I tried standing up, but my right leg didn't want to cooperate with me. This was very bad. I had no idea where the wolf was at right now, and I couldn't really move either. The environmental heat of the magma caverns had already started to fix up my leg, but it would take a good amount of seconds before I could use it again.

  Valuable seconds that I did not have. I was still in the ashy domain of the humongous wolf. It knew exactly where I had been flung to, and it also knew that I was hurt. It shouldn't know that I can regenerate so quickly, though. Maybe I could abuse that somehow?

  Seeing that I was still very alive, the wolf didn't waste much time before attacking again. As I saw it again, I noticed that my defense hadn't been entirely useless. The flesh on his maw, which he used to bite onto my flaming shield, showed visible signs of burn damage. While the wolf, as an inhabitant of the area surrounding the pools of magma, probably had quite a lot of fire resistance, it wasn't immune to fire and magma.

  This meant two things for me, both very important. First things first, I had a way of hurting the creature. If I could hurt it, I could kill it. While I didn't know if I could kill it before it killed me, I wasn't close to as helpless against the wolf as our class had been against that spider.

  On the other hand, I knew for a fact that I could survive indefinitely inside of the magma. If things were truly starting to go wrong, I would just escape into the magma. It couldn't possibly follow me in there, not if biting onto my shield was already enough to inflict serious burn wounds.

  That wasn't entirely riskless, though. If I went too far in our fight and missed my last chance to flee before it could effectively prevent that, I would inevitably die.

  Even so, no matter the risk, I had to take this fight as far as possible. It had already been days since I first escaped the magma, and it was the only opponent here I had seen that was even remotely close to being defeatable. While it obviously wouldn't be as bad as death, fleeing now would waste a lot of valuable time and an opportunity I wasn't sure I'd ever get again.

  Now that I had decided that, there was still a two-meter-tall wolf charging at me. I quickly reformed my sword and shield again and faced off against the creature with my limping leg. This time, it eyed my newly generated armaments carefully. Seeing me quickly reforming them had apparently surprised the creature enough to make it abandon its charge. Maybe it thought that they were some actual weapons and that disarming me was enough to deal with them for good? It had seen me create them to begin with, though.

  I didn't know, but I didn't particularly care either. It had stopped its immediate attack, and that was good enough for me.

  Then, without even a single sign of warning, the wolf just disappeared right in front of me. Like it was suddenly erased from this world, it just stopped existing. Its storm of ash was still going strong, though, so I just stood there, wary and confused at the same time.

  Just as suddenly as it had disappeared, it appeared again. This time, however, not in front of me, but somewhere behind my back. I didn't notice that, though, at least not until one of its claws sliced open my back.

  Shit, it could teleport? Why hadn't anyone told me this! Goddamnit, my leg had just barely healed, and I already had a wound even worse than that. It was quite a lot worse than that actually.

  The wound it made was far from being just superficial. If it wasn't for my spine, it would have sliced me into two. While it did prevent the claw from separating my lower half from my upper half, I did not get away unharmed. The slash from the claw had destroyed something very important down there, which now stopped me from feeling my legs altogether. If it wasn't for my high [Pain Resistance], the pain would have been unbearable.

  Still, it wasn't pleasant in any way. I could still feel every inch of pain that my torn flesh and the broken ribs and spine caused me. With just a single attack from it, I was already close to death. I thought that I'd stand a chance against the wolf, but I was clearly mistaken. That thing was way stronger than I was, and fighting it in its home domain had been incredibly reckless.

  Not being able to use my legs to escape the ashen wolf, I used a rough application of [Candlelight] to fling myself into the vague direction of a magma pool. I had moved with that skill before, back when I was first stuck inside of the magma, but it was a very rough kind of movement. While I had some control over the direction, it was extremely imprecise when I wasn't under the magma. Down there, movement was sluggish, and I had used a sort of constant pulling to slowly move around. Here, I instead used something that was closer to a semi-controlled explosion to catapult me away into a general direction.

  I still couldn't see very far through the thick ash, but I remembered where the closest pool was relative to my position. The first fling wasn't quite enough to reach there, so I immediately did it again the moment I roughly impacted the rocky floor.

  A serene feeling of relief flooded me as I then slowly sank into the magma. I didn't know where the wolf was at, but I didn't care about it anymore. I was alive and safe, and that was all that mattered right now. The magma had long since stopped dealing serious damage to me and rapidly started repairing my body instead. [Photo-Thermic Synthesis] was truly a godlike skill, at least in this type of environment.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  As I lay there, sprawled out in the lava, I couldn't help but think about what just happened. Maybe I didn't take all of this seriously enough. I came really close to dying there. If it had attacked my head or neck instead of my back, or knocked me unconscious in some other way, I would have almost certainly died. My regeneration is only powerful if I actually have time to regenerate. If something kills me instantly, I still die.

