Chapter 43 Ice (Patreon)

                Just outside of the Great Black Tree Labyrinth a strange weather phenomenon was occurring. Sleet and rain were swirling around a man, an ice warrior named Drew, as he made his way to the labyrinth. To make matters odder, it was the height of summer, and the localized cold air was making significant condensation around Drew, creating more rain and a lot of fog. If someone looked closely, they would be able to see that as Drew walked, the rain that was swirling around his body turned his path into ice, and so each step he took was on an ever-expanding sheet of ice.

                As for Drew, the man in the middle of the ice and rain, he wore yellow winter clothing with red highlights that kept him warm as his ice spells froze the area around him and helped him stand out in the midst of the storms he created. When he went to labyrinths with mages or other warriors, they also wore the same type of winter clothing. It was standard issue for five-core ice warriors and their teams. Ice warriors could have spells carved into their mana channels that negated cold, but five-core ice warriors needed to work with mages, so they were specifically not given that particular spell. The thought was that if it was too cold for the ice warrior, then it was too cold for their teammates. That said, their winter gear was reinforced with magic, and so anyone who wore it was protected from cold unless a freezing attack was directly pointed at the wearer.  

                When he reached the labyrinth, Drew thought to himself, “It doesn’t look like this place has changed all that much since I was here all those years ago, but something must have changed since we have lost three teams of two core warriors.”

                While those thoughts were going through his head, he crossed the threshold into the dungeon's area of influence, and the essence creatures of the labyrinth instantly started attacking the ice warrior, or at least they tried. Any of the rabbits waiting underground to ambush Drew were frozen solid, as the ground was saturated with water and frozen before they could attack, or even dig themselves out of the ground. All the flying creatures had their wings disabled with freezing rain. The rest of the essence creatures, whether deer, bear, or man-eating squirrel, were pelted with tens of thousands of pieces of razor-sharp sleet that also happened to be harder than steel at winds in excess of three hundred miles an hour. Unfortunately for the land animals, they were tough enough to survive the ice, so Drew adjusted his strategy, and instead of hitting them with razor ice, he started pelting them with rain, and freezing the rain as it hit their faces. In less than ten seconds their heads were completely covered in a thick layer of ice, slowly suffocating any creature unfortunate enough to survive the razor ice.

                If Drew didn’t have the ability to draw water straight from the air around him, then his sleet and rain would have been blood red as he continued his search through the labyrinth. He knew this from his experience with his water core. A water core allowed a warrior to control a certain amount of water, and as they fought the viscera of the things they killed was caught up in their water. It was disgusting, nasty, and effective. Fortunately for Drew’s hygiene he was able to discard the bloody water and ice, and create new water out of the air thanks to his tier-two rain core. It gave him an inexhaustible supply of water to work with, so he could discard any contaminated water.

                Most of the warriors that entered the labyrinth tunnels waited until they killed all the attacking essence creatures around the trunk of the tree before entering. In fact, that was what Drew had to do last time he came here, but this time Drew was a tier two-warrior with two tier-two cores. There was no need to wait for the essence creatures to back off before he entered the tunnels. Essence creatures that tier-one warriors struggled to kill, Drew’s splash damage killed.

                As Drew entered the tunnels of the labyrinth, he froze the tunnels surrounding him. This was pure habit for the five-core warrior. If there were any traps or essence creatures waiting in ambush, then they would be disrupted or disabled. Either suited Drew just fine.

                Drew hurried his way through the labyrinth. His job was to either find what killed the two-core warriors or to fully search the labyrinth. The sooner he finished this job, the sooner he could get back to the local town and get back to his fun.

                His way through the first tunnel went as expected; nothing tried to kill him, so either there were no traps or monsters, which his memory refuted, or he froze everything to death. When he reached the first bulb, what the mages would call a biome, he immediately sent out wind, rain, and freezing cold temperatures, freezing everything in the biome in a handful of minutes. He then made his way through the biome, but once he noticed there were several tunnels leading out, he huffed in indignation, as it meant that if he didn’t find whatever killed the two-core warriors, then searching the entire labyrinth would take longer than he thought it would.

                As he made his way through the second tunnel, he was irritated when he found out that it just turned back onto the biome. He was irritated that whatever dungeon created this labyrinth decided to make it infuriating long by requiring him to double back. He took a deep breath before heading to the next tunnel.

                In the next tunnel Drew started by freezing everything, but that created a problem he was long familiar with. He froze some essence creatures in the narrow tunnel blocking his path. He simply took out a hammer and shattered the essence creatures blocking his path, then continued on to the next biome.

                Drew continued his journey through three more biomes, accepting his fate of having to search every inch of the labyrinth, when he finally stumbled across the ghillie dragon in the fifth biome. Drew didn’t notice the ghillie dragon at first, but the ghillie dragon definitely noticed the wave of fog, rain, and ice that was freezing everything. The thing was that although the ghillie dragon was cold-blooded, the cold didn’t exactly bother it much as the process of compressing hydrogen was very heat intensive, so where everything else was freezing by the splash damage from Drew’s attack, the ghillie dragon was able to resist it. Unfortunately for the ghillie dragon, resisting the ice damage meant he was the only thing in the biome without frost, and so he stood out. This meant the ghillie dragon would have to learn to attack without its camouflage.

