The dense curtains of steam billowing up from the volcanic landscape served as the perfect cover for the sole human in the area, as he stalked from one magma ape to the next, dispatching them in various fashions, but usually without physically striking them a single time.
His invisible nullfield was only detected by those with the ability to sense mana, and even then, its presence would only be felt as a void in the world, a spot of absolute darkness where no mana can reach. This invisible serpent slithered across the distance, occasionally striking at the hearts of magma apes before they even knew of the existence of an intruder, their magma cores held in a grip of absolute ice, their very lifeforce disappearing as the invisible hand of death reaped their lives.
The deeper Lewis moved int the volcanic landscape, the stronger the apes became, but although they forge themselves with crushing heat, refining their stone bodies and purifying the liquid fire that courses through their veins, the nullfield ignored all of it, as it pierced their magical resistance and assaulted their hearts, each time refining his control and expertise in piercing their resistance.
He even tried to test if he could control what parts of the mana in their bodies would be eroded and which to leave be. Pushing his limits ever further, making it more difficult for himself after he figured out the best way to break their resistance.
After all, each time he grew proficient with his nullfield, he would gain a new level in the skill, but they had slowed considerably after he reached level 28 and could constantly bypass the apes magical resistance despite their gradually increasing levels. It seemed like their resistance didn't grow proportionally to their level, but was rather down to some other, less consistent variable. He had even noticed that one of the lower level apes had a stronger resistance than a higher leveled one. But even then, once he had figured out how to best push passed, those minor differences barely mattered.
To keep things challenging, he started selectively eradicating sections of mana in the ape's body, just like he had learned to do when constructing those traps. Although this was far more challenging, as the plants weren't fighting back. The apes were fighting like hell the moment he struck, both physically and magically, their mana rising up to try and crush his intrusion like antibodies protecting the host.
He could feel this was a partially instinctual response on the part of the apes, but they could also assist their bodies' innate defense mechanism by channeling their energy into the attack zone. this had the added effect of not only slowing his arcane nullfield by making it work overtime to purge the mana, but also somehow strengthening the metaphysical membrane he needs to pierce, making it far harder to maintain his nullfield inside of the ape's body without going for the kill.
But that was exactly what Lewis was looking for to push his nullfield skill even further. The progress was addicting, each time he to managed to use his nullfield in a more precise and clever way making the system acknowledge his progress with another skill level, making his dopamine go wild. It was like a video game, rewarding him for surpassing his limits, and he was loving it.
It was especially rewarding to Lewis as the results were tangible. All his life, he had been working his hardest at nearly every level, but rarely ever saw the fruits of his labor; some third party always swooping in and taking it from him. Be it money, freedom, or simply friends, Lewis had rarely experienced any of it, so seeing his hard work be so directly rewarded was a feeling he found particularly cathartic.
When the system first arrived and he had been tossed into a new world with patch and the others, his only thoughts had been on survival. His imagination and wonder had been sparked when witnessing magic in use, but even then, it was a jealous envy and distant fascination, like when he would dream of leaving his life behind and going to visit those exotic places on his moms calendar. Maybe even run away and stay there forever, where no one would be able to find him again.
It was a naive and unrealistic dream, but it was a flame of hope in the back of his mind that kept him going through some of the worst years of his life. That was what magic was to him, a ticket to greater things, a way to touch upon a higher power to solve his problems, just like those wizards in popular books.
It had always been an escape, a fantasy and an unobtainable dream. He was honestly less angry than he should be when he found out that he didn't have and never would be able to use mana. Because at the back of his mind, he had already lived this countless times. The near daily dreams where someone would step in and help him, or he would find a bundle of money and run away to another country. But each dream ended with the sad reality that it was and always would be nothing more than a dream. So seeing the magic the system promised him turned to ash in his mouth, he had already both, expected, and accepted that it was never something he could obtain. Just another delusional fantasy that can only happen to others, never himself. He had never experienced any sort of handout before, so why would he expect one now?
But despite all that, here he was, fighting monstrous creatures of rock and lava, wielding powers that could crush any mage. Because that's what he does. When the world kicks Lewis Caddwell, he gets back up and keeps going. He had never cracked before, and he never would. All his life, he had been used, abused and mistreated. No-one was their for him, his own mother the primary figure of his torment, her behavior and lifestyle as a drug addict putting him in constant danger and forcing him into a cycle of crime and abuse, forced to run drugs and take on extreme tasks that could have seen him killed countless times.
