Chapter 323: Illusion (3)

The trail broke nearby. Even Miyu circled and circled, unable to find where the marquis had gone. I checked the ground and brush, widening the search by dozens of meters. There was nothing.

Maybe he decided to hide his traces from here.

[Skill: Detection Lv. 7 activated.]

[Switching to Active mode.]

[At current Health, 0.0014% Health will be consumed per second.]

With almost perfect senses, I could catch even the faintest sign. Not just the tremors in earth and air, but the past echoes of what had shaken them as well. The marquis had clearly vanished here. Even pressing my hand to the ground brought up nothing new.

"Where did you go...?"

"I picked... two fern-berries," Naneow said, stopping at a thick patch of brush.

"Fern-berries?"

"Bite them and they burst, cleansing your mouth. Chupacabras hate them."

Miyu sniffed the cluster of milky-white berries and wrinkled his muzzle. A strangely fresh scent stung even my duller sense of smell.

She twined a lock of hair, murmuring, "The escaped chimeras were based on chupacabras. They wouldn’t touch these."

Miyu, making a face, took a berry gently between his teeth.

Naneow had been combing the ground since we arrived. She quickly pointed to another marker stone. "Here, too. Nine."

"So the numbers are descending."

"If so, it's as if it’s telling us to come down to the first floor."

"Let’s go to it." Naneow knew an awful lot, even that chupacabras hate these berries. Studying the tear where she had plucked one, she said, "One was the marquis just now. The other? The duke, maybe. Let’s pick ours. Want to do the honors?"

There was only this place. No reason to hesitate.

"All right."

I gripped a berry and gave it a firm tug.

Vvrrrrm!

"Knew it!" Naneow cried.

Space rippled, and an eddying ring of distorted air hovered before us.

"Can we go through in one go? I’ll take the lead."

I stepped forward. Space warped. A mouth of red, searing heat opened, and the air sucked me in.

***

There was a place like this...?

Traps? Easy to sweep aside. Ambushes? Butchered them to the last. Ever since Leandro claimed Ilien’s relic, the world felt sharper.

Support. Ascent. Amplification. Leandro wasn’t sure what to call it. He held no faith in any goddess, nor would he lean on it. If a man could not find a way forward without kneeling to pray, his end was already written. That was what he had thought. And yet, the diamond worked too impeccably to deny.

It let him pick out a path even in the deepest dark, which was very practical. He feared nothing. And still, the more he walked, the less he believed this place lay beneath the imperial palace.

Fwoooosh!

A colossal mantis of compacted volcanic ash rose, scything its forelimbs at him. No eyes, nerves, blood, or chitin. A gray shadow sculpted from ash, with forelimbs two meters long each.

Leandro slipped past it with ease. Edge meant nothing. Even most magic would barely touch it. Fire, ice, wind, no easy counters came to mind.

Crash!

The rock struck by its limb cratered and blew apart.

One, two, three... seven, ten...

The ash swarmed Leandro in shapes of men, birds, lions, insects, worms.

"Come all at once."

Blue light burst from his sword in a sweeping half-moon. The blade hewed the mantis’s limb, split its thick torso, then carved the lion-shape behind him from jaws to tail. Power still riding the stroke, it cut four more before vanishing into the ashstorm. By then, his edge had already turned.

Leandro severed the leg of a four-meter ash-man reaching to crush him, took its neck, then spun and cleaved the four shapes around him in a single whirl.

Whoooosh!

Silence fell. Waves from his Sword Energy had swept the ash forty paces away. His face, however, only darkened. Forty-two, cut down so far. There were enough of them to wage open war on men.

Leandro pressed on. Beneath a blanket of white fume in the crater, molten rock seethed.

Guaaaaah!

Something new rose in the distance and strode toward him.

Living lava...

It was hard to accept that such monsters swarmed beneath the capital. How blind and deaf had they been?

Thud!

Near the rim, giants burst from the lava and reached to seize him. He angled his sword and cut one. His edge passed through the writhing magma. Sparks scattered, hardly seeming to hurt it. His blade was too small against their size, and their forms were flowing fire.

Eight-meter giants laughed, belching sulfur-yellow gas. "

Ku-ku-ku...

"

"Don’t laugh."

Leandro leaped into the air. He cut right at about their waist height. When the flame shrugged it off and began to fuse, he cut left, then back again, and again. By the time gravity began to claim him, the lava giant’s lower half was gone. Its upper half slapped wetly to the ground, riven by dozens of strokes from chest to heel.

Leandro looked into its face, now level with him. "Now laugh."

Ku-gug?

As it sought lava to rejoin its body, Leandro swung up from below. Blue light exploded, and its head burst apart. He dealt with the remaining giants the same way, and before he knew it, he stood at the volcano’s lip.

"Is it here..."

Kwa-gwa-gwa!

Boiling lava roared. Even a single fragment would punch holes through flesh and shatter bone.

Leandro took one more step. "

Hm

?"

His gut felt the ripple. The field of touch, the three-meter span his sword could reach. The second domain that, when amplified, stretched a hundred meters... Beyond even that, the vague perimeter of intuition, where Leandro knew when something stirred...

