Chapter 109: S-Rank Dungeon: Breaking The Maze
"You silly little bitch!" Arianna’s sculpture copy said with a smile on her face that made Arianna feel disgusted. This copy of Arianna was the visual representation of Liandrin in her mind.
The sculpture of Haman then said to its friend, "Look at the little twat, thinking he would survive this dungeon."
Oliver felt this growing anger as he watched the sculptured forms of mages who used to be his bullies still make fun of him.
"These are not real," Aiden said, stretching his hand out as the white light of his oblivion beam technique started forming.
Arianna then spoke, "Hold on, Aiden. I got this one."
"I’ll deal with them too," Oliver said as well.
Both of them had then walked up in front of Aiden in preparation to face their fears, literally.
"Are you both sure?" Aiden asked as he glanced between them both. Somehow he understood why they both had to do this.
They both nodded in unison, and then Aiden took a step back to watch them from behind. Although, ready to swoop in at a moment’s notice should anything start going wrong.
Then the battles ensued respectively.
"Chain Magic: Homing chains!" Oliver yelled, and from his outstretched arm did long chains appear from thin air chasing towards the bullies.
They made futile attempts to avoid the chain magic attack extending towards them. However, the technique itself was meant to chase until it hit its target.
And in this case, targets.
A black conical weight was attached to the end of the chain, which pierced through the head of one of his bullies.
The chains floated again and immediately chased after the next one running in the opposite direction, slamming and piercing through its torso in one solid impact.
Both of Haman’s stone friends were gone, leaving just Haman with an angry face and yelling out curses at Oliver. "You’ll never amount to anything!"
Oliver smiled at the frustrated face of Haman, then gestured his hand in a swirling motion, which made the chain coil and wrap around Haman. Then he clenched his fist even tightly, after which the chains wrapped around Haman tightened till it shattered the stone structure.
The stone sculptures faced against Oliver possessed nothing more than insulting words, mostly because that was all Oliver experienced from them.
The Malgia could only create stone sculptures based on what it knew from the mind of its target.
Arianna, on the other hand, was in a much more difficult battle, and this was because the stone sculpture of Liandrin faced against Arianna also had mass magic.
When she wasn’t in control, Arianna had experienced seeing Liandrin use her body to cast mass magic.
This experience was part of the mental imprints that the Malgia had gotten access to when it invaded her mind a while ago.
Liandrin had begun with hurling stone projectiles in the form of nails, which she would use mass magic to expand into giant sizes.
"Shrink!" Arianna called out with her arm stretched out, causing the giant nails to shrink into a size so miniature they wouldn’t feel like a thing.
The battle proceeded on like this, and it felt like they were evenly matched until Arianna decided to take a different step.
She used her shrink spell on her body to reduce to a size so minuscule that it was impossible to see her with the human eye.
"Where did she go?" Liandrin wondered, looking about to see if she could find her.
But Aiden could see Arianna with his Dragon’s sight, racing towards the unsuspecting Liandrin.
He then decided to give her a little hand by using his copied distortion magic spell to warp and distort the remaining distance between Arianna and Liandrin and shorten it out instantly.
[Distortion Magic: Faster Pace]
Arianna, who was several steps away from Liandrin, found herself instantly before the stone figure. With a smile on her face, she somehow knew that Aiden had definitely made this strange phenomenon happen.
Then Arianna made her body expand instantly into normal whilst simultaneously delivering an uppercut punch to the jaws of the stone sculpture Liandrin, who hadn’t anticipated that move.
Liandrin staggered backwards, and by the time she tried to understand what was going on, Arianna had disappeared again.
Without warning, Arianna expanded once more but from Liandrin’s side, delivering a punch to the sculpture’s chin before disappearing again.
Once again, she reappeared from the other side and expanded her form to deliver another punch to the other chin of the stone sculpture.
This went on and on, that Oliver, who was now close to Aiden, asked, "How is she disappearing and reappearing?"
