Chương 488: Chapter 486 – Into The Depths Part 2

"Did you just kill dozens of S Rank Demonic Beasts like they were nothing?" Mage Parivar asked, sticking her mouse head out of the crevasse for a look around. Damion ignored her as he cleared two A Rank kill quests and three S Rank ones. He had the feeling before all was said and done he would be clearing a few more of these notifications.

"When you are stronger than something, it obviously makes it easier to kill it," Damion tried to downplay what Mage Parivar had just seen.

"True, but S Ranks usually put up a bit more fight," she retorted. Mage Parivar knew something was off, but she just could not conceive of the idea that Damion had surpassed S Rank.

"Mage Wells has an advantage," Visault told her.

"Let's get moving." Visault and Mage Veers both knew why Damion's attacks were so effective. Magic penetration. SS Rank magic power was one thing; any higher Rank creature could usually overpower another. What Damion did was not overpower the Demonic Beasts but ignore their defenses entirely. Once the group had finished collecting their wits, they continued on. All of them, especially Damion and Straus thought it a waste not to collect the cores of the slain Demonic Beasts, but they had a mission.

Even though he could have kept his spells active, Damion released the four spell combination that had slaughtered the first set of Demonic Beasts. He knew how far they had to go and he did not want to risk mana exhaustion by keeping them active. With Instant Channeling now at S Rank with a number of other spells, it reduced his channeling time by 75%. For most spells that was not a lot, as they only took a split second to channel anyway, but for domain and mastery spells, it made a significant difference.

Damion just hoped that this was one of his passives that would be increasing in Rank again soon. The next three cavern ruins saw a repeat of the first. Though Damion chose to practice with a different domain spell each time. Ice came in the second cavern. His spells froze the Demonic Beasts solid in seconds but left his allies completely untouched thanks to Ice Mastery. Though, they did get a bit of a chill with the sudden drop in temperature around them.

The third cavern ruin they entered was smaller than the others, and Damion had his allies hold in the mouth of the passageway as he entered. For this area Damion chose his Water Domain and Water Mastery spells. He felt it would be possible to isolate his allies in pockets of air, but that would also make those pockets the targets for desperate Demonic Beasts that were trying not to drown. Even though Damion could have used his Water Domain to simply drown the Demonic Beasts, he took a different approach, pressure.

With his domain active the entire cavern filled with water and with Water Mastery he built up the pressure in the water as if they were deep in the ocean. Some of the Demonic Beasts were crushed after just a few seconds. A few were hardier and could somewhat withstand the steadily increasing pressure. For those stronger Demonic Beasts, Damion elected to shred them with water currents. In an ordinary ocean a current would just pull you along. If you were strong you could fight against it.

What Damion created through Water Mastery was not one current, but dozens. He layered them and ran them in opposite directions in each layer. The effect was an odd whirlpool that wanted to fight against itself, but because of Damion's magic it could not. Instead, the currents ripped and tore the Demonic Beasts that were already under enormous strain from the mounting pressure a part. Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

In less than a minute it was all over. Damion ended his spells, his water vanished and Demonic Beast bodies, some more paste than solid, some torn to shreds collapsed to the ground in a disgusting rain. By this point in the expedition, none of Damion's companions said anything. They mostly just looked on, torn between being impressed and horrified. The fourth cavern they came to was further down in the ruins and took them nearly a day to reach while moving through the twisting caves that connected the ruins.

Damion let Visault and Mage Veers handle most of the threats they encountered in the cave system. These Demonic Beasts were usually only low S Rank and it gave him time to rest from spell casting. Despite his ease of slaughtering the Demonic Beasts they had encountered so far, Damion knew in the fourth large cavern there would be SS Ranks. It had already taken them a day to reach this point, and they were still half a day, perhaps a full day away from the central ruins where the seal lay.

They had yet to receive word on the progress of the battle for Sostrad, but they were able to pull up on their tablets a live feed of the battle, which had turned into an urban battle, with the Iblis and human forces occupying half the city and the Alfar fighting to hold the other half. As they continued through the ruins, Damion's magic power kept increasing every six hours. Because of Concealed Aura his companions had no idea, but he was steadily approaching SSS Rank. He was a full day away from advancing.

There were six upgrades left for the Magic System to apply, but he had already exceeded 7, 000, 000 magic power. On entering the fourth of the large caverns containing the ruins of Atlantis, Damion activated his Time Domain. Mage Harris' spell took the most out of him, but it was also by itself more powerful than any of his other spells combined. The Demonic Beasts that rushed at him were instantly frozen in place, some even mid attack.

One Demonic Beast, a sort of fire breathing scaled monkey was trapped with fire spewing from its mouth. With the power of Time Domain, Damion was able to keep the attack in place and force the scaled monkey backwards in time until it reached the edge of the domain while letting another Demonic Beast, a Wood affinity creature, move forward in time until it impacted the scaled monkey's attack. It certainly was not the simplest method of using the Time Domain.

However, this was the first time he was using the spell outside of a training environment and he needed to explore what he could and could not do. Easier than moving one target forward and one backwards in time while keeping a magic attack suspended, was just freezing all the Demonic Beasts in place and aging them. Ordinarily, Demonic Beasts grew stronger with time. However, that was as long as they continued to consume mana. In Damion's Time Domain they were cut off.

Without access to mana as they aged they grew weaker. The most important part of the Time Domain was that unlike the spell, Age Target, where it cost a fixed amount to age a target by a year. Though with his advance of the spell to C Rank it aged them by ten years. Through the domain he could age them as fast as he wanted for no extra mana than what it cost to keep the spell active. In less than five minutes Damion had once again cleared all the Demonic Beasts in the area and the team was moving on.

Though this time, except for Visault, they were not entirely sure what power Damion had used since all they saw, aside from the Wood affinity beast getting burned, was the Demonic Beasts withering until they turned to dust.