Chaotic Dungeon Practice (2)
Chaotic Dungeon Practice (2)
A weighty presence pulsed outward in waves.
— Boom!
The ceiling and walls, which had been collapsing as though to swallow everything, halted abruptly. The spike that had been surging up from the floor quivered, caught mid-thrust.
Homogenization, Taesan.
Earth dominance settled over the area. The preexisting dominion was pushed aside helplessly. Lee Ha-yul stepped forward.
— Rrrumble.
The spike that had been driven right up to his nose melted away into sludge. Rock and soil pooled on the floor like lava, then swarmed toward Lee Ha-yul.
It clung to his legs, climbed his body, covered his head. Boom! His footsteps carried a tangible heft.
Unlike his usual slender hands, Lee Ha-yul flexed thick hands of rock, almost like Aerus.
Taesan expansion ability, Golden Mountain Iron Wall.
Armor formed by compressing the earth into a single mass.
A Taesan manifestor who wields this expansion ability is tough and tenacious—tenacious enough to be compared to a cockroach.
Armor compressed around Taesan—its strength and durability.
When close to the earth, damage repairs almost instantly, and the vitality drawn up boosts physical ability and replenishes regeneration.
When severed from the earth? Self-repair through attribute generation.
During the last Birth Festival, Lee Ji-yeon—using Golden Mountain Iron Wall—took several hits from the 5th Iteration without a single scratch.
'Implementing another person's expansion ability through Homogenization is difficult.'
Manifesting her version is beyond me.
The shape is mimicked fairly closely, but it's fundamentally different. This is nothing more than an imitation that hasn't been fully incorporated into Taesan's Innate Talent.
'For Calamity Flame, I could even manage the expansion ability... but this isn't the same.'
It's closer to magic than an expansion ability. Far inferior to the performance of Golden Mountain Iron Wall that Lee Ji-yeon displayed.
'Still, once Taesan is firmly established as an Innate Talent, I should be able to achieve the expansion ability too. And then...'
Kwaang! A hole burst open in the ceiling amid an explosion. Emerging from within was the worm from earlier—the earth dragon.
— Kyaaaah!
The earth dragon plummeted, its maw gaping wide. Lee Ha-yul, directly beneath it, raised both arms and spread his craggy hands.
Boom! The descent halted. The murky eyes of the earth dragon flew wide.
'Even if it's inferior to the original, it's not so poor that I can't use it here.'
The arms that blocked the earth dragon's fall did not tremble. The legs bracing it did not buckle, and the floor—solidified by Taesan—did not sink.
He drew one arm back. Mana surging from his core and vitality drawn from the earth coiled around his arm. Crunch! Power amassed within his clenched fist.
Before the unanchored earth dragon could topple, his fist plunged into its gaping maw.
The expansion ability Lee Ji-yeon had used—Mountain-Breaking. An inferior imitation of hers.
The force concentrated in his fist detonated.
— ...Kwhaaaaaaang!
'Huhk...'
The spirit who had been observing the situation swallowed another meaningless breath.
The cavern, the underground, shook. A hole was punched into one segment of her consciousness in an instant. The detonating shock annihilated the soil within her jurisdiction.
The surrounding zone—not annihilated, but an area easily twice as wide—splintered, pulverized, and burst apart.
The soldier who took the blast from within?
...She could barely sense any trace. Fragments of what had been a soldier, scattered into countless pieces too fine to perceive. The spirit's eyelids fluttered.
'What in the...'
The complex, subtle wavelengths that had been emanating from him, the three pairs of wings that held countless kinsmen and seemed somehow familiar—an appearance so dramatic it struck even the spirit as uncanny.
The elements that had been seared vividly into her mind scattered.
A body made of rock. Far smaller than the earth dragon, yet a colossal pressure approached like a mountain.
The kinsmen held within the wings.
They radiated nothing short of utter contentment, but to the spirit—who had never entered them—it felt like unprecedented eeriness...
