One With The Abyss

I spent a bit of time in the safe room practising my magic, looking to see what kind of things I could do with composite elements.

I didn't feel a lot of urge to rush through the dungeon if I had so much time to spare. If Abby was right, then an entire year in here was only 1 week outside; that really took the pressure off.

I really enjoyed magic, but who wouldn't. Who on Earth could say that they hadn't day-dreamed about being a wizard or a sorcerer of some kind even once; and now I was living that fantasy - I was going to take advantage of it.

I was able to learn how to use multiple elements in that period as I took time to put in dedicated practice. However, I really only scratched the surface of each ability as I decided to focus on quantity over quality, deciding that battle would be the best way to improve my magic

I learned snow magic in a similar way that I learned to use gravel magic: Discovering a step in between water and ice. Snow magic greatly resembled sand magic; except instead of eroding things away, it gradually sapped them of their energy by making them cold.

After snow, I decided to try my hand at star magic.

It was much harder than snow, combining sun and fire to create structures of light in the air with physical form. When I could finally create them, they looked like sea urchins made from glowing light.

Their only real ability was to launch lasers from the tips of their spikes. That said, the lasers were incredibly powerful and extremely potent; I could even have the lasers shoot from one 'star' to another and gradually build up power until I released it as like a mega attack. This was very powerful but had a fitting charge up time.

I'm sure there was more I could do with star magic than shoot lasers and channel stronger lasers, but I didn't have the facilities in the safe room.

Following star magic, Abby recommended mirror magic. 

"It synergises very well with star magic." She had said. She also told me a lot of the element's capabilities which made me rush to gain it.

Mirror magic was a composite element formed between light and water. The process was much simpler than learning star magic - just creating orbs of water and having light beams reflect off it until the process could be perfectly maintained - but I found it had so many more applications than star magic that could only be used for attack.

For starters it was perfect at defending against light magic as it could easily reflect any light attacks shot towards me; a facet of the skill that would surely be perfect against my sister, but it wasn't just that.

If used correctly it could completely reflect any attack, returning damage to the attacker. This was a hard technique to use though and I did not delve to deep into it, as I needed to create a 'mirror construct' (as I had come to name them) in the shape of a barrier with the exact same specifications of the coming attack, it was the same as trying to take advantage of the weaknesses in the basic elements; only much more rewarding if done right.

While I would struggle to reflect normal attacks, I was more than happy to gain a hard counter to light magic - assuming the attacks didn't just barrel right through the barrier of course.

The final thing Abby told me that mirror magic was primarily a defensive element, all but for one ability. As a skill, mirror magic's only attacking ability was: [Perfect Reflection].

It was one of the most powerful techniques in all of magic, creating a mirror construct that had the exact same specifications as an enemy; essentially being a perfect counter to whatever attack they posed. It could even perfectly copy any physical attack skills, though magic was off the table; any mirror mage with this ability was usually considered a master duelist.

I tried for a while to gain magnetism magic as it was considered to be one of the strongest types of magic in the entire world, Abby even saying it had a similar level of power as space magic, a genesis element. Unfortunately, my ability with lightning and metal were not fine-tuned enough to pull it off.

I spent a while just going through some of the easier composite elements and gaining the ability to use those.

I learned mud magic by combining sand and water; cloud magic by combining water and wind; then storm magic with cloud and lightning - though that one was a little bit more difficult to get the hang of.

I doubted I would make use of any of these magics really, but I would rather have them and not need them than need them and not have them.

In some cases I found that deviating elements was harder than combining them, I was completely unable to deviate my death magic into extinction magic - which granted powerful instant death magic that was much more likely to work properly. On the other hand I quickly found myself using obsidian magic by combining the dark and earth element, gaining a powerful, if brittle, defensive ability.

It was after learning to wield 7 new elements that I decided to progress further into the dungeon, getting bored of inactivity.

I entered the 50th floor and saw something I hadn't expected.

Every 10th floor up until this point had been a giant arena of sorts. A stone room held up by pillars placed throughout with a large open area in the middle.

However this floor was much different, purely for the fact I was now standing before a forest.

I thought for a moment that the 50th floor had dropped the theme of 'big boss every 10 floors' that it had been before; however, the moment both my feet were inside I was immediately under attack.

A giant monster jumped out from within a tree and swiped at me with its wooden claw.

