The Kobold Colony
Crimson Flame has reached its maximum level.
LV 20
With the message came a strange feeling welling up through my chest — warm, and faintly ticklish. A bizarre sensation, as if flame itself were being drawn in through my skin.
Thank god.
I'd been quietly worried. Crimson Flame only triggered when I struck an enemy with fire, and I'd half-feared the Transcendence trait simply wouldn't apply to it. The worry had been groundless. I was certain of it now: Transcendence didn't care what kind of skill it was. Then again, I'd already transcended skills sealed inside equipment. Maybe this was only natural.
"Head west first, wasn't it...?"
I turned, calling the verification post back to mind. After I'd covered some ground, something surfaced on the display — three red dots. A goblin scout team, three to a squad.
The archer came first. I had no intention of testing a new skill on something that could hit me from range. That was how you ended up with an arrow buried in your skull.
Thwack!
A fireball punched clean through the archer's head. Its body went up in flame, crumbled to powder, and scattered on the wind. Whether it was the level-up or not, the fireball was faster than before — fast enough that I wasn't sure even I could have dodged it.
"Kieeeeeek!"
"Kaaaaak!!"
They flinched at the sight of their companion reduced to dust, but only for a moment. Then the shieldbearer and the swordsman shrieked and charged.
Boom!
The next bolt of flame slammed into the shieldbearer's head. The force was so great that everything above the chest blew apart, and a violent fire raced down to consume what remained below the shoulders in an instant.
Now.
Spread.
I willed the flame outward, and in that instant it burst in every direction, exactly as I'd wanted — like a water balloon splitting and dumping its contents.
"Kieeeeeek!"
The goblin swordsman running alongside was swallowed whole. It spat out a death cry and vanished into powder in a single breath. I scratched my chin, watching it go.
The control itself wasn't hard. I just wasn't satisfied. The flame had spilled too far in every direction. It needed aim.
The next scout team I met became the test for that.
Fwoosh!
The archer stood at the center of the trio. A fireball shattered its torso, and instead of letting the flame bloom everywhere, I stretched it out to either side. The goblins were engulfed at once. All three of the scout team were gone in a flash.
"...Not that hard."
Good. Maybe it was the max-level Crimson Flame, but giving the fire a direction hadn't been difficult at all. That was the basic performance confirmed.
I pulled the community post up one more time.
Crimson Flame is the essence of fire magic. The MZ crowd lives on short-form videos these days, so I'll keep this short.
1. The basic principle.
Crimson Flame is the ability to spread fire and expand it. Two ingredients: volume of flame, and mental power.
Volume decides how fierce the fire is. Mental power decides which way it goes.
Which one matters more? Volume, obviously. Overwhelm them with firepower and you burn less focus. Same idea as water pressure — crank the pressure high enough and you barely twist the tap before it comes gushing out.
2. Skill level.
Low-level Crimson Flame is a one-trick. Simple expansion. You spread fire. That's the whole skill.
The higher the level climbs, the more the caster's will gets written into it. High-level users are genuinely good at reshaping flame to fit the moment. A wave of fire when you're sweeping a crowd. A fire arrow when you're picking off one target. That kind of thing.
Doesn't it only trigger when you hit an enemy? No. It doesn't. That's just because your Crimson Flame is garbage.
Common sense stops applying once you're holding the skill at level 8 or above. Reshaping flame outside of combat is basic for them. They sculpt grotesque animals out of fire and set them to biting, or swatting with a foreleg.
Why bother? Because it's stupid strong. A shape hammered out by will goes past raw power and carries a ridiculous number of ways it can change. What I'm saying is, you can modify the skill itself.
Oh. And of course, that kind of shape conversion only opens up once the skill hits the highest level.
Yeah, yeah. You're right.
I'm saying you can't do it.
I nodded at the clean explanation. It was a completely different approach from anything I'd picked up off TV, and it gave me plenty to work with.
"So a change of shape is possible through will alone...?"
My level was 80. Nowhere near high. But the skill level itself was higher than anyone else's. If someone holding Crimson Flame at level 8 could do it, then maybe I could too. Only one way to find out. I summoned a fireball over my palm and poured my will into it.
Arrow. Arrow. An arrow!
Pop!
The tip of the fireball jutted out to a point, like a beak breaking through the shell of a round egg. Deeply unsatisfying.
Shape conversion isn't easy.
Even so, I felt it on instinct. This was only a matter of proficiency. Practice enough, and it would come.
"Going to need a lot of practice."
With that, I pushed on west and cheerfully burned every goblin scout team I happened across. Once Crimson Flame settled into my hands, a single fireball was enough to finish all three.
I didn't skip the gathering, either. All I had to do was walk toward whatever dot rose on the display. Most of it was spirit herb of the utterly common sort, but even those went for a hundred thousand won apiece. Plenty of value, as far as I was concerned.
I walked a long while before I arrived at Nehemis's Tree of Life.
Fsssshhhh...
A trunk as thick as a building, and above it a countless spread of branches and leaves shivering in the wind. A mystique you would never find in the real world — and nothing in the way of a special power to go with it. Its exact use was unknown. To the Awakened, it served as a kind of landmark. Things like it turned up here and there in the Labyrinth, or so I'd heard, and Nehemis's Tree of Life was one of them.
"......."
I rested a hand on the trunk for a moment, then turned south. From here on, it was kobold territory. Weaker than goblins in raw physical ability, but absurd in number — a place that favored mages who could deal damage across an area.
...Even so, people rarely walked in alone the way I had. Mana runs dry no matter what kind of mage you are, and you need time to recover. Wander around by yourself and there's no telling what kind of mess you'll walk into.
