Breaking Through the Unsurmountable

Tristan woke up to the rising sun hitting his eye through the snow of the igloo melting. It was time for him to move ahead. He had to complete the dungeon and meet the master of the dungeon as soon as possible to return to Sindry.

After prepping himself for the cold he melts the igloo and proceeds to carefully climb.

****

It had been a few hours since he resumed his climb. Tristan was marked with clothes with sharp cuts and deep gashes onto his skin to accompany them. The smell of blood wafted around him, human and the blood if the white furred badgers.

He had been constantly attacked by groups of two or three badgers whenever he neared a dangerous pass on the track path. Initially he struggled a lot against those creatures because of their incredible speed and their sharp bites and claws. They were quite fragile, but their tactic of attacking by stealth during a vulnerable moment and immunity to the cold made them ferocious.

Tristan never liked seeing blood. He had been seeing blood from people who had been ill since he started studying medicine under aunt Mel. However, he had never taken a life indiscriminately before. He had trapped and hunted for game, but attacking them en masse was quite a new and unagreeable situation. From initially wincing each time he killed those monsters to thoughtlessly slashing them apart, he began doubting his consciousness.

Tristan was a pragmatist. He didn't believe in absolute good or evil. He just desired to protect people who he cared about and knew. But under that logic he always had been somewhat innocent about the world, he believed in peaceful living, undoubtedly based on his peaceful life in Sindry. The indiscriminate violent world had tainted his insides.

"Is this what it means to become an adventurer? Killing indiscriminately? Losing concern for life?"

On top of all the shocks he had received, he was now conflicted about his own actions. He was unable to place his own ethics in the spectrum of good and bad and it made him wonder if he was doing the right thing in this dungeon. All he had wanted was to gain knowledge. But today, for the first time, he felt the weight of knowledge. Knowing is as much a pleasure as it is a curse.

He finally came to the end of the winding path. There was a cave leading back into the mountain at the end of the path. He was quite close to the peak.

His lips were chapped, cheeks frozen. He was constantly shivering. He looked behind for the first time since he began climbing. The winding path he had taken was occasionally stained with blood. Carcasses lied all around. Tristan's innocent eyes had turned cold.

"I'm a murderer", he whispered.

He looked down. Far below, he could see the powerful flow of water, still gushing out in full force. He had come a long way.

He finally entered the cave after swallowing air. He was ready for an onslaught approaching. His manna sense had already informed him about the horde coming to attack.

Ants. Thousands of ants. Ants the size of Charmy. Crawling quickly, menacingly coming to attack. Tristan, remarkably, had no emotion on his face or in his heart. Just three words on his lips.

"Let's do this."

He created a pocket of air in the shape of a sphere and threw at the ants. There were so many of them now that he couldn't see the walls of the cave anymore, just a swarming black army moving along.

The sphere exploded as air expanded rapidly and shockwaves squished thousands of ants. But the dead were quickly replaced by the incessant horde.

Tristan didn't wait to see the result either. He began working on several magic at once. Flames burnt the ants, and stalactites impaled them. He exploded the air by combusting the oxygen. Tristan kept on a relentless attack, but he was draining his manna very quickly. He finally decided to his his trump card.

"Ice disaster."

Tristan spoke the spell with a finalty to his voice. He didn't need to speak the spell, but saying it made him feel more confident. He used up all the remaining manna into the spell he had created by combining elements of water, earth and wind magic.

The entire cave began freezing up along with the ants. He took the small reprieve he got to consume manna recovery, health recovery and stamina recovery potions. He then took all the bottles of toxins and acid he had and broke the flasks. He used wind and water magic to disperse the toxins as a mist.

Thousands of ands started melting from the acid. Others began getting paralysed and yet others poisoned. It was a one sided onslaught because they had been frozen stiff while decaying rapidly!

A considerable number of ants were vanquished in this manner. Once Tristan got his process perfected, he rinsed and repeated. He kept attacking the ants, millions of them, until he finished off his manna reserves and then recovered it back using his potions.

"This is the last batch of potions."

There were still a few thousand more ants left. But the carcasses of the dead far outstripped the carcasses of the ones living. The ants were huge and we'll coordinated. They disregarded their own deaths for the collective, however individually did little damage and had poor defenses. Their entire strategy depended on numbers and Tristan had cleverly used his largest area attacks to thin their ranks as fast as possible.

However the strategy was not without faults. It left Tristan open to attacks since he completely concentrated on annihilation. Occasionally a few ants would get past and attack him with their sharp pincers. Tristan was bleeding all over, but he could see that they weren't endless anymore and it made him go even more reckless. When he used Ice disaster for the final time he destroyed all but a hundred of the ants.

He was out of manna too. He finally took out both his daggers and decided to engage physically. With just enough manna to cleverly use reinforcement for attacking, Tristan neglected his defence and slaughtered the ants with stabs and kicks. Unlike the previous battles with got over in an hour, the final fight took three hours. Three hours of constant fighting had dimmed Tristan's vision.

With the final stab that eliminated the last ant, Tristan blacked out.

****

A whole day later, he was bathed in the blood of ants, as well as is own. His entire body hurt and he was full of serious bruises. When he woke up, Tristan carefully cleaned himself and his tools, patched himself with the last reserves of bandages. He felt his health had returned sufficiently as he drank his last stamina potion. He had no manna potion left so whatever manna he regained while sleeping was all he had.

He walked ahead recklessly. After the bloody battle he had yesterday, he no longer cared why he came to the dungeon. He felt desolate and hardened. He simply wanted to see it through the end.

He finally came to the end of the cave. He was greeted by an imposing door. He had no thoughts on his mind anymore. The endless suffering had simply made his mind go blank. Without a second thought or hesitation, he opened the door.

A blast of warm air, the smell of molten metal, a bright light and the voice of a...girl?

"Unbelievable. An ordinary human?"