But even as the oddity struck him, he didn't have the time to dwell on it. His gaze lifted skyward, eyes narrowing as they locked onto the true chaos above. The aerial tide was in total disarray. Thousands—no, tens of thousands—of winged demonic beasts flew in erratic patterns, screeching and veering in panic. Unlike the grounded beasts, there was no order among them. Panic had utterly consumed the skies.
Screech.
Mikael surged straight into the swarm of flying beasts. The air was choked with flapping wings, clawed limbs, and tails lashing through space. Trails of feathers scattered as close calls turned to brief impacts. It felt like plunging into a battlefield with no factions—just chaos and survival instincts. Every twist of his body brought him inches from being slashed, grabbed, or sent crashing out of the sky. But he moved fast—faster than most—and their disorganized panic worked in his favor. None of them were trying to attack him.
They were simply trying to survive.
Above him, lightning flashed, tearing jagged patterns through the clouds. A beat later, thunder answered—deep and booming like drums of war closing in from all sides. The air thickened, every breath harder to draw, and even as he twisted through the chaotic tide, Mikael could feel the pressure building.
'I'm gonna make it.'
He thought it with certainty as he passed the densest part of the flying tide, almost clear of it—until, in that final instant—
THWACK!
A brutal impact slammed into his side.
A winged demonic beast, barely maintaining control of its own flight, crashed into him from above. The collision sent them both spiraling downward, their bodies tangled in a chaotic tumble before the force split them apart.
Mikael's pupils narrowed in disbelief. He tried to flip midair to stabilize, but the beast's heavy frame continued to drag him toward the forest below. 'I should've seen that coming…' he cursed.
Under normal conditions, that kind of clumsy hit wouldn't have touched him. His speed far surpassed that beast's. But there were simply too many bodies in the air—too many flapping wings, twisting paths, and blind panic. Dodging one only shoved him into another's path.
He gritted his teeth as he tumbled toward the ground—and toward the moving demonic beast tide that occupied it.
Instinctively, Mikael was about to stabilize and continue his flight, but he froze. The sensation of death now enveloped him completely, seconds away from erupting.
'I won't escape the storm before it hits,' he realized.
And with that realization came a wave of despair. Even with his current talismans, that sense of death didn't lessen. It meant the talismans wouldn't be enough to protect him.
But just as hopelessness began to rise in his heart, his gaze locked onto the earth he was spiraling toward. 'I may not be able to escape it… but I can outdig it!'
The realization reignited hope in his chest. Instead of stabilizing or slowing down, he did the opposite. He burst forward at full speed—outracing the demonic beast that had knocked him from the sky—and plunged straight toward the ground.
With his current speed, the demonic beast in his path would be killed by sheer momentum, and even Mikael would be seriously injured. He knew this, but he gritted his teeth. 'Injuries I can survive. Death, not so much.' With that mentality, he accelerated even further toward a four-legged demonic beast that remained completely unaware of the incoming meteor.
And so, he didn't stop. Wind screamed past his ears, the pressure of the approaching ground compressing the air around him. The demonic beast looked up at the last moment, eyes widening in confusion.
Then—
BOOM.
The blast echoed like a bomb going off. Air exploded outward as a violent shockwave sent dirt and stone flying, raising a thick cloud of dust that veiled everything from view. Trees shuddered, and nearby demonic beasts shrieked and scrambled back from the epicenter.
It didn't take long before the dust began to settle, slowly revealing what lay behind. The expected sight was a gory spectacle: a mangled corpse where the demonic beast had been, and a tunnel or crater marking Mikael's descent into the earth.
But instead, Mikael hovered just centimeters above the beast that had been directly in his path. It hadn't been torn apart. It hadn't even been touched. Yet it stood frozen, trembling with the terrifying awareness that its life had been spared by mere inches.
Thud.
The beast collapsed, not from pain, but from the terror of it all. Now that the moment had passed, its legs simply couldn't support it anymore.
