Zayn’s obsession with magic began when he was a kid, ever since he saw The Helldiver. Obsession, however, was the wrong word. Anything related to magic and mana—books, movies, anime—he inhaled. In his arrogance, he even tried to merge it all into one cohesive system.
He then learned it was the most difficult task ever, as everyone had a different idea of magic.
In contrast, the way ‘magic’ worked in Eldera was quite simple. Far less complex than most stories made it out to be. He could even compare the act of casting magic to cooking.
The first ingredient was the will. The “intent.” The fire that rendered cooking possible.
Without it, spellcasting and magic wouldn’t be feasible.
After that came the conduit. The “circuit.” The pan inside which the cooking happened. The mana of the world was given structure through this conduit. Sigils, diagrams, or a skill: all were conduits.
Right now, he held one such conduit—the patch of mud he’d retrieved from the inverted forest.
Eroded Patch of Mana — Part of a spell circle that has been imbued with flame mana for an impossible amount of time. Possibly tens of millennia.
When he got it, he hadn’t quite understood it, so he bluffed his way out with it. But once he unlocked [The First Spark], the concept stopped being so tangled. No longer was it incomprehensible.
[The First Spark] turned friction into fire. It was a greedy fire that grew with every interaction with the world. Movement and friction were its fuel. Before that, there was a threshold it must pass—one he called the ignition point.
Before the ignition point, the heat had to grow, condense, and fall back into itself, using the repeated failures to quench itself until it was adequate to birth a flame. The patch of mana felt similar—of the same origin, yet strikingly different.
He didn’t dare claim to know what it was, and certainly couldn’t comprehend it with just this patch.
But the magic was there, already cast by someone long ago. All he needed to do was find a triggering point to erupt the flame that had been trapped inside for ages.
Activating Sporogenesis, he sprouted a few strands of wood and mixed them with the mud. The wood generated through Sporogenesis shared Zayn's characteristics, meaning it had [Flame Resistance]. But it also wasn’t inert to the fire like the white-barked wood.
It created a strange but favourable situation—he could suppress the flame just enough for this to work.
That brought him right back to the final ingredient for magic—the cost. Zayn knew of two types: Charge and Mana. Three, if he counted blood. There should be other types he had yet to discover, but now wasn’t the time to sweat about it.
Using his mana, he began to stimulate [The First Spark]. Infused the fire into the mixture at a measured pace. By letting his fire mix with the potent flame inside the mud, he slowly gleaned and tasted it.
It evoked an unpleasant memory. That of a distinct, cursed smell—the curse of the Blood Moon roared within his veins. His muscles shuddered, and his veins began to darken. Before long, the mix was incapable of handling the heat. A fire erupted with the intensity of a jet engine.
Thankfully, it was faced away from him.
A shit-eating grin slowly covered his face.
Despite his confidence, he was worried this wouldn’t work, but that… was all the confirmation he needed. Droplets of sweat kissed his cheeks as he began siphoning and tasting the fire once more.
Failing didn’t matter.
He could just try again.
***
Klaus tore through the darkness of the night. His hood and light armour protected him against the sickly wind, preserving whatever heat it could. Soon, he stood before a structure that touched the sky.
The tavern—Dragonhorn Tavern—took up an increasing amount of his vision as he closed in. As its name suggested, the inn was shaped like a twisted, spiralling horn, like the crooked hat of an evil witch.
He’d been farming a new Feat when everyone around chortled about ‘Stoneheaded’ being live on ‘channel 700’. Anyone else he would have ignored, but he hurried right away upon hearing the name.
Barrier Mage, Iceberg, Stormfire, and AuraCrat were normal. They had been atop the leaderboard ever since it opened. They were the cream of the crop. The top of the class. Stoneheaded was the dropout. The one who lucked into the exam questions and aced it without even studying.
A goddamned fraud!
How else did someone ascend to the apex in one day?
Nobody had heard of the guy in a week of the apocalypse. Nobody saw him stream. Then boom—he was blazing through the rankings. Jumping from the bottom of the barrel to rank 66. Rank 66 to 29.
Two sessions; less than an hour.
Practically impossible to achieve without exploiting a loophole.
Now that the trickster was live, his secret loophole would be laid bare for everyone to see. The method he used would be patched, and he would be punished for exploiting it. And Klaus would be there to witness it.
He was beaming as he stood in front of the inn.
Welcome to Dragonhorn Inn. Would you like to make a reservation?
