Wild Era, Ch 37: Sandfire Elite

As Kelin headed farther in, the colors of the Coral Sea became even more intense and some of the coral pillars began to look sculpted, as if they’d been worked by artisans.

Here and there, some of them had been turned into buildings, with rooms winding up through the spires to a rooftop that overlooked the land.

The mana density and the size of the monster groups also began to increase, with five or more in every one, which made for more challenging fights.

The next groups he encountered were a mix of Coralfire Guardians, Netcasters, regular Trident Bearers at Level 76 that didn’t have “Sacred” as part of their name, Sandstars, and Flying Coral Fish.

He rotated through his abilities as he faced each group and before long he’d killed two dozen of them as he moved on. 

The level difference was still high, with these monsters around 10 levels higher than him, and the experience began to roll in as notifications rang in his mind.

Congratulations, Lord of Wildfire.

You have gained 2 Levels.

You are now Level 68.

Your Soul-Bonded Elemental has also gained 2 Levels.

He dismissed the rest of the notification and added the ten free points to Intelligence, taking it to 556.

Thanks to the practice and repeatedly stressing his body with Blaze, as well as the heavy drain on his mana and soul energy, it wasn’t long before another notification came.

Due to stressing your capabilities in combat, you have gained 3 Constitution, 2 Intelligence, and 2 Aura.

He glanced at the results on his status sheet.

Strength: 124 

Constitution: 142 (+55% from Soulfire Physique)

Agility: 115 (+10 from Traveler’s Boots).

Wisdom: 180

Intelligence: 558

Aura: 248

Charisma: 102

He was developing well for his level, but there was no replacement for time. 

This was only his third dungeon in this life, not counting the mine where he’d awoken. If it were his thirtieth, the differences would be significant.

Thanks to the 55% durability boost from his physique, his 142 Constitution effectively became 220, which put him solidly at the standard for a new First Evolution mage, even if it was on the lower end of the requirement.

His Strength and Agility were slightly higher than normal for a mage, with Agility reaching 125 thanks to the enchantment on his boots, but they weren’t exceptional.

Many races had powerful bodies that would put his attributes to shame, so even with the progress he’d already made, he couldn’t feel too proud of his progress.

The body tempering pool he’d found here had helped, so hopefully he could find some more in the future, in this dungeon or another one.

He continued on and found another group of Coralfire denizens before too long, ones that were gathered around the base of a coral pillar. 

They were using it like a fort, with rooms inside, and he had to ascend through the rooms one by one in order to clear it, slowly moving up a twisting staircase.

Eventually, he found himself on top of the pillar and he looked down across the desert. 

The first things he noticed from this vantage point were all of the coral pillars around him, standing up like trees across the desert, but as he continued to look, a sense of order emerged from the natural chaos.

Like the one below him, some of the coral pillars were carved into ornate spires, and as he moved around to get a better view, he noticed that they came in pairs, with one set after the other creating a line that stretched away to the west.

There was one to each side, like they were marking out a road.

As soon as he aligned himself to look between them, he saw where they led, straight to where a single larger coral pillar stood like a massive tower at the end of the line.

It had a silvery sheen to it, and it looked like it was made from sapphire-tinted coral, but there were other colors present as well, from pinks to orange and red.

It didn’t look like the final city, but it was a possible location for an Elite, so he settled on it as his next destination.

He jogged back down the staircase and aligned himself with the road. 

With other pillars and rocks interrupting his view down here, the path was almost invisible, but it wasn’t hard to overlay it in his imagination with the desert.

He set out at an easy run, keeping his senses peeled for more enemies.

Dungeons tended to get larger as their level went up, but this one was starting to be noticeable for its size. 

He’d been here for a couple of days already, with Gaius helping him to dig secure places to sleep each night. That was a blessing for dungeon exploration, allowing him to only set the minimum of alarm and defense wards around his cavern.

The usual habit for adventurers was to buy wardstones, which allowed for a quick setup of defenses, but they were limited in what they could do. 

True wards were better, but they took longer to put into place each night, and even among mages, not everyone had the necessary skills.

It took him a couple of hours, but slowly the tower grew larger in his sight until he could see it clearly. It rose out of the desert as a silver-tinted blue spire, and as he closed in, he could see that it was easily twice the height of the other coral pillars.

A web of shorter towers was around it, each of them ornately carved with windows and balconies extending from the sides. 

