Chapter 41: [41] : Floor 1 to 5, The Speedrun, Starfall

The red light faded. Declan blinked as his eyes adjusted to the new environment.

They were standing in a massive, cavernous room. The walls were made of dark gray stone blocks, and the ceiling was at least fifty feet high. Heavy iron chandeliers hung from thick chains, casting a dim, flickering orange light across the floor.

It looked like the inside of an ancient, brutal colosseum.

And it was incredibly loud.

About fifty yards away, three different elite guilds were currently locked in a desperate, chaotic battle.

They were fighting the floor mobs.

There were five massive creatures stomping around the room. They were Level 35 Obsidian Minotaurs. They stood twelve feet tall, covered in thick black rocky armor, and wielded giant iron battleaxes that sparked with fire every time they swung.

"Healers, keep the tanks up!" a guild leader screamed from the backline. "Do not let that thing break the shield wall! DPS, focus fire on the left leg! We need to cripple it!"

Declan stood near the entrance portal with his hands in his pockets. He watched the elite players work.

It was a classic MMO strategy. The heavy armor guys stood in the front, taking massive hits that drained their health bars to the red. The healers frantically spammed green magic to keep them alive. The archers and mages chipped away at the minotaur’s health one tiny number at a time.

[Monster Information]

↳ Name: Obsidian Minotaur

↳ Level: 35

↳ HP: 48,000 / 50,000

Declan watched a volley of ten fireballs hit a minotaur in the chest.

[Minus 150 HP]

[Minus 120 HP]

[Minus 145 HP]

The health bar barely moved a millimeter.

"This is going to take them twenty minutes just to kill one," Sloane observed. She crossed her arms and leaned against the stone wall near the portal. "At this rate, it will take them five hours to clear the first floor."

"Yeah," Declan sighed. "And there are ten floors. I don’t have that kind of time."

He didn’t pull out a weapon. Instead, he pulled up his system interface. He swiped over to the Global Auction House.

He had over three hundred thousand Origin Points sitting in his treasury. Money was literally an abstract concept to him now.

He typed Fire into the search bar.

He scrolled past all the expensive, high tier elemental staffs and rare mage robes. He scrolled all the way to the bottom, to the absolute cheapest, lowest tier garbage items available.

He found what he wanted.

[Skill Book: Fireball]

↳ Type: Active Spell

↳ Tier: Scavenged

↳ Description: Consume 20 Mana to shoot a small ball of fire at an enemy. Deals 50 fire damage. Has a 10 percent chance to cause a minor burn effect.

↳ Buyout Price: 5 Origin Points.

It was the most basic, pathetic spell in the entire game. Level 1 mages used it to kill rats.

Declan tapped the buyout button.

[Item Purchased]

↳ Origin Points Minus 5

The glowing red book materialized in his hand. He pressed it against his chest. The book shattered into red light and absorbed into his skin.

[Skill Learned: Fireball Level 1]

’System,’ Declan said in his mind. ’Enhance the Fireball skill. Push it to plus thirty.’

He didn’t even care about the cost. The system drained a massive chunk of Origin Points from his balance instantly.

The familiar, splitting headache hit him like a freight train. It felt like someone was pouring boiling water directly onto his brain. The system was violently rewriting the core code of the spell inside his neural link.

[System Enhancement Initiated]

↳ Fireball plus 1... plus 5...

[Notice: Maximum safety threshold reached. Neural corruption imminent.]

"Shut up," Declan growled through his teeth.

[Talent: Boundless Enhancement activated. Cap removed.]

↳ Fireball plus 10... plus 20... plus 29... plus 30.

The headache vanished instantly. It was replaced by a feeling of absolute, burning power in his chest. His veins literally glowed with a faint orange light under his skin.

[Fireball has reached plus 30.]

[Triggering Ultimate Conceptual Mutation...]

The system text flashed in a blinding, pure white light.

[Skill Mutated: Starfall]

↳ Type: Active Spell

↳ Description: Consume 50 Mana to summon a miniature, self sustaining star. The star immediately incinerates all hostile targets and objects within a 100 meter radius with pure plasma heat. The intense gravity of the star prevents enemies from escaping the radius.