But he had never despair, never broken, for when the entire world is against you and you refuse to break, you become your own unshakable pillar. Doing whatever he can to survive and fight back against the crushing weight of the world.
But for the first time, as his skill grew stronger with each fallen ape, he realized that he might finally be making headway. At least, he was becoming stronger, strong enough that these indisputably strong creatures posed threat no him. Strong enough that he no longer feared what others might try and do to him, for he now wielded power that could strip away their magic and turn them into the helpless little boy that he used to be, reversing the roles for once as he held the upper hand.
And once he beat this secret trial and entered the second floor of the tutorial, he would figure out how to solidifying his spiritual physique and unlock an entirely new realm of power waiting just out of reach. Never again would he be helpless and bossed around like when he was all but sold off as a work mule by his mother to drug lords and gangsters. Never again would anyone else profit off of his efforts, he would make sure of it, mana or not, he would simply smother the magic of anyone that tried to stop him.
Just like these little magma monkeys.
Having reached the deeper sections of the volcanic region, Lewis was encountering apes with levels in the 30s, the magma ape general likely hanging about somewhere, but Lewis was anything but concerned.
During his trip into the steamy magma apes domain, he drastically increased his arcane nullfield's level, bringing it all the way to 35, as his anti-magic appendage was now as easy to control as his real arm, becoming a true extension of his body.
And just like when he had discovered he could destroy various mana constructs by attacking them in diverse ways, this also applied to his piercing of the apes magical resistance, allowing him to intrude within their bodies almost uncontested as he spiked his nullfield inside of them like a needle. Finding that entering through an unexpected angle was easiest, the major sections like head and heart possessing the greatest resistance. But snaking through the legs or back was substantially easier, allowing him to strategically impede the flow of mana in their bodies.
He had learned to entirely cut off the flow of energy to their legs, blocking the heat they channel through the lava veins in their bodies, effectively paralyzing it from the waist down. The ape furiously resisted the nullfield's blockage, expending a large amount of mana into its legs to get them to work again, but his nullfield had become far more responsive and versatile, able to completely halt the apes attempt to reconnect its lower body.
That was when he discovered the reason the lava veins were set up both on the inside and outside of their bodies, as the magically charged heat from the ground continued to bathe the ape in intense heat, but with the lava veins severed from its circulatory system, its lower body started collapsing as the outside rock grew hotter while the inside of its lower body cooled down, causing a temperature imbalance and turning the inside of its legs all brittle, breaking its glistening obsidian black bones like candy, its legs crumbling apart under its own weight.
It was pretty horrible, the magma ape screeching in shock as it tumbled to the ground with only its upper body remaining, so Lewis put it out of its misery by destroying its magma core.
That was another thing about the magma apes he found interesting. Similarly to the nature apes, its heart was the source of its power. Or in this case, the main reservoir since it absorbed most of its energy in the form of magical heat from the ground. But when it needs to regulate the temperature in its body, it uses that reservoir to equalize the internal and external temperatures of its body, to avoid what just happened with the bisected ape.
But it doesn't simply equalize the temperature, it also hardens the volcanic rock of its body, refining and condensing it like a hammer and anvil, repeatedly heating it up to ridiculous temperatures, before hammering it into a denser shape and removing impurities as well as optimizing the slow of liquid lava though its body to transport said mana through.
Out of all the apes so far, these were the least ape-like, resembling more a living forge than anything else. But that meant that any temperature differences were a nightmare for these creatures, so someone like the tidal ape general might have been a real threat to them. At least, as long as her water can over come the insanely hot environment. And it wasn't simply the air that was hot, the very ground itself was like walking across hot glass.
This was due to the strange mix of mana in the air and the apes bodies. It was something he had begun identifying thanks to his intrusion into the magma apes bodies, as they were separating out the complex mix of magical energies in the environment and filtering it within them.
At the start, all he could sense with his mana detection was a noisy jumble of sensation that could all be boiled down to HOT, or BURNS. Very basic and obvious stuff that he really didn't need his mana detection to tell him. But the closer he looked, the more the individual flavors of mana in this hellish landscape became apparent. And the closer he looked, the more he discovered and learnt. Which, in turn, allowed him to better peal back the workings of the mana dense apes, feeding that clinical fascination for the creatures strange mana biology and the functions of mana within them.