“A volcano may be considered as a cannon of immense size.”

-Oliver Goldsmith

“’And what if we choose to remain.’ he said, staring out at the vast swath of glowing lava beginning to consume the city. ‘We worshiped Otga, but in the end we have been abandoned.’ His face twisted into a snarl as he looked at the temple of darkness. ‘Or worse, tricked. Even if the shield survives, everyone inside will die from the heat. Go, I will take vengeance.’”

-Fragment surviving from the last cataclysm

==Caden==

Above me towered something impossible.

Well… I was in a world with magic, so impossible had stretched far enough that I couldn’t see the boundary anymore, but still.

Above me towered something… improbable, an enormous chunk of rock. My new calculation abilities were helpfully putting it to scale. I didn’t have the best perspective, but it reached between a mile, and a mile and a half.

The problem was that it was actually above me. A mountain that simply reached another mile or two above me and went straight up would have been majestic. Its beauty and austerity would have been inspiring.

Instead, some distance to the east, a direction I could now confirm since I knew the position of the sun and the approximate time of day, was the start of an enormous protrusion of rock. And it was angled forty five degrees, pointing up and to the west. Which meant it was directly overhead.

A small jut of stone that did that was fine, its internal integrity would hold it in place. However, something this massive? It just shouldn’t be possible.

I couldn’t see past the stone, so I had no idea if there was an entire mountain that it was connected to, but honestly, even if it was connected to some larger mass of stone it shouldn’t matter. The sheer weight of the stone ought to send it crashing down.

As a dungeon I might be able to get away with it, though I had my doubts. I was cheating though.

My large rooms had no seams, no imperfect joining. Every bit of rock was perfectly fused to every other bit of rock. And even then I made my structures curve so that the arch shape would carry all the weight around the area. In addition, I compacted the stone into a denser and stronger form. There were limits to what I could get away with doing that, but I still had quite a ways to go. Even so, I would not want to try to built the haphazard cliff above me.

I had always loved learning back on Earth, and I watched tons of nature documentaries. Some of the tallest cliffs in the world were in Yosemite, and they only stayed up because they were a super strong type of granite that formed from repeated heating and cooling. There were taller cliffs on Earth, as well, but none of them even reached a mile.

I honestly wasn’t sure what this meant. The truth was that I was on an alien world. I could think of a number of potential reasons why it might be possible.

I could have misjudged the gravity. Even with my projection I didn’t really feel gravity, but if it was substantially weaker then the rock would simply be exerting less downward force. The problem with that, was that I hadn’t noticed objects falling any slower than usual. There might be, and honestly probably was, a difference in gravity from Earth, but it was subtle.

Another was that the composition of the crust was different and some super strong material had formed here. I hadn’t noticed anything particularly strange, but I did have mana crystals and folerth, which I was fairly certain had not been present on Earth.

And, of course, there was the handwavium catchall of mana. It could simply be some kind of localized magical effect. Something that made the stone stronger, or lowered the gravity in an area. Or even some kind of float stone that was less dense than air at sea level.

For now, I couldn’t do much, so I focused on the other strange detail about the giant hunk of rock above me.

It looked melted.

Not the direct underside above me, but the edges. Sections there looked like drips of wax. Stone had flowed and solidified into these drip patterns all over. And they were not a type of stone I recognized, either. I suppose I could take that as potential evidence for a strange material being responsible for the heavily angled mountain above me. It reminded me of obsidian, glossy and dark. However, it wasn’t dark enough, and rainbow glints reflected off the edges, and light diffracted through thinner sections. Though the ice that had formed its own stalactite additions made it difficult to tell.

I hadn’t been too focused on pushing my aura lately. I had just made sure I was always ahead of where the dungeon was expanding. That way I didn’t lose anything. I hadn’t really needed to worry about mana for a little while, so I had slowed down my aura dive into the depths as well. With the evidence of a natural, or possibly unnatural, wonder above me, that would need to change. It looked like a shard was going to be dedicated to expanding my aura as fast as it could again. It wouldn’t be able to expand in all directions at maximum speed, but I could prioritize reaching up the mountain. Honestly, at maximum speed I should be able to reach the top of what I could see above me in a few days.

I was looking forward to the view. All around me were other mountains, white and blanketed with snow. From my position I was already almost as high the tallest peaks. From a position a mile or two above me… The view would be breathtaking.

The mountains around me were a little strange too though. The peaks were normal enough, but the valleys between were shallow. I was fairly certain they should be deeper. I supposed the valley could be filled with massive amounts of snow. Snow certainly piled up across the peaks and valley areas that I could see.

I gauged the depth. Actually I am pretty sure it would compact into a glacier at that point.