Not everyone had the same access to the inn. Everyone could enter the general level, but they would have to place a reservation first. He was exempt from that. The gold subscription provided by his benefactor, ‘Iron Dragon,’ allowed him unlimited stay and food at the general level.
The inn didn’t even have fixed doors. He brought out his card and flashed it in front of a wall. An inverted eye—like that of a snake—tore open on the wall. It scanned the card, then twisted open into an eye-shaped entrance.
He walked in.
Compared to the outside, the interior of Dragonhorn Inn was immensely larger. Nobody had any idea about how big it really was, and the maids with horns never opened their mouths about unrelated questions.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
As far as he’d gathered, it was an organisation from the greater universe. And one of the more popular version who provide the tavern's services. The contract mandated anyone to not venture too deep into the inn.
Nobody who got too far had returned.
“And what kind of person buries a motorcycle when there are monsters all around him, just waiting to make a meat skewer out of him?” The snide voice of a system admin reverberated throughout the floor right as he entered.
Not a voice he recognised—and that's a surprise, because he recognised most of them.
He gazed at the screen. There knelt a downtrodden figure, patting the ground and writing something with a rock. His long hair was greasy and blood-soaked, his clothes shredded. But he seemed not to care about his well-being.
A broken motorcycle helmet covered his face.
Klaus frowned. It was weird. Why was he wearing those clothes from Earth? Everyone got new clothes, armour, and supplies. And it didn’t seem like… a helmet was an option. And the line about burying a motorcycle seemed so off that he was forced to reflect on it. What kind of person buries a motorcycle?
“A Stoneheaded one, of course!”
Klaus took notice of the admin this time, especially his comical, overenthusiastic voice. He honestly didn’t like the raspy tone. But much of the tavern rang out in laughter, so he figured himself to be in the minority.
He scanned the kneeling figure again.
That was Stoneheaded?
Klaus ordered his regular share of food and began to watch. Things were just beginning. Surprisingly, they were showing him from scratch.
Klaus wasn’t complaining.
Immediately, he noted several glaring issues. The pale white forest in particular rubbed him wrong, though more than that, it was the state Stoneheaded was in.
He was a mess.
His clothes were torn in several places, and every exposed part of his skin seemed damaged. He had to have been through a hailstorm and then dragged through the mud to be that battered. What had he fought?
Krakens?
Scenes kept changing. There were only cuts and bits—the important parts, according to the “blabbermouth” admin. Nothing interesting happened until it changed to where the guy was wrestling with a literal chunk of rock… no—wait…
He was choking a stone golem with a chain! With chains!
“Do not question your eye. He is indeed attempting to strangle a monster made of rock. Now you may ask yourself, ‘Can stones be choked?’ I’m sure the thought has passed through your mind from time to time. This one would like to confirm that they indeed do not breathe.”
The intense brawl between man and stone golem made his jaw fall in disbelief. Everyone else were having the same reaction, judging from the pin-drop silence.
Then...the tavern erupted in loud laughter.Some amused, others shook their head in disapproval. Most of them were surprised.
Unlike others, he was surprised for a different reason. The stone monster had just used a skill. Two different ones. Skills weren't something regular monsters had. Those were supposed to be reserved for boss monsters.
That pesky golem was no boss monster!
Everyone else was too engrossed watching a man and a hunk of rock wrestle. A bunch of idiots, these people.
“Choking wasn’t enough, so he came up with new methods,” the system admin smirked. “Innovative methods like drowning a stone, trapping, or impaling them. All great ideas. Must have taken some serious thought… for someone Stoneheaded.”
The entire tavern became lively again. Klaus found himself cracking a smirk. Not because this 007 guy was funny—but because this Stoneheaded idiot was totally crazy!
Not what he expected to see when he came, but it wasn’t any less entertaining to watch. But the surprises were just beginning, as proven by the next segment once the night scenes began.
“What the—the trees grew so much.”
“You’re on about the trees? The moon! Look at the size of that thing!”
“Creepy!”
“Is that King Kong?! What the hell! That’s so fucking cool.”
The inn became rowdy as soon as the two giant monsters appeared on the screen, and even Klaus found his throat drying. This… is…
“Ah. Apologies. This one seemed to have forgotten to mention. The one called Stoneheaded is currently within…the Hell Zone.”
Klaus felt the world turn quiet. His face under the mask froze, then his pupils shrank until it was like a pin.
Had he heard that right? He found it difficult to register those words in his brain.
The inn erupted, finally.
