Chapter 1241: Chapter 1240: Taste Of The Labyrinthian

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    "By the..! The longer we''re here the stronger this damn storm gets! What is going on?!"

    Anput''s complaint fell on deaf ears as we continued to push through the sandstorm, Draka and I pouring out so much mana that we had been forced to drain a potion each just to keep ourselves from passing out - not even from the mana drain itself, but the tax it demanded of our bodies alongside the march.

    Time losing meaning had become far too frequent in these last few weeks for me to be unaccustomed to it, but even then I simply had no idea if we had only been marching for a couple of minutes or if it had been an hour; either was terrible if I was being completely honest.

    The amount of debris being picked up by the storm had only continued to grow as time moved forwards, and now it wasn''t only quartz being whipped through the air at who knows what speed - now we were getting hit with the dismembered corpses of various monsters alongside all of the parts that should have been attached to them.

    Arms, wings, heads, bones and chunks of flesh to name a few all slammed into the crystalline barrier of Ice Mana, splattering against our protection and smearing a paste of organic mass wherever they landed, with the bones and talons always leaving cracks that required immediate repair.

    The fact that those parts survived being transported here amongst hundreds of thousand if not millions of grains of quartz likely had Anput salivating a little, at least if she still had the ability to divert some of her brain towards something like creating armor and weapons.

    Our first real encounter inside of the Labyrinthian wasn''t even with a monster or a group of them, but instead with the land itself, which... was likely fitting, considering everything we had heard, and yet at the same time it was raising even more questions for me about what had earned this place its reputation.

    In short bursts I could do so much, but this was a marathon that I hadn''t properly prepared for and it showed; my arms felt like hell on earth, my head was throbbing hard enough that I believed someone was hammering it for fun, my vision was blinking in and out as those grayish white sheets of sand zipped straight at us...

    My legs felt like lead as I dragged them forwards, my body simply hurt, my mind pleaded for this insanity to stop, my spirit demanded I go ahead and break already...

    All from just maintaining a barrier that was strong enough to block wind and sand.

    Not to block monsters, not to block an attack, but to block the elements themselves...

    It was beyond tiring and draining, but it had to be done, so the moment that the white faded away and was replaced by a vibrant purple glow I almost leapt for joy and dropped the barrier instantly, only for my elation to come crashing down as a roar slammed against the barrier just as hard as the winds were.

    The transition from quartz desert to what looked like an amethyst jungle was already drastic enough, but now a gigantic tiger with two heads was looming over us like it had been waiting all along for someone to be stupid enough to come here, and now that we were here, well...

    It was hungry, obviously, and it might as well just go ahead and eat us now that we were stepping onto its territory.

    From one hell to another I just had to smile wryly before doubling my efforts in maintaining the barrier as two separate balls of bluish flame gathered in the maw of the monster before us, realizing we had really only gotten a small taste of what the Labyrinthian had to offer.