"Take a look at what?" Rory questioned, examining the woman as she sauntered over, the dings in her armor signifying prior battles.

"This," Zoey said as she rummaged through her bag before handing Rory a strange little item that looked like a theater stage.

"Uhhh, and this is?"

"Item I was rewarded with from a rather strange delve. There was even a tier nine monster, though it was more like an overseer; otherwise, I'd be a red stain on the ground."

"Huh," Rory digested what she said before promptly filing away the information. Instead, he looked at the item, taking in the description as he frowned.

Weird. Really weird.

"It's weird, that's for sure," Rory said after a moment of thought. "I would almost want to call it a gimmick item, except for that final blurb, 'Once a day, a scene may be portrayed and projected, allowing for limited interaction and disregarding physical boundaries and limits,' which makes it clear that it can affect reality itself to some degree."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning I will need to take some time to consider it," Rory added. "But for the time being, no idea."

Rory promptly handed the item back to his fellow founder who sighed.

"What?" Rory questioned, well aware the sigh was overplayed.

"I was hoping it would be more interesting."

"It is interesting."

"Yeah, but not my kind of interesting."

"Alright, out with it. You're clearly going to lead up to something."

"The Deep Chambers. Can we finally go take a look?" Zoey said, no longer bothering to play up her reaction.

"Why?"

"Because my ability to gain ascension energy is correlated with how long I've spent in unknown versus known areas, and the Deep Chambers are unknown areas."

"And potentially filled with mid-tier seven monsters."

"Between the two of us, we can handle them, I mean, you've got that fancy staff now," Zoey said, pointing out his war staff, which he had leaned against himself as he'd examined her delve reward.

"You don't even know if it works well," Rory pointed out, to which Zoey gave him a flat stare.

"Alright, fair."

"We just avoid any particularly strong-looking variants, and we'll be fine. C'mon, pleeeassssse."

"Stop," Rory held his hand out, rolling his eyes as the much shorter woman batted her eyelashes at him. "Acting a child is beneath you."

"Alright, Mr. Grumpy, as if you don't act like a child at times, too."

"Neither here nor there," Rory answered defensively. "But… fine. I do need to give the staff a test run, and what better way than against the monsters that might be lurking in the Deep Chambers?"

"I knew you'd see it my way," Zoey said with a nod, as if she'd planned out the entire exchange well in advance.

"Yeah, whatever," Rory muttered. "We can head out in a week. I'd see about asking Eia, but she left not long ago, so who knows how long until she returns next.

"Perfect, it's a date."

Rory glared at her, the woman who was enjoying herself, as if she'd just told a rather clever joke.

"You're doing that on purpose."

"Damn straight I am."

Rory tapped the butt of his staff impatiently on the ground, waiting for his fellow founder to appear. In her defense, she had quite the ordeal to go through with the weight of her armor and just how much there was of it, but that didn't change Rory's general annoyance.

Any day now.

Rory wasn't even sure where she kept her stuff; she had claimed one of the spare rooms that he'd dug out at some point. Which room exactly, Rory had no idea; the extent to which his tunnels had expanded and rooms had been excavated had become rather egregious, as digging was the best way to locate mineral and ore pockets.

Hell, his skill level with his mining skill, an otherwise unextraordinary and very mundane variation, had managed to climb to veteran rank, tied for the highest skill level that he had. Only Eyes of the Architect had a matching veteran rank skill level, which was partly due to the skill being at least under a constant stage one ocular release. Often, it was even pushed up to a stage two ocular release as he capitalized on the cognition amplification and true sight effects.

While he was curious what would happen if he capped out the skill level of a skill, assuming there was a cap, Rory could only tackle that one day at a time. Had there been any 'exploits' to 'power leveling', Rory knew Eon would patch that shit out asap, given one of his earliest noteworthy experiences with the System, the precursor to Eon, was it patching a mechanic he had essentially bug abused.

"Sorry for taking so long," Rory finally heard the voice of his fellow founder approaching from an opposing tunnel. "I left my bag behind in one of the rooms, and I had to search through them until I found it."

"Why would you just leave your stuff lying around?" Rory questioned, taken aback.

"Never really had a ton of stuff to keep track of," She countered.

Rory grumbled, the answer surprisingly valid.

"You ready?" Zoey asked Rory, looking him up and down.

"Everything I might need extra is stored here," Rory shook his vambrace, the void diamond within the perfect storage option.

"I still think you should make me one."

"If you can find me a-"

"Yeah, yeah, I know, find you a 'suitable spatial receptive that can withstand the flux nature that magic exudes' then you'd make me one."

