The light made him shut his eyes for an instant. With a cough, the figure spat out burnt blood and organs, and the charred body split open like a shell, regrowing limbs. Taking advantage of that brief moment, it crawled across the ground in a twisted scramble.
At the same time, the grotesque Dragon-Shaped Greatsword stabbed into the ground, sprouting tendrils that drilled downward. It found something. With a violent pull, the sword dragged up a scorched corpse from the magma, still carrying traces of red scales, and began devouring and merging with it.
Most of its Magic and flesh had been blown away in the earlier self-destruction, but as an anchor for the descent of the true body's power, this was barely enough. After being struck by Authority of Decay, the main body had already taken over the vision and noticed this unusual dragon beast. What came next was simple.
Kill it, eat it, or at least bring something back. Greed surged, driving the greatsword to consume the remaining Red Dragon corpse faster. A chilling sound followed, as the remaining mass was completely absorbed into the blade.
The burned half of its body regenerated rapidly, covering itself in dark red scales and claws. A vicious clawed wing stretched from its back, and a thick dragon tail swayed behind it. Rust-like scales mixed in unevenly, but its presence and strength were clearly greater than before.
Its form grew taller and more monstrous, spines and dragon scales spreading across its body. Solid Magic flames even ignited over its flesh, making it look like a humanoid demon. When it lifted the greatsword, cracks like shattered glass spread through the air, and it turned its head, extending a forked tongue as it drooled greedily at the Black Dragon.
Come on, do it again. I will eat you. While the boss was entering its second phase, Belial quietly adjusted his stance, straightening up as the glare faded, since the flash had not affected him much.
Seeing the uglier new form and the clearly stronger presence, Belial gave it two half-hearted claps in his heart and grinned. "To be fair, your second phase looks pretty ugly. If you think this will beat me, you are very wrong." He reminded it calmly that the challenger was still the one in front of him.
His wings beat, sending out gales and hail, and even without the environmental boost of the Northlands and without full strength, Freezing Breath appeared once more. The temperature plunged so low that the lava battlefield looked like deep winter. The icy storm swept over, and after a brief flicker of surprise, contempt showed in its eyes.
It swung the sword. This time it was not a mere Crack, but a true tear, like a bug carved into the world itself. The freezing storm was sucked in as if into a funnel, spilling into a place beyond nothingness, while the figure behind the Rift remained unharmed.
Having devoured the remains of the Red Dragon gave it enough strength to channel even more power, pushing its spatial control to a higher level. Belial widened his eyes slightly. Then it crouched low like a true beast, shattering the ground underfoot and charging forward at a speed that ripped the air apart.
Its speed jumped past seven Mach in an instant, but for Belial, tracking it was still easy. Calmly, he threw a million-ton punch. Its pupils shrank as it sensed power even greater than before, and while it was stronger now, that did not mean its body could withstand this blow.
So that earlier strength was not even the limit of this monster. Was this bloodline really just a dragon beast? At this speed, it could not dodge at all, and taking the hit cleanly would mean death.
That was only if it hit. Another Rift was cut open, then closed in the next instant, just enough to pull it out of the battlefield and reappear elsewhere. "Blink?" Belial said with interest as he followed up with several heavy punches.
It kept tearing open spatial Rift to jump, closing the distance more and more. After dodging a sweeping tail, it blinked again, appearing directly in the blind spot behind Belial's head. No one had eyes on the back of their head.
It opened its mouth wide with Rend, laughing wildly as the greatsword prepared an even stronger spatial slash. But Belial did not need to see with his eyes. "You counter blink with prediction."
As soon as the opponent vanished, you hit behind you, that was how it always went. Besides, at this speed, it could not escape the perception of Energy Field. Belial's tail snapped upward with impossible flexibility, and the sharp crystal spear at its tip fired a crystallized blast straight back.
There was no sound, because it was faster than sound. Before the greatsword could fall, a Rift appeared around its body. As it sensed something strike from behind, an eerie, all-encompassing force seized it again, crushing it like a heavy blow.
It froze for a split second. "Hit!" The blast landed cleanly, and the tail followed through, smashing the bleeding, half-bodied figure into the ground and carving out a crater. Its organs spilled from the upper body, and to escape the spreading force, it had been forced to cut itself in half and discard the lower portion as a Clone body.
It screamed, but it was not dead yet. Before the eye, flesh fibers and buds spread from the upper body, regenerating at an exaggerated speed and forming a new, bloody lower half. "Tough thing," Belial muttered, seeing how close it had come to dying for good.
While he was thinking, it dragged itself upright again, its body mostly repaired. Its expression was cold, yet even more mad and greedy than before. It was too strong, and it had to eat him.
"I have to eat you!" The madness overflowed, though its mind still held together. Fighting head-on would only get it killed by this monster shaped like a Black Dragon, so it aimed for the minimum goal.
If it could not kill or eat the opponent, it would at least take a drop of blood or a scale. It compressed all remaining chances into a single strike. There was only one chance, and it was enough.
Gathering all its power, it twisted its waist and set the greatsword to one side. Belial raised a brow as he watched the stance, which looked a lot like a draw slash. Thinking back to the spatial cuts, he had a strong feeling something familiar was coming, and he almost wanted to see it.
In the next moment, his vision was sliced into shattered Shard. The surrounding terrain split apart as well. Space broke like a mirror, falling away into countless Shard fragments.
Countless dense slashes appeared across the battlefield in an instant, covering every inch of space around them.
Belial felt like his body could not move for a moment, which struck him as strange. He put away the Greatsword, stabbed it into the ground, and took deep breaths. All around him were dense marks that looked like the world had been sliced apart, but the corrective force of the world was already repairing them at high speed.
Those countless Spatial Rend strikes were never meant to directly attack Belial. After all, even before this, a single Spatial Rend could only scratch a line on this monster's scales, so how could such scattered wide-area slashes work. The real goal was to destroy the basis of this space, since the existence and movement of matter depended on space itself. Put simply, he had forced this map into a bug similar to an Air Wall, where no matter how broken a player's stats were, they could not break the underlying logic.
Creating this temporary bugged zone had cost a huge amount of power and resources, and it was being repaired by the world at an alarming speed, but the time gained was enough. As long as he could take some flesh or blood from this monster and study it, he would eventually find a way to deal with it. All he needed to do now was walk over and use the sword.
"!!!"
His body stepped back several paces, driven by pure instinctive fear. That monster's head seemed to have turned and was looking straight at him. How was that possible when the spatial methods he controlled should not be shaken without him even noticing.
For a moment, he wanted to convince himself it was an illusion, but his dragon eyes had far too strong dynamic vision to lie. Worse still, Belial was not cooperating at all. The earlier signs confirmed it, and this really did resemble something like Dimensional Rend, making his eyes blur for an instant.
It was only a blur.
"That scared me. I thought it was something serious, but it did not even scrape my skin."
Then the massive Black Dragon charged over, as if ignoring the most basic spatial laws of the world and the foundations that matter relied on. This was impossible, because he could not sense any Laws or other power at all. Unless this thing was not a creature formed by the world's underlying Laws, how could it ignore spatial force like this.