I Like It Cool (1)
“All right. It’s about time I cleared out of here.”
Let’s see…
A full six months had slipped by since I dropped into this godforsaken world. Maybe it was because every single day had been an uphill battle to keep breathing, but while it felt like an eternity had passed, on the calendar it really hadn’t been that long.
Across this frozen wasteland, I had absorbed around fifteen Dimension Stones. Most were on the smaller side, but I had devoured them down to the very last scrap regardless. According to Belba, the pool of dimensional power swirling inside me now eclipsed that of most minor dimensions.
It was time to get moving.
Part of me wanted to linger in the familiar frost a while longer, but my growth had ground to a halt. There simply weren’t any monsters left within hunting range that could offer me a decent meal or a meaningful workout.
Ever since I brought down the Ice Queen and stripped her abilities clean through Predation, ice-element monsters had ceased to be any kind of threat. If there was one exception, it was that dinosaur I ran into not long ago. That overgrown beast, built like a walking tank out of the ankylosaur family, had pressured me hard with its thick ice-shell armor and a massive warhammer tail. Brute physical mass like that proved far more troublesome to deal with than things slinging fancy ice magic.
And there were plenty more brutes where that came from out in the wider world. There was zero reason to hang around here and let myself get soft.
Time to pack up and set off for the new continent!
“So, Belba. Go do a wide sweep ahead and see which way we should go. And while you’re up there, check if there are any sentient beings around.”
[Look at you, ordering me around without even offering a dime.]
“I gave you plenty! What about that… that Ice Flower Stone?”
Even after nearly dying a while back, I hadn’t given up on figuring out how to manipulate dimensional power. And my stubbornness had finally begun to bear fruit. Nowadays, I could sense my surroundings within a hundred-meter radius without even looking.
The hitch was that it worked by reading unique energetic wavelengths. If it was a mineral I’d never laid eyes on, my radar couldn’t identify it. I could feel an odd foreign presence, sure, but without seeing it in person first, I couldn't even pin down its nature.
Nothing for it. For a whole month, I had trudged around digging up veins with my own two hands, familiarizing myself with every ore I unearthed. From then on, my sensory net picked them up without a hitch, and I managed to rake in a pretty tidy sum of coins.
That was how I stumbled across the Ice Flower Stone.
It was a bizarre mineral that bloomed like a blossom deep beneath the permafrost. When a subterranean flora known as the Fligel flower soaked in extreme subzero cold over vast stretches of time, it calcified until it turned hard as forged steel. That metallic fossil was the Ice Flower Stone.
Thinking it might fetch a decent price, I had handed it over to Belba, and fifty thousand coins were promptly wired into my account. When I pressed her on why a single rock was worth so much, she laid out the Fligel’s true properties.
‘When consumed, its spores trigger massive dopamine rushes, causing vivid auditory and visual hallucinations that last twenty-four hours straight. And once it hardens into an Ice Flower Stone, that potency amplifies dozens of times over.’
In layman's terms: it was a high-grade narcotic. Without even realizing it, I had unlocked a brand-new career path as an interdimensional drug lord.
Not that I gave a damn.
Coins were king.
“Still, you little swindler. How do you justify pocketing fifty thousand coins on a single rock?”
[Life is hard for me too, you know! Supporting you eats through thousands of coins every single day. Besides, you wouldn't even have a buyer without me. Cut me some slack this once!]
Curiosity had gotten the better of me one day, and when I pressed her for the actual market price of an Ice Flower Stone, she had tried to dodge the question. Under continued interrogation, she finally squeaked out the truth: a full one hundred thousand coins. Shameless little parasite.
Still, I knew how critical Belba was to my survival. She was worth infinitely more to me than a measly fifty thousand coins. But shameless was shameless, and bad behavior warranted punishment. Today, she was going to have to watch me force another high-wire fusion of dimensional power and mana.
[……]
Leaving the glacial expanse behind, I began the long trek toward the distant, smoking silhouette of a volcano. It was dull, repetitive walking—prime time to attempt something that demanded razor-sharp focus instead of letting my mind wander.
