Mordecai pondered his options as he said, "Moriko, please take some time to meditate and pray; I need you to ask for spell prayers granting fiery auras or transformations." One of the advantages of being a priest; you could always ask for spells for the occasion. "I know; that will take several minutes, but we are better off spending time efficiently than gambling that we already have everything we need."

Technically, Mordecai could pray for similar spells, but he already had access to equivalent magic. He was better off keeping all of his divine magic focused on things that his other forms of magic did less well. Plus, it did not feel right asking Ozuran, Lord of Shadows, for spells involving fire or light.

"Everyone else, start searching through your packs for anything heat or fire related and transfer them to your storage rings or bracers." He trusted them to figure out their own priorities for resorting and reaching their storage capacities for both of those. Having a non-uniform set of options would probably be best anyway.

Another giant block of ice ground its way past the entrance, and Mordecai reached out with a clawed hand to scrape along its surface, testing how hard the ice was and getting a feel for its temperature. Still normal ice, and it was not any colder than could be found naturally, if in the more extreme areas of the world. He then punched it to test its strength and noted the depth and width that cracks spread from the impact.

This also verified that they were not moving in a simple ring pattern. If the blocks were moving in different directions, any gaps could, and almost certainly would, disappear as a pair of blocks crushed against each other.

When a fresh section of ice became available, he punched again, but this time channeling chi to create fire and heat. It did do more damage, though not as much as he might have wished. Hmm. "Give me a moment."

Mordecai dashed back up to the level above and grabbed a scoop of the shining sand, transferring it into a storage ring before he went back down. Half of that scoop he tossed into a gap in the grinding ice, then he poured the other half out onto the ground at the base of the stairs.

"What are you doing?" Kazue asked.

"There are always many options for how to create an environment for a zone; I'm just testing to see how the environment above was created." The sand was continuing to glow with its own inner light, and when Mordecai spread it out a bit, he could focus on studying the magic of a few individual grains.

After a few minutes, he nodded with satisfaction. "The nexus went for power instead of efficiency. Each grain is imbued with its own light-producing effect, rather than resonating with a zone-wide enchantment to produce light. That's what made it impossible for me to manipulate shadows there; I was fighting too many individual enchantments, each of which was as strong as the zone could support. It takes a lot more mana to do it that way, but the nexus has an overabundance of mana, and so it was able to create a much more powerful effect. The enchantment is reapplied with each reset, so the sand that has been removed will stop glowing then as well, but that is sufficient for our needs."

In the grinding darkness of the ice, small glimmers of light reflected and sparkled, fighting against the darkness. He made note of the effect; creating a deliberate setup similar to this might make for an interesting pair of zones in the future, though preferably a lot less deadly in both cases.

He took a few minutes of his own to sort his stored items, putting everything he didn't think would be useful from his rings into his pack, then he returned to the light seared zone and filled the rest of his rings' capacities with the glowing sand.

However, this was still simply the collecting of a potential tool; it was not part of a complete plan. Even if they all filled their rings to capacity and dumped them into the lower zone, it would not be enough to offset the ice and gloom. It would take far too long to transfer enough sand to make a reasonable dent, plus the sand would be fighting against a slightly stronger enchantment and be much dimmer as a result.

By the time Moriko said she was ready, Mordecai still did not have a real plan. Just a general idea. "I think we are going to have to brute force this. Here's my idea: I go in first, after I prep some magic that will make me too dangerous for any of you to be near me. The rest of you follow in my wake, but focus on following safely; we may occasionally get blocked off from each other. I will be destroying as much ice as I can to make the gaps larger and safer, but you may have to destroy some ice as well as you go. Does anyone else have a better plan?"

There was a little bit of discussion, but in the end, there just wasn't enough information to formulate any better ideas. He nodded and then said, "Oh, and I am going to need to be uninterrupted for a little bit; there's something swimming through the ice out there." Which meant monsters were going to be able to attack out of any 'surface'.

Mordecai retreated several steps behind the others to give them room to guard him against any attacks, then began the complicated weave of magic that he'd been designing while waiting. Shadow, claws, and magic alike were used to rapidly inscribe runes in a circle around his feet, and in a second, vertical circle using the walls and ceiling as well.

To those circles, he began attaching a series of spells that he normally would have cast directly upon himself, but he needed them to blend with his shapeshifting in a specific way, and he wanted them to all activate at the same time. When he had everything ready, he focused his attention back on the physical world to note that there were a few still oozing bits of creatures that seemed to be a mix of sharks and octopuses strewn upon the floor.

It made for a rather unpleasant scent, even in this cold.

He doubted those were the nastiest surprises, but coming out of the ice to attack them in the corridor had clearly proven futile; otherwise, there would have been a lot more dead creatures.

