Dungeoneering

March 23rd, 2034

B-Rank Wormhole, Unknown Subspace

"Fuck ALL of you!" I yelled while being besieged by dozens of those stupid alien anteater things.

They kept distorting space, which had numerous effects. Notably, when a spacial distortion touched my body, it twisted and warped. Secondly, they were able to use that power to avoid most of my area-of-effect attacks.

It was going well at first. There were a few handfuls of them that kept popping up in the caverns, but they were easily dispatched. However, the caverns kept winding and branching, making it quite annoying to ascertain my location at any given point in time.

Apparently, I was doing something right, though, since they kept getting stronger and there were more of them. That first one had given me 396 XP, and now each was giving me 561 XP. It was a good feast, at first.

"However, now there are way too many of them!" I lamented. This truly was unfair. I, a young, innocent little boy, had just wanted to explore this cave system. However, these unjust and tyrannical mole people wanted nothing but to kill me. This had to have been some form of oppression.

I unleashed upon the horde another spelless wall of fire as a smokescreen before retreating to the cavern prior. With the few seconds I had given myself, I started to prepare one of the quicker-to-cast spells I knew—the classic Fireball.

Of course, when Fireball was cast by a Divine, miraculous things tend to occur.

The beach ball-sized orb of white flames flew down the choke point and into the opening of the cavern, straight into the herd of creatures. With a deafening explosion, most of the creatures were erased immediately. Some of the stronger ones did manage to use their innate defenses to bypass the damage, however.

Before they had a chance to recover, I used another one of my favorite spells—Flame Lance. Only, I used a variation of it that allowed me to dual cast it and splinter both lances into a specific amount of smaller, homing variations of the initial lance.

Another handful of seconds later, the rest of the creatures had been impaled through the head. It was very satisfying to see them die after that annoying fight. Admittedly, I had been a bit too reckless in the first place.

I lifted my shirt and inspected the spot where I had been initially hit. The skin looked like it had been torn off, and the fleshy bits underneath seemed twisted into a spiral. Of course, my shirt was completely soaked in blood. I cauterized the entire wound, which probably would have been lethal for the average person. Making sure I wasn't about to die, I took a quick look at my status.

—Status—

HP: 436/671

Mana: 449/581

Level: 84

XP: 1,365,370

It didn't seem like I was taking damage over time, leaving me content. I had brought some healing items, so I sat down and drank a health and mana potion. Each was designed to work for 30 minutes, so I took in the sights.

Well, there wasn't much to look at. That was somewhat typical of these subspaces—they were usually more like classic 90's dungeon crawls than actual, living worlds. At times people would discover infrastructure of all sorts and indications of intelligent life, and then sometimes they would be like this. I couldn't even say how these things were surviving without food or water.

It was pretty trippy to see the walls warping, of course, but it was something you got used to after a few minutes.

After my picnic, I stood up and strolled to one of the branching caverns, presumably going deeper into the subspace.

If I was more of a traditional magician like Lucian, I would probably be able to detect the mana flow of the dungeon and be able to locate the heart through that. However, all I was good for was razing the earth.

Razing the earth was my passion, to be fair. It's likely the reason I was chosen by the Sun in the first place. Sociopathic tendencies as a youth and an inclination for setting things alight.

With dark thoughts of my childhood, I stepped into what had to be the heart of the subspace. In front of me stood an abomination, a sickenly thin humanoid covered in a shifting carapace. It had to be at least 5 meters tall and had arms that freakishly extended from its shoulders all the way to the floor.

Before I had a chance to inspect it more, the creature lunged forward with an arm raised above its head. It was very nimble, enough so that I was barely able to dodge the initial assault. As it swung the end of its arm toward me, I noticed that the light around its hand was bending strangely—almost certainly another type of spatial magic.

I used my fallback technique to throw a wall of flame at the creature in an attempt to buy myself some time. However, it recklessly rushed through my inferno and kept swinging at me. I wasn't sure what level it was, but I really didn't want to test its offensive abilities with my own flesh.

The glass cannon that I was, though, I didn't have much choice but to make it burn before it was able to swat me across the room like an insect.

As annoying as it was, I tried to run around and dodge its wretched attacks while casting my signature tier-4 spell, Nova. In a time-efficiency sense, it was best to dish out nova damage as fast as possible.

Unfortunately, though, the monster was able to just barely clip my shoulder with its distortion effect, instantly wringing my right arm away from the spell I was working on, as well as dislocating it.

"God DAMN it," I spat through the pain and attempted to use a bit of improv to adapt the spell I had been working on into a one-handed version of it. It might have just caused an explosion, but that really wouldn't be too problematic to me, who was immune to fire damage.

I was lucky enough to be able to adapt Nova into a castrated version of itself after just a few seconds more and tossed it at the monster.

This version of Nova was quite interesting in its effects. There was the apparent start of nuclear fission, and then it quickly fizzled out and collapsed upon itself, resulting in a completely blinding explosion. I felt myself get thrown backward from the blast, eventually hitting what was either the ceiling or the wall of the cavern, and then falling to the ground.

After my eyes had recovered, I was able to see the corpse of the creature that had been assaulting me. Its carapace was no longer shifting, instead looking incredibly burnt. Come to think of it, the entire cavern was coated in a layer of "burnt". I looked down at my own clothes and, despite their fire resistance, they were barely holding together.

"Oh yeah." I took a look at the system's log to see what I'd gotten.

+5881 XP

Level-up available

"Very nice." I walked over to the boss's corpse and placed a hand on it. Once I did, the flesh around my hand started to crumble, spreading across the entire thing until nothing was left at all. What was sitting in the resulting ash pile was a white T-shirt and a pair of jeans.

Intrigued, I opened up their description.

"Outfit of Minor Distortion. Grants a 15% chance for an area-of-effect attack to miss the wearer. This was initially a cape, but you could use the clothes."

I quipped, "Very considerate of you," and then threw them on. I walked to the back of the cavern and went through the wormhole that had appeared, bringing me back to the streets of Philadelphia.