Chapter 58
Heat was rising from the basement.
I stepped into the living room, an ominous feeling gripping me. A faint red light was leaking through the crack in the door to the basement.
I grabbed the basement door handle.
"Ack, it's hot!"
I screamed without thinking and let go. The metal handle was scorching hot, like iron heated in a fire.
My palm had turned bright red.
Only after wrapping my hand in sand could I finally open the door.
Click.
As soon as I opened the door, a blast of searing heat hit my face.
The moment I realized this was an emergency, one thought flashed through my mind.
"What about Chohogi?"
The basement was its room.
It had slept there even last night.
Realizing how serious the situation was, I endured the heat and went down the stairs.
"What is this...?"
The sight before me was grim.
The basement was no longer a cozy sandy beach.
About a third of the room had been completely transformed.
A floor of glass and obsidian, formed from sand that had melted and hardened again. It looked like the site of a volcanic eruption.
At the center of it all was the heart of the mountain.
A rock in the middle of the room that periodically glowed red and breathed out hot steam.
It seemed the core of the Floor 25 boss I fed it yesterday had been the trigger.
But the cause wasn't important right now.
I desperately searched for Chohogi.
No matter how I looked, there was no sign of it.
"Chohogi!"
No reply.
I bit my lip anxiously.
Could it have turned to glass?
Just as my vision was about to go dark.
Through the steam, I saw a particularly intact-looking area in one corner of the room.
It was where the staff made from World Tree roots had been planted.
The legendary-grade staff emitted a faint aura of its own, protecting a small area from the surrounding heat. Like a barrier.
And right beneath that staff, a small figure was curled up.
It was Chohogi.
Unaware that anything had happened, it was sleeping soundly with its small body curled up.
It was fine. It was alive.
"Hah... Thank goodness."
A sigh of relief escaped me.
My legs gave out, and I nearly collapsed.
I rushed over at once and carefully pulled the staff and Chohogi out together.
When it woke in my arms, it looked up at me with a confused expression.
A moment later, Chohogi finally understood the situation and clung to my neck.
Its small body was trembling faintly.
I patted its back to reassure it.
Then Chohogi lifted its head and looked straight at me.
A sullen expression.
It tapped the top of its head.
The safety helmet I had made for it.
One corner of the hat it treasured was singed brown.
With a face like it might burst into tears any second, it kept looking back and forth between me and the hat.
Honestly, in a situation like this, the only thing it was worried about was a hat.
I let out a dry laugh and comforted Chohogi.
"It's okay. I'll make you an even cooler new one later. One that sparkles, with diamonds too."
At my words, Chohogi seemed to regain a little energy and burrowed deeper into my arms.
Holding Chohogi in my arms, I looked once more at the ruined basement.
For now, I had to deal with that rock somehow.
Right now only about a third of the basement floor had melted, but what mattered was what came next.
As I kept climbing the tower and feeding that rock more powerful machine cores, the heat would only grow stronger.
What would it be like by the time I reached Floor 30?
"It might even punch a hole through the ceiling..."
Just thinking about it was horrifying.
How was I supposed to deal with that thing?
The first thing that came to mind was the refrigerator from Wizard Gallery.
As an A-rank ice mage, they might be able to handle that level of heat with ease.
I briefly considered asking for help.
"No, that doesn't seem like a very good idea."
But I quickly discarded that thought.
First, they probably knew nothing about this mysterious rock either. It had come as a reward from EXTREME.
Second, even if they could suppress the heat with cooling magic, that would only be a temporary fix.
Magic wouldn't last forever.
It wasn't like I could ask them to keep cooling the basement until I reached Floor 30. In the end, I had to solve this myself.
I turned it over in my head.
To block heat, I needed an equally powerful insulating material.
The best material I could make with my own abilities was Orichalcon.
I drew out all of the Orichalcon power stockpiled within my body.
Sand and rocks moved according to my will, beginning to take shape.
Sands tinted with a pink metallic sheen compressed together, forming a thick, sturdy box.
A perfect sealed structure without a single seam.
After making the lid perfectly as well, I placed the heart of the mountain inside.
Thud!
The moment the lid closed, the heat that had filled the basement receded like a lie.
I touched the surface of the box.
It felt only pleasantly warm; not nearly enough to melt the surroundings.
"Phew..."
Only then did I let out a relieved breath.
I had barely managed to seal it with a stopgap, but the unease still wouldn't go away.
"I'll just throw it into Floor 30 soon and go collect my reward."
I muttered as I cleaned up the basement.
***
[Entering Floor 26 of the Tower (EXTREME).]
"It's not an abandoned mine?"
I was briefly taken aback when I arrived on Floor 26.
The inside of the huge cavern looked as if it had been through a war.
A completely different atmosphere from the previous floors.
Kobold corpses lay scattered everywhere, with shattered machine wreckage strewn among them. The floor was pocked with massive shell craters, and the lingering smell of gunpowder stung my nose.
And at the end of that ruin.
A massive wall and gate blocked the cavern passage completely.
The gate, shaped more like a hatch than a castle gate, gave no hint of what lay beyond the cavern.
"Where are the enemies?"
I looked around warily.
Only corpses and debris; nothing alive was in sight.
Such a silent battlefield.
That eerie stillness only made the unease worse.
And then it happened.
Kigigigik-!
The machine wreckage strewn around me all began moving at once.
The scrap metal pieces I'd thought were junk floated up as if drawn together, beginning to reassemble in midair.
Drills for legs, caterpillar treads for heads.
All sorts of fragments grotesquely fused together, forming new machine soldiers.
"Surely even these guys aren't mithril, right?"
I thought of the Floor 25 boss. Surely even these trash mobs wouldn't be that sturdy, right?
