Chapter 0082: Frost Caverns of Schnee

As the trio walked in the cave system for a bit more time, Mai cast a barrier over their heads to block the incoming snowflakes that were constantly falling on the path further.

These snowflakes were enchanted with divine magic to suck in all the heat in their surroundings.

"These snowflakes are dangerous even for us. Although our clothes are enchanted to create a barrier around us that prevents any harm, these snowflakes suck in all the heat from our bodies. There's no provision for that so we need to avoid those snowflakes.

As they further walked under Mai's canopy barrier, they noticed a protrusion in the wall. Looking closer they realized that it was a person that was encased within the wall.

"He looks like he was just leaning against the wall and the ice reached out to encase him."

"This is one of the zombies I told you both about in this labyrinth," Masashi says and brings out his sword to stab into the frozen corpse stuck inside the wall.

Masashi's enchanted sword easily went into the corpse as he used the sword as a medium to probe into its anatomy using {BIOMANCY}.

"So that's how these things are reanimated. There's a central mana core that controls these monsters like puppets. Remember the puppets in Miledi's dungeon? These zombies are similar."

"So where's the core?"

"It's about a mile away from here. We should get there before these zombies start swarming us." Masashi speeds up his pace as Mai and Yue follow him closely.

Mai has similar stats so she doesn't have any issue following Masashi but Yue has abysmal physical stats so she takes into the air and flies above the ground at a low height to keep up.

She doesn't worry about mana consumption since Masashi, her walking mana recovery potion is there.

Then a few moments later, the zombies are already swarming around them as the trio blasts them away at regular intervals.

Mai uses the overpowered disintegration magic that she copied from Noint and disintegrates the zombies with small projectiles formed of condensed disintegration magic.

Masashi uses his {BIOMANCY} coated swords to destroy the physical structure of the zombies to prevent them from regenerating too quickly.

Yue backs them up and takes care of the stray zombies that appear.

Mai still keeps the shield canopy since the blizzard still hasn't stopped and they can't let the snowflakes touch them.

They keep going through the zombies that appear on their path but overall their pace toward the core doesn't slow down by that much when taking care of the zombies.

Another minute and they reach a dome-like area that was outside the purview of the frostbite blizzard.

"This is another section of the labyrinth. The mana core's there, I'll take care of it, you girls cover me." Masashi takes charge and moves, in formation, with the girls toward the location of the mana core.

The zombies still haven't stopped coming so the trio is kept on their toes to take care of the zombies.

Inside the wall where Masashi was trying to reach, there was a large deep-crimson fist-sized lump embedded. It was the mana core that was stuck deep within the walls of the cavern.

As the trio reached the wall with the mana crystal that was puppeteering the zombies, another type of monster starts to attack them.

Frost eagles that were condensed completely of ice dislodged themselves from the ceiling and swopped down to get them.

Masashi trusts Mai and Yue that they'll take care of the monsters as he puts one of his hands on the wall and starts to infuse his mana into it, trying to take control of the ice using ice magic.

With his free hand, Masashi brings out his version of Hajime's revolver and starts shooting some of the monsters.

He'd added his {BIOMANCY} based corruption on the bullets so, whenever a bullet hit its target, the target would start to melt into a puddle of goo before the mana crystal reformed it back into the zombie puppet.

This gave them more respite since the corruption wasn't easy to deal with and that stalled the zombie for a good amount of time.

With Mai and Yue covering his back Masashi kept infusing mana into the ice.

After an entire minute of trying to take control of the ice to no avail, Masashi narrows his eyes.

"Wait…" He mutters to himself.

He probes into the wall of ice using his {BIOMANCY} and realizes the actual identity of the walls of this dome.

"Well, my bad I guess." Masashi realizes that the mana crystal that he thought was controlling the zombies was the mana crystal of another monster.

With Masashi's probe, the monster realized that its ambush plan failed, so the part of the wall with the mana crystal started condensing the ice around it and protruded out of the wall.

The trio backed away as they realized that there were thousands of frost eagles, frost zombies, and the new frost wolves coming out of the walls of the dome. They were about to be swarmed by these monsters that were all controlled by the monster in front of them.

The protrusion in the wall transformed into a reptilian-looking head that at first glance seemed like a snake's head but on a closer look it was a turtle's head.

*ROAR*

It came out of the wall in an imposing manner and roared so loudly that even the cavern walls seemed to be shaking.

Mai deployed a defensive barrier in front of them to prevent the shockwave from reaching them but the barrier was obliterated after holding on for a second.

That second was enough for Masahi to infuse his pure and concentrated liquid mana into [Intimidation].

"I haven't tried doing this yet so let's see what happens, shall we?"

Masashi used [Intimidation] that was infused with his mana to impose his soul on the surroundings.

At that moment, let alone the destructive shockwave from the monster, the swarms of weak monsters, and even the big turtle-looking monster were all stopped dead in their tracks.

Everything within the dungeon came to a standstill as Masashi got a notification.

[A new ability has been created using the previous ability Intimidation as the base]

[Conqurer's Haki has been created]

[Intimidation can no longer be used]

[Conqurer's Haki LVL 1: Grants The Gamer the ability to unleash their willpower combined with the pressure of their soul to overpower the will of other beings that are mentally weaker.]

'Weird. Conquerer's Haki doesn't require any mana to use. So why is it that I needed to infuse [Intimidation] with my mana? I won't even need to use mana to use this in the future, so why now.' Masashi has the thought but doesn't care too much about it.

He brings his attention back to the monsters as he says, "Intimidation had already become useless for the monsters in this place since it relied on pressuring people using the soul but the monsters didn't have a soul. Or at least it wasn't a complete soul so they weren't able to be affected by the raw pressure of my soul.

"[Conqueror's Haki] mitigates that problem since monsters without a soul are much more perceptible to the imposing of my will. Ant the effects that it's going to have on fluid magic are also very good. Let's try it."

With all the monsters stuck like statues under Masashi's [Conquerer's Haki], he had enough time to try something different.

He tried to combine two elements to attack the monsters since this time with [Conquerer's Haki] augmenting his will it was much easier to create the spell structure and pull in the mana from the surrounding environment.

"Hey Yue, this is one of your spells."

"Divine Purgatory" Since Masashi copied Yue's spell, he also decided to copy the name of the spell and say it out loud like her.

A large ball of azure flames appeared in front of Masashi as it started getting compressed into a smaller size. It kept sucking mana from the surroundings after Masashi's initial infusion to make the spell stronger.

The fire kept getting stronger but it wasn't able to get spread out and kept getting compressed into a smaller and smaller sphere and finally, it was the size of a tiny marble when Masashi cast it out.

This whole process took less than half a second for Masashi to complete. Compared to Masashi's older time of casting this spell of more than 45 seconds due to the incorporation of gravity magic along with fire magic, this was an unprecedented increase.

This raised the significance of Masashi getting [Conqurer's Haki] since it would do a lot more than just pressuring his enemies.

The compressed azure marble was directed toward the turtle. The moment it touched the still frozen stiff turtle, it exploded into a dome of blue flames that completely devoured the turtle.

With the turtle dead the thousands of monsters also turned into shards of ice and were destroyed.

"I'm proud of you, Masashi." Yue praises Masashi for getting the composite magic spells down. He even combined a peak tier magic like gravity with fire as the first spell.

"Thanks, Yue," Masashi rubs Yue's head lightly as Mai gives him an encouraging look too.

Masashi smiles at Mai.