"I command thee, kneel!"
The leader of the dragon hunters shouted while raising his staff with likely a dragon's beating heart to the skies.
And in the meantime, I intensified the bombardment of my mana bolts, erasing both the only remaining ranger subordinate of his along with the one that stood back to support the rest.
As it turned out, targeting the supporter, in particular, was a great idea. The two melee users that only turned more frantic with their attack ever since the onslaught started managed to avoid death only thanks to the set of barriers that protected them from my attacks.
A set of barriers vanished the second the dragon hunter of a supporting role ceased to exist, along with several body parts of the last two of the soldiers in the instant that followed the supporter's death.
"How…" the leader of the now deceased group stared blankly at the situation right in front of him.
He had his eyes locked on the beating heart on the top of his staff while I was busy finishing off all those small fries that dared to invade my lands. By the time he brought his eyes down to inspect the results of him using some sort of spell or something, not a single one of his subordinates was left alive, leaving him unable to form a single, complex sentence.
Or, to be more precise, leaving him unable to string even a few words into a cohesive, basic sentence.
"Now we can talk," I said, putting a small, sympathetic smile on my face while leaning my head slightly to the side. "So, I heard you talking something about commanding me to kneel, didn't you?"
The look of shock in the dragon hunter's eyes was so precious I almost forgot about all the corpses I saw while on the way to this place.
"How can that be…" the leader of the invaders now managed to bring four times as many words together as he could do before.
Astounding progress, given how he only had a few seconds to reach that kind of progress.
"No dragon could resist this compulsion!" the dragon hunter shouted, slamming the butt of his staff into the ground.
Then, the look on his face changed.
"No dragon could resist this compulsion," the man repeated, raising his eyes before giving me a cold stare.
This time, however, there was no blind denial written all over his face. It was just cold hate that forced him to abandon his earlier assumptions and adapt to reality.
"And that means, you are not a dragon!" the man shouted while raising his left hand and pointing it at me.
"I don't recall ever claiming to be one?" I suggested, slightly taken aback by how the situation developed.
It was this strange guy that called me a dragon before. I never ever tried to acknowledge this, not to speak about confirming it.
And yet, he now had the balls to accuse me of faking it?
"Well, it seems like you don't have much to say," I muttered, quickly losing the patience that was absolutely necessary to deal with this kind of person.
And so, all the wardens that I previously used to eradicate his team, I now redirected straight towards the man's face.
'Even if he has some sort of defense, it would never be able to hold against this kind of massed firepower,' I thought, holding all those wardens back with a mere thought.
All it would take for me to start blasting would be a mere intention for it to happen.
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"No dragon could disobey the heart commandment," the man muttered, still stuck on some notion that I couldn't care less about. "And thus…"
Something in that man's eyes changed again. And to be perfectly honest, I didn't like the new look that appeared on his face.
"Perish," I ordered in a snappy way, releasing the hold over my wardens and unleashing their not-upgraded firepower over the man's face.
In a single instant, a total of fourteen wardens released streams of mana bolts so dense that they appeared to form a set of fourteen, straight lines. The three remaining wardens I held back just in case, wary of whatever retaliatory strike the other party would unleash.
And right as the first set of bolts was about to strike the invader's face and turn in into a sizzle…
The mana flow that I kept a close watch on suddenly started to act weird.
It was acting all normal, with only my own attack disturbing its natural flow in the world. And in the next moment, an overwhelmingly massive surge of energy appeared, centered on the heart held by the three fingers at the top of the dragon hunter's staff.
'What?' I thought, baffled by the inferno of pure mana unleashed by the man's staff… Or to be more precise, the still beating heart at its top.
The first few sets of my mana bolts simply drowned in the sea of mana that surged to this dimension. Yet, the main advantage behind my attack didn't lie in the fourteen different directions it came from.
The main reason why I considered my current ability to be on a cheat-level, was due to how I could keep this form of attack near indefinitely.
Those mana bolts weren't the ones I improved recently by anchoring them in formation stones to unleash the true mana upon the world. They were still the most rudimentary form of attack that I developed since obtaining my current class.
And yet…
The first few mana bolts of mine drowned in the sea of mana that the man unleashed from his staff. Yet, as more and more mana bolts struck the surface of the rapidly expanding zone of his control, the mana that created it… started to sway.
And then, just like water pushed aside by a concentrated stream of water from a spraying hose, the mana of the dragon hunter receded, giving way to my mana bolts.
"WHA…?!"
The shock appearing on the dragon hunter's face was outright precious. And in a sense, the look of terror that then appeared in his eyes redeemed all the sins that he committed towards me.
In that single moment, I forgave all his transgressions.
But forgiveness has nothing to do with proper punishment.
As such, I didn't hold back my attack at all, calmly watching how my mana bolts struck the man's face after a mere few seconds. I didn't stop even when the last of the dragon hunter's defenses saturated and vanished, allowing my attack to reach every last part of his body, erasing him from existence as if he was never real, to begin with.
"Phew," I released a quick sigh, pummeling the ground upon which the dragon hunter stood for a few more seconds, just for a good measure. Then and only then did I dare to cease the onslaught of my wardens, putting an end to their attack.
The dust took a good fifteen seconds to settle, finally revealing that save for a small crater in the ground and the staff that he used, not a single trace was left of the enemy that nearly managed to overpower Levi before.
"Now then, I muttered as I took a step forward and reached out for the staff with a dragon's heart on top of it. "Let's see what it is."