Mikael didn't even glance at it. His earlier expression of grim determination, edged with panic, had shifted into one of utter surprise. "It disappeared?" he murmured, eyes drifting upward.
The storm still loomed above—dark clouds woven with jagged streaks of yellow Thunder Qi. Everything looked the same as it had a few seconds ago, yet the danger was gone. "It's the same, so why did the sensation of danger disappear?" he murmured again, more to himself than anything else.
The confusion ran deeper than simple misperception. Moments ago, just as he was about to crash into the beast and burrow into the earth, his Foresight of Heaven's Mandate had been screaming at him. But then, right as impact neared, the sense of danger didn't lessen—it vanished. Not gradually. Not subtly. One second he'd felt like death was inevitable—and the next, like it had never been there.
That shift—so total, so absolute—made no sense. The storm remained. The pressure still weighed down the air. And yet, according to his foresight, he was perfectly safe.
Grrrr.
Low snarls echoed nearby. The surrounding demonic beasts, now recognizing that the 'meteor' was a human, began to shift. Their earlier fear had turned into aggression.
Muscles tensed. Eyes locked onto him. Step by step, they started to advance, but Mikael didn't even look at them. After what he'd just experienced, even a pack of angry demonic beasts was nothing. His mind remained elsewhere, caught between the ghost of panic and the last plan that had almost become real—to dig.
And then the sky came alive.
SKRAAAAK-BOOM!
A single, lone thunderbolt fell from the darkened clouds in the sky before colliding with a flying demonic beast. The demonic beast didn't even have time to register the pain or the lightning coursing through its body, because the moment the yellow light touched it, it was instantly vaporized.
Not injured, not even killed—but vaporized. One moment the winged beast was flying in a chaotic panic, perfectly alive. The next, it was struck by an extremely fast thunderbolt that destroyed all trace that it had ever existed.
This single thunderbolt was merely the prelude to what was coming. At that moment, the other flying demonic beasts stopped their chaotic movement for a heartbeat. They all froze, their gazes fixed on the darkened sky above. Even the land-bound demonic beasts stopped snarling at Mikael, lifting their heads as if compelled by instinct.
It was like the world was holding its breath—everyone and everything aware that something was about to happen.
In the next moment, it truly began. After the first thunderbolt, others began to rain. From the darkened clouds, rays of yellow light moved at incredible speed.
They struck with precision, each bolt crossing distance in an instant before reaching one of the flying demonic beasts, causing it to explode in a spectacle of yellow lightning.
KRA-KOOM!
Skreeeee.
Amidst the fracas of falling thunderbolts, the panicked screeches of the aerial tide resounded as the demonic beasts flew in erratic patterns, trying to escape the calamity. But no matter what they attempted—no matter how fast or high they flew—it seemed completely useless against the wrath of the storm.
Mikael's gaze caught an enormous flying demonic beast, its wingspan stretching more than twenty meters—a true colossus among all those he had seen. Its aura was powerful, clearly indicating a Late-stage Spiritual Foundation Realm existence.
Seeing its speed and strength, Mikael thought that maybe—just maybe—it could escape. But he was proven wrong a moment later, when an incomprehensibly fast bolt of lightning seemed to rip across space and strike it down instantly.
There was no then. The massive demonic beast was annihilated on the spot, its fate no different from any random Body Forging beast caught in the sky.
Mikael felt a chill. 'It could have been me,' he realized shakily, his heart missing a beat as a wave of gratitude washed over him for having narrowly escaped this calamity.
Under his wide-eyed stare, the rain of thunderbolts continued. And in the span of a few dozen seconds, the entire aerial tide was annihilated. The sky, which had been filled with tens of thousands of flying demonic beasts, was now entirely empty.
Not a single trace of their presence remained. Only the deceptively calm storm lingered in the clouds. If someone arrived now, they would never guess that tens of thousands of beasts had filled the sky only seconds ago.
