Chương 320: Fire Cave Part 2

"Looks like you will need to sit this one out buddy," Damion told Phil. The more he looked at the map projection, the more he realized this was a weird Breach. He had been in an underground Breach before, but that Realm Breach itself had been underground, and it had a passageway that led to the surface. As far as Damion could tell, this Breach was a maze of narrow passageways that all seemed to lead to a large cavern some distance below him. None of the passageways seemed to make their way to the surface.

In fact, as far as Damion could tell, there was no surface. The Breach was either very deep underground, or the boundary of the Breach prevented the auto-mapper from seeing it. In either case, this was going to be a slow slog through these passageways until he reached that large cavern. However, the more Damion looked at the large cavern, the more he realized he was underestimating its size. Retuning his projection to normal, he looked at the cavern and compared it to the rest of the cave system.

The auto-mapper had a range of 25 kilometers and the cavern looked to be at least 5 kilometers long and half that wide with a ceiling of at least a kilometer. The large cavern was more like an enormous void underground. It would be possible for Phil to fight in there, but unless Damion wanted to spend hours, possibly days, widening the passageways down to the cavern with Manipulate Earth, there was no way his companion could get there.

"Let's go back outside for a moment," Damion told Phil, pointing to the portal. Phil walked through the portal, followed by Damion. Once through, the Blizzard King shook its body and stretched out its wings to their fullest.

'Too big,' Phil sent through their bond.

"Yes. You are too big for the tunnels," Damion responded while he sent the map of the dungeon to the Adventurer Association to advise the Breach was close quarters and pitch black. This way he could alert anyone else heading this way and they could be prepared.

'Hungry.' Damion's eye twitched when Phil announced it was hungry again. Though, it could have been that the Blizzard King just wanted to keep trying to find the Simurgh's core. The task would give something to occupy its time while he went and cleared the Breach, but Damion did not want to leave the carcass and Phil right outside the Breach, lest someone confuse the Blizzard King for a Demonic Beast from the Breach.

"Let's go over there," Damion pointed to a hill in the distance before summoning his Ice Sword. Once the pair flew over, Damion deposited the Simurgh's carcass on the hill and let Phil have at it. The hill was a little over a kilometer away from the Breach. Hopefully, that would be enough distance to keep anyone from accidently bothering Phil. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"I'm going to clear the Breach. Don't hurt anyone. If they try and fight you, just fly away," Damion told Phil. He was confident Phil would not attack people needlessly. But after the incident with Justiciar Straus, he did not want to take any chances. Leaving the Blizzard King to its scavenger hunt, Damion headed back into the Breach. Once inside he pulled up the map on his tablet again and began searching for the quickest path to the main cavern.

There were plenty of passageways and small caverns to explore, likely holding all sorts of Demonic Beasts and natural treasures, but Damion was not interested in slowly exploring. Ordinarily, he would be alright with doing so, but he did not feel comfortable leaving his familiar alone for too long. He considered just leaving the Breach to the next team that came along, but if he did that and a dungeon break occurred, he would inevitably be blamed.

The solution then was to clear the Breach as quickly as possible, which meant, finding the dungeon core and defeating the guardian. Wasting no time, Damion began to move along the passageways he identified as the quickest route to the main cavern. As he continued to move through the narrow passages, he was thankful he had not encountered any Demonic Beasts. It was a bit of a surprise, but he had been in dungeons before where there were few Demonic Beasts.

Though, Damion thought it more likely that any Demonic Beasts in these caves would not be able to fit down the passageways. Small Demonic Beasts existed, but most tended to be large, growing in size with each increase in their Rank, which hopefully meant, that if he did encounter any in these tight quarters, they would be low Rank. There were numerous branch passageways leading off, but Damion ignored them, staying focused on the fastest route.

As he moved through the passageways, he discovered that it was not the air that smelled, but a liquid that seemed to be seeping through the stone walls. He touched some of it, but there was not much seeping through, just a slight amount, barely enough for the tips of his fingers to even feel the dampness of the liquid. When Damion reached the first of two smaller chambers he would pass through on his way to the main cavern, he paused while still in the passageway to see if he could spot any Demonic Beasts.

The floor of the chamber was clear, but knowing caves, Damion made sure to look up as well and he was reward for his diligence. On the ceiling of the chamber were a dozen D Rank bats. There were too many bat type of Demonic Beasts for Damion to identify exactly which species of Demonic Beast he was looking at, but since they were only D Rank, he figured he would worry about it after they were dead.

Sticking his head into the chamber, Damion could not help but take note of that smell he had noticed before was much stronger in the room. He still could not place the smell but did not put too much thought into identifying it. Whatever it was, it would either come to him or not and right now a simple smell did not seem important. Since bats pretty much universally preferred the dark, Damion decided to use Fireball and Fire Breath to deal with these.

Fireball he had managed to get to C Rank, but Fire Breath was still only D Rank and while the little bit of reward he would get from them increasing in Rank was not considered much anymore, he still wanted to claim every quest reward he could. The first spell he launched at the bat Demonic Beasts was Fireball. The burning ball leapt from the palm of his hand and hit one of the bats in its chest.

The bat's fur was still smoldering when it fell from the ceiling and before it could even hit the floor, the rest of the bats were screeching and flying straight towards the passageway where Damion waited. He cast his second spell, Fire Breath, into the cloud of bats just as the first bat hit the floor. It was hard to know, which was the cause, the first bat, still smoldering hitting the floor or Damion's Fire Breath, but the entire chamber instantly burst into flame.