Chapter 1590 Bait [2]
BOOOOOOOOM!
Grand Duke Klaus' fist, containing a force rivaling the explosive death of a galaxy, slammed against the dark beast's snout, sending ripples through space and time.
The massive impact's force could be best seen in its effects on the environment. It truly caused a carastrophe in the sky, and the waves that struck the ground started chain reactions that led to natural disasters all over the planet.
Damien was watching from the distance, and even he had to admit that the impact would've shredded him. His powerful physical body would've been ripped to shreds. His only path to survival was the Authority of Immortality.
That was an extremely strong attack. It was absolutely worthy of being something Grand Duke Klaus believed would change the tides of the battle.
But...the dark beast...
What happened to it while everything around it was being plunged into destruction?
The punch forced its head to the side. It closed its eyes as its thick skin absorbed the force.
It was strange to see such a hard external layer ripple, but it did happen. Not because the skin was loose, but because the spatial and temporal position of each particle was being shifted as the spacetime layers shook.
There was no external damage, but surely the beast was injured internally, right?
Just as Klaus tried to entertain this thought, he was proven wrong.
Because once the beast opened its eyes again, it attacked with even more force than before.
Klaus was close now. It didn't need to use such tedious methods to attack.
If there was one problem with being so large, it was that range of motion became a nonexistent concept. When a target was far away, it was forced to rely on a different attack technique and even different methods of perception to fight.
However, when the opponent was close...
The dark beast had a lot in common with Klaus, really.
BOOOOOOOM!
It's eye dilated, and energy concentrated in its pupil. A beam of chaos erupted forth and slammed past Klaus, swallowing him whole.
"Tch!"
The Grand Duke clicked his tongue as he rapidly used malakh to protect his body. The beam eroded his energy, making it difficult for him to continue blocking.
'Fight.'
That was the only answer.
Klaus gritted his teeth and slammed his foot into the air, shooting upward.
He left the beam's radius, but it followed him as he continued to fly.
Klaus watched the beast's eye. The beam would only last for as far as its eyes could physically see, so as long as he could get out of sight...
He zipped around, zig-zagging to confuse the beast as he rushed towards its back.
He did reach.
He also didn't notice as the shell he stood on started to heat up.
The event could be better described from Damien's perspective.
Something like a tangled web of ribs lashed around on the dark beast's back. Those ribs crushed each other and everything around them, creating huge storms of dust that obscured the man they were attacking from any onlookers.
Through that dust, lines of orange began to show themselves, getting brighter and brighter by the second.
The dust melted into nothingness, and the dark beast's shell had completely changed.
It was once a world that inhabited life, so it was built in a similar fashion. Its ridges were mountains and valleys, and it even had artificial oceans that ran across its back.
One would never look at that shell and believe it to be part of a living organism.
But it was no longer like that. All of its previous beauty was gone.
The shell darkened as its inteicacies burned away. It looked like it was made of miasma-filled volcanic rock, with lines of lava highlighting the hexagonal grooves between each piece of the shell.
It still looked natural. It was much more exaggerated than any natural area, but one could easily mistake this new variation of the shell for a volcanic island.
However, it was nowhere near that.
Those orange lines weren't magma, after all.
That was a pure essence of chaos.
A force that even Damien had to work hard to control.
His eyes were peeled as he watched the beast and the Grand Duke's every move.
'That thing...is a lot crazier than I gave it credit for.'
It hadn't shown much, but it had already pushed Klaus into a corner.
And more than anything else, the attack it was preparing now was something monstrous even in Damien's opinion.
'They say sealing is easier than killing.'
If Damien actually tried to fight that beast on an even playing field, he didn't know if his current capabilities were enough to guarantee a win.
'And if I can't guarantee anything, then neither can he.'
Damien could only imagine Grand Duke Klaus' mind right now.
Did he still want to fight?
Or had he accepted that he'd die?
The answer was neither.
Grand Duke Klaus remained blissfully unaware of everything that was happening around him, solely concentrating on the hole he was boring into the turtle shell.
All the way up until the moment when those jagged lines of chaos finally burst.