Far off, at the entrance of this volcanic expanse, the barrier warped for an instant. It was the same pulse as when he opened the gate. A distance so far it blurred. He could not make out what had come.

"..."

Leandro glanced once at the scarlet crater, once back the way he had walked. There was no reason to return.

Kwa-gwa-gwa-BOOM!

He threw himself into the screaming lava. For a heartbeat, the molten rock seemed to harden in shock, then it wrapped him from soles to crown, burning hot.

***

Shhhk!

Sudden heat wrapped around me, smothering. Smoke poured out so thick I could barely see. My armor seared hot in an instant.

Frost.

An explosion of cold cooled the armor, but the thin frost that formed melted away just as quickly in the surrounding heat. I couldn’t see a step ahead through the heavy ash. Pouring wind into my blade, I proceeded to swing it.

[Frost Storm Lv. 1 activated.]

Fwoooosh!

The choking ash pressing in on all sides crashed to the ground and clung there.

Dual Casting...

[Frost Storm Lv. 2 activated.]

A second breath of icy white erased the grim gray veil, clearing twenty steps of vision. Before me lay a twisted world. Unlike the seemingly peaceful surface above, this place was a dark red wasteland.

Naneow stood beside me, twirling her hair, muttering. "Figures. Too easy up there. Should’ve known."

Even Miyu clenched his jaw, chewing on a fern-berry, grimacing.

Frost Storm. Dual Cast...

Fwoooosh!

[Frost Storm Lv. 2: Repeated use in a special environment grants a minor EXP increase.]

So it tracks even this.

I cast harder than needed, but that was the only EXP message I received. As we pushed forward, visibility widened. Ash puppets lay broken everywhere.

"Quite the ash puppet party. So many shapes."

"Over a hundred wrecks so far," Naneow said.

"By your hand?"

"No. Cut marks. Sword Energy."

She chuckled softly. "Then let’s say it was you. Either way, thanks."

I said nothing.

Every storm I conjured whipped hot and cold together, birthing violent winds that scattered the ash. Naneow surely had her own methods to cut through, but here she walked easily, leaving the work to me.

The marquis’s trail led higher. Ash dwindled, but streams of molten rock bled everywhere.

She prodded a lava flow with a stick. The tip burst into flame instantly. "Imagine that. A volcano under the palace. Crazy, isn’t it?"

Shhhh!

No monsters came. Only corpses, nothing alive. The marquis had likely cleared them out. The higher we climbed, the more lava poured down in torrents.

"Remember those shattered ash puppets earlier?"

"Yes."

"Anything here? It's getting dull."

Scrrrk! Skrrrk!

A yellow salamander burst from the lava.

Neigh!

Barely a meter long. Miyu moved first, swatting it away with a forehoof. For a moment, fire clung to his hoof, but a sharp flick snuffed it out. The salamander dove back into the lava, eyes peeking over the surface.

"

Ah

. We’re almost there."

Rumble! Craaaash!

Barely ten steps away, molten rock exploded skyward through a jagged rift.

"You’re telling me he went in there?"

The trail insisted. But my head refused. Following this path led straight into boiling lava. Freezing magic couldn’t protect us here.

Chhh!

I stabbed into a nearby flow, lifting my sword tip slick with magma. This was no illusion. This was real lava. The massive craters spanning kilometers were all real.

Naneow glanced at my blade, then the crater, drawing a long breath. "Still going up?"

"The trail leads here. We have to—hey!"

Neigh! Neigh!

The black stallion leaped, bounding nimbly from stream to stream of lava, mane in wild disarray. Without knowing its nature, one would call it a legendary steed.

"Let’s follow."

Fwip!

I hurled myself after him. How could the marquis have left this beast behind? If it died here in the molten hell, he’d surely blame

us

. He’d come at us with bloodshot eyes. Even for that alone, we had to keep it safe.

Neigh!

Miyu halted at the crater’s lip, pawing at the edge.

"Even for you, isn’t this madness?"

Below us gaped a mouth of hell. The earth was split, veins of molten red sloshing and surging upward. The ground itself was lava.

"This is insane..." Naneow muttered, brows arched.

Kwagwagwagwa!

The boiling crater erupted, louder than before. Even the blackened crust split open, glowing red as it melted away.

"Are we really doing this...?"

Frost. Dual Cast... Frost.

I kept casting for Miyu, who was sweating from all the leaping.

Then Naneow touched my shoulder, wearing a strange expression. "Stop. That spell."

𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

"You want it colder?"

"No. Stop using it for now."

"Are you serious? The horse won’t last..."

"Wait."

Crack!

The ice melted instantly as soon as I stopped.

Sweat dripped down Naneow’s brow. "Knew it..."

"What?"

She stared at the erupting crater with narrowed eyes. "We’re this close to the crater... it should be much hotter."

Whoosh!

She held her scythe to the falling lava nearby.

"..."

There was no hiss, no sizzle. The scythe’s edge didn’t glow red.

"See? It’s different from last time. Let’s go."

"..."

"Think of it like a hot spring. Just... bigger."

Neigh!

Quick as thought, Miyu leaped into the molten red. There was no cry from the horse.