'Repel him?'
Impossible. The duty that surfaced in her mind dissolved immediately. In this space, with the spirit's remaining strength, defeating that monster was out of the question. And for some reason, she didn't even want to try.
Drive him out? Would that even work? She had no confidence she could push that thing toward the exit.
In that case...
'Urk...'
She lacked the confidence to carry out her duty. The moment the thought formed, her consciousness reeled.
The spirit winced and pressed a hand to her head. Her body, floating in midair, swayed for a moment.
'She swayed.'
Lee Ha-yul felt it too. Not just the spirit's true body—the surrounding earth was trembling faintly.
The blow just now had disrupted the spirit's dominion, and simultaneously the consciousness dwelling in the earth had shaken along with it.
'A forced appointment?'
Spirits are also born within dungeons. Even an unstable subspace, once it is furnished with the trappings of nature and attributes, can sometimes give rise to a spirit.
A spirit birthed that way does not belong to the dungeon and receives no correction.
But this spirit is receiving the dungeon's correction. On top of that, she felt like an Alpha Individual outright designated by the dungeon.
He didn't know the reason, but it seemed she hadn't become an Alpha Individual through the normal path.
If so, that eases his mind slightly. Lee Ha-yul walked toward the wall.
The wall retreated backward. The earth under his dominion shifted, opening a broad path in the spirit's direction.
'Hm.'
Quite a distance. Lee Ha-yul tilted his head.
It was a fact he'd only recently become aware of.
Though partly due to the nature of exploration and pioneering, this was a distance where—even after spending five days—he couldn't be sure he'd reached the entrance to the inner core.
And this was the center of that inner core. There was no way the distance to the spirit beside the core was short.
'Spatial Leap... is indeed too easy.'
If he used that, there'd be no point in deliberately bringing out Taesan to train.
'Breaking straight through in a line would be optimal for training... half a day or so?'
If he pushed harder, it'd shrink from that, too. Having roughly finished his calculations, Lee Ha-yul exhaled deeply.
Since he'd entered a Grade 2 dungeon anyway, proper training was better.
'Homogenization.'
Simultaneous Homogenization activation. His insides grew stuffy as if from indigestion. A natural, negligible burden. With a small motion, his hand brushed the air, the wind.
'Gale.'
Lee Ha-sol's unique ability.
— Whooong...
Wind scattered between his fingers of rock. Spreading like thousands upon thousands of strands of thread, the wind swept across every direction.
The sensations rode the wind back to him.
The craggy surfaces of the rock. Wind flowing out of passages connected to caverns, wind escaping into the passages, the distant sources linked to that wind...
'This functionality is similar to Taesan.'
Taesan can merge with the earth and even receive some of its sensations and information.
This Gale was similar. Information carried by the wind battered his mind in rapid succession.
As it happened, he was also imitating Taesan. With the information conveyed by earth and wind merging together, the volume of data was staggering.
'At this level...'
He quietly lowered the main observation, leaving only subconscious-level Crisis Observation active. In an instant, the observation that had encompassed the whole area ceased.
The total volume of information dropped sharply.
'Definitely inferior to Observation.'
But not unusable.
If Observation were ever blocked in the future, his alternatives had increased. Lee Ha-yul grinned and moved his feet.
Beyond the opened path, monsters that had barged in on their own were forming a crude defensive formation.
Without stopping, Lee Ha-yul extended just his index finger.
— Whooong...!
Wind drawn from the entire area converged on a single point. At his fingertip, wind energy that pushed through the rock and flowed outward blended into the gale.
Mixed with mana, the wind became visible—an emerald green gale. Gauging the swirling wind energy, he flicked his finger.
The rapid burst of wind slammed into a rock golem's solar plexus.
— Phaaaang!
The compressed wind erupted in a torrent. The rock golem that took the blow was caught in the fierce current and ripped to shreds.
The damage didn't end there.
