Chapter 137: Battle! 2

When Kent realized that the three-headed Hellhound had failed to leave so much as a visible wound on him, a surge of excitement rose in his heart.

Without hesitation, he threw aside the hammer in his hand, snatched up the dragon lance from the ground, and drove it viciously toward the male Hellhound.

The beast had already lost one of its heads—and worse still, it was the central head, the primary one responsible for controlling the body.

Without its main brain, the Hellhound had clearly not yet adjusted to the sudden change. The two remaining heads were unable to act in harmony, each struggling to impose its own will upon the body.

At such close range, Kent noticed something else as well.

The two surviving heads were different in size, one noticeably larger than the other.

That alone told him that this three-headed Hellhound had not yet reached the ninth rank.

Once a Hellhound advanced to the ninth rank, all three of its heads would be fully mature. There would no longer be such an obvious difference in size between them.

Now, however, the larger head was desperately trying to take control of the body, while the smaller one had yet to learn how to cooperate.

Their confusion gave Kent exactly the opening he needed.

With a furious roar, Kent thrust the dragon lance forward with all his strength.

The spearhead plunged straight into the bloody cavity where the severed middle head had once been.

That spot was one of the three-headed Hellhound’s greatest weaknesses, leading directly toward the region of its heart.

A deafening howl of agony erupted from the beast.

Its enormous body shuddered violently before going limp and collapsing heavily onto the ground.

Kent’s heart leaped with delight.

He had killed it.

Yet before he even had time to celebrate, a tremendous force suddenly struck him.

His entire body was sent sprawling, crashing hard against the ground.

“Damn it!”

Kent felt as though he had suddenly been hurled into the air.

A heartbeat later, he was smashed violently back down.

Then he was lifted again.

And slammed down once more.

Again and again, his body was whipped through the air before crashing into the earth.

His head throbbed from the repeated impacts, and his internal organs felt as though they were being shaken apart.

Through the corner of his eye, Kent finally caught sight of what was happening.

The other three-headed Hellhound—the one that had originally charged toward Daphne—had sunk its teeth deep into his leg.

With its jaws clamped firmly around him, the beast was swinging him back and forth with terrifying strength, smashing him repeatedly against the ground.

A metallic sweetness suddenly rose in Kent’s throat.

The next moment, he spat out a mouthful of blood.

Truthfully, Kent’s victory over the first Hellhound had owed a great deal to luck.

The dragon lance had played an equally important role.

By sheer chance, Kent had managed to destroy the beast’s primary brain, leaving its remaining heads unable to coordinate properly.

But the true key to his victory lay in the dragon lance itself.

The weapon possessed both anti-magic and rending properties.

It was a lance powerful enough to pierce even the defenses of a dragon.

Against a mere three-headed Hellhound, its hide could hardly offer much resistance.

Compared with the defensive strength of a dragon, the difference was like that between a wooden plank and a solid steel plate.

Even so, Kent lacked genuine combat experience.

More precisely, he had almost no experience fighting for his life with martial weapons.

That inexperience had allowed the second Hellhound to catch him off guard and seize his leg in its jaws.

No matter how formidable Kent’s physical defenses were, he was still human.

His muscles and bones might be strong enough to withstand tremendous force, but his internal organs were nowhere near as resilient.

“Brother Kent!”

Seeing Kent being tossed about with no sign of resistance, Daphne cried out in alarm.

She raised the magical crossbow in her hands and fired again and again.

One cyan magical bolt after another streaked through the air, burying themselves deep in the Hellhound’s body.

But the creature had already gone completely berserk.

It paid no attention whatsoever to Daphne’s attacks.

Its companion had died at Kent’s hands, and all of its rage was now focused entirely upon him.

Daphne fired more than a dozen magical bolts in rapid succession.

By the time the last one left the crossbow, her body was already swaying unsteadily, as though she might collapse at any moment.

After all, Daphne was only a first-rank practitioner.

And yet, every magical bolt she fired possessed destructive power comparable to a seventh-rank attack.

The reason lay in the magical crossbow itself.

Strictly speaking, the magical energy contained in each bolt was only at the third rank.

But after being compressed into an extremely concentrated form, its penetrating power increased dramatically.

The principle was much the same as the difference between a hammer and a nail.

If someone struck a thick wooden board with a hammer, even a powerful blow might simply bounce off without breaking through.

A nail, however, required only a fraction of that force to sink deeply into the wood, because all of the pressure was concentrated onto a single tiny point.

The magical bolts fired from Daphne’s crossbow worked in much the same way.

“Squeak! Squeak!”

Big Nose’s eyes had lit up with excitement when he saw Kent kill one of the three-headed Hellhounds.

But the moment he noticed Kent being ambushed by the other beast, his expression changed.

With an anxious squeak, Big Nose suddenly shot forward like a streak of shadow, racing straight toward the Hellhound that was viciously tossing Kent around.

No one would have imagined that such a plump, heavy-looking body could move so astonishingly fast.

“Thud!”

Before Big Nose could even reach them, and while Daphne was still desperately squeezing out the last remnants of her mental strength, the three-headed Hellhound that had been gripping Kent in its jaws suddenly collapsed to the ground with a heavy thump.

