Overpowered Wizard

Chapter 130: B2: C30: Into Hannah’s Dungeon

First things first, Zarian checked the network connection between him and the recon spiders while keeping his feet planted in one place. He also looked around with his own eyes.

His starting location was an enormous chamber that was moving around him. Different size cubes slid, docked, tumbled, and configured themselves like Hannah had merged a death game with the inner workings of a Rubik Cube and a three-dimensional display of Tetris.

Even the light sources shifted around.

Zarian saw blocks that were solely made for illumination travel along the jagged edges of the ceiling and down the uneven walls. The light sources would sometimes disappear into random recesses that open and closed unpredictably.

The only thing that remained somewhat stable were dark cubic formations and four colored paths.

Zarian had no idea what the rules of the game were in Hannah’s prototype dungeon, but he knew what she’d done here was a feat worth marveling over. He hoped Empress Ruvaria was a little impressed while overlooking everything.

Still, he had to test if he could push his way through the network jammer that was blocking his connection with the recon spiders. The harder he pushed, the more he could get past the fuzz, but it took some considerable concentration.

He reached a point where it wasn’t worth pushing anymore and dropped the recon.

While such an inconvenience might’ve bothered most others, he was actually proud. Hannah had found a way to jam his spider network and keep him somewhat blind to other chambers and hallways unless the spectral spiders were in the same section with him.

“Clever girl,” Zarian said.

He waited to see if Hannah would respond through the spectral spider on his shoulder. She kept her silence, which Zarian could respect.

Zarian figured Hannah could take out some frustrations while staying constructive here. Or maybe she might rage against him for real.

Either way, Zarian wouldn’t mind. He was okay with her taking her pound of flesh from him if that meant she would warm up again. He missed how much closer they were before the Darkrun Apocalypse.

Maybe they could talk about all of that later. Now was the time for action, and for Hannah to draw blood from the son of ultra gods while Zarian went on a rampage.

“What do you have for me, Hannah?”

Zarian examined the four colored paths. There was a red one, a green one, a blue one, and a white one.

The red one traveled on the floor. The green one traveled along the wall. The blue one traveled along the ceiling.

And the white path went wherever it wanted – floor, wall, and ceiling. The start of each path was near his position, giving him a choice without having to tell him directly.

Beneath him was a blocky tower that was fifty feet tall and solid. It hadn’t shifted or budged, letting him get his bearings while most of the death chamber kept rearranging itself and playing with lights and shadows.

It was a simple effect, but insidious and complex in practice. A weaker dungeon crawler would’ve had their visual senses and balance disrupted constantly.

Zarian was unbothered while noting how the four colored paths seemed the most stable throughout from the starting point and toward the chamber exits.

“The white path will be more interesting, won’t it?” Zarian asked.

Para didn’t respond. She was going inactive until she was needed directly. She even withdrew her limbs and became a seemingly unspecial battle kilt hanging down from around his waist. No sparkles or glimmers.

This way, she could slow their metabolism and keep hunger and thirst from being major concerns for a long enough time. They had plenty of provisions in the pocket dimension just in case, but it was better to make those last as long as possible.

Zarian could still use the parasite abilities himself even while she was staying inactive. He also felt small pulses of her in his mind. She was still aware, looking at the world through his senses, even when she didn’t respond directly.

She was agreeing with whatever decision he made, so he chose the white path, which was behind him.

He turned and jumped down from his starting point. His boots hit the cubic floor that was painted white, the Madness Wizard falling into a crouch and waiting for a reaction from Hannah’s engineered dungeon of shifting death.

Nothing happened.

Feeling adventurous, Zarian rested on one knee and used his Identify trait, his Basic Aura Manipulation trait, and his Level 0 Rune Alteration skill in combination to mess with stuff.

The entire chamber blared wrathfully. A warning yellow light flashed from everywhere. A strident klaxon alarm filled the air. The warning lights and alarm were so loud Zarian and his parasite squirmed in discomfort, his kilt flapping angrily.

Eyes squinted, Zarian noticed the dungeon’s reconfiguration turning up in speed. It all seemed more menacing and chaotic, like he was waking a beast or rousing the anger of the creator. Zarian’s own path seemed to glow with the promise to retaliate for any further tampering.

He stopped messing with Hannah’s work. Everything returned to normal operation and nothing more threatening happened.

With a heavy breath followed by a chuckle, he nodded at the situation in approval. He was growing more and more impressed.