Here and there, hanging bridges made of what looked like petrified kelp stretched between the pillars, linking them together in a web that was centered around the main tower.

There hadn’t been too many monsters on the road, so he hadn’t been bothering with camouflage, but as he approached the towers, a resonant drum of sound echoed through the sand, sounding an alarm.

It seemed some enemies had caught sight of him approaching, and dozens of them began to pour out of the towers. 

Some of them came from the entrances, others leapt down from the lower windows, and a few shot up from the sand, flying through the air.

Kelin came to a stop on the road as he examined their forces. It felt like he’d stumbled on something important, but that didn’t stop him from beginning to cast.

A handful of talismans flickered into his grip and six layers of Runic Scale Shields surrounded his body, covering him in a runic armor.

He used the old ones, so it was a layered shield worth 90 points of mana.

Then he began to count what was in front of him. There were over three dozen that he could see, and more were appearing from the towers.

There were a dozen Coralfire Guardians, and the same in Trident Bearers, six Netcasters, five Shamans, a handful of Sandstars and Flying Coral Fish, and then some monsters of a type he hadn’t encountered yet that looked like yellow and red-scaled eels.

They were each about a dozen feet long, leaping up from the desert sand and then diving back down into it like fish in water. Their bodies shimmered with fire mana as they raced toward him.

He analyzed them swiftly.

Sandfire Eel. Level 78.

Their bodies were a mix of serpent and fish with vestigial fins on the sides, and they had long, narrow mouths full of fangs. Despite their name, they seemed perfectly at home in the desert sand.

Behind the horde, the head of an even larger eel of the same type appeared from the sand between the towers. Its scales gleamed with ruby and sand-colored light, and as soon as it popped up, its aura overwhelmed everything else around it.

Its head was six feet tall from the top of its skull to the bottom of its jaw, and as it surged up through the sands, it leapt into a massive arc in the air, revealing the full extent of its thirty-foot body.

Ruby-tinged flames exploded around it as it dove back into the sand, and then a hill of flaming sand surged up in front of it, heading straight for Kelin.

He analyzed it as soon as he saw it, but he already knew it was an Elite.

Royal Sandfire Eel. Level 82. Elite.

It had a powerful affinity for Fire and Sand, but it looked like it was a monster that wanted to get up close and personal. It was swiftly outdistancing the rest of the monsters as it closed in on him.

For the first time in this dungeon, Kelin called on Gaius to help. The sand wasn’t the elemental’s preferred domain, but it was still part of the earth. 

Sand hardened into a hill directly in front of the Royal Sandfire Eel’s path. Just the top of it showed above the surface, but Kelin could sense the rest of it twenty feet across and twenty feet thick.

It appeared so quickly that the Elite didn’t have time to dodge, and the eel slammed into it with a collision that shook the earth, sending some of the nearest monsters tumbling.

Bands of stone rose up from the ground near their feet as Gaius seized the moment, locking them down in a wave that stretched back toward the towers.

With all of the levels he’d gained, the elemental’s powers had expanded considerably, and he trapped twenty of them before he reached his limit. 

Bonds of sandstone climbed swiftly up their bodies, sealing their limbs as they were half encased from below. 

Unlike regular sandstone, Gaius’s version was infused with his mana and incredibly strong. Their blows bounced away from it, barely chipping the surface.

While that was happening, a wave of spells flew out from Kelin. 

First, a ward circle sprang into being around him and he ignited the Soulfire Sigil, tossing the disk into the air above his shoulder. 

He ignored the Elite for the moment, since he had other plans for it. It was reeling back from the blow, but it was already shaking off the impact.

There were 51 of them total, counting the Elite, and Gaius had stopped almost half, which helped to divide that group from the ones that were still running toward him, 

There were 31 left, and he wanted to clear the field.

He focused on the key targets.

The spells on his staff went first as he launched two soul arrows at shamans that were casting in the distance. 

Then he intensified the remaining two Soulfire Bolts and hurled them at two other shamans that were trapped by Gaius’s stone. Most of the melee mobs were sealed there, but those could still cause trouble.

The intensified bolts were more expensive than a soul arrow, but the doubled mana cost and the improvements he was making with that spell meant that when they hit, the shamans’ heads simply disintegrated.

That left one shaman he could see, so he created another pair of soul arrows and hurled one of them at it. 

The second arrow he flicked at a Sandfire Eel that was closing in on his ward. 