"Thank you. Now, fall back behind me and give me a bit of room; follow when you think it is safe." He pointed to the side where he had arranged for a thin spot in the vertical circle, making it easy to step through without touching any of the glowing runes. Once the way was clear, Mordecai waited for the next opening to show and triggered the spell structure just before he launched himself into the gap.

He started changing into his war form, but the spells he had used altered it further than Mordecai otherwise could. By the time he landed on a section of ice, his body was that of a fully grown lava dragon, and only his storage rings were still visible, though altered to match his current size, with the scaled armor that he'd gotten from Dersuta having merged with his hide to provide enhanced protection. All the rest of his magic items were inaccessible while he was transformed this way.

The heat from his modified body was already melting nearby ice, and this was enhanced by the elemental fire aura that his unaltered body could already produce, but these alone would not be enough, which was what the next layers of magic were for. He shone with a light too bright for most to look at, offsetting the gloom, and waves of concussive force started radiating off of him.

Mordecai didn't wait to observe the effects; instead, he immediately blasted a cone of lava forward to attack the next ice block, then began assaulting every surface within reach. He carved and bashed the ice to break it up beyond what the heat and concussive blasts alone could do.

His attacks did not break up the blocks as fast as he would have liked, and eventually he was forced to leap into another gap that was just opening, but his assault had given him a lot more room to get the timing right.

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As Mordecai continued to move destructively from gap to gap, he slowly trickled out batches of the glowing sand. This did almost nothing to help with the ice itself, but the grinding blocks and melting water slowly spread the sand out, even after the ice eventually managed to refreeze. This gave him lots and lots of shadows to play with when the time was right, and would provide the same for Fuyuko should she need it, which was something the dark of the gloom did not provide.

Shadows were, conceptually, a sort of reflection or representation of an object, formed by light being blocked by said object. The gloom actively absorbed light, nullifying it rather than blocking it. That simply produced darkness, which was not the same thing. Especially when suppressing shadows was the intent behind such an enchantment.

He was attacked, of course, but it almost didn't matter. Mordecai simply carried through with every attack, often aiming to slice claws through a charging creature before it breached the surface of the ice. However, even with the steady state of his assault, Mordecai couldn't defend himself from every angle at once. It did not take long for him to start accumulating a collection of injuries from bites, pincer claws, barbed tentacles, and various cold, corrosion, and electric-based magical attacks.

While he wasn't getting a good look at the complete creatures, Mordecai had been able to ascertain that there was a combination of body horror and extreme attack forms. At least one type of creature had a tentacle with a hard ball at the end, which it used to slam its target, which was when the nature of the ball was revealed; five more tentacles that exploded from the ball form to grab whatever they hit, and those sub tentacles had combinations of mouths and micro claws to grasp and rend, making them very difficult to dislodge.

Mordecai simply sliced the main tentacle in half and let his overwhelming body heat burn away the rest.

Naturally, a lot of the attacks were also toxic. Only about half of them were potentially lethal, directly at least. The rest were various sleeping agents, paralytics, and numbing agents. It only took a moment of analysis to see why these were indirectly lethal in this ever-shifting environment of grinding ice.

Of course, Mordecai was using poisons as well, so he could hardly call it unfair. It was probably more unfair that he was practically immune to them right now, given the combination of his composite metabolism and the alchemical boosts that Moriko's parents had provided.

The thing that surprised him the most was how many creatures seemed completely focused on attacking him; he had been expecting to get some of the attacks, but from what he could sense with his aura, almost everything appeared to be targeting him.

Then he realized that for creatures swimming through the ice, the concussive waves his body was emitting probably felt the same as they would to a creature underwater experiencing the same thing. The pain must be driving them into a frenzy, focused on him.

Mordecai's thoughts on that subject shattered as he suddenly realized that he was surrounded by something, even though he couldn't see it in any direction, nor detect any hint of an invisibility spell. An elemental? No, that didn't feel right.

He waited as long as he dared before jumping to a shadow that was being cast through a gap a safe distance away. This let him see the absolutely enormous ice ooze completely engulf the space he had just occupied, along with the bunch of 'gifts' that he had left behind.

Looks like he had found the zone boss. Watching the explosion of fire bombs ripple through the ice ooze's body was fascinating, but sadly, he didn't have the time to study the effect. While the ice ooze clearly hadn't liked eating that treat, it also did not seem to be greatly harmed by it either. At least the distribution of glowing sand made the ooze much more visible now.