Carefully, I drew a bead of mana onto my palm. Prismatic light bobbed in the air like a cluster of glowing fireflies. From here on out, it was all about visualization.
I brought my other hand down, slowly compressing the mana. A fierce repelling force pushed back against my palm, the distinct resistance of two identical magnetic poles fighting for space. In the past, this was where my experiments invariably blew up in my face. But now that my proficiency had jumped several tiers, I had the strength to bear down and overpower the recoil.
Hummmmm—
Refusing to yield, I kept pushing inward. The violent pushback slowly smoothed out, and a sphere of dazzling radiance flared to life above my palms.
It looked gorgeous on the surface, but it was primed on a hair-trigger—unstable enough that a single careless tap could set off an explosion. Yet because of that very instability, tiny microscopic gaps remained within the mana framework. All I had to do now was thread dimensional power into those seams.
I had devoured dozens of books on theoretical energy compression, buying up anything remotely relevant from the system shop to study until my eyes bled. Because if I messed this up, I wasn't just failing an experiment. I was dead.
Focus.
With surgical delicacy, I wove threads of dimensional power through the frayed edges of the mana matrix. Methodical and precise, like sliding a hypodermic needle between living cells. Gaseous by nature, the dimensional energy only needed a nudge of calibrated pressure to flood the gaps and lock the core into place. That was my theory, at least, and after working with this energy for so long, I had the confidence to back it up.
How much time ticked by, I couldn't say. But eventually, a colorless, shimmering haze rippled around the glowing orb, like heat wavering off black asphalt on a midsummer afternoon.
It was done.
Yoo Yeon-ah’s Special Buggy Bomb—wait, scratch that. The Dimensional Mana Bullet Prototype.
[It’s so pretty it’s ominous. What is this even supposed to do?]
Its advantage? The beauty of the Dimensional Mana Bullet was remarkably simple and brutally direct.
To demonstrate, I flicked my wrist straight through the core of the orb and pulled it back out. On the surface, absolutely nothing appeared to happen.
“Well?” I asked.
[Just drink a potion already……]
A burst of exquisite agony flashed through my arm. When I lifted my forearm, my hand dangled limply from the wrist like a dead weight. The tendons had severed clean through. Not just the tendons, either; every artery and vein had burst internally, accompanied by a spiderweb of hairline fractures splintering the carpal bones. All from grazing the field for a fraction of a second.
“Now imagine this: what happens if I wrap this field around my fist or coat a blade with it? Anyone I touch just drops dead on the spot.”
[It looks far more likely that you… I mean, Lady Yeon-ah, will drop dead first. Please, be careful. I’m begging you.]
“Oh, come off it. I’m not dying that easily.”
Of course, to make good on that boast, I first had to safely dismantle the bomb floating in front of me. One wrong twitch, and the delicate equilibrium would shatter, taking my torso with it. After a moment of grim contemplation, I decided to unravel the construct by reversing the exact sequence I had used to forge it.
To put it in perspective, it was like knitting a sweater and then unpicking every single stitch in reverse. Except instead of one ball of yarn, this sweater was woven out of hundreds of live, volatile wires.
It was absolute hell. Forging the sphere had taken fifteen minutes; diffusing it took five grueling hours. My comprehension and finesse over mana spiked drastically through the ordeal, but the sheer, grinding frustration was something I never wanted to endure again. By the time I finished, I was completely drained, trudging forward with heavy, miserable footsteps.
[Serves you right.]
“Ugh, it’s so damn hot.”
Rivers of bubbling magma cut through the blackened terrain, and persistent flames danced on the scorched tips of dead trees. My stress levels were spiking fast.
[The fox says she loves it, though.]
She does?
Come to think of it, the little furball had been bouncing around for a while now, looking more like an overexcited puppy than a wild fox. After being trapped in the freezing cold for so long, arriving at the Volcanic Zone seemed to have put her in high spirits. Feeling a bit like a dog owner taking their pet out for a nice walk, I paused to watch her dart back and forth across the ash.