That was twice that Hannah had made things more difficult for him instead of letting him steamroll as usual. If that hadn’t raised Hannah’s spirit, then she really needed to give herself more credit.

Again, Zarian could only wonder what Empress Ruvaria was thinking.

Personally, Zarian was really starting to like this game.

It’s almost unfair that I learned the perfect spell for screwing all of this up.

Thankfully, the Void Shout spell had a very high aura cost and was demanding in other ways. And his Advanced Grimoire of the Voidling Exile was in the beta section, so it was best for Zarian to keep the powerful spell in his back pocket for now.

Zarian looked ahead. The white path was as wide as a ten-lane highway. There was plenty of space for him to maneuver around without going out of bounds of the white path.

He imagined going off the chosen path would turn the entire artificial dungeon and its mistress against the crawler who’d fouled.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

It’s tempting to mess around more, but it’ll be more fun to see what Hannah has in store for me under normal play conditions.

Hopefully, all paths would cross or converge, or there were ways to mess with others on different paths. That way, Zarian wouldn’t be too restrained once he found paladins on paths that weren’t white.

Wasn’t white looked at as pure in this world? He would be surprised if the paladins hadn’t chosen white.

Finding nothing else unordinary, Zarian moved forward at a decent jogging pace, which was still blistering fast to most people. He fed aura into his Level 0 Wondrous Speed skill for the extra haste and luck, but he only used a conservative amount.

He kept brushing his aura manipulation ahead of him, behind him, to the sides, above, and further out at all times. He wanted to sense any sharp changes in foreign aura as a protective measure against traps going off.

He wasn’t much of a rogue, so he had to handle the threats of traps as a wizard would, with his fingers on the trigger, ready to blow something up. Granted, he didn’t have a bing bang ability he wanted to use down here, so he would have to get creative.

The white path veered toward the right and took Zarian between two dark monuments of shifting cubes. He felt something in his gut, his instincts telling him to slow down a little as he passed in between the shifty monuments.

He heard a loud clunk and felt something was wrong. The patch of white cubes around him glowed brighter.

Parts of the cubic floor dropped away before refilling with another white floor piece that seemed no different at first glance. The weird feeling in the air increased with each section of the floor that quickly shuffled and replaced itself.

This was all happening at superhuman speeds, so Zarian was just a tad slow on realizing why the air felt so weird to his physical and mystical senses. Then he realized the strange energy reminded him of Warper, one of Hannah’s first experimental skeletons that wore her runic enchantments heavily.

Warper had the warp enchantment and could do unique teleportation stuff.

Knowing this, Zarian understood one part of the trap: Hannah was going to slow his void spells. She was warping the immediate area as a countermeasure to void abilities, which was freaking brilliant and highly, highly scary of her.

The second part of the trap revealed itself as cube panels sliding open on the sides of the two monuments flanking Zarian’s path. From each opening, rectangular artillery guns folded out, their mystical payload already charged.

Zarian recognized the power of one right away, which held a typical load. The right cannon was going to shoot light at him.

The left cannon was different. It vibrated more violently while releasing its payload, which blared with such volume that Zarian understood what he was facing, which would’ve doomed most adventurer parties.

The left cannon struck with pure vibrational force. The right cannon unloaded concentrated light energy as a blazing laser.

There was a roar like one long thunder clap along with an explosion of light that shone like a solar flare. Then all became still while the cannons made slight readjustments, as if recalibrating per Hannah’s predictions of Zarian.

Not bad. But not quite good enough, because the attack had struck nothing but boggy swamp water.

Zarian was gone!

At least from sight.

Meanwhile, the anti-void energy was much weaker. Zarian’s Quagmire Pit had transmuted the cube sections on the floor that empowered them. Without that warp field, Zarian could use Void Waltz easier and slip free of Hannah’s first major trap for him.

Of course, the Madness Wizard didn’t take the easy solution. Instead, Zarian burst up from the surface like a lunging alligator. His parasite kilt flapped behind him like one long tail, the boggy water sliding off of him easily.

He zipped into the air quickly as both cannons readjusted to get a bead on him. But it was too late for them.

Zarian held orbs of furious flames in each palm, but these flames were far different from the embers of his Black Fire spell. They were not black and gray like they usually would be.

Instead, they were almost glassy, clear, and twisted in such a way that most observers would find them disturbingly wrong. In fact, even Zarian found these flames to be disturbing because they were a danger to even himself if he allowed them to get out of control.