“The Hell…fucking Zone?! We’ve still not cleared the normal zone!”
“Cheating bastard! Why does he get to go to Hell Zone already?!”
“Do you want to go to Hell Zone?”
“Hell nah.”
Klaus stared at the screen with intent, ignoring the commotion.
No wonder he was wearing clothes from Earth. No wonder the monsters could use skills. It was because he was not spawned into a safe node. That thought seemed illogical—it bothered him—yet it was the truth.
So, the one called Stoneheaded was immediately sent into the Hell Zone. With no aid, no help, and no guide.
How did he survive?
He watched as the meteorites fell. He watched Stoneheaded being flung into the skies with bated breath. It was impractical to survive all that—and yet he did.
Unless he too had received training become the successor of an underworld regime, it was unlikely. Klaus didn’t believe Stoneheaded shared the same origin story as him. Even a trained assassin like him wouldn’t have survived that leap.
The voice of Sysadmin007 passed over the screen.
“The strength of a material is exposed when it faces pressure beyond its tolerance. Some metals bend. Others become quenched—tougher, harder to break.” The system admin adjusted his golden mask.“Then there’s the third kind. The rarer kind. The one you need to stay away from. These, when applied pressure… they have a tendency to—”
***
“Explode!!” Zayn muttered through clenched teeth. “Explode, explode, explode!”
Eventually, he accepted his failure. He threw the clump of dirt behind him, where a dozen such failures sat—a graveyard of his trial and error. This marked the tenth failure.
He was close, though. Close enough that he could almost feel himself succeeding—but far enough that the gap didn’t lessen with time.
He didn’t have time.
Outside, a tremendous fight had been ensuing for the last hour or so. The stone ape and the black giant conjured by Faeria fought a deadly battle that shook the desert—the ground trembling beneath their tremendous impacts, the air full of flying rock chunks and vines.
The ape began with the upper hand, but Faeria was simply too much for the stupid ape to handle. Every move, every strike she took was calculated. It was like an adult fighting a toddler.
A giant toddler.
She was whittling it down to the point of inaction. If things continued in this trend, it wouldn’t be long before Faeria defeated the ape.
“Stupid ape,” Zayn muttered as he took another clump. “Couldn’t even last long enough.”
Once again, optimizing the ratio of wood to mud to balance the explosion—but this time, he did something far more reckless.
He mixed something extra.
A drop of bloodmetal.
This time, something changed.
He was engulfed in a vision of fire, where trees lay fallen, smouldering like charcoal burning for an eternity. The vile smell of rot and ash slammed into him, his skin struck by a strange heat. In the corner of his eyes, he caught a distorted shape between the burning trunks.
A hand—reaching out—charred and broken.
Then he saw another. More. Charred limbs. Disfigured hands. Squirming flesh that barely resembled anything of natural order.
Burnt and broken corpses. A sea of them. All engulfed within a cursed, unending fire.
Some humanoid and whole, others mangled and torn to pieces. Root-like tendrils connected them to the trunks. Ashen wood and flesh merging into one.
Then he saw the first movement.
A hand moved.
The corpses started pulling themselves out of the ruins of fire—twisted messes of flesh and bone.
Alarm flared in Zayn as he quickly pulled himself out of the vision.
When he returned, he found the mix in his hands sizzling like a haywire chemical reaction.Zayn immediately threw it and encased it in bloodmetal. But thankfully, it didn’t erupt.
It just sizzled before stabilising.
Only then did he huff in relief.
Resistance ‘Corruption – Curse’ has been upgraded to Medium!
Ignoring the pain, he took a look at the clump.
?? — An explosive crafted through a cursed source of flame. It is a flame that can’t be quenched once it begins. Trigger with caution.
Would you like to name your creation?
A smile rose at the corner of his lip. He’d succeeded.
“Dirt Bomb.”
Name chosen! You’ve crafted an item: ‘Dirt Bomb’ – 1!
Feat Unlocked!
Disaster Cooking Alchemist (Silver): You decided you alone weren’t enough of an environmental hazard, so now there is an even worse explosive. Be aware of what you have created, though, as playing with fire might burn you too.
Effect: Intelligence +3, Dexterity +3. Anything you create has the slightest chance of either going wrong or going boom.
Zayn was never one to heed warnings. Now that he had seen the fire, the process became much easier, and he could make a less dangerous one without issue.
Watching Faeria and the ape fight without a clue, he smirked.
“Just you wait.”
What would you have done if you were in Zayn's shoe?
