Chapter 140: Swamp (1)

Jaxir didn’t react to the marker behind him. He kept walking through the outer roads while checking his map every few minutes, letting his gaze pass over the same distant point before closing the screen again. Whoever was following him maintained enough distance that Jaxir probably wouldn’t have noticed without the expanded perception of his map in the first place.

That suited him fine for now. If they wanted to watch, Jaxir could give them something worth watching while he handled the actual reason he had come outside the city today. His destination sat several kilometers ahead, beyond the forest and inside a sprawling wetland that housed one of the most frequently cleared dungeons in the region.

The Drowned Willow Dungeon wasn’t hidden, rare or particularly mysterious. Players entered through the same gate every time, chose between Easy, Hard and Nightmare, then fought their way through a fixed set of swamp creatures until reaching the boss at the end. The only real competition came from the clearance rankings, which awarded additional treasures for reaching the top ten, top three and first place in completion speed.

Most parties entered with five players. Jaxir had read that recommendation, closed the page, then immediately started planning how he would clear it alone. Between the mana potions sitting in his inventory and the amount of punishment he could avoid by burning MP instead of HP, calling him a glass cannon was starting to feel less and less accurate.

He had enough mana recovery now to fight like an idiot for far longer than any reasonable Magic Class player should. More importantly, the dungeon offered something Jaxir had realized he lacked after going through the government’s information. He hadn’t actually fought many powerful mages.

Rin didn’t count as a proper fight in his mind. Their exchange had been cut short almost immediately after she stopped suppressing herself, while the Demi-Goddesses had possessed a spear user, an archer and a Tank rather than placing themselves inside another Magic Class. Even the Kindled Bear King had taught Jaxir more about raw mana and manipulation than it had about fighting someone capable of building spells against him.

The final boss of the Drowned Willow Dungeon was different. According to the government’s notes, the Drowned Willow Witch relied almost entirely on magic, using roots as casting mediums while layering curses, swamp mana and wide-area spells over one another. More interestingly, higher difficulties changed how intelligently she combined those abilities rather than merely giving her bigger raw stats.

That had caught Jaxir’s attention immediately. He had spent most of Divinity learning how to break fighters who wanted to rush him, survive things that should have flattened him, or exploit bodies carrying more mana than they could control. Fighting something that would stand across from him and actually try to out-cast him sounded much more interesting.

Jaxir entered the forest and left the wider road behind. Trees closed around him while the ground softened beneath his boots, and the scattered Tier 2 beasts wandering through the undergrowth gave him plenty of opportunities to work before he ever reached the dungeon.

He didn’t bother sneaking around them.

A long-bodied lizard burst from beneath a fallen trunk only to take a Cast through the side of its skull before it finished turning toward him. Jaxir stored the corpse, moved on, then sent three more Casts curving between the trees when another pair of creatures came charging from opposite directions.

He kept the attacks simple at first, paying more attention to how quickly he could form and release them than how much damage each one dealt.

Cast was the last Root Ability holding him back from becoming a Grand Archmage. Channel and Attune had both changed once Jaxir stopped treating their descriptions like instructions carved in stone, so he doubted mindlessly firing mana bullets would carry Cast much further either. For now, though, the repetition gave him something to do while he waited on true inspiration.

He passed the next hour that way, moving deeper through the forest while leaving a trail of dead beasts behind him. Every few encounters, Jaxir opened his map and checked the marker following the same general route. It never disappeared for long.

Whoever it was knew how to maintain distance. They weren’t rushing to close the gap when Jaxir fought, and they didn’t take advantage of the moments when he stopped to collect a corpse or recover his bearings. If anything, their patience made Jaxir more curious.

By the time the trees began thinning into marshland, Jaxir could smell stagnant water before he saw it. The ground broke apart into muddy islands divided by shallow channels, while long grasses and low trees leaned over dark water covered in floating green growth. Somewhere farther ahead, the dungeon entrance sat within the deepest part of the swamp.

Jaxir opened his map again and found the marker still hanging well behind him. He had changed direction twice on purpose and taken one unnecessary loop around a stretch of flooded ground, yet the person had adjusted without ever getting substantially closer.

"Hm." Jaxir closed the map and continued through the marsh at the same pace. If they wanted him dead, they had already followed him far enough from the city that reinforcements shouldn’t have mattered.

The nearest guards were kilometers away, Nick was off doing his own training, and nobody from the government knew exactly which dungeon Jaxir had chosen for the day. Even if he somehow managed to send for help, anyone attacking him now would have plenty of time to finish the job before support arrived.

The fact that nothing had happened made the silence behind him more interesting than an ambush would have been.

Jaxir stepped onto a patch of firmer ground and looked ahead toward the twisted tree line marking the dungeon territory. He could keep pretending not to notice the follower for as long as they wanted, especially when they seemed content to do the same.

For now, the Willow Treant Witch sounded like much more fun.