Chapter 350: Chapter 349 - “This is where you belong.”
A few instants before Graye’s laughter.
The battlefield shuddered as Siris hung in mid-air, swallowed whole by the crushing palms of a monster that looked like a nightmare stitched together from dragons and titans.
Scales like obsidian armor overlapped across its forearms, each plate glowing faintly with draconic mana.
Two eyes—vertical, molten, ancient—blazed between its clawed fingers, staring straight at the girl it meant to pulp.
Those dragon eyes shimmered with a power that erased magic the instant it appeared.
The Drake Graye slew was said to be the second strongest, but that was only when it came to physical strength.
Overall, the beast that Siris was facing was considered the second strongest.
Heck, in a way, the dragon-eyed beast was stronger than the Colossus if it came down to a magic battle, as no magic works before the beast.
Right now, the beast’s grip tightened until Siris felt like her bones would break.
But she didn’t panic, as this much injury was nothing for her, who had Vaise blood in her body.
She only growled in response. "Try me, you oversized lizard—"
That was when Graye’s laughter echoed through the surroundings. It was bright, mocking, and wild.
Both captor and captive froze.
The beast’s pupils narrowed, the glow inside them flickering.
"One of us..." It hissed, head tilting toward the echo, "...fell to a human?"
That single heartbeat of hesitation, however, was all Siris needed.
The air inside the beast’s palm suddenly screamed as spears of black-blue ice erupted outward.
Cryovoid—her own twisted fusion of void and ice—pierced through scaled flesh like glass through silk.
"GAHHH!!" The monster roared, yanking its hands apart.
Needles of frost jutted from its palms, spreading a creeping cold that devoured its nerves.
Its scales cracked, flesh whitened, and even its blood froze.
The beast stared in disbelief at the growing frostbite crawling across its own skin.
However, all it needed to do was stare at the frostbite, and it vanished because the mana inside the cryovoid slipping into his body was gone.
Like a layer of a snake’s skin, the ice peeled off his hands.
But when it turned back to glare at the girl it had been holding—
—She was gone.
The next second, a metallic whip echoed above.
The creature’s head jerked up just as a thin silver string of ice zipped taut across the sky.
Siris swung along it like a shadow-born pendulum, her daggers flashing like winter moons.
Before the beast could even blink, she landed lightly on the back of its skull, her hair fluttering in the ashen wind, her eyes glowing a deep, glacial blue.
"I was really looking forward to a longer stabbing party," she said, her voice cool enough to frost steel. "But someone just had to be arrogant enough to call themselves the first."
Before the beast could even flinch, her dagger plunged into the crown of its head.
Of course, the beast didn’t even flinch when the dagger pierced because it was too small a wound for it to feel anything, but the next instant, its eyes widened.
Cryovoid raced outward from the wound—black ice crawling beneath bone, void pressure collapsing blood vessels, silence swallowing heat.
The creature thrashed, but its dragon eyes were useless; it couldn’t see the infection spreading inside.
It looked like Siris had realized its only weakness, which was that it couldn’t nullify the magic of things it couldn’t see.
In a few breaths’ time, the cold reached its brainstem.
Its roar cracked the air like thunder.
"If I can’t live anyway," it ground its teeth. "Then I take you down... WITH ME!"
It leapt backward, its colossal body twisting in a suicidal plunge, aiming to crush the girl riding its skull.
The ground screamed as its shadow swallowed the plain.
Siris, however, sighed, already in motion.
"You seriously announced that?"
A flick of her wrist, and another icy string shot outward.
She zipped away in a graceful arc, landing lightly on a jagged rock as the beast slammed into the ground with earth-splitting force.
Dust erupted in a blizzard of ash and shattered stone.
When the haze cleared, the dragon-eyed monster lay still.
Its once-burning eyes were now dull, like glaciers, with faint traces of void frost still crawling across its skull.
Siris dropped to the battlefield like a falling feather, her boots kissing the ground without a sound.
She flicked her daggers clean and exhaled a frosty plume.
Her gaze turned toward a distant rise where Graye’s laughter had first cracked the silence.
"Tch." Her lips curled into the faintest pout. "Couldn’t let me have my fun, could you?"
If that battle maniac hadn’t announced her victory, then Siris wouldn’t have killed the beast in a single shot.
So, in a way, it was Graye’s fault that Siris couldn’t have her fun.
.................................
Across the battlefield, Graye stood atop the body of the huge Drake she had fought before, waiting—hopeful—for a call for help.
Instead, the only sounds reaching her were death rattles and collapsing giants.
One after another, the roars ended.
Her shoulders slumped.
