Overpowered Wizard B3 Ch104: Big Bad Berserk Polymorph

<You’ve entered the Hunter Gorer Super Dungeon (Mythical-Level 160)>

<Beware! Super Dungeons are more difficult than normal dungeons. You are currently in a Super Dungeon that has defeated all challengers. None have made it to the Super Dungeon Boss. You have a one-use teleportation to exit the dungeon.>

<Do you wish to use the teleportation exit? Yes or no?>

Dungeons were fascinating.

They were worlds within worlds. Places bound within their own rules, following the greater will of the System.

To enter one led to facing a natural creator god, because, essentially, that was the nature of dungeon cores – little gods packaged into pearly orbs that wanted to defend their home and create more obstacles and monsters. And inside of a dungeon, their domain, the little gods could reign supreme once given enough time to grow.

And some of those little gods had years and years of practice and preparation to keep their winning streak going strong.

So when Zarian landed feet first, taking in the notifications before dismissing them to scan his surroundings, he expected little out of the first room. It looked like another jungle themed cavern, but with less steam and claws, and more of a purple gloom in the air.

Simple place. A little on the quiet side, though. No worries. Para’s enormous feet crashing down behind him, crushing plant matter into pulp and shaking the area was a decent way to let the locals know of their arrival if they hadn’t known already.

He even smiled confidently when Para’s kaiju body fell into a crouch, posed and ready to defend him from all threats.

The sentiment was appreciated, but it was only the first room, so they should be fine.

At the .2 second mark of entering a new dungeon, Zarian noticed his Devourer of Secrets and Stories was failing to grasp the hidden mechanics of the area. Even the soft-felt bushes around his shins were resistant to giving up their secrets and stories.

At the .6 second mark, he looked up to evaluate their location with his own eyes again.

At the .7 second mark, an unidentifiable flying object flew at mach speeds for his chest.

Para slammed her kaiju hand in the way, but the object phased through her hand, ripped a hole through Zarian’s aura and sorcery, and punctured the right side of his chest.

It exited out of his back in an explosion of gore.

Numerous arteries, the right side of his heart, and his right lung got shredded up. Half of his rib cage was scattered in a bloody splatter behind him that wet the soft-felt bushes and the claws on Para’s feet.

The pain was nearly blinding, but Zarian’s Willpower and willful traits kept him locked into the fight.

By the .8 second mark, Zarian finally had eyes on the threat: a humanoid monster with a boar’s head. It was twelve feet tall and armed with throwing spears it carried in a long quiver with one hand, the other hand already throwing another spear.

Para activated every emergency ward and force-generating array to disrupt the projectile. None of it worked. It ripped through magic and phased through a three-hundred-foot kaiju that was slamming her fists down.

Zarian took matters into his own hand and used Super Speed Force +2 to throw himself aside, which was faster to activate than casting Void Paradise while he was still in shock. The javelin changed its path instantly, unwilling to let its target get free, but it did fall short of killing him.

He felt his right shoulder got devastated instead, his arm hurled aside, his right side becoming an even messier anatomical scene of destruction, barely held together by aura, vitality, and healing arrays.

None of that was as great as having a stellar healer like Gilbert, but it kept Zarian in the fight to finish prepping a spell and finally retaliate by the .9 second mark.

Para was also going on the attack, throwing all of her weight down on the boar-headed monster, whose twelve feet in height was tiny compared to Para.

A blue-green shockwave of aura pushed against Para’s mass without slowing her much. Then a second shockwave, this one green-yellow, slowed Para a little further, but her hand was already coming down with claws aimed to rake and divide.

The third shockwave, this one yellow-orange, was quiet and not as forceful. The explosive blaze and bright light seemed to snuff away as Para’s hand closed around the boar monster with a crushing finality.

Then right at the 1 second mark, Para’s entire hand exploded, all the way up to elbow, her whole body thrashed backward by a release of potent force and aura.

The boar monster was juiced up with the unyielding power of Aura Ignition/Third Stage. That was Zarian’s cue to drop the monster into the void with all his gumption, ripping the control of realms and dimensions free from the dungeon.

Doing so wasn’t a cheap maneuver, but the aura expense was a price he was very willing to pay.

And victory wasn’t yet his.

On both fronts, from the dungeon and the boar monster, Zarian felt his Void Paradise struggle.

The dungeon kept interfering with its own magic over dimensions and realms. And the boar monster was ripping and goring its way through eldritch challengers while on the other side of the veil.

Zarian looked up at Para’s collapsed form and felt her trust without having to ask. She knew what he would do next and accepted it. Zarian didn’t second guess himself, either.