These flames were born from the Black Fire spell combined with the Void Layer spell. For a high expense of aura, Zarian could lay the starved emptiness and madness of the void over an elemental ability. The result of that changed Black Fire from seeking vitality to seeking aura.

Zarian peeled his own aura out of the way before he unleashed twin gouts of the ghoulish void flames from his palms. He doused the cannons in the void flames and watched them make inhuman, almost machine-like screams.

The void flames did its gruesome work plus more. By the time Zarian settled back down on the surface of the Quagmire Pit, the cannons fell apart, and the aura-eating flames began to spread further.

Zarian cast his Void Authority spell and snuffed out the ghoulish flames.

By that point, Hannah had disengaged her first trap completely and gave him safe passage between the artillery monuments. Zarian wondered if Hannah had calculated he could do something like this or if he had caught her completely off-guard.

Granted, he’d never used a low-quality spell like Quagmire Pit in such a creative way before. He hadn’t even planned for it.

As everything was happening, his mind had found a weird but worthwhile solution to the problem and went all in like any proper Florida Man would.

He felt Para praising him in his mind. She was pleased that they’d avoided the super vibration cannon, which would’ve messed with Para hardcore.

Zarian chuckled as they reached the wall of the chamber and found big and blocky white platforms for him to jump on so he could traverse upward and at a diagonal angle.

“Hannah, you are being really scary for me and Para. Aren’t we supposed to be the dungeon boss? I hope you’re not tossing the paladins into instant death traps like mine.”

Zarian shook his head.

“No, you wouldn’t cheat that hard. I know you would cheat when necessary, but you value the data you can gain more than outright victory. And you enjoy the power trip, even if it means you hold back on outright victory.”

Zarian grinned as he pushed his enchanted sunglasses up his nose with a finger.

“It’s okay, Hannah. You can let it out here. Go on ahead and play dungeon goddess and get your rocks off.”

Zarian landed on another platform just like the many beneath him. Suddenly, he felt the warp-effect again, but the source came from the walls this time, which made Quagmire Pit useless against them. Zarian looked up as panels in the walls opened up and shoved out a humanoid figure.

The figure landed on the next platform he was going to jump on. It looked like a darkly colored character formed out of cubes with two blocky arms and two blocky legs.

From its blocky head was one eye that glowed with an aura-rich blue color. From its blocky fists, the high whine of the lightning element plus some thunderous vibration sounded off.

Zarian used his Identify trait and saw that it was an item instead of a proper creature, which was interesting. So the cube man had no level. Instead, it was epic in quality, which meant it was similar in sentience to Hannah’s usual roller golems.

The proper name was Cube Golem Dummy, and when it clashed its two stormy fists together, it looked like it meant business.

Zarian cast the quagmire spell on the golem’s platform and watched it drop into the magical quicksand like a heavy construct would. He only transmuted the middle and was lucky enough that the platforms were made thick for Quagmire Pit to work.

After the golem electrocuted itself and short-circuited, he hopped onto the platform with the magical pit and dove into the boggy water. For the next few seconds, Zarian swam like a predator, grabbed the golem by its blocky shoulder, and punched it in the face a couple of times until it fully broke.

Zarian resurfaced and turned off the spell. The broken golem appeared on the floor in front of his boots. Looking up, Zarian smirked at each of the platforms above him.

Hannah hadn’t changed them to make the platforms thinner. She could probably make the changes to ruin his Quagmire Pit tactic if she wanted, but she was surprisingly a good sport.

Instead, she unloaded more Cube Golem Dummies with different elemental effects. Some had roaring flames around their blocky fists. Others had misty frosts on their fists. Plenty more could extend their fists and shoot bright lasers that even came with a classical sound that reminded Zarian of Star Wars.

Many of the golems rushed down at him instead of waiting on the platforms above. He might have to sweat a little if he wanted to reach the ceiling walkway and finally leave his starting chamber.

This had to be the only human-made dungeon across the Infinita Star System that tried to smash the dungeon boss along with the adventurers.

Please tell me the paladins are getting the kiddie version. If they are having it way easier than me,I would literally fall over and laugh my ass off and let them get a few hits on me

Zarian felt like he was unraveling. He used his Willpower and multiple mental abilities to keep his fractures somewhat stable. He fought his way up from white platform to white platform as golem men rained down upon him and threw punches with their magic-lit blocks for fists.

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