The journey to the mountain peak’s caldera took time, as the sheer elevation forced them to navigate narrow switchbacks cut directly into the scorched basalt.
Rhys focused his wind mana to wrap tightly around his boots, creating pressurized air pockets that absorbed the downward momentum and propelled his feet with explosive bursts, granting him massive, leaping strides across deep sulfuric ravines.
Mira followed suit effortlessly.
Channels of dark crimson fire erupted in controlled, rhythmic pulses beneath the soles of her boots, launching her athletic frame in wide, sweeping arcs as she leaped clean across the bubbling acid pools of the swamp and bounded straight onto the burning basalt slopes of the lava-infested foothills.
As they climbed higher, the terrain transformed into a suffocating, hostile wasteland.
Massive tectonic cracks in the mountainside vented pressurized columns of noxious green sulfur and white-hot steam, screaming like dying beasts as they escaped the subterranean vents.
The air itself grew dense, superheated to the point of blistering bare skin, and thick with floating embers that swirled around them like a blizzard of fire.
Where a standard scout would have succumbed to heatstroke and suffocated on the ash within minutes, Mira moved flawlessly.
She wove subtle, overlapping veils of dark mana around their perimeter, creating an invisible, cooling barrier that neutralized the worst of the toxic vapors, purified the air before it entered Rhys’s lungs, and dispersed the intense thermal radiation before it could blister his flesh.
The ascent up the Black Caldera was a grueling climb across razor-sharp fields of volcanic glass, jagged obsidian shards, and loose, treacherous scree that threatened to give way with every step.
At the summit, the rim dropped into a massive, circular caldera half a league wide, filled with an ocean of churning, golden-yellow magma.
At the center of the molten lake, the stone erupted.
"ROOOOOOOAAAR!"
Rising from the magma was the Obsidian Colossus.
A titanic, quadrupedal behemoth fifteen meters long, forged entirely from compressed volcanic stone and cooled basalt plates.
Its broad head lacked eyes, replaced by four glowing fissures of white-hot fire that vented pressurized jets of liquid rock from its jagged spine.
The moment it sensed the intruders, the Colossus dug its massive stone claws into the lava and lunged upward toward the rim with the velocity of an avalanche, its maw opening to vomit a tidal wave of molten rock.
"Mira. Strip its mobility," Rhys commanded, dropping low.
Mira stripped the suppression gloves from her hands in a single, fluid motion, tossing the leather aside to reveal pale, delicate fingers that immediately ignited with a blinding, terrifying crimson-gold radiance.
She leaped from the basalt rim, descending directly toward the rising wall of molten stone.
In mid-air, Mira thrust her right palm forward, channeling her innate bloodline fire technique.
[Supernova Palm]
A sphere of super-concentrated, white-hot fire no larger than an apple manifested at the center of her palm, then detonated outward in a focused, high-density beam of localized thermal radiation.
The attack did not merely blast the oncoming lava; it fundamentally altered the thermodynamics of the strike zone.
The extreme, hyper-dense heat of the Supernova Palm violently sucked every trace of moisture, volatile kinetic energy, and liquid mass out of the targeted area.
When the blast struck the Colossus’s left shoulder and front leg, the effect was catastrophic.
The liquid magma running through the beast’s rocky veins was instantly dehydrated, calcifying into a gray, brittle, lifeless stone.
The stone itself lost all structural cohesion, its cellular density withering into a fine, lightless ash that began to spread across the titan’s torso like a creeping cancer.
The Obsidian Colossus let out an ear-splitting, grinding shriek as its front left limb completely dissolved into powder under its own weight, causing the massive behemoth to pitch sideways and crash violently against the inner caldera wall, sending tons of shattered stone cascading into the lava below.
Rhys took his time to strike at the perfect moment while all this happened.
Channeling all his wind and water mana into his leg muscles, Rhys vaulted from the rim, his trajectory a sharp, descending green arc.
His twin daggers were ablaze with concentrated emerald lightning, humming with enough rotational frequency to pierce dragon scales.
In the fraction of a second before the beast could bring its remaining limbs to bear, Rhys landed squarely upon the Colossus’s fractured, ash-eaten neck.
He drove both daggers downward to the hilt, directly into the glowing fissure where the creature’s central mana pathways converged.
"Die," Rhys breathed.
He twisted the blades ninety degrees and released a massive burst of kinetic lightning directly into the beast’s internal core.
CRACK!
A sharp, crystalline detonation echoed from deep within the titan’s chest.
The white-hot fire in its facial fissures flickered violently, turned to dull orange, and died.
The massive stone body went completely limp, sliding down the basalt wall and coming to a rest half-submerged in the cooling magma.
Rhys ripped his daggers free, sheared through the remaining calcified stone of the neck with two clean, lightning-infused strikes, and hauled the massive, smoking head onto a solid outcropping.
He reached into the shattered chest cavity, pulling out a fist-sized, Disaster-rank core that pulsed with dense, dark red mana, before storing both trophies inside his spatial ring.
A small gift Rhys had received from Loryn. He originally created it for Jack, but with his system, he didn’t need it.
So what better use than to give it to your protégé? A gesture of good faith to show you are invested in his continued growth.
He turned to see Mira landing lightly on the ledge beside him, her gloves already back on, her face completely expressionless.
"Target eliminated," Rhys said, his breathing steady, his eyes looking toward the northern horizon where the spatial beacon to the next floor awaited. "We move to Floor Twenty-One."
-------------
Fifteen leagues beneath the high plateau, upon the watery expanse of Floor Eleven, Captain Theo Althalos was discovering that pureblood military doctrine was utterly useless when fighting an invisible enemy.
Floor Eleven was a desolate, violent ocean world.
Endless expanses of slate-gray, churning water stretched in every direction, broken only by jagged, barnacle-encrusted sea-crags that jutted from the waves like black fangs.
A relentless, howling crosswind whipped dense sheets of salty spray across the sky, creating a low-hanging blanket of brine-fog that cut visibility to less than thirty paces.
High above the crashing waves, Theo sat astride the massive, armored neck of the Disaster-class Dragon he had selected from Jack’s vanguard.
His silver plate armor was drenched in salt water, his golden hair plastered against his forehead, and his cold cerulean eyes were bloodshot from straining against the mist.
His enchanted broadsword was drawn, its edge crackling with golden light mana, but there was nothing to strike.
For nearly an hour, Theo had forced the dragon to fly sweeping search grids across the stormy floor, expecting to locate the native demon clan’s stronghold.
A fortress, a coastal keep, or an open war-camp he could obliterate with aerial superiority.
There was nothing.
Only endless water and barren stone.
"Descend to fifty feet!" Theo barked, violently tugging on the dragon’s heavy leather reins. "We are flying too high! The mist is blinding us!"
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