Daphne and Big Nose both froze, their mouths falling open in astonishment.

“You damned beast... Cough! Cough! Cough!”

Kent slowly struggled back to his feet.

In his hand was a pitch-black dagger.

Glaring at the fallen Hellhound, whose entire body was rapidly turning black, Kent cursed furiously between violent fits of coughing.

The beast’s fatal wound was a small black hole in one of its heads, from which thin wisps of smoke were still rising.

Yet the hole did not remain small for long.

It continued to spread outward at a horrifying rate.

As the wound widened, even the bones inside could be seen melting away like wax beneath a flame, dissolving little by little into a pool of foul black liquid.

Kent lowered his gaze to the dagger in his hand, and a chill ran through his entire body.

While the Hellhound had been repeatedly smashing him against the ground, Kent had desperately pulled out a dagger at random and stabbed blindly at the beast.

He had hardly even known where he was striking.

And yet a single stab had reduced the Hellhound to this horrifying state.

Kent quickly realized that the creature had not died immediately.

Instead, it had been afflicted by both powerful poison and multiple curses.

Among the dark curses Kent could identify were Slow, Numbness, Paralysis, Corrosion, and several others.

And that was only what he could recognize.

Three-headed Hellhounds were venomous magical beasts themselves, possessing considerable resistance to toxins.

Yet after being pierced just once by the pitch-black dagger, even the creature’s bones had begun to rot and dissolve.

That alone showed how terrifying the dagger’s poison truly was.

The bones of magical beasts were extraordinarily tough, comparable in hardness to refined steel.

For a poison to corrode them into black liquid within moments was nothing short of horrifying.

Kent hurriedly tossed the dagger back into his spatial ring.

Even after putting it away, he could not suppress the lingering fear in his heart.

The mere thought of accidentally scraping himself with that blade made another wave of cold creep across his skin.

“Awooo! Awooo!”

There was still one young Hellhound left.

Although it belonged to the three-headed Hellhound species, it had only developed two heads.

Seeing both of its parents lying dead on the ground, the young beast let out a series of grief-stricken cries.

It stumbled toward its father and pressed both of its heads against the enormous corpse, nuzzling it gently.

There was no response.

The young Hellhound waited for a moment before turning toward its mother.

Still nothing.

It looked back at its father again.

With great difficulty, the little beast pushed and tugged at the corpse, desperately trying to make its father stand up.

Its eyes were filled with sorrow.

The viciousness Kent had seen when he first encountered it had completely disappeared.

At that moment, it no longer looked like a ferocious magical beast at all.

It looked like nothing more than a frightened child who had suddenly been abandoned by its parents.

Even so, Kent did not lower his guard.

Magical beasts were far from stupid.

Their intelligence was not something that could ever be underestimated.

“Forget it. Let it go.”

Kent noticed the magical glow gathering around Daphne’s crossbow and immediately realized that she intended to kill the young Hellhound as well.

Unable to bear the sight, he spoke up and stopped her.

“Thud!”

Kent had barely finished speaking when the young Hellhound suddenly collapsed onto the ground.

Its body rapidly began to turn black.

It turned out that the little creature had been unable to move its father’s corpse, so it had gone over to its mother and tried to push her instead.

But in doing so, it had unknowingly come into contact with the poison still lingering on its mother’s body.

“Damn...”

Kent let out a long sigh, an indescribable heaviness settling in his heart.

Part of his sorrow came from witnessing the fate of this family of magical beasts.

But another part came from the fact that he had been forced to kill them in the first place.

This was simply how the world had always worked.

If Kent had not killed them, then they would have killed him instead.

And by now, he and Daphne might already have become a meal for that family of three.

The thought left Kent with a bitter realization.

There was no absolute fairness or reason in this world.

In the end, strength itself was the only truth that mattered.

Daphne, however, felt no such hesitation.

As far as she was concerned, Kent’s safety mattered above everything else.

Kent raised his hand and cast a Fireball spell.

Flames quickly engulfed the bodies of the three Hellhounds, reducing them to ashes where they lay.

After all, all three corpses had been contaminated by an extremely potent poison, and leaving them behind could easily cause trouble later.

Fortunately, this part of the cavern was relatively open, and the air circulated well.

The smoke gradually dispersed into the darkness.

At that exact moment, the duration of the Light spell finally came to an end.

The cavern was immediately swallowed by darkness.

Kent had cast the spell while fleeing earlier.

Although everything that had happened afterward seemed long and chaotic, only two or three minutes had actually passed from the moment he charged toward the three Hellhounds to the moment the last one died.

“Huh?”

Kent was just about to cast another Light spell when he suddenly noticed something strange.

The walls and ground around the cavern were covered in plants that emitted a faint fluorescent glow.

Their dim light spread through the darkness, painting the cave in a pale, ghostly radiance.

Kent stared at them in surprise.

But what truly caught his attention was something else.

The pair of pitch-black hammers he had thrown onto the ground earlier were now giving off a faint magical glow.

The dragon lance beside them was doing the same.

Kent already knew that the dragon lance was a magical weapon.

But the two hammers...

They were clearly radiating magical energy as well.

That meant they were almost certainly high-grade magical items.

Kent’s eyes narrowed slightly.

Could these two hammers really be magical weapons too?