The corpse had a hole melted in the back of its head that leaked the same Affinity as the dark fire. That was unexpected; Serenity had killed him with Death Magebolts, so his body should have been withered but outwardly uninjured. A hole in the back of his head wasn’t normal.

Whatever that dark fire was, it was even nastier than he’d assumed. As he cleaned up the corridor, he’d started to feel like he was wasting time, but he no longer felt that way. In fact, he wanted to clean this up before he even thought about raising the corpse.

Unless he tried to raise the corpse as the monster he’d create by neutralizing the leftover mana, even the mana still inside it?

No, that was a dumb idea. What if he couldn’t control monsters he created this way after all? He knew he could control undead he raised; that was the point, after all. It wasn’t worth the risk without a lot more testing.

There was also no way he was going to ignore this, not when whatever that was was slowly eating away at the body. As it was, Serenity might have already lost the information he wanted; it all depended on exactly what the stuff had already eaten. If he raised it without first dealing with the black fire, who knew what it would do.

Serenity examined the remnant Affinity carefully. It was somehow sharper than the residue he’d dispersed earlier; more than that, there was a lot more of it than he’d expected, at least as much as he’d cleaned up before all put together and probably more.

All of the monsters he’d created from the residue were Tier One at best; many were Tier Zero, pitifully weak like the initial slime. Anything he made from this mess would be stronger; the relationship between strength and the amount of mana and essence that were combined was obvious. Perhaps it was time for another test; could he create a monster using only part of the mana present?

A success would explain a lot about dungeons, though Serenity suspected that they were more likely to need to combine power to make a stronger monster than split it apart to make a weaker one. A failure might be informative, but it also might simply be the nature of the black fire. It would all depend on how the failure happened.

“One more,” Serenity informed Blaze. “I’m not sure how big this one is going to be; it’s going to be worse than the others, but I’m not sure how much worse. I’m going to see if I can make it several instead of one.”

Blaze summoned fire to his hands. It looked almost like he was holding it, but Serenity knew that whatever spell Blaze was using was more flexible than most. He could do almost anything he wanted with his fire, whether that was throw it, use it as a stream of fire, or simply shove it into monsters manually. He could even write with it if he wanted to, though it was smokeless and didn’t leave a trail behind it unless he actually burned something.

Serenity nodded before turning back to the body. Serenity pushed essence at the mana that had leaked out; it bonded with the mana and started to form into the wooden golem he’d picked. He pulled back on his essence, limiting it; the golem stopped growing, but the mana pulled more essence out of him and began another. That was fine; it was still only about waist-high. They could deal with an entire group of these if they had to.

The pull was worse on the second golem and even worse on the third. After the fourth, Serenity’s attention was completely consumed by controlling the essence flow; he wasn’t low yet, but he definitely wanted to keep interrupting it so that new monsters would form instead of making one giant monster.

Something hit Serenity hard on the shoulder, startling him and making his concentration waver. His eyes snapped open to see one of the four golems, probably the first since it was the smallest, trying to hit him again. That wasn’t right; the others hadn’t attacked until he hit them. Admittedly, this was probably a longer wait than he’d had for any of the others; still, it didn’t seem right.

“Stop attacking!” Serenity wanted to put some magic behind the command, but his essence was still flowing to the corrupted mana inside the corpse. Trying to push essence anywhere else just meant it went to the corrupted mana even faster.

The golem hit him again.

A whip made of fire looped around the golem’s middle and pulled it away from Serenity. Blaze had that one under control. Serenity pulled his manablade off his belt; fortunately, running mana into it was easy. He skewered the next one, then chopped apart the third. Another fiery whip captured the fourth; these really weren’t very difficult to deal with.

Unfortunately, the dozen or so seconds that they took to handle the golems was time that Serenity wasn’t controlling his essence very effectively; it simply flowed out, unrestricted. The fifth monster no longer looked like a golem; instead, it looked more like a ball with spikes. Serenity tried to impose the idea of a golem on it again, but that simply gave him the feeling that it was there, simply covered by the ball and four of the spikes.

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There was no reason for it to have changed and definitely no reason for it to resist returning to the form he imposed. That meant something else was happening. Serenity could only blame the Affinity of the mana he was using; he didn’t know what else might have done it. He could be wrong; weird behavior when trying out new forms of magic wasn’t unusual. That was why he hadn’t been worried when attempting to stop giving essence resulted in starting a new monster instead of actually stopping.