Before the dungeon and the boar monster demolished his Void Paradise spell, Zarian summoned all of his grimoires for more wizarding prowess. Gator growled. Voidling orbited. Black rattled. And Morph fell into his left hand and opened his pages wide, ready to be used.

Pointing Morph up at his loyal kaiju, Zarian cast the spell made from the combination of Big Bad Polymorph and Animate The Thing. The result was called Big Bad Berserk Polymorph. And what it would do to Para might just end up killing Zarian if he was too slow on the follow-up.

<Big Bad Berserk Polymorph (Mythical): Don’t use this spell unless you don’t have much of a choice. The end results can animate an object into an abhorrent monstrosity of mass destruction. Or it can take an already powerful creature and transform them into a living doomsday device that will surely backfire on you. To even use this spell costs more than aura. It costs life energy and very well may kill you. You’ve been warned. Scales doubly with Willpower, Wonder, and Mysticism.>

Zarian felt his aura drain halfway. He felt his already endangered life energy drop even lower. His vision shook from the rapid energy depletion, and his soul felt shifty, which would’ve been concerning if it wasn’t for the Divine Revival Charm.

It was at that moment, as Zarian poured magic from Void Paradise into Para’s transformation to alter it even further, and make her even scarier and deadlier, that he noticed his Divine Revival Charm was inactive.

It was not something most people would check on until the charm was activated, saving one’s life. Yet he noticed its inactivation even though he hadn’t died yet. The only explanation could be found in the spear or the enemy or the dungeon itself. Something canceled divine revivals here.

That would require a divine power.

A part of Zarian found that interesting. This place was the most murderhobo dungeon Zarian had ever faced, and he was the one guy in the universe nobody wanted dead unless they were sickos.

Then all of Zarian’s limited focus snapped back to Para as her transformation neared its ending. It was time to cheat, which had Zarian dropping Morph and blitzing his way through hand signs with only his left.

“Lock,” he rasped at the end of the ritual, catching the berserk rage before it took over Para completely.

He did it right before Para reached into the cavity where half of his chest and arms were gone. Her claws stopped an inch away from snatching his heart away while she looked into his eyes.

<Twenty Master Locks Sealing Style (Mythical): You don’t need tools or items to lock in your sealing style anymore. You are the master locks. Your gestures, magic, and/or aura can apply the locks masterfully to yourself or to your targets as long as you know what you’re locking down with this sealing style. Doing so grants you +100% Willpower, +100% Agility, +100% Wonder.>

The absolute training had incorporated sorcery studies first and foremost. But that wasn’t all. Ruvaria had ensured Zarian’s approach to his darkness and his sealing style went through intense refinement.

Through sheer practice and hard work, he’d advanced the old Bearer of the Twenty Dark Locks Sealing Style into the Twenty Master Locks Sealing Style. He could do more than just apply power locks to himself – he could do it to others as long as he understood what and how he was locking something.

The ‘how’ usually required his aura and some sealing know-how condensed into ‘locks’ on specific powers or effects, sometimes as large as an entire ability. In this case, Zarian targeted the ‘berserk’ consequence, because it was literally baked into the spell. He was the one who’d studied it, engrained it, and channeled it. So, of course, he could intentionally lock it.

That didn’t mean the targeted powers wouldn’t challenge those locks. Big Bad Berserk Polymorph was a willful spell that wanted to crash out, and it wore against the lock Zarian placed on the berserk part.

It would most definitely break free against one lock.

Zarian applied twenty of them, maxing out the limit of his sealing style, subduing the spell’s berserk nature fully. The trade-off was reducing Para’s new overall power drastically … but even then, this new form of her was vastly stronger than the kaiju form, even if it was puny in comparison.

“Zarian, this body … feels remarkable,” Para said, looking down at her hands and her feet, each digit tipped by claws. Then her eyes roved over her humanoid limbs and other parts. “It is solid and magical. It is … pure insanity.”

She looked like a red reptilian version of him, but as a girl. A snake-like tail swayed and whipped from behind her. Her hair came down in flowing and scaled locks. There were patches of scale that covered the feminine bits while she stood naked at six feet tall, his height.

The most interesting part wasn’t her physical form getting condensed from three hundred feet to six feet as a unique alteration from polymorph. It was that she didn’t have a personal level, nor could Zarian identify much more than this hovering above her.

<Unable to Identify Unknown Quality.>

That … was new. That … was a sign.

Zarian tried not to stare, since they were running out of time. He felt out the magic humming off Para’s powerful body, which sent out eldritch ripples, intense bodily heat, nauseating curses, and the familiar buzz of runic magic. Basically, she was an absolute unit.

And she was still attached to his soul as his skill. He was pretty sure Para could leave the body like leaving a suit and store it away in her pocket dimension to bring out whenever she wanted.

