Novel Full Chapter 359: Five-Horned Lava Lizard (5)
Chapter 359: Five-Horned Lava Lizard (5)
In the very next second, a colossal pillar of draconic fire crossed the battlefield.
Everything in its path simply vanished.
Rocks the size of houses turned into liquid upon contact with the flames. The ground evaporated, creating a deep crater that stretched for dozens of meters.
Kyrian moved instantly.
His body vanished in a blue blur as dozens of ice platforms appeared in the air, each one used as a point of momentum to continuously change his trajectory. Left, right, upward, downward, he moved like a frozen beam, unpredictable and fast.
Even so.
The fire partially reached him.
The edge of the pillar of flames touched his right arm, and an explosion of heat engulfed half his body. The sleeve of his robe vanished instantly. The skin beneath almost began to burn.
Kyrian raised barriers desperately to gain fractions of a second.
All of them evaporated almost instantly.
At last, an enormous layer of ice condensed around him like a frozen sphere, enveloping his entire body in a protective shell of crystal.
Three seconds.
The sphere endured for three long seconds before exploding from the inside out, shattered by the heat penetrating from every direction.
But three seconds were enough.
Kyrian channeled half of all his remaining Qi into a new armor of ice, thinner than the previous one but denser and purer. It covered every inch of his skin like a second layer of frozen flesh.
The fire struck him.
The armor hissed violently, white vapor exploding in all directions, but it endured. Kyrian was hurled backward once again, sliding violently across the melted ground before finally coming to a stop.
...
Silence emerged once more.
The battlefield was unrecognizable.
An enormous trail of destruction cut through the Intermediate Area of the Great Volcano, a scar upon the land stretching for hundreds of meters, wide enough to swallow entire buildings. Lava flowed through the opened craters, forming small rivers of fire that slithered between the smoking rocks.
Mountains in the distance still smoked, their slopes covered in melted volcanic glass.
In the middle of that hell, Kyrian slowly stood up.
Half of his robe had disappeared completely, reduced to ashes by the draconic fire. The remaining fabric was charred at the edges, clinging to his skin through sweat and dried blood.
Parts of his skin were reddened, not severe burns, but enough to hurt. Small blisters formed along his right arm, where the contact with the fire had been more direct.
His black hair, once tied in a simple bun, now fell loose over his shoulders, swaying alongside the cold vapor still emanating from his body.
His breathing was slightly ragged now.
The battle had consumed a significant amount of his Qi. Two ice armors, dozens of barriers, offensive crystals, and the constant maintenance of the frozen region around him, all of that demanded energy.
But his eyes...
His eyes shone more intensely than ever before.
The snowflakes rotated slowly within his pupils. Without Kyrian noticing, the white color of his pupils began to change almost imperceptibly. Becoming slightly more bluish.
An almost childish excitement appeared upon his face.
Kyrian smiled.
It was a genuine smile, not the cold smile from before, but something more sincere. Something close to satisfaction.
Finally.
Finally, an enemy capable of truly pressuring him. Someone, something, that demanded he use and test the full capacity of his eyes.
His adrenaline boiled with excitement as he stared at the gigantic Five-Horned Lava Lizard in the distance.
The contrast was almost comical. The lizard, a twenty-meter-long colossus, scales glowing with infernal heat, is surrounded by lava and destruction. And Kyrian, a young man less than two meters tall, with torn clothes and burns across his skin, yet standing upright like a mountain.
Even the almost always cold and calm Kyrian was showing emotions upon his face.
That experience... was perfect.
And he was loving every second of it.
The lizard tilted its head once more, confused again. Its draconic instinct told it that the prey should be terrified, wounded, and trying to flee. After all, it was superior.
Instead, the small human was smiling.
The Five-Horned Lava Lizard remained motionless in the distance.
Its colossal mass rose like a living mountain over the devastated battlefield, dark-red scales glowing with the internal heat escaping from every crack in its natural armor.
Smoke rose from its skin in slow spirals, and its eyes remained fixed on Kyrian with an intensity that few prey had ever experienced and survived to tell about.
Kyrian observed the creature with heightened attention, his snowflake eyes recording every detail.
It’s breathing...
Even after that exchange of monstrous attacks, after destroying small mountains, evaporating rivers of lava, and unleashing draconic breaths capable of erasing a small city, the beast’s breathing remained steady.
Not heavy. Not irregular. Steady, as though all of that had merely been a warm-up.
Kyrian evaluated the creature’s Qi with his eyes.
The vastness was astonishing. Deep. Much deeper than his own.
Even with two cores...
He breathed slowly as he recalculated his position.
Only half of his Qi remained.
Even possessing two abnormal cores, both absurdly larger than those of ordinary cultivators, it was still not enough to compete in energy reserves against a draconic bloodline beast at the peak of the Core Formation realm.
And that was without considering the creature’s monstrous physical strength. A single strike from its tail had nearly killed him. One claw could crush him like an insect.
If his Qi were to run out completely...
Kyrian knew exactly what would happen.
That creature could crush him alive using nothing but its paws. It would not need draconic breath, nor special attacks. Only brute force, weight, and size.
But strangely...
He did not feel worried. He did not feel fear. He did not even feel that he would lose.
The confidence did not come from his current strength, nor from his strategy, nor from any plan he might have devised. It came from something deeper. More instinctive and arrogant.
His eyes.
The eyes he had been born with were inherited from his mother.
At some point in his life, or perhaps since his existence in this world, those eyes had begun giving him an irrational confidence. A cold arrogance that grew the longer the battle continued.
It was as though the more he used his ice eyes to fight, the more something inside him awakened.
A strange sensation.
A connection.
Not merely with ice as an element, but with something greater. Deeper.
Something he still could not completely comprehend.