“Sam? Why are we still heading for the crater? I thought the plan was to go around it,” Jeffrey asked.
“I wanted to see if we could find anything within it. Don’t you think that there might be anything valuable there?” Sam replied.
“You are quite foolish indeed, human,” the same alien who had complained about the ship earlier interjected, a supercilious note in his voice. “Not even our leader would dare to enter such a place. Can you not feel the power from here? You apes must be quite a slow species.”
“Hey!” Sam exclaimed. “Who do you think you are?” He was starting to get a bit angry now. “You were complaining earlier about our ship, and now you start insulting my people? You should remember that you are under my command here.”
“I may be in a nominal sense, but I still follow the orders of Lord Manthrox. I only follow you because you managed to beat him, and proved that you are stronger than him. That does not mean that I have to like you,” the alien replied.
“Is that how it works out there in the Multiverse? Huh? Well, if power is so important, how come you think that you can insult me without retaliation?” Sam answered.
“You are weak in the mind. You do not use your faction members as you should. I saw so many examples of people stagnating in your city, that it was pitiful,” the other man answered, sneering.
One of his companions laid a cautioning arm on his shoulder, but he ignored her. The alien continued in his hectoring tone, curling his lip in disgust. “I will follow you, as is your right as my superior, but I will not go on fools’ errands with you. You have not proven yourself to be worthy of such a thing.”
Sam’s Dao was starting to boil within him, demanding him to make an example of this alien. However, he knew that would be a mistake. It would simply paint him as a vacillating man who went between emotional extremes whenever it suited him. Instead, he shook his head, and kept walking towards the crater, ignoring the other man.
Jeffrey, Lao and Pyotr followed after him, and after a brief pause, most of the alien captains did so as well, leaving the one who had complained behind. Cursing, he sprinted to keep up, and rejoined the pack, mollified for now.
Sam smiled slightly at this, but he kept his petty sense of vindictiveness to himself. The animosity of some of the aliens was a problem that he would have to look into.
Soon the heat grew to be immense, and Sam was starting to feel it slightly. Eventually, Jeffrey and Lao could go no further, and most of the aliens could not either. It was just Sam, Pyotr, and the belligerent man who had kept trying to undermine Sam’s authority. They were about a mile out from the edge of the crater now, and great gusts of superheated air came rocketing up every few seconds from the immense amounts of heat down in the crater. Sam picked up the pace slightly, and jogged along the broken rocks of the crater edge, weaving around puddles of noxious goo.
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He soon reached the edge of the crater, and peered over the edge. It looked like a vision of some surrealist hell, painted with green instead of red. Bright green flames licked at the rocks at the sides of the crater, and roiling seas of green lava, which he had not seen before, writhed at the bottom.
He heard panting from behind him, signaling that the others were catching up. It was like standing in front of a furnace now, even for him, and Sam could only imagine what the others were feeling. Pyotr looked quite uncomfortable, and the alien even more so. However, the latter of the two seemed to be trying to prove something to Sam with his accompaniment of him.
As Sam looked at the crater, he spotted something that was at odds with the rest of the scene. A small metal object, that almost looked like a stereotypical treasure chest, sat on a ledge about two thousand feet down the side of the crater. It glittered with the emerald light of the radiation, and seemed to have a golden hue to it. The alien spotted it, and his eyes widened.
“You were right. There is something valuable here. That chest is the remains of a surface level dungeon. It must have formed when the explosion wiped it out.”
“Surface level dungeon? Like the sites of the Seven Seals?” Sam asked. “They were large concentrations of monsters within an artificially constructed landscape,” he continued, explaining to the alien what he was talking about.
“Exactly. Normally, dungeons are secreted away in a separate dimensional space, but sometimes they form on the surface of a planet as well. When they are defeated, they create a treasure chest rather than giving people items randomly. Something to do with the limitations of the System in realspace. In any case, there is certainly something of value in there, and by its hue, it is something quite good.”
Sam raised an eyebrow at the alien, but the man only gave him a stony faced stare. That was about as close to an apology that Sam was going to get, so he took it. Pyotr crossed his arms, and looked won into the crater, seeming to be taken in by the sight. Sam knew that he would get no further conversation out of the two, so he instead headed for the edge of the crater, ready to climb down. The others watched him anxiously, and he gave them a thumbs up as he descended beneath the crater wall.
As he exited their line of sight, all he could see was the greenish rock in front of him, with the cracks in it filled with powder. It was in those cracks that he placed his hands and feet, getting as sturdy a grip as he could on the wall.
The crater wall was surprisingly vertical, and there were few curves in the sides of the wall. This was good for him in that he would not have to do any upside down segments, but it also meant that he wouldn't be getting any sort of a break on his way down here. Then again, he hardly needed one, what with his massive strength and endurance.
It was slow going picking his way down the wall, and the heat kept ramping up and up as he went. By the time he was halfway to his goal, it was pushing a thousand degrees, which was quite annoying, even to him. For such a temperature to be spread across such a wide area, the amount of heat being generated at the base of the crater had to be truly immense. He would not survive going down there ever for a few seconds. It was lucky that he only had to go down a small amount of the crater’s side to reach the chest then.