That didn't apply to me.
"...Hm."
A short walk later, a black dot rose on the display — a color I wasn't used to. Up close, it was a kobold corpse. A pig's snout stuck on a face like a rat's, two ears bigger than the head itself, and a frame smaller than a goblin's. Under the shabby leather, though, it was packed with muscle. They said even an Awakened's bones would break under that club. Looked at that way, there was no such thing as a monster you could afford to relax around.
Always be careful.
Step. Step.
Checking the Labyrinth compass I'd bought off the equipment merchant, I advanced slowly, dead south. Turning was out of the question. The energy saturating the Labyrinth wiped out any sense of direction.
It wasn't long before new dots appeared — three in gray, and something like ten red ones beneath them. Three hunters, and a pack of kobolds.
I closed my eyes. From Perception to Sensation. Human and monster alike unfolded in front of me in real time, as clearly as if I were watching with my eyes open.
A shield caught a kobold's club. A spear shot out and punched through its skull. Three arrows flew at once from behind the shield and drilled clean through three kobold chests. The red dots thinned fast.
"...Hm."
The last of the three never so much as shifted. The reason wasn't hard to see. A mage — the sort who could sweep a whole canyon by himself.
I didn't step out in front of them. I followed along behind the hunters. I wasn't here to raise my level, and I had no particular desire to be noticed. Their destination looked to be the same as mine, but that hardly mattered. There was more than one canyon. Watch them awhile, then take an empty one. That was all.
Convenient, having them clear the kobolds for me.
I walked the Labyrinth at my ease. Half an hour or so passed that way before the canyons came into view, thrusting up high in the distance.
Six of them, by eye. Two had already been cleared, and four stood empty. The three Awakened made for the one set deepest in. Three small dots began to climb the upper reach of the canyon — the mage would be wiping out everything below with an area skill from up top, most likely.
Once they had vanished completely beyond the rim, I moved to the nearest canyon. The climb was steep, long, and dull, but nothing about it was truly difficult. I eased my head out and looked down.
Kobolds seethed across the floor so thickly I couldn't see the ground. The display was already drowned in red. The dots had become a solid field a long time ago.
Step. Step.
I was curious. If a level-20 Flame Burst dropped into the middle of them — if I then spread that heat with a level-20 Crimson Flame — what, exactly, would happen?
I felt my heart kick with anticipation, and I walked slowly toward a vantage that looked straight down on the center of the canyon.
A short while later, the central plaza lay beneath my feet.
"Kiriririk, kirik!"
"Kererererek!"
The horde shrieked back and forth in cries I couldn't begin to parse. There had to be thousands of them, and the sight of it was something to behold. I watched for a moment, then formed a condensed flame over my palm and expanded it as far as it would go.
Kuuuuum...!!
Heat sucked madly into a fire that had swollen to the size of my head. My mana plunged, then surged back to the brim — the Meditation skill. Yeah. This thing was the real deal.
Soon the flame had filled to its limit, a sphere shuddering as if it might burst at any second. I caught it in one hand and hurled it straight at the center of the canyon.
Fwoooosh!!!
Flame Burst streaked in like lightning and detonated in an instant over the kobolds' heads. A volume of fire greater than anything I had ever seen in my life tore outward.
KRA-BOOOOOOM!!!
Focus.
I seized the blaze with Crimson Flame and drove it out in every direction. The enormous fire had turned to lava, and it began to sweep the canyon like a wave. The blast born in the plaza scoured the whole of it in a flash.
"...Holy shit."
Even watching from a distance, the flame was vast enough to knock the sense out of me.
The kobolds never so much as thought of running. They stared blankly at the fire rolling in, and they melted. The red dots on the display vanished without a trace — not even a single black dot left behind.
Only after the red was entirely gone did I snuff the flame.
Kuuuuuum...!!
A beat later, the parts of the canyon that couldn't bear the fire's weight began to collapse. In places the sheer cliff had slumped into a gentle slope, and I picked my way carefully down one of them.
I reached the dead center of the plaza, drew a glass bottle from my inventory, and popped the lid.
Hssssss...!!
An invisible current was sucked down into the bottle — the life force of kobolds melted by the flame.
◈ A vessel that holds a monster's vitality.
◈ Current capture:879
The capture count climbed in real time. So many souls were being drawn in that the air around me shimmered like a heat haze. The dizziness got bad enough that I shut my eyes entirely.
It was over only after the bottle had drunk down close to four thousand souls. I sealed the lid and dropped the Breath of Hatred into my inventory, then sat on the scoured ground, drew a long breath, and thought it over.
Could I clear one more canyon?
It wasn't impossible. Nothing dangerous waited on the road back, either.
Just one more.
The mental power that had expanded when I hit level 80 was still holding firm. I'd come this far. One more place ought to be fine. I was turning to go when—
"...Hm?"
Something glinted on the plaza floor. Overwhelming firepower had melted everything that existed down here, and the simple fact that anything remained felt wrong. I walked over and picked up the small object at my feet. A little copper key.
"......."
Nothing special about the look of it. Utterly ordinary. But it couldn't be an ordinary thing — a normal key would never have survived that heat. It made sense, then, that none of the guides had mentioned it. Unless you'd melted the kobolds down completely, the way I had, you would never have found the key at all.
I settled that in my head and looked carefully around, and before long I was tilting my head. There was nowhere — nowhere at all — to put a key.
"Ah."
There was. A place I'd seen in a community guide: beneath the canyon, the space where the kobolds lived. Maybe something was down there.
My interest stirred.
Should I go take a look?
© Domhwangcha #1ylk2