Chapter 189

In the sprawling underground magma cavern labyrinth, there were plenty of splits, loops, and dead-ends. Zoey and Maddy worked by no particular methodology picking which way to go—though they marked where they had already explored. A variety of stone and fire-type monsters assaulted them, but having found a rhythm, they worked efficiently to clear a path.

Soon enough, they wandered into the next notable event. Taking a step through a small arched cavern entrance—the tunnel having narrowed and narrowed as they walked down it—Zoey blinked as she took in their new environment. With a ceiling so high up she couldn’t see where it ended, and walls at least fifty feet to either side of her, she and Maddy had emerged into a massive space. A doorway was on the opposite side, with glowing orange bricks drawing her eyes there.

The problem? The hundred-foot chasm that sank into the darkness, its bottom, like the ceiling, nowhere in sight.

“Huh,” Zoey said.

“That’s ... a big hole,” Maddy commented, stepping up to peek over the edge—apparently not afraid of heights. Zoey nearly reached out and pulled her away just from instinct. Even for a wayfarer of her advancement, that had to be a long drop. A fatal one.

“How are we supposed to get across?” Zoey asked.

Maddy frowned. She leaned back from peering perilously over, setting Zoey’s nerves at ease. Her eyes flicked around the room as if trying to scour out an answer to Zoey’s question. Some incriminating piece of terrain that indicated a puzzle to solve. A way to manifest a hidden bridge or something like that. But she saw nothing. Neither did Zoey. Despite the huge chasm and the faraway exit, the room was rather nondescript.

“Huh,” Maddy said. “Not really.”

“And I can’t use my ice, somehow?”

Maddy tilted her head. “You don’t have nearly the control needed to make structures. Just summoning one shape is difficult, much less a free-form manifestation technique.”

“Right,” Zoey said. “Just wondering.” Though she probably should know better by now that just conjuring up new spells was far from a simple process. It had been the first thing to pop in mind, though.

“Not that you aren’t good,” Maddy hastily said, worried Zoey had taken the dismissal the wrong way. “That’s just high-tier stuff. The mental control needed for free-form manifestation is crazy. Otherwise, everyone would use it.”

“Gotcha.” She wasn’t offended. If anything, she found Maddy’s quick assurances cute. She pursed her lips as she looked out across the stretching black chasm. “What about a potion?”

“A potion?”

“I have a skill that makes alchemy in shards easier. Potions are even stronger when made using ingredients gathered from inside the same shard. Might be useful here.”

“But what would you make?”

“Dunno. Are there potions of flying?”

Maddy’s eyebrows rose. She politely didn’t deride the idea as ridiculous, though Zoey knew the girl well enough to recognize that was what she was thinking. “Not that I know of.”

“Doesn’t seem that strange,” Zoey defended herself. “It’s gotta exist. At least as a high-advancement potion.”

“Maybe,” Maddy replied noncommittally. “There’s no saying what does and doesn’t when it comes to magic. But I doubt it’s an option available to us.”

“Fair.” Zoey could have guessed that herself. Flying potions did seem high on the list when it came to advancement. If they existed at all.

“There’s potions of slow falling, though,” Maddy suggested. “We’d have to climb up real high and throw ourselves forward. Might not even reach if we did that, though. Risky.” She frowned at the smooth walls. “Not sure how we’d even climb up, anyways.”

“Embed ice spears into the wall?”

Maddy hummed. “That could work. Assuming you can even catalyze feather fall somehow,” she said. “For that matter, if you can get your spears into the wall, we could just bridge ourselves across. Try?”

A short experiment later showed that Zoey could not. Not even if she empowered the ability. Her ice javelins shattered against the stone—definitely not embedding deep enough to act as hand- or footholds to climb across the chasm.

“Hm,” Zoey said.

“Might have to consider this a dead end.”

Zoey didn’t like the idea of that. “That’s definitely a special doorway.” Whether a useful reward or possibly even the path leading to Rosalie and Delta, Zoey doubted they should just ignore the chasm.