Staying well away from the building, we moved so we could look into the now-open door. For once, Lia was taking the lead, with both Luna and myself ready to deploy magical protections at a moment's notice. There was a thin length of Hard Ice, with a few runes engraved, floating between Lia and the door, kept aloft by my Ice Magic and acting as the core of my defence. If things got suddenly hot, I could use Overflow and a burst of Ice Magic to turn the slim piece of Hard Ice into a sturdy wall, allowing it to take a surprising amount of punishment. I doubted a rapid channelling would allow me to conjure all of the planned wall out of Hard Ice but with Hard Ice as a basis, the wall should gain some additional durability as opposed to using normal Ice.

Similarly, Luna’s defence was primed and ready, though where mine was set to create a physical wall, Luna could accomplish something similar to the boost I could give myself using my Blood Magic, only that Luna could readily do it for somebody else. Sadly, her Life magic boosting came with some severe drawbacks, just like my Blood Magic boost did, which is why I didn’t use my boost on others, just myself. Simply because I could readily recognise the damage I caused within my own body and use the very magic causing the damage to repair it. Luna, on the other hand, was still learning how to heal, her Life Magic having a greater range of applications but, consequently, having a steeper learning curve. But she was getting better each day and soon, she’d be able to graduate to bodies we cared about. For now, her healing was potent but, well, there had been more than one occasion where she was regrowing some bodily tissue only to have it end up as supercancer that tried to cannibalise and devour the rest of the ‘healed’ organism. Nobody had ever claimed that Life was a nice element or that it was anything but ‘Survival’ in the most primal sense. Death Magic was, in many ways, a far gentler element, though in others Death was just as primally brutal as Life was. It all came down to the user, the application and the intent guiding the entire process.

In this case, it didn’t matter in the slightest. As Lia carefully and slowly made her way across the open space so she could look into the hall, nothing happened. It seemed that whatever was in there wasn’t so aggressive that it tried to scorch every living thing moving around its domain. Or maybe it simply didn’t see as people did but sensed its surroundings in some other manner, or it might just be very short-sighted. There were countless possible explanations and, sadly, a lack of reaction didn’t automatically mean a lack of recognition. It might have noticed her and was waiting, ready to strike at a moment’s notice if some other condition was met.

“I can only see some strange fire, not if there’s anything else in there,” Lia reported, her voice carefully pitched to carry no further than our position. Nodding to my companion, I decided that I wanted to get a look as well, but I wasn’t about to trust that my approach would be ignored like hers.

So, remaining cautious and paranoid as I was wont to do, I grounded the length of Hard Ice and slowly started to channel Astral Power into it, not aiming for instant speed but trying to get a solid and sturdy wall to give me cover for my approach.

Once the wall was up, I moved behind it, barely peeking out to glance into the wall. As Lia had said, the only thing I could see at first glance in there was fire and a lot of it. The space was roughly thirty on fifty metres, the gate an opening in the middle of the short side and, from my perspective, the entire centre of the hall was completely consumed by flames, a bonfire some twenty metres in diameter though I couldn’t be quite confident in regards to the measurement, thanks to the shifting heat-haze in the wall and the general dimensional weirdness in this place. It might be that the hall was, in actual fact, hundreds of metres in size, with the fire covering dozens of metres or it might be the other way, that the image of the hall we saw was scaled to the dimensions of the Charland while its interior was scaled to the outside world. We didn’t know and, as far as I could tell, we couldn’t tell without actually heading in there. Something I was a little weary of, if only because of the blast of flame that had shot out of the hall when we originally opened the door.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Still on the hunt for more information, I decided to poke the fire, at least after I made sure that the wall I was hiding behind was sturdy. Raising the concrete beneath us into a wall was a somewhat time-consuming and exhausting process but we had time and I wanted to have the best protection I could get between me and whatever fiery monster had claimed the node. To that effect, I even conjured a layer of liquid water and placed it between the original sheet of Ice and the concrete, making sure that any incoming energy would have to go through the concrete, then vaporise the layer of water and then burn through my Ice. Possible, certainly, but I doubted it was possible to do so in the short time I’d need to escape by either shadow-stepping in the shadow of my wall or simply running away.

With my paranoia temporarily satisfied, I decided to start with simple, gentle pokes. In this case, that meant pulling a shard of concrete from the ground behind me and launching it into the hall with my Earth Magic. If possible, I would have preferred to use Wind Magic but with the distances involved, I’d have to use a massive amount of effort to get a focused blast of wind into the doors, to say nothing of keeping that wind together long enough to have an obvious effect on the fire inside. Wind was a lot of things, but it dissipated fairly easily in calm air, making it a relatively bad conduit for physical effects. Sound, on the other hand, was also part of Wind Magic and an excellent conduit for mental effects but those were for later. If it came to that.

So, a piece of rubble was sent flying into the hall, moving through the flame before the flame surged for a moment and, well, nothing further happened. There was no further sound, other than that brief roar of flame, no indication that the concrete had impacted the floor inside, no strike against the position the concrete came from, nothing. My poke had been completely ignored unless the surge of flame had been the fire eating the concrete, something I wasn’t quite sure about. But given that I didn’t have an alternative explanation for its lack of impact, I decided to remain very, very careful. And double my protections before I continued poking, just in case.

So, after reinforcing my protections and adding a hole for me to hide in and teleport away, I decided on the next poke. If Earth didn’t cause an actual reaction, maybe Water would get one. However, given that the concrete had evaporated and I had no desire to be in the open and channel a continuous stream of water into the fire, I first conjured a ball of Hard Ice the size of a beachball before filling it with water. That way, I could throw the ball and get into cover while it travelled, just in case something bad happened. A part of me was tempted to try forcing more water into the shell than normally possible, experimenting with changing densities and the phases of magical water but those experiments were for another time. For now, I simply had a ball filled with water and sent it flying into the hall.

Compared to the chunk of rock I had thrown before, throwing the Ice Ball was simplicity itself, allowing me to precisely aim it so it would impact the middle of the fire. To make things even better, I decided to channel a mote of Astral Power into the Ice right before it reached the fire, causing the ball to shatter so the water turned into an open wave, flowing towards the fire.

The result was quite fascinating. For a moment, the fire receded, allowing me to get a glimpse of the entity hiding within but it was only a moment before the fire rallied and caused the water I had conjured to burst into steam, obscuring the hall again. And, the next second, a blast of fire came roaring out of the hall, blackening the space between the entrance and us even further, though the fire didn’t reach my makeshift position.

Now, I only had to figure out how to defeat a guardian made of living flame, an entity that looked eerily like the guardian that had protected the Soul Prison on Mundus. Granted, if it was only that, it would be easy, the guardian on Mundus had proven that, though mostly because it was bound to the fire of its brazier. Here, the creature was sitting on an effectively endless supply of Fire, making it just about impossible to extinguish.

This was going to be difficult.