I evaded and saw as it disappeared into another tree. I was vigilant, and soon my probability control ability warned me of an increasing chance I would be attacked from behind.

I spun and punched as the monster was once again coming out of the tree to attack me. I knocked it away to the side, and watched as it sunk into the first tree it had hit; taking no damage as it did so. Luckily, I was able to appraise the monster in time.

[Wendigo]

[Corrupted tree spirit. Driven mad by its desire to protect the forest a dryad has fallen, losing its intelligence in exchange for vastly superior strength]

For the fight I had to rely greatly on probability control, future vision and [All-Sight] as the wendigo's ability to phase in and out of any tree at random made it very hard to predict and the smallest change to my body language would greatly change the possible futures of the monster's attacks.

The description said the monster had no intelligence, but it acted like a tactical genius in regards to combat. It easily emerged from what would have been my blindspots, hoping to catch me off guard, and despite its size it was extremely fast.

There was a chance it had some kind of domain talent like the magma wyrm had, but I doubted that.

"It likely has something to do with that merge ability it has." Abby said as I used my soul weapon to cut away one of its arms as it attacked. Of course this did nothing to stop it as it simply grew another back in its place.

I quickly grew tired of trying to pin the monster down and changed my target.

Fire erupted from me and began spreading to the surrounding trees, normally trees imbued with magic (like those in dungeons or created through nature magic) were incredibly difficult to burn; but fire magic was one of my best.

I amped up the strength of the fire by augmenting it with heat magic, to the point it soon began to burn blue.

"RAAAAARRRAAAGHH!" An enraged scream echoed through the forest and the monster reappeared, now much larger and sporting 6 arms that all ended in horrifically sharp wooden claws.

"Bring it you dumb stick!" I yelled back, covering my hand in ice and cold element mana and punching at the claw coming towards me.

As intended the ice began to spread over to the wendigo, greatly diminishing its mobility.

Cold and heat magic on their own were pretty useless, but they excelled when assisting their original elements.

With fire, heat could massively improve the power like wind could, but at a much lower cost - making it much more efficient.

With ice, cold would allow the ice to spread by using contact, if cold enough it could even completely freeze a person's insides; killing them over time.

This strategy seemed to work doubly well on a being made entirely from plants like the wendigo as the freezing effect was much more severe after just one punch than Abby and I had theorised.

The wendigo freaked out after my third punch left one of its hands completely unusable and cut it off completely, growing another in its place.

But this lapse of concentration allowed me to jump on top of the wendigo and grab it by its horns, beginning the process of copying the talent. It bucked and flailed to get me off, both because it definitely didn't like me, but also because I was trying to freeze it from the top down - starting with the horns.

It was made of wood so I doubted being frozen would insta-kill it, but one solid punch and it would shatter into dust, that would definitely kill it.

I extended jagged tentacles into the wendigo, using them like climbing picks to stay on it and continue freezing the monster.

With so many points of access, the wendigo froze in moments; perfectly synchronising with my acquisition of its talent. I jumped off of it, seeing it struggle and both altered my muscles and increased my fist size; shattering the monster in one hit and killing it entirely.

As I watched the particles of ice float down, I looked over at my newest talent:

[One with Nature]

[Increases affinity with nature magic, allows body to merge with plants and use them to transport themselves through them]

For a moment I was tempted to fuse this into [Zero], but stuck with the basic choice of [Elementalist] - feeling the wave of knowledge rush through me as the talent settled in.

Not only could I now merge myself with plants as advertised, but I could also use plants to sense things.

I picked up the dropped key, a brown one, seemingly made of wood with branches extending from the head and the wooden axe it dropped before using my new sensory abilities to find the door, in front of which was a chest.

Looking inside the chest I found a bottle of wine, a very fancy looking one with artificial vines growing along the body. I added it to the collection of alcohol I had gotten from the various floor bosses that had dropped them.

Before walking through the door to check out my new weapon. 

[Axe of the Enchanted Forest]

[Axe made from a branch of the world tree. Can grow and control plants at will]

The ability was fairly redundant considering Liz already had nature magic, but she still decided to absorb it into her soul weapon and see what it could do later.

Liz was a little annoyed to find that the wendigo had broken her mask somehow, likely after she had gotten cocky while dodging it, but she didn't sweat it too bad.

"Weren't you going to use it to hide from your class?" Abby asked, "Then get in a big fight where you reveal the jaw-dropping truth?"