Almost twenty impacts crashed into his ward a moment later as the band of Flying Coral Fish, a series of blasts of fused sand from the Sandstars, hurled tridents from the Trident Bearers, and the hard bodies of the Sandfire Eels all struck at the same time.

His bracers flared with mana as they leapt to his defense, but it was still the hardest hit his ward had ever taken.

They almost broke through as cracks spiderwebbed across the ward like rolling thunder, their trails glowing an ominous red.

The only thing that saved it was his immediate infusion of mana, flooding the barrier with new strength, but his mana dipped sharply.

He lost forty points in an instant and the cost pulled hard on his meridians.

If it had been a few days before, it might have made him stumble, since there was a sharp strain on the ability path too, but the advancements to his physique and the training with the much larger cost of Blaze served him well.

The shield stabilized as his bracers sent some of the attacks flying.

Deflected tridents flew away from him at angles, and blasts of half-molten sand bent as they were partially turned aside, but the density of the sand meant that it was difficult for his bracers to fully deflect it.

The enchantments were intended to deflect smaller projectiles and shaped mana, and the sand was in neither category. Up to now, he’d just been letting the blasts hit his mana shield as training.

He was already casting again as a swirling rainbow sphere appeared in his hand, igniting into fiery life with sparks of red and yellow inside.

Then the Royal Sandfire Eel recovered and joined in.

It shook its head and rose up out of the sand. Its fiery red eyes glared as it looked around, but then its attention locked on Kelin. 

It leapt into the air, making a ruby-tinted arc like a flaming rainbow, and then it came down straight at him, its jaws open with hundreds of sharp fangs on full display. 

Its mouth was as wide as Kelin was tall, and its enormous body had to weigh thousands of pounds, all of which was accelerating toward him.

Standing there and letting it hit him was an insane idea, so Kelin did the next best thing.

He triggered the Haste effect on his belt, which he’d never used except to test it out, boosting his speed by 21% for 30 seconds.

He tilted his ward at a slight angle to deflect the blow as much as he could, flooded his deflection bracer with mana to add its support, and then he hurled himself to the side.

Soulfire exploded at his feet as he used the blast to accelerate himself.

An explosion of ruby fire and tons of crushing weight struck his shield, but he didn’t try to sustain the ward. He sacrificed it, letting it shatter under the force.

The deflection bracer on his left arm released a searing heat as the ward overloaded, but then a safety enchantment kicked in and there was a sharp crack as the core inside exploded.

He didn’t make it fully out of range in time, but the talisman shield around him took the brunt of the attack, shattering in layers as it resisted the weight, and the force of the impact and his jump sent him flying twenty feet away.

The Royal Sandfire Eel continued straight into the ground, not bothered at all by the impact, and the lesser eels and Flying Coral Fish nearby scattered at the same time, unharmed by its leap. 

Kelin rolled across the ground, losing another layer of shielding as it buffered the impact, but when he jumped to his feet, the sphere of Wildfire was still blazing in his hand.

He channeled the last bit of soul energy into the spell as it fully formed. Then he hurled it at one of the regular eels that stuck its head out of the sand to look for him.

The sphere of Wildfire exploded across the eel, sending torrents of ethereal flames across its soul. 

The eel’s mouth gaped open in surprise as it froze in place. Streamer of rainbow flames covered its eyes and smoke began to rise from its scales. 

Then its soul ignited.

A column of Wildfire energy exploded upward as a shockwave roared outward in a ring at the same time.

The nearby Sandfire Eels were too close to avoid the blast and the flames roared over them. A few of the closest flying fish were caught as well, despite their speed.

A moment later, rainbow flames surged across their bodies.

Then they exploded as well, each of them turning into another column of Wildfire and a shockwave that expanded outward.

The Royal Sandfire Eel was in range of most of the blasts, its head just now surfacing from the sand. Waves of Wildfire crashed over it, making its eyes close from the intensity.

Kelin stood in the midst of the Wildfire as it raged. Streamers of rainbow flames curled around his hands and licked at his feet, washing around him in a tide.

He looked like a king ruling over his subjects as fire bent to his command, and his eyes were sharp as he stared at the eel.

Then he turned away, pointing at the coral fish that were flying away. 

The Wildfire was soaring as it filled the area, and now it expanded at his command, stretching after them in a wave.

It washed over the two that were trying to escape. As the flames swallowed them, he sent an altered blast of Soulfire at one.

