His eyes widened as his body blinked away in the next instant, and the ground he had been standing on was smashed into a giant crater by millions of tons of force. Before he could react at the next location, a thick tail slammed into him head-on, nearly tearing him in half. His whole body twisted from the impact.
"Flashing around like that is really annoying," Belial said calmly. "But in this kind of environment, once I get used to it, I can kind of tell where you will flash to."
He did not understand the principle, but Belial felt it was about time to kill this guy. At first, he had only wanted to catch the other side and ask who had blown up his bed. How it had turned into this was something he could not figure out.
Spatial jumps were no longer useful, and after nearly being split apart several more times, he understood that this monster had found some way to predict the nodes of his jumps. It made him more curious, but also made things harder. At minimum, he needed to obtain some biological material, even a single scale or a drop of blood would do.
He had planned to retreat safely, but now that was no longer possible, so he had to use this last option. He would store it in this body first and retrieve it later. With that thought, flames ignited.
Every inch of his flesh and Magic turned into surging fire while regenerating at high speed, crazily squeezing out his power. The increasingly grotesque Greatsword, which had almost fused with his hand, separated again, and cracks appeared across his flesh and face. This was a Rift caused by his body failing to withstand the spatial Laws.
His body vanished from its spot and began flashing rapidly around the area, squeezing out his final strength to form Spatial Rend strikes. Other methods would not injure the opponent, and he only had one target. His figure flickered without pause, the air trembling with each appearance.
"You know, someone pretty similar once used a continuous flash like this on me," Belial said. "Forget it, take my internal radiation!"
A destructive light poured out from every part of Belial's body, filling every inch of the surrounding space without a single blind spot. It was refracted again by spatial Shard fragments, leaving nowhere to escape. Every corner of space was struck at once.
This unexpected move caught the opponent off guard, and layers of flesh and scales were peeled away as the massive body made of Red Dragon flesh rapidly shrank. Even though he hastily drew another spatial Rift to divert most of the power elsewhere, he still suffered serious injuries. That was fine, because as long as the goal was achieved, everything besides the most basic signs of life could be discarded.
"Found it."
Amid the rapid flashes and constant searching, he finally found the target. It was the only scale that had been scratched by an earlier Spatial Rend. In theory, it was also the weakest one, and because Belial had grown too fast and absorbed too much energy, there was a slight gap between his scales that had not fully closed.
Perfect defense had revealed a point so small it could be ignored. A flaw that was tiny beyond measure, but for him, it was enough. He swung his sword and flashed to the side, twisting through the air and unleashing all the remaining Battle Aura in this body, along with the Magic produced by burning Red Dragon flesh.
Under this special flesh structure, everything was converted at extremely high efficiency and wrapped around the blade. Even a casual swing tore at space through Rend. This was a strike so strong that even Lyles Edward himself, logging in personally, could not reproduce it.
The sound of blade colliding with flesh rang out together with a demonic roar. A massive spatial Rift at least thirty meters long appeared, dragging everything around it inside. The blade, already covered in Crack, extended jagged teeth and gnawed at that slightly thin scale, pouring in surging Battle Aura and burning flames.
Power enough to tear the earth into a Rift was actually locked in a stalemate with a single small scale. Hurry, hurry, it was almost there. He was about to get it, that blood.
In the span of an instant, the Dragon-Shaped Greatsword was already on the verge of collapse, and the toothed blade shattered into fragments. His eyes nearly bulged out as his tall body withered from overexertion, and his twisted face screamed in madness.
"Bang."
The tip of the blade finally snapped. At the same time, a pitch-black scale broke free, along with a single drop of dark red blood. "This is it!"
His body opened like it was being torn apart, revealing a gaping mouth as tentacles swept away the scale and blood. He forced himself to suppress his wild excitement. Waving the broken Greatsword, he tore open a spatial Rift and prepared to flee at once.
As long as he escaped with this thing, there would come a day when he could study it and find the weakness. Then he would definitely eat it. But at that moment, his eyes widened again.
A huge fist followed the spatial Rift and smashed straight through. The immense force shattered this ruined body into fragments, exposing parts wrapped around Lyles Edward inside, while the half-broken Greatsword was smashed completely, leaving only a bare hilt. The eye carving on it closed, tears of blood flowing down.
But even so, he laughed wildly with Lyles Edward's face. "I still succeeded! Hahahaha!" He clenched the bloodstained scale in his hand, and this crucial item was finally preserved. As long as he brought it back to the main body, as long as he did.
He looked at the scale again and instinctively sensed the information in the blood. He realized that it really was just a dragon beast, one that had never inherited a dragon soul, a mindless creature with a shattered soul. That was not what mattered most, because the blood within the scale had ignited into flame.
It was a flame of decay and destruction, like the final glimmer left after a star went out. Even a single drop of blood, with body and soul as one, could project power across distance and call upon Authority. Images of destruction spread across his consciousness, countless figures wailing in flames, the sun in the sky bleeding and withering, leaving only ashes behind.
The decaying Authority that stood above Laws descended equally upon the sun, the gods, everyone, and him as well. "No!" He did have ways to deal with attacks on will or soul, and in an emergency, he could throw out the body's original soul to take the hit.
But it was too late, because after seizing the body and then separating in haste, his imprint had become too deep to escape. The power transmitted by that single drop of blood was not enough to destroy the entire body, and there was no need for it to do so. This was an attack on consciousness itself, a pollution from a higher Authority that left no way out.
The moment that decaying aura was felt, it was as if countless years passed in an instant, and his soul released a final wail. Then came decay, weakness, and his mind sank into a Gold Rank stupor. In the end, nothing remained.
Belial pulled his fist back from the slowly closing Rift, and the rift that had been stuck there could finally heal. "So annoying, I was just a bit short of killing him," he said with a sigh of mild regret. His punch had missed the other guy's life by just a little, simply because his reach was not long enough.
"And this fight really cost me a lot," Belial added, looking over the battlefield that was shattered into fragments and filled with spatial Crack. Not only had his bed been blown up by his own anger, he had even lost a small scale and suffered such heavy injuries. The other side had only paid with most of a life, which felt like a terrible deal.
"Damn it, looks like there are way too many hidden experts in this Otherworld. Next time I see that guy, I will just blast him with a heat ray and send him off." He made another note in his little book and began looking around again. His gaze settled on the huge spatial Rift left behind by that massive slash.
"To be honest, when I saw that guy's look, I thought I had wandered onto the set of some demon realm next door," Belial muttered. "It felt like a little brother stealing his big brother's move list." As he complained, he reached out and touched it, and his fingers could actually pry at the edge, as if it could be pulled open.