Chapter 23 Ice Explosion
Chapter 23 Ice Explosion
What lay before them was a peaceful and serene garden of ice sculptures and dozens of beasts that had frozen in the middle of exploding. All of the explosions came from the same focal point, which was easy to tell as everything was frozen in midair, that place being the center of their skull. The purple ice sculptures were of course dozens of Cadaver Dogs, it seemed like Damians' plan had worked beautifully. Each macabre masterpiece was rays of purple with an orb of gore just the end of the highest point of the arc.
"Wait a second all of these cores are empty." Samuel was heard saying breaking the serene silence.
"Ok, what does that mean?" Damians' question resulted in inquisitive looks from everyone present.
"You dont know? How can someone so strong be so stupid?" Benny muttered sitting down on a patch of clean ice.
A few moments later a high-pitched shrill was heard as Lisa realized something. "Wait for a second, if you don't know what that means that means it wasn't part of the spell." Damian looked at her shaking his head.
"No clue why empty cores would be a good thing or what that even means." Damian replied shrugging his shoulders. "I just wanted to create a spell that could jump from one target to another and hopefully cause massive internal damage, so that they would be easier to kill. All this," Damian said motioning to the different sculptures "As the great Bob Ross used to say, A happy little accident."
"I'd say, and who's Bob Ross I've never heard of him." Damian waved away Sam's question.
"An artist, anyway, why the comment on the cores?"
"Well, these cores are all clear which means they're empty. Empty cores are useful because they can be refilled with any kind of manna, most cores when thier manna is consumed they disentigrate. the only way to get cores like these are to kill a beast that has used all of the manna in thier core before killing them, but trying to do that has its own risk. I mean most beasts wont allow themselves to be put in a posiyion where that can happen." Samuel continued talking about beast behavior even after answering the question, so Damian took a moment to ask the system what it knew.
"System can you explain to me why all of the cores are empty it has to have something due to the spell right?" Damian questioned the system in his mind.
*Correct, the spell was designed to use external energy to cause the ice to explode however the spell made no distinction and used the beast cores manna to accelerate the speed of the spell causing an almost instant chain of events*
"So the Ice Explosion spell doesn't have a filter, tsk, guess I still have to work out the glyph before I can call it complete as that wasn't my goal." Damian thought to himself lifting his arms above his head and bending side to side at his waist. "Alright let's collect these cores and move on we still have a boss to beat," Damian said he punched his hand through the frozen beast, the beast shattered on the massive impact the core fell and as it reached the ground it shattered into fine sand.
"NO! Damn it I was too late. I should've mentioned this earlier but empty cores are extremely fragile the manna in them is what makes them strong not the structure itself." Sam said, as he hung his head and started tucking in his shoulders "Sorry Damian I shouldve said something before, I didn't mean to yell. Instead I went off a on a tangent and then raised my voice."
"Dude, it's cool, don't worry about it you're good. It was my bad for jumping the gun." Damian replied raising an eyebrow at Sam's display. "So we just have to be careful while getting them out that's all right?"
"Huh? Oh yeah thats all there is to it from what I read most people require special tools to get them out but we dont have those."
"Ok let me see what I can do about this problem then," Damian answered scratching the back of his head. "Let's see here, how about this." Damian took out a small knife and started cutting away pieces until it he had a core surrounded by a chunk of ice, then he started casting firebolt but never finished the spell just using the heat to melt away the ice. When it was melted he had a perfect empty crystal that sam carefully took into his storage. Damian repeated the process and kept a few of the cores for research purposes. "Right I'll have to tell them to take those cores out of my cut of the money." He thought after taking out the last core.
When they finished they headed toward the boss room they had completed the main part of the dungeon in record time with four and a half hours have passed by since entering the dungeon, to begin with. The doors in front of them were huge standing at least twenty feet tall made of iron that seemed to be glowing red with a horned silver skull. It reminded Damian of a certain game where you play as a child escaping from his mother who believes she heard of words of God telling her to kill the child. Shaking away the thoughts Damian had a bad feeling all of a sudden calling Blackie to stay at the door and to warn him if anything strange happened. He approached the door and pushing with all his might flung the doors open. The doors were far easier to open than he thought they would be by the looks of them.
That's when Damian saw it, in the center of the room a huge pile of corpses about as long as a bus and as tall as the doors were. Damian knew what lay below that pile in a hole was a Canine Ghoul and while he had killed them before this would be his first time fighting one.