The blast picked up the fish and hurled it across the desert sand, where it struck one of the Coralfire Netcasters that was still running across the distance. It was at the front of a group of others that had been slow enough to avoid Gaius’s trap, but not fast enough to catch up with the eels.

The fish exploded into a column of Wildfire.

The blast caught that Netcaster and the three running behind it. The impact sent them rolling across the ground, but they didn’t have time to recover as they were consumed by the flames.

Three more explosions erupted across the desert as the Wildfire expanded again, and the edge of those blasts caught a Sandstar that was farther back.

A moment later it exploded as well. 

That wave caught the other four Sandstars, as well as the edge of the trapped group.

By then, the entire desert between Kelin and the closest coral towers was a sea of rainbow flames.

His eyes were blazing and the ethereal haze of Wildfire covered everything, making it look like he was walking through an inferno at the dawn of time.

He glanced at the Royal Sandfire Eel, but the Elite had burrowed into the ground and was thrashing as it tried to put out the fires igniting across its soul.

It wouldn’t be long now.

He ignored it as he walked into the hottest part of the flames, halfway between where he was and the trapped ground. They were already burning as he gathered the energy toward him. 

Streams of rainbow flames poured toward him and then sank into his soul, where he swiftly began weaving them into the wards. 

This time, the density of the soul energy was so high that it battered him like a ship on the ocean, searing wherever it touched. 

Half of the backlash hadn’t even arrived yet, so he needed to work swiftly.

As monsters’ levels increased, so did the strength of their souls, and he hadn’t strengthened his wards enough for the ones that were over Level 80 yet.

The Elite was going to hurt, but he accepted the cost as necessary.

At that moment, the first members of the trapped group exploded into an inferno of Wildfire that towered into the sky, with each burning soul sending it higher.

The flames rose to a hundred feet and soared higher. Then they spread outward like an ocean, the waves rising halfway up the coral pillars as they flooded the area.

At that moment, the Royal Sandfire Eel exploded, its soul joining the conflagration with a bass note played on a massive ocean drum.

The flames swelled again, fighting against Kelin’s control.

A few more monsters inside the buildings were caught by the expansion, including a shaman and a couple of Coralfire Guardians that had been waiting in ambush at a tower near the back, and a handful of flying fish and Sandstars just past them.

As he sensed their souls igniting, Kelin clamped down on the flames, pulling them back.

They’d gone far enough.

The ocean of flames shuddered, twisting as it fought against his control, and he focused his attention on one section, twisting into a stream of soul energy that he drew back to himself.

Like drawing a thread out a tapestry, that section of the flames suddenly collapsed, turning into a river that rushed toward him.

It slammed into him, raging like a river of molten steel. 

His soul wavered under the impact, but he held steady, forcing the energy to move into the wards and to follow his command.

As the rest of the flames began to collapse inward, following that thread he’d pulled, an ocean of Wildfire headed straight for him.

It was massive, easily ten times the size of anything he’d dealt with in this life, and if he let it hit him like that, things weren’t going to be pretty.

Despite that, his expression was calm.

The entire ocean was connected to the thread of energy he was weaving into his soul, and as he worked on that, he took control of the flood of power and used it to inscribe even more shining runes, creating a second layer of protection around his soul.

Then a third.

These runes were different from the ones he normally used to strengthen his soul, since up to now, he hadn’t had enough energy to bring them to life. 

The runes made a strange and intricate pattern around his soul, like a mystic labyrinth that had massive intake areas for energy, ones that would take thousands of points of soul energy to fill.

Those were followed by a mysterious series of refinement cycles, and then much smaller connections to the core of his soul.

It was incredibly complex, but to him it was as familiar as breathing. He finished just as the ocean of soul energy slammed into him.

Outside his body, the ocean shrank into a whirlpool that was a hundred feet wide around him. It roared with force as it tried to engulf him, and the waves of fire battered him.

The flecks of red and yellow sparks that were normally in Wildfire had turned into bolts of rainbow lightning, and now they rained down on him, striking in a fury as they hammered at his protections.

He’d killed 5 to start, which had helped to thin out the numbers, but with the extras in the towers, there had been 54 monsters caught up in the spell. 

That was pushing it for his current use of Wildfire, especially with the Level 82 Elite as part of it. 

The force struck the new wards he’d woven first, and the pressure of the flames forced energy into the enchantment he’d created. 

It would have taken him days to channel enough energy into that pattern himself, but the ocean surged through it in an instant, filling it to the last rune. 

As soon as it did, the enchantment activated.