Rory frowned at Zoey, who was looking at him with a straight face.

"I…. I've never said any of that. Is that what you heard?" Rory finally asked.

"Potato, tomato."

"Those aren't the same things at-"

"We're burning daylight!" Zoey cut him off as she turned around, quickly striding through the tunnels toward the specific branch that meandered its way deeper into the mountain.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"…. Can't even see daylight in here," Rory grumbled, following her. Zoey was eccentric and definitely knew what she was doing as far as annoying him went, but she was also from Rory's time around her, generally good folk. He could tolerate her antics.

Plus, she made for a perfect crash test dummy to test new weapons on; her durability meant that unless he tried to add extra oomph into a strike, she would barely notice a hammer being smashed over her head.

That, combined with the fact that she was also the frontline of their little 'party,' was enough for Rory to overlook just about anything she did.

With that, the duo continued through the extensive tunnel network, circling down deeper and deeper into the titanic volcanic mountain. After trekking for some time, they finally found themselves at the local trial site. Technically, it still existed, but it was no longer something they could interact with; between the two of them, only Rory could even tell it was still there, thanks to Eyes of the Architect allowing him to sense and see things that Zoey couldn't.

While the forest of burning snow and pine trees was gone, what had replaced it was a sprawling chamber filled with pools of golden magma, charcoal the size of boulders, and crags of steel-colored stone.

"I can sense a good few monsters lurking," Zoey said as she examined the chamber from above. "No source that screams mid or high tier, though."

"Ditto," Rory responded. It was a good start; his main fear was that after making it past the Ape of a Hundred Throes, the immediate following monsters would be of equal stature.

"Let's get a move on then!"

Sliding her way down the side of the chamber in much the same fashion as they had when it had been a snowy forest, the duo soon took their first step into the chamber proper, only for a notification to flash in front of their eyes.

"Deep Chambers, B1." Rory read out loud. "Huh, I wonder if every one of the super volcanoes in this region has something like this,"

"No idea, we'll have to look into it in the future."

"Yeah, maybe not the near future," Rory corrected. "It's enough tackling this single mountain for the time being."

"I guesssss," Zoey drawled out before confidently taking the lead. Seeing no reason not to follow, Rory took his position at the rear. In truth, it wasn't all that different from exploring the lava flats or lava plains one might fight back on Earth, just more… magick-y. For nearly half an hour, they walked until Zoey held out her hand, Rory having caught a whiff of what she'd noticed at the same time.

"Six, maybe seven?" Zoey said, her joking tone dropping, as if she were entirely in business mode.

"Seven," Rory amended. "Two o'clock, and breaching rapidly."

A river of lava coursed off ahead and slightly to their right, and from within, Rory could sense the energy signature of several monsters rapidly approaching.

Waiting, only a few seconds later, seven monsters suddenly shot out from the lava, landing with a heavy thump as they stared at the founding duo. They were large, at least compared to a human, standing roughly two feet taller and quite a bit wider than Rory, and each was made of magma and rock. As far as appearance went, they looked almost as if someone had constructed a human skeleton from charred stone and overlaid it with the body of one of those giant Chinese salamanders Rory had seen in documentaries.

"Cherufe Scout," Zoey said. "Levels seventy with a singular level seventy-one. Manageable."

"Agreed," Rory said.

"Water weakness?" Zoey questioned.

"Probably, but I'm not sure I want to deal with the steam explosion."

"I can probably hold their attention for a bit, but taunting seven monsters at once can burn out the skill effect rather quickly."

"That's fine."

The seven monsters looked between the two humans discussing, their heads tilting in unison in general confusion, before, as one, they bellowed.

Before promptly turning around and diving back into the lava.

"Are they supposed to do that?" Zoey questioned.

"Ah, fuck." Rory realized what was happening. "Your taunt skill, quick!"

Zoey must have put two and two together a moment later, her eyes widening as she spread her arms wide, as an aura blasted outward, catching the monsters before they could submerge more than a few feet. From what Zoey had explained about the skill, it was more effective based on the cognition differential, the number of monsters, and the tier difference. Against Rory, it was essentially a non-factor; his much higher cognition meant that he could ignore the skill outright.

Which he had actually done in the past without even realizing it. Their first conflict, Zoey had attempted to hit him with the taunt, except Rory hadn't even noticed.

Their history aside, the current predicament was that the cherufe monsters were directly referred to as scouts.

And what did scouts do? That's right, they scouted stuff, meaning they were intending to flee to report back on two human intruders. While both Rory and Zoey had confidence in handling even a small crowd of tier seven monsters, if mid-tiers began to turn out in bulk, they would be royally fucked.

