to watch the fights and collect the resources. Yang was definitely not the leader of her team, as she had someone else in the group take care of that, but at least she wasn’t hiding from it. The worst that happened was I caught Yin having to comfort her after one of their first runs, because she was scared of what had happened.
Yin herself had actually done much better, surprising me with how well she could lead a group with her reluctance to speak long sentences. Out of all of them, her team had the lowest death rate, usually no more than one or two per run. According to the reports I read, any time a situation looked dire, she would step in at the last second and prevent a fatal strike from landing. Those that did manage to die in her team often did so because of either friendly fire or an ambush.
Yo… well, she let someone else lead her party and was just having fun ‘playing’ with the dungeon monsters after we got a soul core for her to clone herself into. Unlike us, she actually had to put her entire body into a large cylinder so that she didn’t spill out when she relaxed. Aside from that, though, her clone worked much like anyone else’s. She even managed to absorb one of the monsters from the boss room of the ‘goblin’ dungeon, the ettin. Seeing her turn into a giant, two headed slime woman was… I’ll just leave that out. She was still as affectionate as ever, even in that form....
Now, as for the dungeons themselves. We made a total of ten of them. Two of them became plant dungeons, which was not surprising given the fact that plants seemed to be much more abundant on this world compared to animals. One turned into the goblin dungeon I mentioned before. One actually became an undead dungeon, filled with skeletons on the first floor with a zombie boss. That one wasn’t very difficult, but the second floor was a mix of zombies and ghosts, the latter required magic to deal with.
Another dungeon spawned rock-based creatures, much like I had encountered in NeoLife. Then there was the lizard dungeon, the fire dungeon, the water dungeon, and the weirdest of them all… the demon dungeon. In the demon dungeon, all of the creatures had at least rudimentary intelligence, and some even spawned with weapons, or used methods to make them themselves. Creatures weren’t really spawning around us, so we weren’t able to tell, or get the readings I had wanted.
Since we couldn’t get the readings, Celeste modified the scanning device. Rather than something the group carried, they placed them inside the dungeons, and they would scan constantly, taking note of when the mana began condensing. To power them, Celeste rigged them to run on the ambient mana of the dungeons themselves. With those, we began to get semi-regular results. She had the results automatically sent to a terminal she set up in my lab on the planet, powered by a few elemental seeds to keep it running. The rest of the seeds were brought up to me.
Now… is there anything else I’m forgetting… While we were here, Celeste has been gradually teaching me the language of the people we are visiting next. From her information, they are a powerful psychic race known as the Ha’vosh. In NeoLife, almost every Ha’vosh is born with at least two psychic powers, sometimes even more. One is almost always rudimentary telepathy, while the others vary as much as other psychic powers. It would not surprise me if we found a Toybox owner or two among them.
I think, with that, I’ve caught you all up with where we are now. The last of our crew members have just gotten back from their final dungeon runs, and we are taking one day of rest before we leave for the Ha’vosh homeworld. As for me, I am leaning back away from a pile of bone rings I just finished enchanting with extra strength and agility, while thinking about the things that had happened lately.
“John?” I hear Celeste speaking up from behind me, and turn around to find the Deus Ex waiting at my door. I wasn’t in my quarters right now, but instead in an empty room I had repurposed for my enchanting and alchemy experiments. It’s good to be captain. And yes, I have another bamboo fountain in here, too. Though, the two headed dog sitting between my feet was an even better anchor for my sanity. “Can I come in?”
“Sure, what’s up?” I could see a bit of a troubled expression on Celeste’s face, her brows furrowed slightly in thought. “There an issue with the lab or something?”
“Ah, no, nothing like that. Well.. maybe not. It’s probably completely unrelated.”
“Slow down… what’s the matter?”
“Well…” She took a deep breath, more likely to calm herself than to actually breathe, because of the fact she doesn’t breathe in the first place. “It’s this planet. I got curious, so I did some calculations.”
“And…?”
“I plotted its location three thousand years in the future, and cross-referenced it with the star maps I had memorized. I found out where it will be, when the players begin arriving in the future.”
“Again, and?” Not really sure what she was getting at, but I didn’t think I was going to like it.
“Well… we’ve been here before. You and I have, specifically.” She said, still looking a bit nervous.
“Celeste… What is this planet…?” Okay, now I was starting to get nervous. Not in a panicky sort of way, I checked. But still.
“You remember that jungle planet we crashed into…? Where we met that dryad, Arianne?”
“Wait, you’re not saying…” I subconsciously looked to a nearby wall, as if the planet we were orbiting around was just behind it.
“Yeah, this is the same planet. Obviously, it’s not been overrun yet, so it is still relatively safe. As safe as any other planet these days.”
“I hate time travel…” I shook my head, thinking this through. “I read Fallem’s report about the first floor of the plant dungeon you guys visited early on. Thanks again for the specimens, by the way.” The unique plants they had brought me were sitting on their own little island in my grove, waiting to be studied. “So… we come on this voyage, gather a crew, find a planet to train them on. But, that planet’s dungeon then spawns something that escapes, and over time takes over the entire planet. The same planet which I then crash land on three thousand years in the future.”
“And meet a naked plant lady, yes.” She added in that last part to tease me, I just knew it. Chrome yipped at her, and I mentally cheered him on. At least someone is on my side.
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