Aiden smiled, understanding how it would look that way. From anyone’s point of view, it would look like Arianna was simply manifesting herself at different points and disappearing, but Aiden knew it wasn’t exactly the case.
What Arianna did was shrink back so fast after every time she delivered a punch, then run to another side and expand into a size enough to deliver another punch.
It was happening quickly and suddenly without warning.
Then Arianna decided it was time to end it. Whilst still in her minuscule form, and from her unsuspecting position directly below Liandrin, she flung one of her nails upwards, then snapped her fingers, "Expand."
The nail then expanded to an insanely ridiculous size and burst right through the stone structure from underneath, shattering it into smaller stone pieces.
Arianna then returned back to her normal form and walked towards Aiden with a smile on her face.
Aiden had a smile as well while staring at Arianna walking back. "That was really impressive," he said.
"Thank you," Arianna said, then turned her face away slightly. Her hair covered the side of her face from revealing that she had blushing on the cheeks.
"I don’t know how you did that, but that was good," Oliver commended as well.
Then she turned towards him with a smile and said, "Thanks, Oliver."
Aiden’s focus returned to the matter at hand. "Others would be fighting something similar right now or soon enough, and from what I can tell, the strength of these stone fakes are dependent on how much the victims know about them."
"But how come you didn’t get one?" Oliver asked, realizing Aiden never had a stone sculpture to fight.
"Cause I’m me," Aiden said with an arrogant grin on his face whilst shrugging.
Arianna chuckled slightly and shook her head a bit.
"Although I must say that this is getting slow, and so far it feels like we’ve made no progress," Aiden said, with that contemplative look on his face.
His avatars stretched into the dungeon as well had made no progress finding anybody, but at that point every one of them stopped moving.
Every one of them, and at that same time, paid attention to their surroundings using their dragon’s sight and they came to a conclusion in the next moment.
The dungeon’s geography was being altered at a constant rate.
This was probably the Malgia’s doing. As written on the texts regarding this monster, it was one of the most difficult things, fighting a Malgia in their territory.
Aiden looked behind him, then used his dragon’s sight to stretch his vision’s range and saw that the entrance they had first arrived at wasn’t so far from where they stood.
Which shouldn’t have been so, especially considering that they had taken and walked several different paths to where they currently stood.
The Malgia was crafty. While the mages walked different paths and felt like they were making progress further into their journey, it only readjusted their current locations closer to where they came from.
Aiden chuckled slightly, in fact impressed at the creature’s work. Arianna and Oliver had glanced at themselves with puzzled expressions, wondering why Aiden was laughing.
"I’ve been looking at this the wrong way," Aiden said, prompting Arianna to ask, "How do you mean?"
Then he went on to explain what was actually happening the whole time. Both Oliver and Arianna looked disturbed after hearing it all.
"How do we even deal with an impossible situation as this?" Arianna asked with a worried look on her face.
"By going bizarre," Aiden replied with a devious grin on his face.
He already had the idea, and because he shared a hive mind with his avatars, they also had the same idea and started carrying out the instructions immediately.
Right now, his avatars scattered within the dungeon were about only fifty, but one after the other, they started making more duplicates.
Each new avatar only made new duplicates that also further duplicated themselves. The numbers went from the fifties to hundreds, and right now they had crossed the one thousand mark, and even then, they didn’t stop making new ones.
The avatars would disperse in different directions as they were formed, but they weren’t walking coordinated directions anymore.
Some randomly used transport magic to randomly teleport to locations they had passed through before, and some randomly just walked about with dragon’s sight active.
Right around the corner where the original stood with Arianna and Oliver, different avatars had randomly appeared there and disappeared right after.
At a point it became so bizarre for Oliver that his head spun and it looked like he was about to pass out. So he just sat on the ground.
"What’s happening?" The confused Arianna asked.
Aiden raised a finger up towards Arianna, without replying to her. After a few seconds he then turned towards her and said, "I found them. I’ve found them all."