                When Drew saw the creature, he had one thought, “That’s new.” A moment later he sent hundreds of thousands of pieces of razor ice at the ghillie dragon. The ghillie dragon responded by spewing his liquid hydrogen. Drew's attack of swirling ice and rain managed to divert the liquid hydrogen while striking the ghillie dragon, but as it was diverted Drew was shocked that he could feel the temperature in the biome drop. If he was in an ice labyrinth it would not have been a surprise, but it was unheard of for a tier-one labyrinth to produce temperatures this cold. For a moment, he thought the dungeon might have finally evolved into its tier-two variant, but this dungeon was supposed to become lightning, not ice.

                It took a long moment for Drew to come to terms with this change, but he wasn’t the only one surprised. The ghillie dragon was very surprised that something it sent its liquid nitrogen at didn’t freeze solid. So far in its short life, everything it sprayed its liquid hydrogen at had frozen, and for a moment, it felt slightly intimidated by the small creature. A moment later, it felt indignant, and it began charging the warrior.

                Drew’s role in every team he had ever been a part of had always been to deflect enemy attacks and use area attacks to wipe out weaker enemies. Whether it was his water, wind, or rain cores, he didn’t have strong attacks, but now he was a five-core ice warrior, and he finally had a devastating attack, albeit one overshadowed by what mages had.

                Three-core ice warriors could control ice like water mages controlled water, and they would be able to turn the ice covering the biome into spears; Drew couldn’t do that, as his control over water turned into control over rain when he received his rain core, but that didn’t mean Drew didn’t have any powerful attacks. All ice warriors had at least one overpowered attack and Drew was no different.

                With that in mind, Drew started his most powerful attack. He swirled all the water in the room together above the charging ghillie dragon, froze it into a gigantic blade of ice, and then dropped it. Although the ghillie dragon was moving fairly fast, the ghillie dragon was forty feet long, and so although the first spear missed critical organs, once it pierced the dragon, the dragon stopped cold, as the spear piercing it weighed over twenty thousand pounds.

                Drew did not hesitate to drop two more onto the ghillie dragon, one right after the other. Once he was sure it was dead, he walked up to it and used his personal dungeon core to absorb the essence creature before taking it back to the mage's tower.

                Later that day, when he reached the tower, the golem of the tower door allowed him in immediately, and he made his way up to the fourth floor, where one of the mages was working. The mage was heavily pregnant, covered in heavy makeup, looked to be thirty, but was probably closer to three hundred, and was a tier-two mage. Whether she only had one tier-two core, or all fourteen, Fred had no way of knowing, but to be a graduate of any branch of the mages academy meant having all eight-tier one cores and one tier-two. If she were a tier-three mage, she would be doing something other than babysitting a mage tower near a growing dungeon.

                Before she had a chance to look up at him, Drew said, “I think I found what has been killing the two-core warriors, but you are going to have to take a look at it outside.”

                She smiled and said, “Oh, that sounds interesting. Was the dungeon using poison again?”

                Fred asked, “Poison? No, nothing so simple.”

                “According to the imp, the dungeon has used poison in the past.”

                “If you get could information from the imp why did you send me?”

                “Imps only report to the mages that make them, and those mages don’t always feel like passing on information. Furthermore, we don’t know how good the senses of the imp are, as the mage that makes an imp keeps their imp’s abilities secret, so the imp may or may not know what the dungeon is doing in its labyrinth, especially when the dungeon is making parts of its labyrinth so deep in the earth. The only reason we know about the poison issue is because the mage that made the imp said to watch out for this dungeon because it actually has a creative streak.”

                Drew nodded and said, “If you are happy about this dungeon's creative streak, you will be thrilled when I show you its new creation. Follow me.”

                The mage slowly followed Drew as she waddled behind him. Once they were out of the tower, Drew released the ghillie dragon from his dead dungeon core. The pregnant mage whistled and said, “I have seen bigger, but only from growth labyrinths. Its size should not have made it that deadly; what kind of essence attack did it use?”

                “I don’t know what kind of essence attack it used because somehow it sprayed out a super-cold fluid, a fluid that is colder than the attacks I use.”

                The mage was confused and checked the essence creature for a moment before asking, “It has an earth and wind core, how could it use a cold attack?”

                “I don’t know, you’re the mage, you tell me.”

                The mage took out her wand and waved it in the air. As she waved her wand in the air a trail of light formed, and before long, the trail of light shot in several different directions. Once she was finished she said, “Drew, thank you for your work. You may move on to your next assignment. A few mages are going to come and try to find out how this essence creature makes cold.”

                “Are you going into the labyrinth?”

                “Until the dungeon is tier-two, we will continue using warriors for that, but it shouldn’t be too long now that it has a few of our two-core warriors to study and improve.”