I reflexively made tungsten bullets and fired.
The torso of the nearest machine unit was pierced clean through and exploded in a single shot.
It definitely didn't seem to be mithril.
The moment I confirmed that fact, I no longer hesitated.
"Let's finish this in one go."
I planted my staff into the ground and unleashed my mana.
Desertification, full-power deployment.
A wave of sand surged out fiercely from beneath my feet.
Rumble-rumble!
The machine soldiers, just after finishing reassembly, were swept away and shredded by the torrent of sand before they could even move.
Both the kobolds' corpses and the machine wreckage. All of it turned into a handful of sand and disappeared.
A moment later, when the ripple died down, nothing remained in the cavern except the massive wall.
All traces of the battlefield were gone, leaving only an endless desert and the fortress blocking the way ahead.
"That gate looks incredibly sturdy..."
I muttered as I walked toward the wall.
Getting inside there was what I needed to progress to the next stage, right? It was a simple, straightforward objective.
Kikigigigik!
Then dozens of openings appeared atop the wall.
Turrets. Countless turrets all pointed at me at once.
"Ah..."
Boomboomboomboom-!
Without warning, a barrage opened fire at once.
Dozens of shells, spitting fire, flew toward me.
I immediately raised a thick sand barrier to shield myself.
A barrier made by lavishly mixing in Orichalcon, thicker and heavier than any barrier I'd ever made.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The world shook every time a shell struck the barrier.
Cracks formed and were filled in again, over and over.
Even blue-flamed shells occasionally flew in, sending electric current across the barrier.
"This is nuts..."
At this rate, even getting close to the wall seemed impossible.
I decided to change tactics.
If I couldn't break through head-on, I'd go underneath.
I dug the sand beneath my feet into a trench.
Then I advanced forward, covering the ceiling above me with a thick sand wall.
I kept tunneling forward for quite a while, building as I went.
I could see the wall. Poking my head up from underground and looking at it up close, it was utterly overwhelming.
It sealed off a space of tens of meters in radius without a single gap.
Its surface was so smoothly finished, with not even a crack between bricks, that it looked less like a brick wall and more like one giant rock carved in one piece. A flawless monolithic wall.
I couldn't even begin to guess how they made this.
Just in case, I tried using weathering on the wall.
As expected.
Only the tiny point touched by the staff tip corroded by the slightest amount; the speed at which it turned to sand was agonizingly slow.
"Is this mithril too?"
I let out a hollow laugh.
Those crazy bastards. I couldn't help cursing.
Do they have money to burn? For them, mithril is just overflowing like pebbles on the roadside?
They made this entire massive wall out of a single block of mithril.
"Were they preparing for some great war with the fate of a race at stake or something?"
But no matter how sturdy a wall was, I could just go around it.
I went back underground.
I planned to dig deeper beneath the wall's foundations and slip out to the other side.
"Damn it, you even saw this kind of move coming?"
But my plan was quickly thwarted.
No matter how deep I dug, the mithril wall stretched on endlessly.
There was no way around it, above or below.
"The floors in the 20s are really all disgusting bastards, one after another."
In the end, I gave up digging and came back to the surface.
There was only one way.
A head-on breakthrough.
I had no choice but to break through the toughest gate head-on.
I drew on the power of the diamond once more.
This time, it wasn't just a simple blade.
I rotated diamond particles at high speed to form the shape of a massive drill.
It was a slightly more advanced application of the previous technique.
"Giga... Drill... Break!!!"
Shouting the hastily coined technique name, I sent the giant diamond drill charging toward the gate.
Kakakakakakakang-!
A horrifying screech of friction filled the cavern.
The diamond drill slammed into the mithril gate, sending fierce sparks flying.
Fortunately, it worked.
The gate started getting carved away at a rapid pace.
Even so, the gate was so thick that it took forever to break through.
Even while that was happening, the turrets atop the wall kept bombarding me without pause.
My head rang. My mana was being drained like crazy.
How much time had passed?
I think I'd been digging for more than five hours.
At last, I felt the touch of empty space at the end of the drill.
"I finally broke through..."
Completely exhausted, I collapsed right there on the floor.
The diamond drill and the barrier above my head both turned to sand and scattered at the same time.
All the strength drained from my body, and I couldn't even twitch a finger.
"Haa... I'm seriously dead."
It was then, as I sat there catching my breath.
An all-too-familiar message appeared before me.
[Congratulations on clearing Floor 26 EXTREME difficulty.]
The familiar clear message.
But something was different from usual.
The bonus text for first place that usually followed wasn't there.
"What, I wasn't first this time?"
I muttered in disbelief.
My streak of 26 straight first-place clears was broken like this?
Was it because my clear time dragged on too long?
I felt wronged.
It was EXTREME difficulty; shouldn't the scaling be a little more generous?
At that moment, three skill books floated before my eyes.
"Level up?"
Two were gold, and the remaining one emitted a brilliant platinum light.
A platinum-grade skill book.
My eyes sparkled too.
"Wow... So I really pulled one of these from the ground..."
The next moment, the promised transformation began to occur.
[The First Clear Bonus has been applied!]
The platinum light grew even more intense, then began to shine brilliantly in rainbow colors.
Rainbow grade.
A top-tier skill of the same caliber as Weathering.
"Right, I can just eat this and try again, can't I?"
I smiled brightly, as if I'd never been dissatisfied at all.
Rank 1?
If I have one more skill like Weathering, I can take the ranking back anytime.
I reached for the rainbow skill book, almost spellbound.
The skill book dissolved into particles of light and seeped into my body.
At the same time, new knowledge and power were engraved into my mind.
[Summoning Skill: Sandworm]
[Grade: Rainbow]
[I am the god of the earth.]
[Pay your respects.]
...?