“That is exactly what I am hoping for, but we still haven’t even gotten that yet?” Mage Teft told Damion. “However, it is still a niche set of qualifications we are asking for.”
“What about soone that doesn’t have kids, or their kids are all grown and isn’t interested in advancing anymore, so they won’t want to venture into the labyrinth?”
“That would be easier to find, but most people that have stopped advancing have settled down where they are and aside from the occasional call to respond to a beast wave, seldom leave their chosen ho.”
“What about Manager Halsey? Surely he can help us out?” Damion suggested.
“He could if he would. But as the branch manager of Saung, he cannot just abandon his post. The Adventurer Association is not allowing any of their current branch managers to leave their posts.”
“How long do we have to solve this?” Damion asked, feeling deflated.
“We need to have it solved before we open the gates to outsiders. If we don’t, then we will have a lot of adventurers coming to Atlantis with no way to easily give them things to do, aside from going into the labyrinth. There are, however, other things that must be done. Exploring and securing the outer areas. Businesses will expect to be able to post missions for certain materials, if we can’t fulfill our duty as the city’s governing body, it could beco quite unruly.”
Damion and Mage Teft continued to discuss back and forth the needs of their growing city and school as they moved from floor twenty-eight to twenty-nine. The twenty-ninth floor turned out to be a rather complicated floor.
The entrance of the floor was in a valley that had a few trees and various Demonic Beasts about. At one end of the valley was a frozen wall of ice, the edge of a glacier. On top of that five-hundred-ter-high ice plateau was the passageway to the next floor. Neither of them had any difficulty reaching the entrance to the thirtieth floor, but when Damion examined his map, he saw there was no easy way up. If people wanted to ascend to the thirtieth floor, they would have to either climb up the ice face or use a flying artifact or spell.
When they entered the thirtieth floor, Damion was not surprised when he found it was a combination of the previous floors. The passageway opened halfway up a mountain. Right near them was a cave, that looked similar to the Fire Cave on the twenty-fourth floor, and the tunnels of the cave wove around inside the mountain, one exiting at a high peak, another onto a high frozen plain at the foot of a glacier.
The map showed Damion that the core and the passageway to the thirty-first floor was down the mountain in the forest that surrounded the mountain. The student and ntor pair were able to quickly journey down the mountain, Mage Teft being kind enough to take out a half dozen peak B Rank Snow Lions that were guarding the core. It was unusual, but not unheard of for a group of Demonic Beasts to guard a core. In this case, since it was likely to be the final B Rank floor, the increased resistance was understandable.
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Once the core was destroyed and the pair exited the passageway on the thirty-first floor, they could feel that the density of mana had risen. On the B Rank floors, Damion had felt comfortable, at ho. Here, on the first A Rank floor, he felt like he was surrounded by the mana and that every step he took was akin to walking through an invisible cloud of it.
“I’d almost forgotten how much mana an A Rank Realm Breach has,” Damion said as he activated Mana Absorption to let his passive begin overfilling his core.
“The mana density of an A Rank floor is good. And it will help your training greatly. We spent nearly two and a half hours making our way here. It will probably take you at least that sa amount of ti to make it back. Train here for the day. It is important for you get to A Rank as soon as possible.”
“Are you going to give the ‘talk?’ Damion asked, rembering what Mage Phinn had said to him in the Crimson Waste dungeon.
Mage Teft raised an eyebrow as she gave Damion an appraising look. It seed he had ntioned sothing more important than he first thought. He thought the ‘talk’ was just about a mage’s responsibility to humanity as a whole, but the way Mage Teft went silent, it seed there was probably more to it than that.
“It seems that soone has a big mouth. What do you know?”
“Not much. It was more ntioned in passing,” Damion said sheepishly. “I thought it was about the importance of putting humanity first and responding to beast waves. That sort of thing.”
“That is part of it. But there is more. Much more. But until you reach A Rank I can’t tell you. Just know. You need to reach A Rank as quickly as possible.”
“Should I train in here for a few days then? I an, it would save a lot of travel ti if I just stayed for a day or two and then went back.”
“Do what you want. You are a grown man. But you should not take unnecessary risks. This is an A Rank floor, even if I kill the guardian on my way to the higher floors, there will still be Demonic Beasts about that are stronger than you.”
“I understand,” Damion told her. “Go on, I’ll be alright here. I’m still in the safe area after all.”
Since Damion was apparently content, Mage Teft turned and left without a goodbye. On his tablet he watched her dot move away quickly and after the dot of the core and guardian vanished, revealing the way to the next floor, her dot vanished too. He had a feeling that once she reached the S Rank floors, she was going to take a while to train for herself.
Taking Mage Teft’s warning about strong Demonic Beasts to heart, Damion sat down by the passageway back to the thirtieth floor and focused on compressing his mana. Training in such a high mana environnt, he found it much easier than normal to pull in the mana he needed. Mana Absorption even seed capable of pulling in more mana than normal.
Sitting idle was not an easy thing for him to do. Usually, his training regin consisted of physical exercise, spell casting and a small amount of ditation. After the first hour, Damion was starting to go stir crazy. The only thing that kept him in place was his rapidly rising magic power.
He had no idea how ordinary mages asured their gains while training, or if they even could. With the assistance of the Magic System, and its ability to show him his attributes, Damion never had to guess what his magic power was, or any of his other traits. That simple advantage had helped him to know he was always making progress, though sotis, that progress was small.
Today, however, the progress was astounding. After training in the A Rank floor for twelve hours, he had achieved nearly the sa result of his last year of training elsewhere. Feeling empowered, Damion continued to train for another half a day. It was not until he began to feel his progress slowing down that he took a break and examined his progress.
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