But even if she stayed in this form, their attachment as host and phantom felt stronger somehow. They could sync up better this way, which would need some practice to reorientate themselves. Practice that they couldn’t exactly afford now.

At the very least, it was an improvement all across the board.

And there was more raw power waiting to be accessed behind the twenty locks. As long as Zarian and everyone he cared about could keep safe from Para going berserk.

But that was neither here nor there. Zarian was close to dying. And he couldn’t revive.

“Can you defend me? Or should we take the teleportation exit?” Zarian asked, making the best use out of having one lung.

Before Para could answer, the dungeon and boar monster broke Void Paradise, which came with a displeasurable feedback for Zarian. A sound like the world was screaming ripped through the air as a tear in space-and-time opened up and closed behind a bore monster covered in the aura flames of Third Ignition.

The yellow-orange energy shone like the light of a newborn star, blinding Zarian, chasing away the darkness, and laying upon him a deadly impression.

The Third Ignition, the stabilization of the overall technique, bent reality toward the ideal that the monster would do nothing less but kill all hunters in a bloody and painful fashion. The moment it set its sight on Zarian again, it was already in his face with a spear thrust at the wizard to gore him and kill him.

Consequences be damned.

Para intervened again, her body humming with a storm of powers morphed into her new flesh. She grabbed the shaft, planted her bare feet into the dungeon floor, and yanked the ignited boar monster to a halt.

The spear fell a foot short from Zarian who took the opportunity to back up. Reality shook with confusion, and the boar monster’s Third Ignition wavered, as if taken aback by someone else being physically opposing.

There was a lapse of action from the boar monster as it stood there surprised by Para. That was enough time for Zarian to unlock Five Percent Darkness and shoot the boar in the head with a beam.

It was not a large beam.

It was only the width of a dime in thickness. And it was not a beam that would destroy worlds or landscapes. There was no need for such destruction.

The point of Zarian’s darkness was to consume and destroy his targets, and his targets alone. The moment its job was done, the beam could go about as darkness should, an absence of all things.

Zarian’s overwhelming power was to take darkness and make more out of it. So returning it to its natural state was a given. But until it served its purpose, a beam that represented five percent of Overwhelming Darkness had the power to shoot through a Lesser World and reach the other side easily.

The boar’s head scattered into atoms.

Its body took a step back. Then it dropped the spear Para had latched onto and shaped its ignited aura into energy javelins that thrust at Zarian.

The javelins rammed into a Five Percent Darkness Wall that shook the starting area. More and more aura-ignited javelins crashed into Zarian’s dark wall, but none could break through while he cast another spell.

With its cover spread open, Black’s pages emitted a dark red and ruddy light on the verge of brown. The spell coming to fruition had come from combining Breath of Destruction (which was originally a skill called Super Destruction Flame Force) with Burning Blood Blast.

<Mega Desolation Blood Inferno (Mythical): Cast this on a bleeding enemy and turn them into an explosion of destruction magic and blood magic that spreads like an inferno. The flames will make other vulnerable enemies suffer the same fate and spread the inferno further. The flames will also grant you and allies life energy and increased vitality as long as there are enemies to desolate. Can only be used once every long rest.>

Brownish sparks appeared from the bleeding neck between the shoulders of the headless boar monster. Then the sparks ignited and became a brown and ruddy gout shooting up hundreds of feet into the air.

The desolation flames concentrated upward because the boar monster’s yellow-orange aura ignition was preventing the body from being completely consumed and blasted apart. But that focus on preservation from the flames opened up to retaliation – Para flipping the spear around and stabbing it into the monster’s groin.

Zarian dropped the darkness wall and slashed a thin, hypersonic jettison of darkness from the hip to the shoulder, splitting the creature apart. The new blood ignited and spread the brown flames even further, yet the boar monster kept standing on nothing but legs and what remained of the left side of its torso.

It even tried to rush past Para and smash Zarian to pieces with a punch.

Para wasn’t having any of that. She moved even faster, shoulder-checking the monster and sending it flying into the wall far away.

That left Zarian with plenty of space and time to line up his next shots. He knee-capped the boar monster before removing its last arm, leaving its headless and limbless torso to stay put in the soft-felt foliage.

Finally, its Third Ignition petered out. The monster gave in to the desolation flames and exploded, with a big wave of brown flames spreading everywhere.

Zarian sighed with relief as his dangerously low life energy rose quickly and his vitality became supercharged. His injured right side healed faster, though it wasn’t an instant relief.

“Zarian, there’s more coming,” Para said. “I can sense something like a murderous intent from them somehow.”

It hadn’t even been a full minute, and the Hunter Gorer Super Dungeon was becoming a menace.

Zarian took the best option.

He accepted the teleportation exit and went back outside with Para.