Waves of Wildfire soared around him, spinning in an arcane pattern that followed a higher law, creating an eye of the hurricane that surrounded him.

The storm was forced to follow the pattern, spinning around him now, and the battering on his soul turned to a steady force, one that rotated around him as much as it tried to harm him.

It was powerful enough that his soul was already scorched in a dozen places, and the damage continued to sizzle at the edges, but the greater part of Wildfire’s energy was forced to submit to its own higher law, following the principles that he’d woven.

At the same time, it wasn’t going anywhere as it continued to circle him.

He reached into the whirlpool and drew out a new thread of energy, pulling it through the ward he’d created. As he did, the energy was refined and turned into a slender rainbow thread, which he wove that into the wards on his soul. 

When he was done, there was a tiny golden wisp of soul energy left, which fused into him with a gentle warmth, and a tiny part of the damage he’d done to his soul disappeared.

Then he did the same thing again.

Thread by thread, the wards on his soul grew stronger, and under the influence of the golden wisps, his soul began to heal too. 

And as the damage healed, it ever so slightly became stronger.

Every backlash had a sliver of hidden potential in it, which he could use to strengthen his soul at the same time as it burned him.

It was one reason the spell counted as Legendary.

He didn’t have the attention to spare for anything else except dealing with the backlash, which was still incredibly dangerous, so he sat there among the coral pillars, slowly drawing it out thread by thread.

If anything had tried to bother him, it would have been torn to pieces by the Wildfire surrounding him.

Every thread he wove into the wards seared him slightly, but his defenses grew stronger and his soul improved.

By the time he was done, three hours had passed, and his face was pale, but finally the last wisp of Wildfire disappeared.

His soul felt like it had been hammered in a blacksmith’s forge and his entire consciousness ached. It felt like his head was splitting open.

He felt Gaius’s awareness bump into his, asking him if he was alright.

“I’ll be fine,” he said in a hoarse voice. Then he coughed and tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry.

He summoned a stream of water from habit. He drank from it and then used it to scrub his face and hands.  

Then he noticed what he’d done.

It was usually hard to summon water in a desert, but it looked like he’d grown strong enough. It was a minor thing, but it made him smile.

That was thanks to the improvements in his soul, which slightly affected his Water affinity.

All of that Wildfire had condensed into fairly minor improvements, but his soul was about 5% stronger than it had been before.

The new protections he’d woven were part of a long series of improvements he’d created for the spell. They were capable of holding back the backlash for a short while and refining the energy into something that was beneficial.

There wasn’t much of it, but it was enough that his soul, which was still fairly undeveloped in this life, had benefited noticeably.

A series of notifications from the battle was ringing in his mind, but there was one in particular he turned to.

Congratulations, Lord of Wildfire.

You have discovered a method to strengthen your soul.

By refining the souls of your enemies, your own has grown stronger.

You have gained 12 Aura. The improvement was noticeable, taking his Aura from 248 to 260.

The spell wasn’t something he used on anything but his mortal enemies, but it came with some surprising side effects, one of which was that the refined soul essence of his enemies led to a subtle strengthening of his own soul.

It was a benefit to Wildfire that he had never shared with anyone else, even his prospective students. The Path knew, but it wasn’t something he spread around.

It wasn’t because he had any problem with accepting the improvement, since it was the same theory as benefiting from the experience his enemies gave him.

It was because he knew the envy it would inspire.

This effect, combined with the seemingly endless hordes of enemies he’d fought during the Chaos War, was a major factor in why he had been able to reach his old level of power.

And probably in why his memories had survived reincarnation.

The only downside was that it took a while to absorb, and if he didn’t have enough time, he would lose most of the benefit.

Fortunately, nothing else had come to bother him.

Although that wasn’t unusual after Wildfire had scorched an area.

He slowly stood up and stretched, trying to push all of the aches out of his mind.

It was worth the cost.

He looked across the desert, but there was nothing except the corpses of the monsters scattered across the sands.

The coral spires all around him were silent, something that he’d long ago become used to after unleashing Wildfire.

Most of the corpses were untouched, since the only damage was done to their souls.

The Sandfire Eels in particular looked like they would make good crafting materials, especially the royal Elite.

He slowly began to move, ignoring the pounding in his skull, as he got to work gathering the rewards of battle. 

Given the density of the monsters here, as well as their level that was close to the maximum for the dungeon, he was fairly sure the final city was close by.

He should be there soon.