Chapter 1159: 1159. Instability

One of Noah's greatest weaknesses had always been his lack of long-range abilities.

His mental attacks had been easy to counter once the world learnt about them, and his slashes could never pierce the enemy's defenses when launched from far away.

The dark world had fixed that weakness, but a cultivator had to remain inside it for Noah to apply the restrictions and launch his strongest attacks.

Night was another powerful asset that perfectly paired his dark clouds, but Noah didn't want to rely only on such massive techniques to express an essential part of his prowess.

Snore had taken care of the long-range side of his offensive, and the latest improvements had made it a great asset to use in that field.

Still, it also relied on the dark world to express its true might, leaving Noah with a small number of attacks that he could use without the dark matter.

Sword Saint's slashes were powerful and immediate, but Noah knew that he would eventually abandon them to make room for attacks that expressed his individuality.

He needed reliable techniques that could reach opponents far away, and he had made sure to improve spells that could fix that weakness in his battle style.

The Dark Ray spell had always been weak compared to the other spells that Noah had owned in the past. The Demonic Form was too strong, and his physical prowess usually pushed him to engage in melee combat.

Yet, training with Sword Saint had taught Noah that everything could be a sword. Even a spell with good piercing abilities could turn into a blade in his hands.

The Mountain Dragon roared in pain, but anger soon filled its mind. It had barely fought for a few minutes, but its opponent had already injured it.

Its atrophied wings began to vibrate, and the vegetation around its mountain wilted as the Dragon forcefully drained energy from the environment.

The wings slowly grew as nutrients filled them. The Mountain Dragon turned its lair into a wasteland to restore its body parts to their old peak.

Its tail cracked in Noah's direction during the process. Intense shockwaves shot toward him, but the Demonic Sword launched slashes that fended them off every time.

Noah appeared to be lost in his thoughts as he deflected the Dragon's attacks. The new Dark Ray spell had decent power, and its piercing abilities were strong among his skills, but it took a long time to cast.

A small dark sphere eventually came out of his clawed palm. A vortex rotated at its center, and uneven edges contained its power.

The sphere enlarged as primary energy converged toward its form. It soon became a ten meters large mass that leaked surges of power from its shape.

The new Black Hole spell resembled Noah's fourth center of power, but it lacked its orderly shape. It was a simple mass of energy that absorbed anything coming in its way and used it to grow in size.

Noah couldn't add sharpness to that ability, but it expressed both creation and destruction due to the power that it could absorb and unleash. The only problem was that its shape had become quite unstable after all the modifications and improvements.

Noah had created the current Black Hole spell from two different abilities that he had rebuilt until they could reach the sixth rank. That instability was a natural consequence of all the modifications applied over the years.

The Dragon continued to launch shockwaves with its tail, but the Black Hole spell's gravitational pull made them converge toward its form.

The attacks crashed on the sphere and destabilized its surface even more, but the spell eventually absorbed their power to increase its size.

Some worry filled the Dragon's mind as the spell became more than thirty meters tall. It wasn't even spherical anymore. Its shape had become a mass of flares and boiling edges.

'I wonder how much energy it can absorb before exploding,' Noah thought while creating copies of the fuming armor.

When creating that spell, his initial idea had been to replicate the dark star's power, but it seemed that his darkness wasn't dense enough to contain so much energy.

Yet, he could use its instability to his advantage. After all, he only wanted an explosion. He didn't care if he couldn't control it.

'I guess I can only wait and see,' Noah took a step back as he thought that and launched his fiendish copies toward the dragon.

The Mountain Dragon's wings had returned to a decent condition after absorbing all the energy in the environment. It began to flap them, and intense shockwaves spread under the creature.

The mountain chain had lost most of its energy by then, and those attacks made it crumble. Large fissures opened among the rocks, and the ground began to cave in as its underground structure shattered under that pressure.

The Dragon then aimed its wings at Noah before using them to help its tail in its offensive. The number of attacks shooting from its figure tripled, but they all ended up inside the Black Hole spell.

Meanwhile, the fiendish figures landed on the dragon and began to slash at its rocky skin. Their power alone wasn't enough to pierce its tissues, but the corrosive smoke made them able to surpass that first line of defense.

The Dragon saw those enemies cutting away large boulders from its skin and turned its attention toward them. A series of shockwaves shot from its tail and wings, and the fiendish copies soon exploded, filling that area with even more corrosive smoke.

The creature turned toward Noah only to see that the Black Hole spell had reached its head. The mass of energy had become more than fifty meters tall by that point, and the vortex at its center released sharp sounds as it rotated.

The Dragon didn't have the time to roar as the Black Hole spell exploded, engulfing everything in the area with a wave of dense energy that carried corrosive properties.

The black cloud dispersed as the spell detonated, and Noah removed his fuming armor to fly toward his opponent.

A large crater had appeared where the spell had exploded, and all the mountains in a few kilometers' radius had crumbled as the wave of energy swept them.

The danger zone had entirely changed after those exchanges. Any battle among existences in the sixth rank would alter the environment forever, and those effects were even more evident in the old continent.

Many packs of magical beasts had died during the battle. They had been too slow in their escape, and the shockwaves released by Noah and the Mountain Dragon had destroyed their bodies, leaving no traces on that ruined region.

Noah descended into the crater while his mind went through the battle to find flaws that he could fix and new ideas on how to improve his abilities.

He had already found something that could solve the Black Hole spell's instability and improve the power of his copies. Overcharging them with the energy accumulated in the sphere would make them far more threatening.

Noah didn't even need to modify the diagrams inside his sea to apply those effects. He had already invented a martial art that worked similarly. He only needed his copies to perform it to gain its effects.

The Dragon was under a pile of debris and dust. Most of the rocks on its head and torso had crumbled during the explosion, so he could see its exposed pale-yellow skin.

The creature breathed weakly. It had survived the explosion, but it was too tired to continue fighting. Noah had destroyed its will and forced it to accept its death.

'If only your element were different,' Noah though as a sigh escaped his mouth.

The Mountain Dragon was an exceptional specimen, and he would consider turning it into a Blood Companion once his mind had more room if it had a different aptitude.

However, Noah would spend fewer resources building a similar body and throwing inside a different will. The Dragon's mind was too weak to meet his standards.

The Dragon could even become a useful asset in the Copying Technique, but Noah needed it for his reasons. He didn't hesitate to sever its head with a clean slash.