↳ Special Effect: Omits user and recognized party members from all thermal and gravitational damage.

Declan stared at the text. He smiled. A real, genuine smile.

"Hey," Declan called out.

The guilds fighting the minotaurs were too busy screaming orders to hear him.

"Whatever," Declan muttered. He raised his right hand and pointed his palm at the center of the massive stone room.

"Starfall."

He felt a massive chunk of mana rip out of his body.

Directly in the center of the room, twenty feet in the air, a small dot of pure, blinding white light appeared. It was the size of a baseball.

Then, it expanded.

In a fraction of a second, the baseball became a ten foot wide sphere of roaring, twisting plasma. It didn’t look like a fireball. It looked exactly like the sun.

The light was so bright it physically hurt to look at.

The heat hit the room instantly.

The stone floor directly beneath the miniature star instantly turned red, then white, then simply melted into bubbling lava.

The Level 35 Obsidian Minotaurs stopped swinging their axes. They threw their arms up to shield their faces. It didn’t matter. The thick black rock armor covering their bodies instantly glowed white hot and began dripping off them like melted candle wax.

"What is that?!" a guild tank screamed. His heavy silver armor was already starting to smoke.

"Run! Get to the walls!" another player yelled.

The elite players completely abandoned the fight. They threw down their weapons and sprinted toward the edges of the room, diving behind heavy stone pillars to escape the blinding heat.

Declan, Sloane, and Kendra just stood near the portal.

Sloane blinked. She held her hand out. "I don’t feel anything. It just feels like a nice, warm summer breeze over here."

"The system recognizes you as party members," Declan said, lowering his hand. "The sun knows not to burn you."

Out in the center of the room, the minotaurs were roaring in absolute agony. Their health bars were melting faster than their armor.

[Minus 15,000 HP]

[Minus 15,000 HP]

[Minus 15,000 HP]

It took exactly three seconds. The massive Level 35 monsters collapsed into the lava and instantly dissolved into millions of blue digital pixels.

[Obsidian Minotaur Killed! times 5]

[Experience Points Gained: 250,000]

The miniature sun flickered and vanished, plunging the room back into the dim orange light of the chandeliers.

Where the monsters had been standing, there was only a massive, glowing crater of melted stone. Five piles of high tier loot hovered over the lava.

The elite players slowly peeked out from behind the pillars. Their armor was scorched black. They were panting and sweating heavily. They looked at the melted floor, and then they all slowly turned to look at the guy in the black coat.

Declan didn’t say a word. He walked straight past them. He didn’t even look at the other players. He just walked up to the edge of the lava crater.

"Quartermaster," Declan called over his shoulder. "Pick up the loots. We have nine more floors."

He walked to the heavy iron door at the back of the room. He pushed it open and stepped onto the stairs leading to Floor 2.

Sloane sighed, jogging over to the crater. She casually reached her hand right over the bubbling lava which didn’t burn her at all and swept all the dropped loot into her inventory.

"He treats this place like a grocery store," Sloane muttered to Kendra as they followed Declan up the stairs.

The next twenty minutes were incredibly boring for the girls.

Declan didn’t fight anything. He didn’t swing his massive halberd. He didn’t use his cleaver.

He just walked up to the heavy door of Floor 2. He kicked it open. He looked inside at the horde of screaming monsters.

"Starfall."

A blinding flash of light. A wave of heat. The sound of everything in the room instantly turning to ash.

Declan waited five seconds, then walked through the room, his boots stepping over the scorched shadows burned into the stone floor.

He did the exact same thing on Floor 3.

And Floor 4.

And Floor 5.

He cleared half of the hardest raid dungeon on the server in twenty minutes, using a Level 1 spell book he bought for five points.

"I feel like a janitor," Sloane grumbled, tossing another pile of high tier boss loot into her bag as they walked across the completely incinerated remains of Floor 5. "I am just following him around sweeping up the floor."

"I am completely okay with this," Kendra said, keeping her bow lowered. "I like not dying."

Declan stopped in front of the door leading to Floor 6.

He reached for the handle, but the door looked different. It wasn’t made of heavy iron or wood. It was made of perfectly smooth, highly polished silver glass.

He pushed it open.