No… if the valleys were as deep as I thought they should be my entrance tunnel would have hit the snow and ice.

Exsan had been responsible for digging out the tunnel and extending the aura into it. I hadn’t paid much attention to the tunnel except to decorate it. Even then I automated it and didn’t pay it very much attention.

I examined the stone below where the valley was.

Past the Celtic knot-work it was all volcanic stone. Large areas of the bottom was the basalt I was already familiar with, mixed with compacted glassy ash. Random chunks of stone were embedded everywhere as the ash extended upwards.

The mountains around me were buried in old volcanic debris. Possibly miles of it. I briefly considered all the geothermal features in my dungeon. It was too much to hope that the volcano was extinct.

How powerful had the eruption been, and how long before it blew again?

I was interrupted by Exsan.

Entrance. It will be ready soon.

Well at least he remembered to warn me this time like I asked him.

I looked at the giant stone above me again. I would not give great odds on that staying in place during another volcanic eruption.

For the first time as a dungeon I felt claustrophobic. I was suddenly aware of the unimaginable weight above me.

Oh well, I had other things to do. Reinforcing the giant stone above me so it didn’t suddenly collapse and crash through the earth shattering me into pieces…

Stop that.

Breathe.

Take a moment to appreciate that I can breathe.

My avatar disappeared only to reappear in the tunnel Exsan had been making.

I only needed a cursory check to see that these tunnels had gone through many many miles of cooled lava too.

My calculation ability tried to be helpful by approximating the total length of the various sections of lava. More than twenty miles, split into two sections, out of the tunnels total current length of around thirty five.

That is a lot of lava.

Right. Art.

I like art.

Time to distract myself with art.

==Zidaun==

“I hate this dungeon,” Gurek grumbled.

I just shook my head. Sweat dripped down my face and body. I didn’t have the spare energy to talk. Gurek’s individual endurance was far above my own. The only reason I hadn’t needed to bow out before now was my own abilities and a higher than usual Heat Resistance. When picking blaze blossom flowers underwater during Freeze, the water near the flowers could reach almost boiling.

A bubble of air and stone was forcibly cooled around us both. Outside of it the air shimmered violently and the stone of the walls had a dull red glow.

Cooling that tiny section around us both was taking every bit of concentration I had. It was actually easier to borrow this dungeon’s abilities than any other with my new personal connection to it, but I still had a long way to go.

My mana was draining away swiftly, and it had been draining away faster with each room as the temperature spiked again and again. Firi and Inda had already been forced to bow out and leave through the available side doors.

Firi’s blessings had helped us all endure the heat better. Without him I had to endure more, but without covering him and Inda I had more magic and concentration to work with. I honestly wasn’t sure if I was better off or not.

My throat was parched, but I aborted my automatic reflex to drink. There was no point, our water-skins were long empty.

We took another few steps together. The sweat that we left of the ground vaporized behind us as it left my bubble.

“Next… ha, room, ha,” I gasped as we reached the door.

The door opened into an almost identical hellscape. All the surfaces in the room glowed a dull orange and the shimmering of the air was even more intense. Glowing crystals in shades of red and orange were embedded into the walls and stretched from the floor to waist height. They depicted flames and looked real now as the wavering air made them distort and jump.

Steps took longer and longer as the heat wrung me dry like a rag. I was starting to get dizzy, my sweat diminishing and feeling tacky.

“Done, I’m done.” I panted.

“Damn, me too then,” Gurek said. “My endurance is pretty good, but not this good. I would bake without you.”

We twisted to the side and step by step we took the path into the side passage. The door shut behind us and the air felt like ice. It was glorious. We each took great heaving gasps trying to cool our bodies down.

“I’m… ha… going to… dive into a fountain… ha… and drink til I pop,” Gurek panted out between his massive breaths.

Obviously he had dropped his endurance skills, and was paying back a portion of the exertion.

I just silently nodded. My breathe was slowly steadying, but my throat was dry as paper.

A few minutes later we rejoined everyone else. We refilled our water-skins, and took slow sips, even Gurek. We knew how to rehydrate properly, even if it was a struggle not to gulp the water as fast as possible.

Slowly our bodies recovered, Firi’s blessings helping our recovery continue with unnatural speed. As we recovered we exchanged our own observations on the trial. They were sparse. Endurance was tedious and difficult, but not particularly interesting. Apart from the fact that the dungeon was testing us at all, but even with my communication with it, I couldn’t hazard a good guess as to why it was doing it.

Usually a dungeon would just throw stuff at you inside the dungeon where you had a good chance to die. Why do it relatively safely?

I had no answer.

After we all recovered fully we trudged down to the next test.

Gurek’s curses stained the air blue with their intensity when we discovered it was the exact same test again. Except this time we were each doing it alone.