Thankfully, the skill worked, as the monsters that had been fleeing suddenly resurfaced, an unnatural rage in their reptilian eyes.

No, wait, pretty sure salamanders are amphibians, not reptiles. Or, well, that was the case on Earth. In hindsight, we could use a monster biologist or taxonomist, or perhaps a – I'm getting distracted.

Putting the stray thoughts aside, Rory decided to give his staff its first proper combat test run. Slamming the staff down, a magic circle erupted around him like a glowing tattoo placed on the earth itself. It rotated around Rory as he quickly activated the magic he had in mind, seven shimmering golden circular 'portals' appearing above each of the cherufe scouts. From those same golden circles, seven massive swords slowly slid out, hovering for a moment. Each was the size of a zweihander, and even then, that wasn't quite doing them justice, taller than Rory was.

"Weapon diversity is increasing," Zoey noted as she took stock of the oversized swords that hung above the monsters.

Sliding out the last bit, the swords hovered for only a heartbeat longer before they shot downwards. The cherufe had begun charging toward Zoey, only to be stabbed straight through their chests, and the swords plunged through their hunched backs and erupted out the front of their bodies like an oversized nail through hardwood.

An attack like that against a tier-six monster would have instantly ended them. Still, tier seven was where many monsters began to have 'second phases' or such that would occur once they were damaged past a certain point, and the cherufe were no exception. Their bodies, which had been equally split between magma and stone, began to harden, forming an armor of magmatic stone and whatever else went into their magma bodies.

Typically, that was the point at which Rory would explode his projections, but the oversized swords required a far more stable approach to pneuma and thus lacked the same ability to explode.

While it was comical to see the monsters hardening with the swords still through them, only a moment later, they snapped in half as they were unable to withstand the naturally forming armor pressing into and against them.

Still, not a bad start.

The cherufe began to hammer into Zoey, her shield snapping forward to intercept their hammering arms. They were strong, and their natural heat was formidable, but against Zoey in her heat-resistant if not completely heat-proof armor, they were almost entirely ineffective. Rory himself would have had far less of a good time, but neither was Rory looking to eat up each attack.

Two of the seven managed to loop around Zoey, only to be stalled out by a dome of projected shields blocking their path.

Dome, up. Knives, next.

Knives quickly began to project into reality, appearing in much the same fashion as the oversized swords had.

Two projections, easy. How much further can we push it?

Chains seemingly erupted from the ground, ensnaring the cherufe's ankles.

Three.

More portals and this time spears began to rain down, bombarding the cherufe, their armor, which had already started to be pelted by the exploding knives, now being put under further pressure.

Four.

Splitting his dome, Rory pointed the staff as a stream of pneuma bullets washed over the cherufe. They inflicted no damage, but Rory was using them as test dummies more than he was attempting to take them down.

Five.

Five projections in, and Rory felt fine.

Hot damn.

Not managing, not straining. Fine.

I'd say this was a successful trial.

Banishing the excess projections that were failing to do more than scratch their armor, Rory switched entirely to focusing on bombarding the monsters with projected lances.

Waving the staff once more, the projections flew forward, giving the cherufe not even an inch as their defensive forms began cracking under the sheer intensity.

As a last-ditch effort, the cherufe changed forms one final time, their tough armor, which had slowed them down, melting into magma as they became beings of pure lava, almost akin to an elemental, save for a single patch of armor right through their chests.

His spears, which had been cracking their armor, now passed through without any resistance, as the cherufe seemed to have found an answer to Rory's bombardment.

When in doubt, bomb them.

"Head's up," Rory called out, giving Zoey a moment's warning. With his warning given, the many portals vanished, instead replaced by a singular oversized portal far above, as a now quite familiar bust began to emerge.

Accelerating from the portal, Rory didn't even bother to call out the attack as it collided with the earth, a dome appearing around Zoey and reforming around him a moment before impact as a wave of debris was blasted out in the shockwave.

When the dust finally settled, what remained inside the crater was a scattering of what looked like broken statues, seven to be precise.

"Dang," Zoey whistled as she looked back at Rory. "That staff fucks."

"Expended a lot of pneuma, though," Rory said with a frown. The storage of pneuma within the pearlescent core was useful, but it wasn't exactly fast. Rory could only funnel pneuma in for so long before his mind began to show signs of pneuma-wracked due to the constant exposure, like an abrasive applied directly to his brain.

"Still, not bad," Zoey nodded satisfactorily.

"Not bad, indeed," Rory agreed.

"Well… Back to exploring!"

"Yes, back to exploring," Rory sighed, rolling his eyes.

No rest for the wicked.

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