  Ah damn, I really hate it here. The omnipresent heat is nice, but that's it already. Everything else fucking sucks. Stupid overly strong monsters. I didn't mention it before because it wasn't that important, but the air down here also stank beyond belief. It wasn't a particularly strong smell or anything, but it was always there, just waiting to catch you off guard.

  It was a faint smell of rotten eggs that was enough to cause permanent annoyance. Luckily there were some places where it smelled less like it, but I couldn't possibly spend all of my time there. This area is very volcano-like in general. It's probably that distinctive smell from the sulfuric gases that are commonly present around areas like active volcanoes.

  By now, I really missed the way the gentle breeze felt as it weaved across the rolling meadows. I missed the feeling of relaxing in a cleansing bath after an exhausting day. I missed the way that lying in the sun made a comfortable warmth spread all over your body.

  The magma was also hot, but not comfortable, at least not in the way the sun was. It had long since passed the turning point between destruction and healing, but I still wasn't immune to it. I didn't really care much about pain anymore, a boon of a high-level [Pain Resistance], but pain didn't suddenly turn pleasant or anything. In that sense, pain wasn't unlike any of the other senses. Musky scents or blinding lights weren't enough to strongly impair you in any way, but they were still extremely annoying.

  I get why nobody ever wants to come down here voluntarily. Imagine if you didn't have a godlike passive healing skill that freed you from having to eat food or drink water, along with no good resistance to heat and no safe place to sleep like the outskirts of the magma pools were for me. It would suck to the point that it could drive people insane.

  Unfortunately for me, I was kind of stuck down here. I could survive somewhat well here among all the invigorating heat and magma, but if I left here in an attempt to reach the surface, I'd have to heal from my own fire. While that would work for some time, I'd lose the benefit of the seemingly unending mana I had available here, which would make me run out very quickly in any other environment. Until I was stronger, leaving this place was not an option.

  But getting stronger very much depended on my slaying monsters. Which I could not do because they were all vastly more powerful than I was. In other words, I was stuck. Like a bird in a cage and a flower among tall trees, there was no escape. What should I do? How do I get out of here?

  Really, my only option is to fight against that wolf again, no matter how much I do not want to do that. For that, I need to think of another tactic, though. What I tried the last time, the flaming sword and shield, was okay in theory, but I lacked the physical power to make use of them. Trying to actually wield armaments like that was probably instinctive to some extent, but very stupid for someone like me. I could already completely manipulate the malleable fire through intent. Why did I ever think that using my weak physical body to do the same but worse was in any way smart?

  I didn't have the greatest range in which I could effectively use [Candlelight], but it wasn't zero. Realizing my missed potential, I immediately got to work. First of all, I needed mobility. I didn't have a designated movement skill, so I would have to get creative somehow.

  I had already moved myself with this skill before, but those methods weren't effectively usable in the long term. Actually, I think I already have an idea. I had seen something like that before in some fiction back on Earth, and it could actually work for me.

  At this point, I hadn't been in the magma for long, so raising myself to the surface didn't take long. Without delay, I formed another solid stick of fire in the air above the magma. It was similar to the simplified flaming sword I had made before, but a bit longer and flatter. A bit like a skateboard or a snowboard, which made sense as it was supposed to fulfill a similar purpose.

  Testingly, I carefully tried pulling myself up onto the board. It sank down a bit as my body weight was progressively added onto it, and I had to push my intent harder to keep it afloat. After a couple of seconds of struggling, I was fully on top of the board, dangling my feet from one of the sides.

  I did it, I was actually flying. How ironic, actually. My class was literally called [Firefly], but I didn't get anything out of the box to fly with. Instead, the option for that was just a bit hidden. After all, what kind of a stupid class would [Firefly] be if there was no way to fly with it?

  I giggled a bit in surreal excitement as I slowly started gliding across the pool of magma. This is fantastic, I should have thought about that sooner. Actually, though, I doubt that this would be very usable without the environmental heat constantly regenerating my mana. I couldn't estimate how much mana it took for me to stay afloat, not here at least, but it probably wouldn't be low. Not much in any given moment, but a constant drain at a quite significant rate.

  The mental strain of it all also wasn't something I could just gloss over. While I hadn't felt it at first, it made itself known after playing around for barely even a minute. Constantly pushing against the weight of my body while also moving the board around was mentally exhausting.

  It started with a slight thumping sensation at the back of my head, but it quickly developed into a full-blown headache that forced me to stop and sink back into the magma. Sadly, though, mental strain was not something the soothing magma could fix.

  While that prevented me from using that method of transportation for anything meaningful right now, I already thought of an alternative I'd have to try out later. The magma was significantly more viscous than the air was. If I laid the board directly onto the magma, I could potentially offset some of the weight I was carrying into the molten rock below. In theory, it wasn't unlike a surfboard on water. Whether or not it actually worked like I imagined, I'd have to find out when this goddamn headache finally went away.

  Ugh.