“Having fun?”
The fox gave an enthusiastic nod.
Now that I thought about it, I really needed to give this creature a proper name. The reason I’d put it off for so long was simple: to be completely blunt, I assumed she was going to die early on. A terrible thing to admit, but true. Still, we’d grown quite attached to each other over the months, and I had apologized to her plenty of times since. We were cool now, right?
When I held out an open palm, the fox came trotting over on light paws and rested her chin squarely against my skin. God, she’s cute. Pure soul-cleansing therapy.
After giving her chin a fond scratch, I stared down at the fox as she rolled onto her back, clearly loving the radiant heat from the warm soil. A name, huh… Hmm.
“When you think of foxes, you think of a nine-tailed fox. Let’s go with Gumiho.”
[What on earth is that?] Belba piped up, clearly puzzled by the exotic syllables.
“What is it? It’s the name of a wicked monster back where I come from.”
[Why would you name a pet after an evil monster……?]
“Because it’s legendary. In my world, fame is fame, whether you’re good or bad.”
Besides, the old myths said a fox had to live for a thousand years to grow all nine tails and become a true Gumiho. I wanted her to survive that long. I wanted her to stay by my side for as long as I walked this earth. The name carried that quiet wish.
[……I have no idea what you’re rambling about. I’ll just register ‘Gumiho’ in the status window for now.]
“This is driving me insane. There aren’t even any monsters around, just endless, miserable heat.”
Irritation was simmering right at the surface. Sweat poured down my skin in relentless rivulets. I had stowed my heavy armor in subspace, but the padded undergarments clung to me, soaked and suffocating.
Should I just strip it all off?
I remembered reading somewhere that people in desert climates wore thick robes to shield their skin from the scorching sun. I had tried to copy that logic, but ‘shielding’ my skin turned out to be complete nonsense—it was just suffocatingly hot. And when I stopped to look up, there wasn't even a visible sun anyway. The sky was choked by a perpetual canopy of volcanic ash.
Wait. Then why the hell had I kept these thick layers on in the first place? The heat had clearly cooked my brain.
Just as I reached down to strip off the damp underclothes and change into something lighter—
[Ahead of you! An enemy!]
Belba’s sharp cry snapped my head up.
A massive, reddish-brown dinosaur stood before me, jaws split wide. Even from this distance, the blistering heat rolling out from the crimson cavern of its gullet washed over my face.
…Wait a second. Is that thing about to do what I think it’s about to do?
Every survival instinct in my body screamed in unison. The very sense that had pulled me back from the brink of death time and time again flared with absolute, piercing clarity.
Without wasting a fraction of a heartbeat, I threw myself sideways.
An instant later—
ROOOOOOAAAR—!!
A colossal pillar of white-hot flame ripped through the atmosphere. Heat intense enough to vaporize flesh scorched my skin and seared deep into my lungs. By pure reflex, I triggered Freezing, encasing my own flesh in a shell of frost. My burning clothes and blistered skin hissed violently as the flames were extinguished in a cloud of scalding steam.
“You… son of a… bitch.”
It hurt like absolute hell. I hadn’t even taken a direct hit, yet my entire body throbbed with a sickening, burning agony. In terms of clinical damage, I was looking at third-degree burns across my entire front.
The dinosaur tilted its massive head, seemingly perplexed that I had survived, before settling back into a tense crouch to wind up another blast.
A predictable pattern. I had faced this kind of telegraph a hundred times before.
My mind immediately processed the tactical variables: The speed at which thermal energy gathered in its gullet. The volume of mana churning through its internal organs.
Plenty of time.
Summoning a spear from subspace, I surged toward the beast. I was faster than its breath weapon. I was going to win this exchange. And then I was going to butcher it.
I would tear this thing apart until there was nothing left to burn.
“Die—!”
Carrying every ounce of my boiling fury and spite, the tip of my spear flashed forward like a bolt of lightning, skewering the monster’s skull clean through.