"Of course, that is gonna be sick!" I replied, heading to the next floor.

"Then why aren't you mad about the mask breaking?"

"I'll just use thread dominion." I responded. My control over [Thread Dominion] had grown exponentially as I just randomly decided to change my clothes on a whim, it was to the point I could make it stronger than metal.

Creating a mask was easy and to prove it, I made an exact copy 3 times. I destroyed 2 and put the remaining one in my bag; I wouldn't need it in the dungeon.

Floor 51 was a very annoying one, changing entirely from how the floors normally were.

I had to fight a series of mini bosses one after the other, only letting me pass into the next room after beating the mini-boss.

The floor itself was a giant carnival, full of everything you would expect to find there.

The first enemy was a troop of clowns, coming out of a tiny car. They sprayed poison on me from one of those flower things, threw pies with magic landmines inside; threw exploding balloons at me; and when I hit them, nothing really happened. It was like fighting a cartoon, magic did little to stop them and when I punched them their bodies just  changed shape, like punching a lump of clay. It was beyond annoying.

I only beat them after managing to land a successful instant death attack on them. It took actual days before that worked successfully.

The talent I got from them wasn't even all that useful:

[Elastic Body]

[User's body stretches under pressure]

It went into [Zero], but it was already something I could do.

The next mini-boss was much less irritating: A lion and its beast tamer.

The only annoying thing was that if you didn't kill both of them at the same time the other would revive. Though for me it wasn't an issue as I simply pierced them through the head with a tentacle simultaneously.

Gaining 2 talents: [Beast's Strength] and [Man's Intelligence]. They both entered [Abyssal Soul].

The next mini-boss was a mime. It took a minute to get used to his 'gimmick', but once I did it was easy.

He created invisible constructs that I couldn't see, even with [All-Sight]. His weakness was that he could only make 1 construct at a time, allowing me to bait it into attack to avoid whatever invisible wall it would create to block me. The talent was cool, but also later fused:

[Mime Sight]

[Create an invisible object that only you can see]

I lost the completely invisible aspect of the talent, but instead gained air magic. I could freely solidify the air around me, one could sense it if they could sense mana, but now I could create multiple objects. I was slightly glad to get this as air magic was one I was struggling to grasp before this.

The 4th mini-boss was a pair of acrobats. No real problem fighting them, they were evasive so I just expanded my body until I suffocated them to death. They both gave the talent [Acrobat], improving my agility. This went somewhere I had not expected: [Assassin], changing it to [Ninja]. It incorporated the stealth of [Assassin] with the agility of [Acrobat] to massively improve my fighting style as I began to prioritise evasive movements.

The final boss was a magician. Like an actual magician from Earth.

His main fighting style was throwing cards at me that had sharp edges like knives, other than that he used illusion techniques that would have normally gotten me hit by his cards, but with [Time Manipulation] dodging them was easy. 

His talent was not really what I was expecting. [Throwing Weapon Mastery], was the talent I had gotten; I was expecting an illusion ability, but this was also good. I distinctly remember not putting any throwing abilities into [Soul Weapon] before it awoke.

To be honest the best part of the floor were the drops, each dropped a unique weapon for me. From the clowns I gained [Spray Flower] that shot out poison, the beast tamer gave [Control Whip] which inflicted fear in any beasts I hit it with; the mime gave me an [Invisible Bat] that had abysmal damage, but could not be seen even with [All-Sight], I only found it after tripping on it; the acrobats dropped a weapon each [Performer's Ribbon], a whip specialised in restraining, and [Performer's Batton] a staff that could grow in length like the staff wielded by Sun Wukong. The final weapon was [Deck of Knives], the playing cards with sharp edges the magician had used.

I absorbed all of the weapons into [Avarice] but was momentarily unsure if the cards could be absorbed, thankfully they could. When I brought them out I had all 52 cards that I could throw, though I would have to retrieve them or dismiss all 52 to get them back.

All the weapons were unique, so I felt that the floor was still mostly fun.

After 51 was 52. Populated mainly by bee variant insectoids of 4 types: Soldiers, Workers, Royal Guards and the Queen. I got a lot of stinger growth skills from the soldier bees, that went into [Zero]. From the worker bees was [Dutiful Worker] which reduced the amount of sleep I needed even after I added it to [Abyssal Soul]. The royal guards gave me a talent called [Advanced Stinger] which let me change how my stinger manifested, another that entered [Zero]. Abby said that the 2 stinger talents might make my tentacles more dangerous with giant sharp and poisonous spikes on the end; I had to agree.

