Belial could not recall shedding any scales, and he always cleaned the battlefield carefully after fights. The only samples taken from him before were a little blood and some scrapings, so this scale puzzled him. Entering the user space, he immediately spotted a familiar figure, the horned girl he had met before, though her horns were gone now.
Her state was even worse than last time, so he healed her first. Turning his head, he saw another familiar middle-aged face and finally understood where the scale had come from. It was the one cut off long ago when he first crossed paths with that little dragonman.
Seeing that the scale had replaced a little girl's heart made him curse the cruelty of whoever had done it. He felt his instinct absorbing matter and energy to repair itself and quickly stopped, knowing the girl would die if it continued. Even strangers, especially cute ones, got priority points with him.
He stood up, brushed away the man beside him, and looked into the distance. He realized this was another case of old and new users mixed together. Narrowing his eyes, he sensed the presence of the old man he wanted most to kill, along with someone else he vaguely recognized.
He remembered that person as an innocent passerby dragged into the Rodan instance last time. That one barely counted as an acquaintance. Checking the past light and dark records, Belial paused when he saw who had torn out the heart.
"I have decided," he said. "What started as testing new tech with a new user just changed. Old man, I am protecting this one for sure."
Since everyone here had a grudge with that old man, Belial knew he would step in. He swore that the culprit would die again. At that moment, voices shouted for Nefit to stop, and Chloe reassured Lyles Edward that the matter was mostly settled and the child would be fine.
They watched as the small Nefit suddenly erupted with terrifying presence. Black mist surged around her, she stamped the ground to leave a crater dozens of meters wide, and then shot into the sky wrapped in flames. Chloe held Lyles Edward by the shoulders, having already seen traces of Dawn's intervention and believing the situation was stable.
Even so, she worried whether relying only on Nefit's body was too reckless against Elfido. As she thought, this body was the worst Belial had ever used. It was just an ordinary human girl, only slightly stronger due to Dragon-Cursed Blood, at about a young teen's level.
Compared to even that young Black Dragon body from before, this was far weaker. He thought about temporary modifications, but the network cable was too long and the power transfer too small. There was no time, and he was not about to turn a little girl into a giant brute.
The amount of Magic he could draw was also very limited, only what Chloe and Lyles Edward had provided. There were no convenient sources to refill energy like before. In the end, he muttered that there was only one more way.
Belial rushed toward the distant battlefield.
"It is a bit annoying."
Elfido swung the Scepter in his hand, and a surging river of blood rushed forward. It corroded the ice mountain that crashed down in front of him and then carried flames from the Abyss as it rolled toward Icelis.
Sensing that this hit would be bad, Icelis let her body collapse to avoid it and reformed elsewhere. Her hair now reached her ankles, her whole body looked like clear ice, and she wore the Snowflake Gown. There were many melted patches on her body, water running down her face as she breathed lightly, and when Elfido looked over in surprise, she did not care about her image and raised a middle finger.
"What, old man? What are you staring at, you stupid thing? A piece of driftwood that should not even exist?"
After staying with Fei'er Li for so long, she had learned all kinds of vicious and absurd insults, firing them off without pause. Elfido did not care about the words at all. What he cared about was her condition. She had some injuries, but nothing serious, which made no sense, and more importantly, where had the Abyssal Whispers and Dark Corrosion he infused into her gone?
"There is something wrong…"
Elfido deliberately circled a few times and noticed something below the battlefield. In a corner, there was a small human figure hiding there, with strength at most Silver Rank. "And yet I can feel this level of Holy Light on them. Interesting. So it is you behind this…"
"Huh?"
Behind the scenes, Fei'er Li had been secretly using the contract to throw Holy Light purification and buffs onto Icelis. Cold sweat ran down her face as she realized she had been exposed, and all those skill points spent on hidden Magic had still failed.
"Hmm… what was that…"
Elfido seemed to glimpse a blurry pure white book flash in Fei'er Li's hands. But the roaring Ice Dragon charging from behind and Fei'er Li activating Blink forced him to deal with the situation behind him first.
"To be honest, the fact that you lasted this long is already far beyond my expectations. So of course, it is better if you die here!"
He beat his wings, and the space Rift torn open by Rend swallowed the entire Ice Dragon. A huge and complex Profane Art array flashed behind him, guiding power from the Abyss. A massive blood-red fireball erupted and blasted Icelis away, expanding without stop and staining the sky in a twisted black and red color.
"This is bad. I do not think I can take this…"
Icelis barely pulled Fei'er Li behind her, cold sweat pouring down both in body and mind. She knew she could not beat that old man.
Fei'er Li frantically flipped through her past spell records, trying to find a way out of this situation. In the end she flipped through a blockbuster, and everything she had written still felt useless.
"Hahaha… do not struggle. Being killed by the true heavens of the supreme Abyss is an honor in itself! Now go and completely…"
He laughed while holding up the massive fireball, but suddenly a sharp sound cut through the air. Elfido turned his head in surprise.
A small figure wrapped in black mist was already close, moving so fast it looked like a skipped frame. It ignored all resistance along the way, accelerating like a black meteor. It pierced through his close-range defenses, spatial transfers, and deflection shields, while an unseen force locked him in place.
Then a fist came crashing in.
"Boom!!!"
The shockwave from the explosive Rend and the dull sound of bone and flesh colliding spread out. Compressed white air blasted in all directions, followed by a ring of orange-red flames. Elfido, his upper body burning, was hurled into the ground, triggering a small earthquake as power leaked out, and the flames surged into a huge hemispherical fireball that kept rising like a nuclear blast.
"Guh… ah…"
"What the hell is that?!"
Icelis stared wide-eyed at the unsteady black-mist figure in the sky. She then saw something even more unbelievable as the figure looked up at the fireball. The terrifying fireball seemed to lose all its heat and turned into something like water, rushing into the figure's mouth at incredible speed, as if it were being drunk, until it was completely consumed.
"Hmm… I was almost out of mana. Good thing I stole this old man's Magic in time to refill, or this would be hard."
Belial, who had turned most of his power into Battle Aura and landed that punch cleanly, licked his lips and savored the taste. "And sure enough, these guys are probably the sponsors of those so-called kind people last time. I know this kind of power very well."
With some power to spare, Belial quickly started modifying his own hardware. He normally would not casually operate on someone else's body, since logging in was one thing, but changing the machine itself was another. But this was an emergency. The organs in this little girl's body were barely stitched together by him, with a makeshift heart holding things up, and without repairs she would truly stop being human.
He also needed a stronger body to make sure he could kill that old man, so he had no choice. Belial hesitated slightly. "This is an emergency, so you cannot blame me, right? I should be able to keep a humanoid shape, at least. Let us try."
Icelis watched as the black mist around the figure in the sky spread out, then rolled back into the body, revealing its true form. Her eyes widened. "Nefit…?!"
"Nefit?"
Both of them shouted at the same time. The Elfido they could not defeat had been punched away by the suddenly appearing Nefit. It felt unreal.
Fei'er Li was also stunned. What exactly was going on with Nefit? That form was clearly not normal. Icelis turned back and asked Fei'er Li, "Is this why you tried so hard to pull in members of the Hero Party? If Nefit is this strong, are the others the same?"
"…I do not know."