"Seriously? Everyone’s already done? I didn’t even get to—" She cut herself off with a groan and hopped down from her perch, muttering as she strode toward the center of the killing field.
Somewhere in that swirling chaos of fading mana, Raven was finishing his own duel.
However, like everyone else, she also knew that things were far from over.
With Raven around, things were never this easy.
It wasn’t that they (excluding Graye) hadn’t fought a battle where they could die due to a single slip-up, but Raven had it considerably easier.
That guy didn’t even have to transform into his dragon form—which, by the way, Graye loved a lot.
All of them knew that things weren’t over until Raven, the protagonist, had to use all of his power and push through his limits.
So, they moved toward him.
What they all failed to notice, however, was that the slain beasts’ corpses were dragged away the moment they left.
Dark, shadowy tentacles, originating from the underground crater that no one was looking at, were the ones pulling the beasts’ corpses into the crater.
.................................
Back in the center of the battlefield, there was silence.
The death roars that had clawed across the Ashen Expanse only a heartbeat ago—sharp, guttural, defiant, but filled with pain—snuffed out one by one, like candles drowned in a storm.
The cyclone of black voidfire and molten breath still screamed between Raven and the black-boned colossus, but beyond their clash, the world itself seemed to hold its breath.
Because the mana signatures of the eight level-ten beasts were gone.
Both Raven and the colossus could tell that they were dead, and Raven’s crimson eyes narrowed, the faintest gleam of amusement flickering like a knife across his expression.
"Was that," he asked softly, his voice carrying like steel through the mana storm, "also a lie? Or maybe an illusion?"
The colossus’s faces twitched as it growled, the sound a grinding avalanche of stone and fury.
But no words came.
After all, it couldn’t deny Raven’s words anymore.
It was already hit by the raw, ugly realization that every one of its kin—every supposed savior—was gone.
The voidfire surged again, crawling closer to its throat.
A low, guttural snarl tore from the beast’s chest.
Then instinct overpowered pride.
’I’ll die if I don’t run away!’
The creature ripped its own jaws shut, snapping off its stream of dragon breath and breaking the deadlock.
With a single convulsive beat of its wings, it spun on its taloned feet and ran.
The instant its breath faltered, Raven’s voidfire crashed forward unchecked.
The black flame speared into the colossus’s exposed flank, eating through its flesh like burning paper.
Scales burst. Bones flashed white.
The creature howled in agony but never slowed, twisting its massive body mid-air to avoid the killing core of the blast.
Its body, now free of the burns, tried to heal, but the healing was too slow.
Worst, its wings were burned, and now it couldn’t fly.
Still, it didn’t care.
If not its wings, then it would use its giant feet.
But as it ran, from behind it, a voice slid through the darkness like a hunter’s blade.
"Running with your tail between your legs?"
The beast’s molten eyes reddened.
It hated that voice, so it roared in fury, but its legs never stopped. Survival eclipsed anger.
That was when an explosion echoed through the sky.
BOOM!
Raven shot upward in a burst of fiery explosions, each detonation beneath his boots propelling him faster than sound.
Ash spiraled in his wake as he streaked ahead of the fleeing monster, a black comet wrapped in crimson light.
In panic, the beast turned its head back to look at Raven, wanting to know what was happening, but Raven wasn’t there anymore.
That guy was now standing some distance away from the beast in the direction it ran.
He stood calmly on the shattered plain, cloak snapping in the voidfire wind, crimson eyes glowing like twin eclipses.
Omni rested across his shoulder in its full three-meter form, black blade gleaming like a fragment of night torn from the void itself.
The beast, on the other hand, panicked as it couldn’t see Raven behind, only to hear a word, "Extend," from ahead of it.
The colossus snapped its head back toward the sound just in time to see Omni descend.
Fwoooosh—SHHHRAK!
The blade cleaved through the air with a sound like the world breaking.
Steel met flesh, and in a single elegant arc, Raven sliced clean through both of the creature’s legs.
The monster’s momentum carried it forward in a helpless skid.
Its roar shattered the silence as its titanic body plummeted, carving trenches of molten rock before crashing face-first into the ash-choked earth.
Dust and blood erupted in a choking wave.
The ground trembled until, at last, the colossus lay still, its ruined stumps twitching uselessly.
Raven stepped forward through the settling haze as he stared at the beast that had skidded to stop right before him.
He planted one boot lightly atop the beast’s trembling head, voidfire still licking along the blade of Omni.
His crimson gaze bored down into the molten eye below.
"Now," he said, his voice low and absolute, "this... is where you belong."
"Damn, boss," Omni’s voice followed. "That was some OP aura farming moment!"
Raven merely grinned at that, feeling like he had accomplished something.