novelraw Chapter 375: What’s His Secret? (I)
Chapter 375: What’s His Secret? (I)
He hadn’t even had time to relish his smugness when a streaking purple light flashed through the distance like a beam from a plasma cannon.
The attack hit the necrotic dragon squarely, rattling its massive head with a concussive force that broke its concentration and forced it to release its siphon on Ryuga’s soul energy in the process.
Without the slightest hesitation, Ryuga slithered out of reach. The black serpentine dragon wound away from the abomination’s loosened grip, shuttling up into the upper skies like a swimming eel escaping a net.
The Transcendents who had been battling Ryuga immediately moved into action. The entire time the necrotic dragon had held Ryuga down, they had cleared away entirely. The sheer density of the essence and soul energy that the abomination had been siphoning from the Errant’s dragon was frightening enough that none of them wanted to remain close to the vortex.
That clearance was what gave Ryuga ample time to maneuver now that he had broken free. Before the Transcendents could react or keep up with his sudden burst of speed, the black dragon was already out of range.
Lyris, Sue, Odette, and even the Soul Transcendent himself took off into the upper atmosphere after him, just as the necrotic dragon shook its head clear of the rattling blow.
Far in the distance toward the walls, Casmir’s head whipped backward to locate the source of the attack that had freed the Errant’s dragon, and he found the culprit immediately.
It was the wolf... Finn’s obsidian wolf, Syf.
She had descended all the way to the ground at some point, tearing through the blocks of Caretaker and Preceptor-rank Ossuarists who were battling the Errant’s forces on the battlefield far below.
She had released that high-density purple beam of lightning right as she leapt from the grand wall, targeting the necrotic dragon across the massive distance.
This guy and his many soul masses, Casmir cursed internally, his teeth grinding.
Just how was a single human capable of powering all of these colossal creatures alone? So far, the severe disadvantage they had all expected Finn to suffer had completely failed to manifest.
Knowing he could not use his core Error abilities, his nullification, and everything else that spawned from the inversion aspect of his concept, they had assumed he would be much easier to deal with. They had thought forcing him to rely entirely on raw soul energy and physical soul masses would leave him crippled.
But nothing had really changed. Finn had found a practical means to hold every single one of them back, systematically buying himself ample time to do exactly what he wanted.
Right now, he had just finished breaking one of the major defense lines. A resounding, deep tremor rumbled across the fifty-story grand wall as one of the primary anchor points was shattered into absolute obliteration.
Finn stood amidst the settling dust, a calm, cold look on his face as he immediately turned his eyes toward the next target. He didn’t waste a second, moving straight toward the battlement guarded by the Vail family, the specialized clan of Ossuarist assassins.
If their lethal arts, combined with the efforts of Nocturne and Storm who were currently blurring across the wall after Finn, couldn’t stop the Errant at this point, then they might simply have to rely on the help from that man...
Casmir’s eyebrows furrowed deeply. Knowing the identity of the person his mind was drifting toward, he desperately did not want things to resort to that extent. It would be a severe blow to his pride as an ancient legend.
Gritting his teeth, he employed another use of his spatial authority. This time, he bypassed the skirmish on the wall entirely, jumping far into the upper atmosphere where Ryuga and the cluster of Transcendents were waging their aerial duel.
The serpentine dragon had totally outpaced every single one of them in raw speed and maneuverability, looping through the clouds with impossible agility. But Casmir was tired of holding back. He decided to go all out.
In one clean, long-distance teleportation without breaking his movement into short spatial bursts, he vanished from the wall and reappeared directly in the trajectory where Ryuga was heading, slashing down with an immediate wave of spatial force.
Madoc and Osmund were still chasing him from below, continuing their relentless assault to hold him in place, but they simply couldn’t replicate the clean, long-distance jump he had just executed.
Under normal circumstances, the two Anaelle would have been able to mirror the jump because the distance wasn’t entirely outside the scope of their fragments. But the current state of the atmosphere around the mountain range had been severely warped by Finn’s opening Invalidation Cascade.
It was another reason why Casmir was so flabbergasted by how well thought out every single one of Finn’s attacks stacked together.
That first strike had not only been devastating to their morale, but it had also completely destabilized the local coordinates, making long-distance spatial navigation incredibly erratic.
It was for this exact reason that even Casmir had been restricting himself to short spatial bursts to maintain accuracy. To break through the ambient distortion now, he had been forced to burn a significant chunk of his own soul energy, further depleting reserves that weren’t exactly full in the first place.
Madoc and Osmund couldn’t match that expenditure. They were forced to pursue him in a series of rapid, short spatial bursts, struggling to reach him before he could do any lasting harm to the dragon.
But Ryuga was not a standard beast summon. As Casmir’s spatial slash tore through the clouds, the black dragon utilized its high maneuverability to escape the trajectory of the attack. Its massive form suddenly shrunk into a significantly smaller, compressed size.
With that sudden reduction in mass, its flight speed more than doubled in an instant. Ryuga shot into the upper atmosphere like a black bullet, stunning Casmir in the process.
The Space Transcendent’s eyes widened, and then he grimaced fiercely. Not even one small win? Nothing was going according to the plan they had drawn up at all.
As Transcendents, it wasn’t that they lacked power, and it certainly wasn’t that he himself lacked authority. But the tactical conditions of this battlefield kept shifting, throwing variable after variable that took them completely by surprise.
It was an infuriating realization for someone who had lived long enough to forget the feeling of being surprised.
The Soul Transcendent, along with the other three finally reached Camsir’s altitude, intending to go after Ryuga together with him, but Casmir barked at them instead: