There wasn’t a single thread of essence inside that monster, not as far as Velik could tell. Wherever it was storing it, the divine beast had secured that resource completely. Mana, on the other hand, was not so hard to detect. Or rather, it was easy to spot whenever the monster actively used it. Unlike every other living—or unliving—creature Velik had ever encountered, this one didn’t seem to pull mana from some sort of internal reserve.
Instead, it grabbed it from the world around it, like droplets of water condensing on its body. The mana beaded up, was absorbed, and was then put to whatever use the monster wanted from it. In this case, that use was to fire off a beam of absolute destruction that scoured the sky while it chased Velik.
If it had been a single shot, it would have been easy to dodge. Simply letting himself fall could have gotten him out of the way. Unfortunately, the divine beast didn’t seem to worry about running out of mana—not with the whole world supplying it—and energy kept pouring out of its mouth in an endless stream.
Velik ran for all he was worth, moving so fast he outpaced the sound of his own body cutting through the wind. The monster’s magic tracked along behind him, lighting up the sky from horizon to horizon, but he was too fast for it to keep up with, even when all it had to do was swing its head around. Probably the fact that its miles-long body moved with it instead of just turning its neck helped Velik out a little bit.
No one ever won a fight by just dodging, however, so while Velik was fully committed to moving at max speed to avoid finding out if he could take a hit from the divine beast’s death beam, he was also pulling on [Void Lance] to repeatedly slam wrist-thick bars of absolute blackness into the monster’s face. It had already proven its ability to shrug off the tiny, rain-like needles Velik had used to clear out whole fields of monsters quickly, but it wasn’t quite as impervious as it had appeared when confronted with a more powerful version of the skill.
That was not to say that Velik shredded it. The armored carapace still held up better than anything he’d ever fought. It wasn’t even close. Reisha himself, arguably the most powerful being alive, hadn’t been able to withstand a concentrated [Void Lance] volley. This beast, however, was so large that fighting it was similar to being an ant wielding a splinter.
If one hit isn’t enough… If ten hits, or a hundred, aren’t enough…
Every [Void Lance] chipped off another shard of metal from its face. The divine beast didn’t seem to notice, but Velik was hoping that would change once he finally hammered his way through its armor. Alternatively, if it could run out of steam or even just get bored with the mouth blast, he wouldn’t mind a chance to slow down so he could focus on offense.
Tossing a [Void Lance] into that beam resulted in the mana unraveling before it could reach the mouth, even when he fired it from a sharp angle. The instant his skill came in contact with that beam, it was obliterated, which served as powerful motivation to keep moving.
I can’t keep doing this forever. Eventually, I’ll get tired, and probably before this thing does.
He’d already busted through at least two feet of whatever metal the monster was made out of, which would have been a lot under normal circumstances, but considering its overall size, was barely a dimple. For all he knew, a creature a thousand feet wide could have a hundred-foot-thick shell.
The problem was it just didn’t have any evident weak spots. Everything was armored, even the spots that would normally be thin like its joints. With every scuttling movement, it just revealed layer after layer of plates expanding and sliding back beneath each other. Even those plates were ten or fifteen feet thick, which made him wonder how far he’d have to dig to get through its skull.
Unfortunately, losing a leg or fifty probably wouldn’t much slow the monster down, and he had no way of even beginning to guess where any vulnerable organs might be inside such a gargantuan creature. He could only hope there was something like a brain in its head, and that scrambling it would do something useful.
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Seeing that it wasn’t going to catch Velik with its mouth blast, the monster finally gave that tactic up and lunged into the air after him. It chased, obscenely fast for something so big—It’s like watching a mountain come to life and move around! For all that, it wasn’t faster than Velik. The problem was that it wasn’t nearly as stupid as he’d have liked it to be.
Coils that were thousands of feet long hung in the air as the divine beast contorted itself, its legs jerking about as additional hazards to box Velik in. He dropped under them or leaped over them where he could, even going so far as to run across the surface once in a bid to change his direction and confuse the creature, but its flesh made solid walls in the sky. It was quickly stripping him of options.
He determined that the only escape was to flee directly away from the behemoth monster, but that did make it a lot harder to fight back. Worse, when he went to put some distance between them, he discovered that it was much, much faster when moving in a straight line. All those armor plates were
limiting its flexibility after all.Plus, once it was a straight race, it opened its mouth back up and started firing its destruction beam at him again. Velik felt the mana wicking off the surface of its body a fraction of a second before the blast erupted out of the monster and immediately twisted in the air. Flowing into a twisting leap that saw him upside down and turned around, he flung out a hand to launch bars of absolute black into the beast’s mouth.
They almost made it, traveling over a thousand feet in that frozen instant, only to be swallowed up by light just before they could enter the beast’s mouth. If they accomplished anything besides wasting a chunk of mana, Velik couldn’t tell. He let himself drop a few hundred feet before he started running again, strafing the massive centipede’s face and getting back to work on its face plate.
Tension hung heavily on him as he fought. A single mistake would see him obliterated, and even if he did survive a blast from the divine beast’s magic, he’d surely be in such terrible shape that it could finish off the job well before he recovered. At the same time, it wasn’t even trying to dodge his own strikes. It didn’t need to.
One slip up and I lose. A million strikes and maybe I actually hurt the thing. The only bright side here is that it doesn’t seem to be regenerating the damage I’m doing. That would make it probably the only thing I’ve fought at this level that can’t regenerate though, which is almost impossibly unlikely, unless the armor plating isn’t actually part of its body.
The beast slammed into the side of a mountain, so intent was it on keeping its beam chasing Velik. An explosion of stone and dust filled the air, roiling up and out for miles in every direction, but the obliteration beam cut through it without stopping. The dust disappeared like it had never been there, making Velik wonder if it too had an aspect of void to its magic.
The impact didn’t hurt the monster, but it did give Velik an opening to close the distance. For the first time, he got behind its head, not that he thought for a second that a divine beast would have trouble locating him just because it couldn’t see him. The thing didn’t even have eyes on its face, so there wasn’t much reason to think it needed to look in any specific direction.
But it did give Velik a moment uninterrupted by death beams of massive mandibles to launch his biggest attack yet. From a distance of less than ten feet, he stared down the steel-blue plate, then he held both hands out and fired a [Void Lance]. Usually, the spell had a beginning and an end as the spear formed. This time, he just kept channeling it into the back of the divine beast’s skull.
For two and a half seconds, he blasted it with the skill that had destroyed the leader of the divine beasts, a creature that was equivalent to at least level 200, maybe even higher. A crack appeared in the first second. Half a second later, it widened to the thickness of Velik’s leg. Then he saw something pale yellow beneath it. And finally, the plate split open.
It sprang apart a full hundred feet, revealing pulsating yellow flesh that swelled up, popping loose and unfolding into tendrils a few dozen feet long. Those tendrils immediately quested out, flailing blindly as they lashed the air.
Velik retreated, hurling [Void Lance] after [Void Lance] to keep the tendrils at bay. Unlike when it went against the armor, each one sliced cleanly through flesh like it wasn’t even there. Velik felt a brief spike of hope surge through his chest at the first real sign that he’d hurt the beast. That hope snuffed itself out a moment later when the missing flesh grew back.
How do you kill something with perfect regeneration that steals mana out of the air around it? It’s invincible. No wonder the gods trapped it. They probably couldn’t kill it either.