chapter 2 arrival to the dungeon

AD33 felt the warp gate release him from its hold and leave him on the hard, cold floor of something that didn't feel like his room, thinking it was nothing more than the room where his fellow AD was sent to be recycled. With his eyes closed, he started reflecting on the life he had from the beginning to this very minute, close to his death.

The only thing he knew in his entire life was to always follow the orders of the minister. When he would always ask questions about the reason he was born and the reason why they would always have to fight to the point of death, to make sure he stopped his constant questioning, they used chaos to permanently destroy his voice box and scar his throat as a constant sign of his mistake, making him unable to talk properly anymore.

That was the beginning; he started fearing the ministers. AD33 doesn't know what to feel currently, for he is dreading that he is truly going to die at any minute, and he is also a little happy knowing that everything is going to end now; all of this numbness can go. He lay there, waiting for the ministers to finally kill him. He heard a sound from the distance, thinking it was the ministers he was waiting for. Likewise, he felt something grab hold of one of his limbs and seem to be dragging him somewhere.

Bewildered knowing that is not the way the ministers would act, no minister would touch him, always saying that just touching him would lower their status, so they would always just float him up in the air, never drag him anywhere physically. He tried to see what was dragging him, and when he tried to open his eyes to see, his wounds wouldn't allow him to open his eyes. He sighed, knowing that his injuries were more severe than in the past and that he didn't even bother healing himself the minute he came here, waiting for death.

Furthermore, he tried using his internal mana within himself and felt empty. He sighed again, forgetting that he used all of his internal mana to cast that powerful nuke spell to severely injure the void beast. Having no choice, he forcefully opened his mouth to start devouring the surrounding mana. At the time he was devouring the mana, the hellhound that was dragging him had found his fellow hellhounds and gestured for them to help him.

When the group of hellhounds tried helping, they would also bite the man to kill him, but none of their fangs were even capable of scratching; instead, their fangs shattered when they bit hard on him. They all tried harder to kill him. While AD33 was devouring the mana, he noticed that the mana he was currently devouring was both far more minuscule and lesser in quality than before, when he was still in his trial.

He shrugged off this knowledge for now, knowing that he could just make use of quantity to offset the quality of mana. Hours pass by with AD33 having devoured enough to heal his wounds enough to see and move his body, while the pack of hellhounds has been trying to bite this man to death, but they weren't even capable of scratching the man's body. The pack was surprised when they saw the man move his hands to the snout of a hellhound, grab and drag it to him, release it, grab its head, and crush it, killing it.

When AD33 was finally able to see, what he saw was a pack of dog-like monsters trying and seemingly failing to bite him. He stretched his arm out to the snout of a near-dog-like monster and dragged it to him to grab its head and crush it. When it died, he was surprised that instead of leaving a corpse like any other void beast, the corpse imploded to dust and left behind a crystal-like object.

When the pack of hellhounds saw their fellow hellhounds, they all started breathing out flames from their mouths and bathing the man's whole body with their flames. When they all stop before the smoke clears out and a hand shoots out of the smoke, they drag a hellhound by their snout and are thrown to another hellhound, killing both at contact.

When AD33 saw the dog-like monster that he threw, its fellow dog died, and both corpses imploded like the one from before to dust and left behind two crystals as well. He pounced on one of the nearby dogs and grabbed its snout. He carried it by its snout and used it to batter a nearby dog, killing both. Furthermore, he kicked another dog into another one, killing both as well. Before any of the hellhounds could even react, two-thirds of them had been killed.

AD33 cast magic bolts to kill all the remaining dogs. When the remaining hellhounds saw these magic bolts, they tried dodging them but failed with how fast they were, and all of them died like all the other hellhounds. He stood there trying to analyze the situation of what just happened, and he went to grab a crystal, sensing mana from them. He inspected it and judged it to have a higher quality of mana than the surrounding mana.

With this judgment, he proceeded to devour all of these crystals to hasten his recovery. He stood there, converting the mana he just acquired from this pack of dog-like-breathing monsters. He decided to roam around the cave system to learn more about his location.

Not only that, but he heard something from a nearby wall and saw it spawning or creating a similar dog-like monster. He waited for it to complete, and when it did, the hellhound pounced at him. Before it could. He grabbed it from its open mouth, grabbed it from the backside, and ripped it in half, splitting it in two, the two body parts imploding and leaving behind a similar crystal. He saw more similar activities happening on the walls, and before they could spawn completely, he cast magic bolts targeting all the spawning dogs, killing them.

AD33 noticed something: his spells were both weaker and stronger. It was weaker than before because the surrounding mana was so minuscule that it only had one-third of its original strength, but at the same time, it was stronger because of how he felt when casting the spell like the world was too weak to properly accommodate the true strength of the spell.

The reason why his spells are so powerful and how he can constantly cast countless of them is that, of the minister's thousands of years of optimizing the spell from the cost of the spell to its firepower, the caster only needs to use their internal mana at the start of the spell to jumpstart the spell and let the surrounding mana fuel it instead of the internal mana of the caster. This made the casters consistently cast spells while simultaneously regenerating the wasted internal mana used at the start of the spell.

But because of the minuscule amount in his immediate surroundings, the magic bolt seems to be weaker while also being stronger with the world, incapable of doing anything to balance the world. With this discovery of his magic, he starts to once again begin his exploration of the cave systems under his cloaking spell.