Chapter 110: S-Rank Dungeon: Reuniting The Guild
Aiden’s plan was bizarre as he said, but it worked.
All he had to do was cluster every nook and cranny of the dungeon with several clones who were on the lookout with dragon’s sight.
Whilst paying attention to any sounds or smell using their Dragon’s sense passive.
The dungeon itself may have been too vast, with several rooms, but at the end, it still had a limit, and a single Malgia could not possibly keep up with repositioning the landscape of the dungeons to displace the Aidens whose numbers were now in a couple thousand and counting.
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The avatar who arrived at Piers’ side of the dungeon came at the nick of time, for a stone sculpture of Talen Gawyn was about to finish them off.
Without a thought, Aiden cast the Force Spell which telekinetically blasted the unsuspecting sculpture away to the other end of the room.
Piers and Elena’s attention was drawn towards the source of magic, and when they saw it was Aiden who had made an entrance with that spell, their faces brightened up intensely. Elena even teared up.
The team of Piers, Elena, and Sorkin were in a pretty bad shape.
Piers had sweat all over his face with bruise marks everywhere as he clutched onto his right arm with his left hand. He was trying to hold against the throbbing pain his body was feeling.
Elena was barely standing and tried to support herself with her staff. She had used up most of her mana, and what was left of the mana the purple hermis stone on her staff had absorbed from the surrounding had gone into trying to heal and resuscitate the team.
She had been the only reason why this team had survived against their sculptured enemies for this long.
Sorkin was lying on the floor with blood rolling down from his head, and it looked like he had been knocked out already.
They had managed to defeat two out of the three stone sculptures as pieces of their body parts had been scattered around. Talen’s stone sculpture had proven far too strong for three of them combined to deal with.
The avatar proceeded to healing Sorkin with Goddess Embrace, but that didn’t last long as the stone sculpture he had sent away started walking out of the debris.
The Talen sculpture had one arm left, and its left arm had already broken apart from its stone body.
Aiden, with a grim look, pulled away from healing Sorkin to face the threat that had returned.
This Talen sculpture had been reproduced from Piers’ mind, given as he was the one who Piers had feared the most.
Aiden took steps towards the sculpture who held a stone sword in its hand. A representation of Talen’s signature weapon.
The sculpture instantly appeared before Aiden after using its distortion magic to distort the distance between it and the avatar.
It swung its blade in a horizontal arc almost simultaneously in an attempt to cut through the avatar. However, Aiden’s reaction speed was far too great, and he simply caught the edge of the sword with his fingers.
A crack appeared on the stone sword from the point where Aiden held and webbed further on the rest of the sword before it burst into rocks that fell on the ground.
"He... he caught it with his bare hand?" Piers said to himself as he and Elena watched in shock. Aiden could react perfectly to the speed of that stone structure that had made a mess of them.
Well, the stats he had been accumulating over a while weren’t just for fancy.
The avatar quickly followed up with a lightning magic: raging bolt spell, but then this sculpture employed the use of distortion magic again, but this time to create more distance between it and Aiden.
It distorted distance to achieve an effect similar to teleportation, to move backwards and away from the immediate range of the bolts of lightning.
Aiden stared at the sculpture for a moment, and then an idea came to him. "You stone fakes are a result of magic, so what if one removes the one thing fueling magic?" he said to himself.
The stone fake was then about to cast another distortion spell when Aiden whispered, "Mana steal."
This was the theft magic spell he had copied from Ambrose a while ago, and the moment he employed the usage of that magic, the stone fake’s body started to crumble starting from the outstretched right arm it had intended to cast magic from.
There was mana in every spell made, and if you removed the mana right out of the spell, then the spell would crumble.
That was the logic behind Aiden’s usage of mana steal. For the stones themselves were simply just spells.
And with that, the Talen stone fake had been destroyed.
Piers immediately heaved a sigh of relief before letting himself fall to the ground to rest.
"Thank you," Elena said, trying to hold back the tears of relief and joy. She was certain they were going to die in that dungeon.
The avatar smiled and then turned to resume the healing spell on them, starting with Sorkin.
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The avatar who appeared in Kayden’s side of the dungeon saw Kayden standing with lightning coursing through his body and a few bruises on his face.
Fred was seated on the ground, and he and Kayden were both trying to catch their breaths.
There were destroyed stone body parts scattered around the floor, which meant that they had just concluded their own battle right before this clone Aiden stepped in.
Rick, on the other hand, had been knocked out.
And when Aiden saw him lying there motionlessly, he asked, "Is he..."
The first assumption Aiden had was that he was dead.
"No. He took a solid one right in the noggin," Fred said whilst tapping his head.
Rick had been knocked out from blunt force. It had to be one of the stone sculptures they faced.
The avatar then stretched his hand towards Kayden, who had sustained quite a lot of bruises, and cast Goddess Embrace healing spell on him.
"I didn’t ask for your help," Kayden said, even though deep down he appreciated it.
"Just shut up," Aiden retorted.
One by one the avatar used the healing spell on them to grant them fast recovery and healing.
Of all the stone structures they had fought, the one who looked like Oberon had been the most difficult to deal with.
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On another part of the dungeon, an avatar had arrived to see some other members of the guild that he had never really interacted with, all shivering with fear.
They were still under the effects of the tormenting voice of the Malgia.
These ones had been unlucky right from the start and could not possibly find a way to deal with the malevolent magic.
Aiden immediately used the Light Magic Guard spell on them, and an aura of light engulfed them. The malevolent voices in their head started to dissipate from them.
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For Katherine’s side of the field, they had also just concluded their battles against the sculptures that faced them.
Katherine sheathed her sword back into its strap and was breathing slightly faster than normal while she stared at a dismembered stone head of a strange looking woman.
She turned to her side, then stretched her hand downwards to Laela, who seemed to be exhausted and was seated on the ground trying to catch her breath.
Laela grabbed the captain’s arm, and with that she pulled the elf up. "We need to keep moving to find the others," Katherine said.
Then she spoke over to Bernard, who hid behind a wall, "Bernie, you can come out now."
Bernard peeked out from the side of the wall and said, "Is the evil you dead?" He was referring to the stone sculpture of the captain who had a frying pan as a weapon.
This was evidently a version of the captain that Bernard feared the most. The one who always beat him up in the guild.
"Yes, evil me is dead," the Captain said with a smile on her face.
The rest of the immediate area around them were covered in giant tree roots and vines that were slowly disintegrating as the caster had ended the magic.
These tree roots and vines were all Laela’s magic, and the sculpture she faced as the projection of her worst fear was Arianna’s.
Laela’s face immediately brightened into a smile when she saw one of Aiden’s avatars who had just stepped into the room.
The Captain also smiled when she saw him step in.
...
A few moments later Aiden’s avatars using transport magic had brought together the different pairs of Ravens Grave members scattered about the dungeon.
Right now, the guild had all been reunited in the part of the dungeon where the captain and Laela fought at.
A few of the members who had been initially knocked out still looked exhausted.
The ones who couldn’t counter against the ordeal of the tormenting voices until Aiden came to their rescue, still had very gloomy faces.
And even though most of them were amazed at Aiden’s multiple magic usage, they were all just thankful to still be alive.