Seeing this, Mikael once again felt a chill. 'That was way too close…' His gaze drifted toward the nearby demonic beasts, all of them still staring upward with what he could only interpret as fear—or perhaps awe, or intimidation.
Even more eye-catching was what came next: all of the demonic beasts around him—and throughout the tide—had entered a strange, immobilized state. Previously, they had all been running forward. Slowly, yes, but given their sheer numbers and size, the resulting fracas had been deafening.
But the moment the first thunderbolt fell, everything changed. The entire tide ground to a halt, the beasts freezing in place. They no longer ran, simply shifting their weight and pacing in tight, agitated circles—restless but motionless.
Now, with the rumbling thunder fading into the distance, a strange silence settled in. The crashing advance of the tide had vanished completely, replaced by low groans, hisses, snarls, and guttural growls. Aside from these sounds, the forest felt unnaturally quiet.
Mikael didn't care much for the eerie stillness. His focus was elsewhere. '...If I hadn't been thrown out of the sky and decided to dig into the earth, I probably wouldn't have survived, since this storm seems to be targeting anything that's flying.'
Mikael thought so, but he wasn't entirely sure. To confirm his theory—and, most importantly, to ensure he wouldn't suddenly be struck by a thunderbolt which would instantly kill him—he grabbed a nearby Body Forging Realm demonic beast and hurled it upward.
The beast's feline eyes widened in a mix of surprise and horror as its limbs flailed uselessly. Under Mikael's throw, it quickly ascended higher and higher. And when it passed the 50-meter mark above his position, a thunderbolt crossed space and struck it, making the beast explode in a shower of deadly yellow.
'So the storm targets anything above 50 meters from the ground?' That was his initial conclusion, but as his gaze landed on the trees and mountain peaks that easily passed that height, he revised it.
'It shouldn't be everything above 50 meters. It's probably restricted to living beings—or maybe only living beings with a certain degree of power. I'm not exactly sure what the requirement is, but it should be in that range.'
As he had these thoughts, Mikael relaxed ever so slightly, and with that came a wave of fatigue—both mental and physical. While his 'escape' hadn't lasted long, he had pushed himself past his physical limits.
That alone brought a heavy exhaustion. As for his mind, it had been under intense pressure from the moment the storm activated until now, and there was no doubt the stress had left its mark.
Honestly, at that moment, he wanted nothing more than to sleep for hours on end. But sadly for him, that wasn't an option. The nearby demonic beasts, however, had been partially shaken from their storm-induced torpor the moment he hurled one of their own into the air to die.
They didn't resume running. The tide's momentum remained stalled, their instincts still refusing to let them move forward—not with that storm crackling in the sky. But tearing apart a lone human in their midst?
That, their instincts didn't object to.
As if responding to some unspoken cue, the surrounding beasts slowly began to snarl and advance, their bloodlust now focused squarely on him.
Mikael wasn't blind to the shift. He looked up at the storm-wrapped sky and sighed before casting an exasperated glance around. A small, "Seriously?" escaped his lips before he spread out his Divine Sense, dramatically enhancing his perception across the battlefield.
At the same time, his hand moved to grip Sangrelia. A faint trickle of Lunar Qi flowed down her obsidian-black blade edged in blood red. "Fortunately for you, Sangrelia, you'll get your fill today…" he murmured, eyes sweeping across the ocean of demonic beasts surrounding him.
Then, without the slightest trace of fear, he shifted into a battle stance. The air around him tensed as if the world itself braced for the slaughter to come.
"You want to kill me. Then come and try."
Author Note:
EnjoyingAscension Through the Records?
A quick Power Stone, short review, or thoughtful comment helps the novel rise in the rankings.
Want to read ahead? Unlock advanced chapters on Patreon—just search SDASLUMMY.
You're part of this story's ascent. Thanks for being here.
— End of Chapter —