Chapter Thirty-Two: Now We Are Safe (Part One)

Until this moment, I had never imagined that I could feel such profound terror toward a companion fighting by my side.

Before our stunned eyes, a roaring volcano erupted from the ground, its molten lava bubbling with fiery red froth, rolling out scorching waves like the greedy tongue of a colossal beast, licking away the land inch by inch and melting it into the streams of magma. Though the flow was sluggish, every patch of earth it covered was transformed into a new infernal realm, consumed by unstoppable destruction.

Vampires caught by this creeping magma had no chance to struggle. At most, a piercing shriek would escape their lips before they crumbled into ash. The burning was swift and merciless, leaving the vampires' formidable resilience utterly powerless. When their bodies were utterly consumed, not even a wisp of smoke remained—only a faint, charred scent lingered in the air.

Had this been the extent of it, perhaps those vampires farther from the volcanic maw might have had a chance to escape before the magma engulfed them. But the final flourish from Black Aurora—a simple “Wind Rush”—doomed any hope they had of survival. A raging whirlwind spun restlessly at the volcano's mouth, drawing up great torrents of magma from the heart of this fiery hell, then flinging it high into the air to rain down in a deluge that nearly covered the entire hall.

This dazzling, beautiful rain was anything but gentle or delicate; in fact, it was the most terrifying aspect of this magical disaster. The burning, boiling drops fell from above, utterly extinguishing the vampires’ final, desperate hopes for survival. The vast hall now seemed suffocatingly small, offering not a single inch of refuge. The blood-dependent, hideous creatures were laid bare under the relentless fiery drizzle, writhing and screaming in vain, only to be ignited by the rain and consumed as wriggling tongues of flame.

In this sacred sanctuary devoted to the god of death, perhaps only one place remained untouched by mortality: the space surrounding our flame mage, Black Aurora. Neither the flowing rivers of molten rock nor the blazing rain invaded this small sanctuary, and there we stood, dumbstruck, eyes wide, witnessing this earth-shattering spectacle unfold.

Not a word was spoken, even long after the last vampire’s death cry had faded. Perhaps the suddenness and sheer magnitude of the event had left us too shocked to breathe, seized by a terror that quickened my pulse and tightened my chest. My companions, having witnessed this transformation, stared at Black Aurora in disbelief. I sensed that their thoughts mirrored my own: uneasily wondering how an unremarkable mage just past the thirtieth rank could unleash such devastating, large-scale destruction.

To our surprise, Black Aurora himself appeared even more stunned—his mouth gaped wide, jaw nearly dislocated in shock.

A string of drool dangled from his slack lips to the floor, yet he seemed oblivious. He looked worse off than any of us, as if he too had been frightened out of his wits by his own spell. In fact, it seemed he was even more terrified than all four of us combined.

“Wh-what…” he stammered, pointing first at the charred remains of the vampires scattered about, then dumbly at himself, his eyes round as gold coins and filled with doubt, as if he could scarcely believe he had done this.

We exchanged equally bewildered nods. He stared in dumb silence for a long while before finally giving a helpless shrug, as if reluctantly accepting responsibility for what had transpired.

Our elven mage struggled mightily to explain it all to us. He cycled through what he called “Shanghai dialect” and “Japanese,” interspersed with much “pidgin English” and a wild array of martial-arts-like gestures. By piecing together the fragments we managed to understand, we finally formed a rough idea of what he meant—though even so, most of our understanding was guesswork.

The story went something like this: By chance, Black Aurora had once helped an unnamed legendary mage complete a most arduous task. This mage had conducted an experiment using his pet parrot, exchanging his own soul with that of the bird. The brilliant experiment was marred by a trivial oversight: the mage forgot to open the parrot’s cage before the swap. Thus, upon becoming a parrot, he could not reach the potion needed to reverse the spell, effectively trapping himself in a cage of his own ingenious design—an irony as exquisite as a contented bachelor suddenly deciding, in a moment of madness, to get married.

By sheer coincidence, Black Aurora stumbled upon the mage’s secluded hut during an adventure, and most crucially, opened the cage door.

Let me stress, this was described as a “difficult” task; its challenge lay in patiently listening to the squawking of a loud-mouthed parrot—and, even more incredibly, actually believing its story. Only the most naïve would fall for such a tale.

Regardless of how absurd it all seemed, the outcome was that Black Aurora completed the mage’s task and received a reward: permission to cast a level 100 spell—what we had just witnessed, “Infernal Earthfire”—even though he was far below the required rank. For our elven mage, casting such a spell under normal circumstances would be sheer fantasy.

To achieve this, he had to satisfy an almost impossible list of conditions: expending twenty times the spell’s usual casting time—long enough for a frail mage to die and come back ten times over; any interruption or movement during the process would break the spell, meaning he could only safely cast it at range against a non-existent target; and, most daunting of all, casting this forbidden magic at such a low level would drain 120% of his maximum mana—a feat impossible unless his reserves overflowed beyond reason. If he tried to use potions during the casting, the process would be interrupted as well.

These severe restrictions meant our mage had never before witnessed the power of his strongest spell, leading to understandable frustration—perhaps akin to the agony of constipation: knowing something is inside you, unable to get it out.

But by a stroke of fortune, we had Crado the shaman with us, who happened to use the “Soul Totem” to restore mana without interrupting Black Aurora’s casting. Once the long-dammed torrent of his power found an outlet, it erupted in a flood, turning the tide just as we faced collapse and producing this astonishing reversal.

Whatever gaps might exist between our guesses and the truth, the indisputable fact remained: we were alive, and we had all leveled up. This miraculous reality was enough to fill us with awe.

As we lamented the unpredictability of fate, we hurried to restore our combat readiness, knowing that, since we had found the vampires’ lair, we would surely face more than just a handful of barons and viscounts.

With sword in hand and eyes alight, I watched the empty hall of the death god with vigilance, alert for danger at every turn.

But even after staring so long my vision blurred, the expected attack never came. Sunshot Longbow, on the other hand, was having the time of his life—searching out rats and vermin creeping from the piles of corpses, whacking them one by one with his staff while shouting, “Exterminate the four pests, leave none alive!” pouring his overly enthusiastic bloodlust onto these defenseless creatures.

At last, it was Yangtze Delta who broke our fruitless vigil. The half-orc had found a lever inside the mouth of a death god statue. On a hunch, he pulled it hard, drawing out an iron chain from the statue’s maw. As he kept pulling, a stone wall beneath the enormous death god sculpture slowly slid upward with a grinding, heavy rumble.

When he finally hooked the chain to a ring in the corner, the stone gate was fully raised, revealing a hidden, circular chamber within.