Finally, the boss, the Queen Bee. She didn't move until after the royal guards died, but still put up quite the fight. Her talent was [Wax Walls], allowing her to create powerful barriers to hide behind, before jabbing me with her toxic stinger. The fight went on until I just brute forced my way through her barrier.

I couldn't fuse them with anything, but it was still my first dedicated barrier skill. I was sure I would get more later

Floor 53 was a cemetery with undead rising from the graves, nothing but [Life-Sense] from them. The floor wasn't hard for me, but I could tell others may have struggled; After only 1 minute of being on the floor I was being bombarded by at least a thousand undead, my light magic made quick work of them, even more so when it deviated into the holy element. By then they couldn't even approach me.

The boss was an undead called a [Grave Digger] and it was massive. It had a shrivelled face and boney fingers, it sat right in the middle of the cemetery and pointed at graves; after that undead would climb out of the dirt. It didn't even move when I began attacking it, just sat there huddled up in a ball. For a normal person I could see this fight being near impossible. 

The [Grave Digger] easily tanked even my holy magic as hundreds of thousands of low ranked undead charged at me ceaselessly. It took at least 10 minutes to kill the [Grave Digger] even with magic that it had a severe weakness to and after I began using star magic to pelt it with lasers as well. 

For a person without holy magic it would have taken longer, and they would have had to fight all the other undead swarming them. 

The [Grave Digger] had the [Raise Undead] talent that further improved my death magic abilities. It also dropped a staff with the top of a human skeleton attached to it that increased the average strength of undead raised by it. Useful, but very creepy.

I took a short break after that floor. I was not necessarily tired, but fighting off thousands of undead was not a pleasant experience as I had to have my holy magic shining brightly down the entire way through the floor. If I hadn't gotten holy magic, I'm not sure I would have cleared the floor at all to be honest.

"Yes you would have, stupid." Abby chimed in, reminding me of all the crowd control abilities I had.

"Yes, but I would feel lazy if I just slept for no reason." I muttered, she laughed and that was the end of that.

When I woke up, I continued deeper into the dungeon, refreshed.

Afterwards I faced monsters called [Beastlings], that were just beastfolk, only much stronger and having more bestial features. They gave [Mana Circulation] as a talent that entered [Abyssal Soul]. Abby even told me beastlings were on the surface, usually leading beastfolk tribes as they were considered closer to their ancestors.

Next was another undead floor, where I faced [Blood Zombies], they gave endurance enhancing talents, but the boss was quite interesting. A [Dhampir] inside the ruins of a castle, it was fast and could use its own blood as a weapon, but it was nowhere near my level. I was glad to gain a [Lesser Blood Manipulation] talent though. 

Abby said it was one of the only manipulation talents that could not be replicated in magic, being something innate to the vampire clan. Unfortunately, [Lesser Blood Manipulation] only allowed me to control my own blood, and was also not as refined as the superior versions [Blood Manipulation] or [Blood Dominion].

(A/N: Blood manipulation lets you control other blood - from corpses, soul resists controlling other blood so no blood bending strong people - and blood dominion lets you produce blood as well as control it)

56 was an empty field full of different kinds of wyvern. They all gave me affinity type skills for the basic 6 elements with the boss being a [Rainbow Wyrm] granting [Unified Affinity], meaning an affinity to all 6 basic elements. Good, but ultimately useless.

57 was a swamp floor full of toad and lizard people. No talents worth mentioning, just defensive and tongue abilities.

58 had me fighting rats in a sewer, giant rats, but still rats. The normal rats gave me teeth strengthening talents, while the boss gave an unusual talent: [Psychic Link].

The boss was a [Rat King], essentially just 10 of these giant rat monsters connected by the tail; all acting as one cohesive unit, even having just 1 talent.

I fused it with [Psychic Web] and felt the talent improve.

59 had me fighting high ogres and a high ogre king. Nothing but muscle enhancement talents. Yet again the ogres showing how much they suck!

I was soon about to fight the 60th floor boss, ready to destroy the challenge in front of me.

I was more than halfway done with this dungeon and I couldn't wait to see the kind of person I would be on the way out.