This time, however, Serenity was facing something potentially a lot worse than a simple wooden golem. He had no real worry about it at this point, but he didn’t want it to grow any stronger and he definitely didn’t want to make another one. He was willing to put more effort into it than he had the first time; that time, it hadn’t seemed to matter since the wooden golems were insignificant.

He pulled back on his essence, then pulled back again, harder than before. He felt a small rebound against his essence pool as the thread snapped. That was great news; he now knew he could either create a monster set or stop the outflow of essence by pulling a little harder. It was things like this that made experimentation necessary.

The monster seemed to solidify like the others before it, but there was still residue linked to it and that residue flowed into the monster.

That was not at all the effect Serenity had wanted. It was about par for the course for testing new magic, unfortunately; something always went wrong.

The spiky ball was quickly covered in the nasty black fire. Serenity glanced at Blaze and found that he’d already backed off to near one of the room’s walls; that was wise. Serenity backed off in the opposite direction, but not as far. He wanted to keep the thing’s attention. He could heal the injuries now that he was back in his human form; Blaze would have to actually spend mana to heal himself.

Moments later, it was clear that backing off to see what the organic-looking spiky ball covered in black fire did was wise but insufficient; the entire area around it was covered in streamers of black fire. Some were the spikes themselves, which moved like tentacles, while others were fire that seemed to spread off the tentacles.

Once again, this looked like a fight Serenity would want to stay away from. Blaze seemed to have reached the same conclusion, because a ball of fire whipped towards the enemy’s rear almost in unison with Serenity’s Death Bolt.

Neither missile made it to the creature itself. They did seem to cut a swath through the spreading black fire, but it was quickly replaced by more.

Okay, then. That could potentially work but it was going to take time and a lot of mana. The other easy option was a sacrifice play where Serenity moved in close and took the necessary damage in order to kill it. It would be faster but the downsides were obvious; Serenity simply didn’t want to do it that way. While he could deal with the pain, there was no reason to. They weren’t in a hurry.

The shielding enchantment for his robe was down and he had a limited number of other spells infused and available. If he could somehow hold the spiky-ball-creature in place, killing it would be easier. He had prepared a Slow-type spell for a single creature; perhaps that would work. It had a gravity component that would vary to try to trip the person in addition to the general Time effect. The tripping part probably wouldn’t do anything, but the Time effect might be very useful.

Serenity took the time between Deathbolts to dig out the mini-wand. He watched the spell arc towards the critter. It made it, but Serenity could see damage in the spell structure; the black fire somehow ate away at the spell as well as simply forcing damaging spells to push their way through. That was unusual; not all Affinities could manage it, though both Death and Arcana could. Serenity didn’t usually bother with it, since it was an extremely inefficient way to counter a spell.

Which meant it was something he could abuse. The Slow spell wasn’t going to last long at all, but it was completely worth casting.

A whip of dark fire extended towards Serenity and he had to dodge out of its path. A pained shout from the other side of the monster told Serenity that it had managed to target Blaze at the same time all the way across the room and hadn’t missed. That wasn’t a good sign; they might not have as much time as Serenity thought.

He needed to get the creature’s attention on him; better yet, he needed to tie up all of its magic while he did so. None of the spells he’d pre-prepared were likely to do that. On the other hand, he had made good progress at expanding his Death Magebolt. If only it weren’t Tier Four to begin with; a higher-Tier Skill would let him kill this creature much faster.

Serenity triggered the Skill but pushed it into a channeled form. It would have less immediate impact, but the long-term impact would be greater. More importantly, it would punch through the initial blunting only once, then be subject to the spell-damaging feature of the creature’s black fire. That would overall weaken it even more, but it would cost the creature a lot more mana than the ordinary magebolts did. He’d make the exchange of dealing out less harm to drain more mana when it was the mana that was dangerous.

The channel snapped. Serenity quickly restabilized the Skill and restarted the channel; this was not a good thing to do to a Skill, but as long as he took the moment to restabilize it each time, it wasn’t that bad.

It snapped his channel five times before the black fire died down to no more than a coating on the creature’s spiky limbs. By then, Serenity had spent almost a third of his mana; that was an incredible amount, far more than a normal Tier Five mage would have available. It wasn’t as much as a mage-specialized Tier Eight might have, but it was still very significant, especially since he’d done very little damage with it and the creature’s mana use was far more flagrant than Serenity’s. It was clearly not at all cheap to raise someone’s Tier, which made Serenity worried about what he’d find whenever he caught up with the person who knew how to do it.

Blaze continued to throw balls of fire at the thing; they started to scorch the creature’s skin well before the end. The final blow, however, was Serenity’s. He was able to simply walk up to it and stab the central ball once it stopped throwing magic around.