The monsters in the defensive formation were swallowed by the torrent an instant later, and before even a second had passed, every last one of them was ground away.
The aftermath of the torrent spilled into the passage.
The fierce wind that had ground the monsters without a trace swept past Lee Ha-yul as gently as a tailwind, affecting only him.
'Hm.'
The wind gradually stilled. Lee Ha-yul entered the passage. The inner walls had been torn to ribbons and flipped inside-out.
The spot where the wind had exploded. There, a space larger and more jagged than the previous cavern had been carved out.
'The output is excellent, as expected.'
Not excellent in any modest sense. It was an output that would make most witnesses drop their jaws in shock.
He only called it this much because his points of comparison were the unique abilities of the Three Great Families.
And even that was an evaluation compared to Hong Yeon-hwa and Baek A-rin's unique abilities during the early first-year entrance period.
Meaning that even among those standards, he could claim the output is "excellent."
On top of that, it had multiple supplementary functions and some side effects too, so...
'...Once this settles as an Innate Talent as well, I'll probably be able to achieve the expansion ability too.'
Wearing an odd expression, Lee Ha-yul rolled the wind across his palm.
After a moment's hesitation, he drew up the energy within his body.
There were currently three types of mana inside him.
One was his original pure mana.
Another was earth energy, converted from pure mana under Taesan's influence.
And the last, likewise converted from pure mana, was the wind energy he was currently rolling in his palm.
Calamity Flame was fully established within Lee Ha-yul, but its fiery nature didn't manifest until he actually called Calamity Flame forth.
'Just a little...'
Carefully, he attached Taesan's earth energy to the Gale wind energy rolling in his palm.
— Jik, jik, jijijik...!
Crack! His bent fingers snapped open on their own. The wildly surging wind shook off his control and scattered.
A stinging palm. Golden Mountain Iron Wall peeled away, and his palm was left jaggedly scratched. As blood dripped down, Lee Ha-yul furrowed his brow.
'Repulsion.'
The wind energy and earth energy repelled each other. Not a catastrophic repulsion.
Again, the standard of comparison was the repulsion generated between the unique abilities of the Three Great Families.
Three Ends.
In other words, the repulsion was far more viciously aggravating than with ordinary attribute abilities.
As a side note, Heavenly Thunder also repels viciously. With Calamity Flame, with Azure Sea, with Taesan, with Gale.
There wasn't only repulsion, though.
— Fwooosh!
The instant he kindled Calamity Flame into the wind energy, the Calamity Flame surged up far larger than intended and touched the ceiling.
His expression grew even odder at the sight of the ceiling burning away in a flash.
Mutual Promotion. And Repulsion.
Three Ends is a technique that exploits the Mutual Promotion and Repulsion of Calamity Flame, Azure Sea, and Taesan.
'Mmmmmm...'
Could Gale, could Heavenly Thunder, be inserted into that?
'I don't know... Part of me thinks it could work...'
He still didn't know. He'd thought about it but hadn't tried.
Because he knew that if this goes wrong, he really could die.
'...Should I try it in the Tower of Growth?'
But there was a suitable place.
The Tower of Growth. There, even death isn't a problem. It was a place perfectly suited as a test bed.
Lee Ha-yul nodded and extinguished the Calamity Flame.
'First, the spirit.'
Bang! The ground he kicked off caved in deeply.
Acceleration achieved by fully utilizing the physical abilities boosted through Taesan.
On top of that, the wind smoothly pushed his body forward, and the wind that had obstructed his path naturally parted.
'It'll be even shorter than half a day.'
Lee Ha-yul gave a small nod as he revised his projected schedule.
— Aaack! It's coming aaaack...!
The spirit, who had been trembling visibly at that tremendous acceleration, let out a sharp scream.
* * *
[The Tower of Growth's Tower Master is silent.]
[The Tower of Growth's Tower Master is silent.]
[The Tower of Growth's Tower Master is silent.]
...
[The Tower of Growth's Tower Master is silent, anxious.]