-Chapter 21- Flaming Tunnels III

Arthur Leywin P.O.V.

The sight of the ice holding the Mutated Flame Serpent crashing down releasing the beast from its prison terrified the entire group. The flames on its back ignited once again giving it the look of life.

"God fucking damnit!" Adam yells.

Derek screams in horror as he sees the beast coming toward us. I unsheath my rapier once again in preparation to defend.

But suddenly it stops and winds back its head, before shooting its head forward spitting out a smoldering hot liquid like acid, this was the Flame Serpent's signature attack. Liquid Fire worked like acid, and a strong one at that, it could melt us all alive down to the bone in seconds normally. There's no telling how strong the corrupted beast's liquid fire is.

Lilia summons a large bubble of water to surround us, the acid lands on it hitting it but it begins to evaporate letting some through. It luckily gave us enough time to get out of the way to avoid the dangerous acid. We begin to run out of the way of the acid, the others get away but I notice Derek unable to move from fear. 'Damnit' I turn around and grab him, pulling him out of the way.

We are forced to separate into two groups, Jasmine, Adam, and Lilia. While I and Derek are on the other side of the serpent, we currently have the serpent's attention so it is swiping its tail at us violently. I continue dragging him behind me till we get behind some large rubble to hide behind.

The others had taken the serpent's attention off of us to let us be free from the constant onslaught of attacks. 'How can we beat this thing?' We should have been able to take it down with no problem. I look over to Derek who is trembling from fear, gripping his bag.

I suddenly remember what he had said back when we first started our dungeon raid. 'My choice of weapons is this whip I have here and explosives.'

"Hey Derek, I have a plan but I need you to calm down first."

Catching his attention he looks at me trying to keep his cool. "What is it, whatever, we just need to get out of here." He speaks with his voice trembling.

"We can't escape without killing this thing or at least immobilizing it. Here's my plan." I explain to him my plan to use the explosives to deal major damage to the serpent and cave in the roof, crushing it while we flee.

He nods his head in agreement. "Ok, on go you run behind the serpent while I take its attention. I should be able to distract it long enough for you to enable the bombs. Ok, three, two, one, go!"

We begin running, he hides behind the serpent placing his bag down and taking out the explosives. Meanwhile, I run in front of the serpent to take its attention off the others. While distracting it the others seem to catch onto what I was planning. They begin shooting it with some spells to take its attention to confuse it.

Suddenly enraged, the serpent swings its giant tail covering the entire floor around me, I try to dodge but my injured leg from the previous hit prevents me from making a large enough leap to dodge. So I am hit and sent flying into the wall, I fall to the ground like a body bag.

Lilia runs over to me while Adam and Jasmine distract the monstrous beast. She lifts me to try and help. "Arth-Note, Are you ok? How can I help? Wait, your glove!" she reaches towards my left hand and takes off one of the crystals on it, she crushes it and rubs the crystal emitting a soft green glow over my wounds. The feeling is warm and refreshing, I can see my destroyed arm and shoulder slowly regenerate fixing themselves.

"I think that should be enough, can you move?" She asks, concerned.

"I think so, barely." I try to lift myself but my arm collapses from the pain. Catching me before I hit the ground Lilia lifts me a bit. But suddenly we hear a deep roar from the serpent, we see Jasmine and Adam weakened from the fight not being able to fight back. The serpent is facing us, it draws its head back and begins to spit out its Liquid Fire, Lilia quickly grabs her staff and summons a water dome around us as a shield, but the liquid fire continues to plow through it.

She screams as she draws more mana to make the water dome stronger, the water dome replenishes the parts that are evaporated from the Liquid Fire. I place my hand on their back near their mana core and start transferring mana for them to use. I don't have any spells that I could use in such a short amount of time to help us in this situation.

Suddenly her water takes the form of a serpent itself and launches itself back at the Mutated Flame Serpent with the liquid fire inside it. It hits the Flame Serpent making it fall back. Derek runs towards us and helps Jasmine and Adam up to us.

"What was that?!" He asks Flow.

"I have no idea! But we need to get out of here," Lilia yells.

Lilia carries me while Derek helps Jasmine and Adam out, we can see the Flame Serpent getting up until suddenly Derek has Lilia put some mana into a small orb, then suddenly. *BOOM!*

The explosion from the explosives Derek set blows up the Flame Serpent and I can hear the ceiling collapsing from beyond the doors.

We finally defeated the Flame Serpent and are now fleeing. Derek and Lilia get us out of the tunnels and we exit the dungeon. They get us to the medical center for adventurers and get us treatment for our injuries.

Waking up hours later I get up, my limbs aren't entirely healed and are still a bit sore. But it's nothing that bothers me. I immediately go and look for Jasmine and Adam, I find them in a nearby room going through their bags, it looks as though they were already healed.

"Oh, Note, you woke up," Jasmine says.

"About time brat. Sun is about to set." Adam says.

(Just to clarify he kept his mask on the entire time he was in the medical center, so his identity is kept secret, if anyone did remove his mask it would only be people who already knew Arthur was Note.)

"What had happened while I was out?"

"After taking us here Derek had left to continue adventuring. Lilia had gone outside to train, she has been out there for a while though." Jasmine says.

After checking up on Adam and Jasmine, I go outside to try and find Lilia. Looking around for a short bit, I soon hear the sound of rushing water and a loud crash followed by a tree falling. I go check it out and I found Lilia, she is training by firing spells at nearby trees.

I can't see her face due to the mask but I can tell she is working hard. I walk up and ask why she is training so hard.

"I want to replicate what I had done in the dungeon. I have no idea what had happened so I am just trying out random things." She says before shooting another blast of water.

"Good, because I'm here to try and help you with that."

I have her sit down and I explain to her what I found in her mana core and how her attack earlier was probably related to that. We begin testing out some theories on how and why it was caused and how to do it again.

***

After getting fully healed of my injuries, we decide to continue our journey as adventurers. We continue dungeon crawling and training.

Along the way, we learned a bit more about Lilia's deviant magic,

First up, what is happening is she can create spells in the form of beasts like a serpent or wolf, and so on. The way this happens is pretty much just based on her mind's influence like how normal spells work, nothing out of the ordinary besides her having an easier time with doing it.

Second up, the elemental attribute or ability it takes on is not limited to her own. Yes, she only has an affinity with water and can only make water spells. But when she uses a beast core as fuel she can give the beast its abilities, of course to a certain degree. She can't just copy stuff willy-nilly.

Finally, the beasts in a way have a will of their own, not exactly sentient but they don't need to be commanded to do two things, either instinctually attack threats or roam around. It requires Lilia's full attention to get them to do anything else.

We got lucky that this didn't turn out bad, and she got a special deviant ability. She will turn out to be a skilled mage in the future, hopefully, able to fulfill her dream to help people in need.

***

-One Year Timeskip-

Authors Note:

Chapters gonna be a bit short so I'm gonna take this time to fill you in on Arthur's abilities as he is now.

His strongest elements are a tie between Fire, Water, and Wind. Earth is his weak point, Lightning and Ice are only a bit better than Earth.

His current strongest spell is Ice Age.

He hasn't developed his skills like Black Lightning, White Flame, Absolute Zero, or use Blue Fire... yet. He will be able to use them without realmheart since he had more time to train with elements this time than in canon when he couldn't use mana from ages four to seven. So he has a bigger headstart.

Hopefully, this clears up any concerns.