She gathered a tiny stream of cold, barely worth calling Magic. It was just raw elements pulled together. She threw it straight at the monster's face, like a moth rushing into fire.
What else could she do? Dying without trying would be worse. "Die!" she shouted.
The monster screamed. A massive torrent of ice crashed down like divine punishment, smashing it off the wall. Its frozen flesh shattered, its wounds worsening beyond recovery.
The once arrogant body was buried in ice, turned into a sculpture by dense Ice Element. Even its screams were frozen solid. A sound tore through the air as a winged figure descended from the sky.
A far greater shadow passed over Feltz. A familiar dragon roar echoed across the battlefield.
"I was a bit careless."
Belial casually threw aside the lower half of an ugly creature he had torn apart earlier. The huge remains, at least ten meters long, crashed to the ground, causing a slight tremor as murky blood spilled out. In his past life he had heard of lizards shedding their tails to survive, and even seen it, but this was the first time he had seen something throw away its entire lower body and still manage to run.
Just like before, creatures that looked like they had some kind of genetic mutation and even had rotten-smelling flesh gave him no appetite at all. Belial glanced down at the human city beneath him, where he had reforged the city wall with ice and wiped out all the monsters. Some of the ant-like people below were trying to catch sight of Belial, who had just hidden himself with magic.
He felt that he had probably done a good deed just now, and he had originally intended to make contact with humans. However, something he discovered forced him to keep moving without delay. Belial checked the progress inside his mind.
"Download progress: 17.56%… network interrupted, please go to an area with better network…"
"Damn it, the connection dropped again." Belial cursed as he flapped a wing. That was why he flew off again.
In short, he followed the system's guidance, smashed a few things, killed certain monsters, and absorbed Magic so he could connect to the network for a short while. Put simply, he needed to absorb special Magic that met the system's requirements to unlock the interface. But it was only temporary, and even an entire city could only provide him with so much network, far from enough to fully download and unlock God of Destruction.
Fortunately, there was more than one city. For this little bit of network, he had already flown to three cities in a single day. Every one of them had suffered a similar Beast Tide.
Each time, he conveniently killed the monster hordes attacking the city, and not long after, the connection dropped again, forcing him to curse and fly on to the next city. What surprised Belial was that one monster had survived his wide-area ice attack earlier, earning the honor of being torn apart by hand. He casually split it in two and threw it aside.
After some time, he realized his network still had not arrived, so he flew back to check. To his surprise, the thing had dragged half its body and actually escaped. It was fairly strong, strong enough to scratch his skin, so it ran quickly and slipped away among the surrounding beast tide.
Some monsters that had not been fully wiped out, likely its underlings, also fled with it. Fortunately for them, they ran fast, because with his increasingly powerful ice abilities, even monsters a tier stronger than normal would have been frozen into ice statues.
The massive dragon was wrapped in a storm as it surged into the high clouds, using its wings to unleash Magic and propel itself forward at extreme speed like an intercontinental missile. Each wingbeat tore at the sky with Rend, releasing thunder-like booms, and with a thought, wind and snow gathered around his body as thick clouds surged through flashing lightning. At his current speed and noise, flying close to the ground would have been a disaster on the level of a natural calamity.
After entering this frozen land, with killings counted in the tens of thousands, massive amounts of Magic, and ample nourishment, his body had further grown to forty meters. His appearance had not changed much, but he had grown noticeably sturdier, with muscles rippling like mountain ranges as he breathed, and sharp crystal spears gradually forming along his tail. His proficiency with Magic had increased again, especially ice-based Magic and his breath, both greatly enhanced through deeper analysis of runes.
He no longer relied solely on gravitational control for flight, and with the boost of Magic, his full-speed flight was approaching three Mach. Using his cosmic horn for precise positioning, he could not get lost even inside thick clouds. Belial beat his wings, creating another sonic boom in midair, and chased after the scent of the three-mouthed ugly creature that had dared to escape him.
"Hmm… traces of a blockbuster monster, and that familiar stench of blood. Good, it's just ahead." After locking onto the monster's trail, Belial soon spotted a surging blockbuster of beasts and the faint outline of city walls. Then came the familiar process, starting with an area-wide ice breath attack, and only those that survived earned the privilege of being torn apart by hand.
Crystals within his body surged with ultra-high-density Ice Element mixed with Magic, flowing along his bones and channels to his mouth as he opened his ferocious jaws. Crystal-like dorsal spines stretching from head to tail emitted a faint icy glow, dazzling like gemstones. Though he was a thousand meters in the air, the surrounding Ice Element and cold air gathered into spirals as he prepared to breathe, twisting the clouds into a vortex.
Several glowing ring-shaped Magic Array formed before him, stacking layer by layer and filled with dense, delicate lines, rectangles, and runes. Their sole purpose was to weaken and spread the power of his breath. When the charging was complete, icy light burst from deep within his throat.
"Trash-clearing cannon!!!"
He unleashed a catastrophe. The breath, compressed to the extreme, passed through layers of dispersing Magic Array, transforming into a storm tornado descending from the heavens. Mixed with countless snowflakes and hailstones, each packed with massive Ice Element, every gust of wind cut to the bone, forming countless wind blades that surged downward like an avalanche.
With ice as the core and wind as support, Belial flapped his wings within it, driving this terrifying beast into the monster horde as a sky-connecting ice storm bared its frozen fangs. Lighter and weaker monsters on the outskirts were flung into the air and shredded into fragments, dying instantly. Some that barely survived the initial impact were drowned in endless snow and hail, their flesh stripped to bone by innumerable icy winds.
Those that tried to resist with Magic or attempted to burrow underground were still frozen by the penetrating, bone-chilling Ice Element. In the end, only the strongest or most resilient managed to barely endure this wave. Then Belial turned around again.
He continued sweeping back and forth until nothing remained that could breathe. The Magic contained in the monsters killed by this attack was forcibly absorbed, piling up like a snowball until it became an unstoppable avalanche. Since it was just an area attack meant for clearing the field, some tough ones still survived, and those were the ones he personally tore apart.
Earlier, he had been careless, thinking that splitting the creature in two with its organs spilled everywhere would surely kill it. He had not expected it to survive. "Got you now, huh! Aha!"
Sensing that familiar scent ahead, Belial lowered his altitude slightly and dove down. The massive dragon poked its head out from thick thunderclouds, jaws slightly open, and even without doing anything, the violent wind pressure around his body shredded the remaining survivors into pulp as he skimmed the ground. The humans who had already fallen into despair after the city wall collapsed were left staring in shock.
A Blizzard, a natural disaster-like Blizzard, wiped out the dense monster horde in an instant and scattered the remains everywhere. The monsters were powerless, able only to wail and roar at first, and later even that became impossible, leaving them praying for a quick death, just as the humans had moments before. Almost no individual survived, all swallowed by a monster even more massive than themselves, their bodies pierced by the fangs of ice and snow.
Strangely, there seemed to be an invisible boundary between the city walls and the outside. As long as they did not step beyond it, everyone inside was completely unaffected by the disaster. Some sharp-eyed professionals noticed that there were still a few surviving monsters within the Blizzard, mostly the stronger ones and those with deformed bodies.
Especially the latter, proven through bloody battles, seemed to have high resistance to ice-type Magic. Their vitality was also extremely strong, so even as ice formed over their bodies, they stubbornly stayed alive. But that did not mean they were lucky.
What they faced next made some people on the wall widen their eyes. "That is… a dragon?" "N-no way, am I seeing things?" "…Ah, was all of this done by that dragon?"