After tearing through a section of ice to expose the surface of the ice ooze, Mordecai let loose with a blast of lava breath. It recoiled, then lashed out with three pseudopods, each from a different direction. He had to shadow jump again to avoid the retaliation; Mordecai was fairly certain that being engulfed by that monstrosity would be unpleasant.

Unfortunately, he could not spare much attention for his friends and family, other than a general awareness of where they were, so that he did not get too close to them, and as he battled the boss, he just had to hope they were doing well.

It took only a few tests to verify what Mordecai had suspected as soon as he recognized it was an ooze. Very few oozes or slimes had much in the way of intelligence, and there had been no signs of Svetlana using any sort of creature cores. The boss was simply a brute and lacked any intelligence. It was still dangerous, but at least it was a little predictable.

Mordecai started leaving more special presents for it, but he made sure to only do so occasionally, to avoid creating a pattern. He also had to make the timing close, so that there was no time for anyone else to tell the slime to stop its attack.

The battle was not entirely one-sided. Any ice that the ooze had passed through recently was acidic, so his claws were being corroded and softened every time he dug to expose a section of the ooze, and attacking it directly often spattered sticky, semi-frozen acid flesh back on him.

Constantly moving like this made it hard even for Mordecai to keep track of where he was, and he had not started this assault with any knowledge of how large the zone was. So it came as a surprise when he realized that one of the edges of the gap that he'd just jumped into was stone.

Solid stone. There was no sign of the exit, so he was up against a wall. Well, it was a start, and he still had a boss to kill.

This was the slowest and most drawn out, one-on-one fight that he'd experienced since Moriko had awakened him a little more than a year ago, but the ooze eventually quivered before going completely still. Mordecai verified that it was dead by removing a portion of its body into one of his storage rings, after dumping out the rest of the sand from that ring. If it had still been alive, it would have resisted being taken apart like that.

Also, he now had a sample to study later, and potentially add to their future ice zone.

Now he could focus on trying to find the exit. The spell creating the concussive waves had been the first to wear off, and he was no longer glowing as brightly as before. Every motion he made left trails of blood that boiled the ice it came into contact with; his regeneration and healing abilities were being taxed to their limits.

The attacks from other creatures had become much less frequent shortly after the concussive spell had worn off, and Mordecai couldn't tell if that was from most of them being dead or from them shifting their focus on the rest of the party.

Eventually, he heard a difference in the echoes around him, and one more jump left him in a new cavern, one that felt much closer to Svetlana's core than anyplace else he'd been yet. A mixture of paranoia and the simple logic of this being a likely spot for an ambush caused him to immediately start casting a barrier spell in front of him, but fighting his way through that ice zone had left him tired and slow.

A beam of necrotic energy clipped his shoulder, and the death magic immediately assaulted his vitality as it attempted to wither away his flesh. It was one of three spells that had been launched at the same time, but his partially formed barrier had blocked the other two, one of which was a simple beam of force, while the other one tried to disassemble matter into its smaller parts.

This also caused the barrier to collapse before it could fully form.

Mordecai wasn't given the chance to retaliate as he felt more magic surging ahead. The source of it was invisible, but he could feel the rough location of the source, and he cast a smaller, more focused barrier that was quicker to form. This time, he managed to catch all three spells, but this was not something he was going to be able to maintain for long.

The steady beat of three spells at least gave him a rough idea of the attacks being used. Two of them were probably from single-use items, and the third one was a spell cast directly.

His next spell was too slow, and all three of the attacking spells hit. The magic that had let him change into a lava dragon collapsed, automatically sacrificing itself to restore a portion of his health. This left him in his normal war form, which was still large enough to almost entirely fill this end of the passageway. Shifting to a smaller form would have made it possible to at least dodge some of the spells, but there were advantages to bulk in this situation too.

One of those advantages was simply that there was more living mass to absorb the effects of the spells. Mordecai still did his best to defend himself with a mix of the projected shields from his now available bracers, magical barriers, and brief lived bursts of chi that let him nullify some of the spells.

He stopped most of them, but that still meant he was taking a lot of damage, more than he could afford to take. The best he could do was slowly advance toward the source of the assault, taking advantage of the second reason to maintain his war form. It was simply dangerous to be around, with a constant, aggressive elemental aura, plus the corrosive toxins being released when the spells broke more of his spines.

Mordecai could only maintain his advance for so long, leaving a trail of blood and desiccated flesh behind him, along with a good chunk of one of his secondary arms. But he didn't need to maintain it forever.

When he felt a sudden blast of wind from behind him pushing all the noxious fumes released from his spines deeper into the nexus and towards their target, Mordecai let himself collapse with a grin, using a portion of his fading consciousness to trigger a return to his normal form. He'd bought time for everyone else to arrive and made their foe spend a lot of magic on him instead of on them.

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