Chapter 151: Take My Ultimate Attack!
The gigantic claws spread wide, aiming to swat him down from the tree trunk.
Ryan did not dodge.
He waited until it lunged into midair, and then—
Wind and lightning exploded beneath his feet once more.
He jumped upward.
The creature missed.
It shot past beneath him, and its massive claws sank deep into the trunk of another tree. Hanging there, it twisted its head and looked up at Ryan, dark yellow slit pupils filled with astonishnt.
It could not understand.
This little rat had clearly only jumped once, so how had it leaped again in midair?
Ryan offered no explanation.
He landed on another ice spear embedded in the trunk and used it as leverage to spring upward again.
Those ice spears—the ones he had deliberately “missed” with during his feint—were all lodged in the trunks of these giant trees now. From the ground to the canopy, there was one every two or three ters, like a spiraling staircase climbing into the sky.
And now he was on that staircase, stepping from one spear to the next, ascending in bounds.
The creature froze for an instant.
Then it understood.
It let out a furious roar, sank all four claws into the tree trunk, and began climbing as well. Those enormous claws punched deep into the bark, leaving several huge holes with every grip. It climbed with terrifying speed, like a monstrous gecko, racing up the trunk after Ryan.
Ryan kept leaping upward.
The creature kept climbing after him.
One spear, two spears, three spears—
Ryan climbed higher and higher, already thirty or forty ters above the ground. The creature was drawing closer and closer. At one point, its claws ca within less than a ter of his feet.
Ryan did not look down.
He stared upward.
At the fork in the trunk above, there was one final ice spear—the thickest of them all—driven deep between the branches.
That was his destination.
He leaped one last ti, wind and lightning detonating with full force beneath his feet and launching him straight toward that spear.
At the sa ti, he closed his eyes and began to chant—
The creature had caught up.
Its huge claws dug into the tree, and it was now less than ten ters away. It opened its jaws and let out a triumphant roar, then released its grip and hurled its entire body at Ryan.
Those giant claws spread wide. The tips were less than—
ten centiters away.
Ryan opened his eyes.
That faint smile still lingered at the corner of his mouth.
“Fla Dragon—”
The space around him began to warp.
The temperature spiked. Even the air itself seed to catch fire.
The creature’s claws stopped.
Not because it did not want to move.
Because it could not.
It lowered its head and saw a gigantic circle of fire rising from the ground.
The magic circle had a diater of nearly fifty ters. Ring upon ring, it spread outward, each circle inscribed with densely packed runes. Those runes flared to life, gold and crimson intertwining, lighting up the entire sky.
Then, from the center of the magic circle, a colossal hand of fla rose upward.
That hand was made entirely of fire, crimson and molten, its surface flowing like lava.
It rose from the earth, seized the creature’s tail in a single grip, and yanked downward with brutal force.
The beast was dragged sharply lower.
It struggled wildly, jamming its claws into the tree trunk in an attempt to steady itself. But the flaming hand was far too strong. It could not break free.
“—Scorch the Heavens!”
Ryan’s chant ended.
The entire magic circle activated.
The rings began to rotate, faster and faster. The runes on every circle brightened until they were blinding.
Then countless streams of fire burst from those runes and converged toward the center.
The flas collided, exploded, and beca a pillar of fire that shot straight into the sky.
The pillar was so thick it could have swallowed the giant tree whole, and so tall it looked fit to burn the clouds. Within it churned flowing magma, seething fire, and a heat that could incinerate everything.
The creature was swallowed by the fire pillar.
It let out a shriek of agony.
The sound was sharp and horrific, like countless beasts wailing at once. It thrashed and rolled madly inside the pillar, trying to burst free. But the flaming hand held it fast, pinning it in the center of the inferno.
Molten fire surged upward and poured over its body.
Its pitch-black fur began to burn, blacken, and peel away.
Those muscles, hard enough to turn aside blade and spell alike, began to crack open, oozing grease—and then even that grease caught fire.
It opened its jaws and scread, but what ca out was no longer sound.
It was fla.
The pillar only burned fiercer.
Around it, all the trees the beast had smashed down before—the trunks and branches lying in tangled heaps on the ground—began to ignite as well. The flas spread over them as though alive, and in the end they all poured into that towering inferno.
The fire pillar grew larger and brighter, so bright it hurt to look at.
Ryan crouched on the tree fork, one arm wrapped around the trunk as he looked down at the scene below.
His face was flushed red in the light of the flas.
Sweat ran down his face, only to evaporate before it could drip from his chin. His chest heaved violently, every breath like swallowing fire.
Syl’s Mana was still pouring into him, a river without end.
He could feel that Mana being drawn into the magic circle with frenzied speed, transford into fla, and fed into the pillar.
This was a spell he had learned through the special access Cecilia’s privilege had afforded him.
Fla Dragon Scorches the Heavens.
Among advanced spells, it belonged to the destructive class—and among destructive advanced spells, it was one of the hardest to master.
It required not only the ability to command vast quantities of fire elent, but also the precision to compress and detonate those elents so that they released their maximum power in a single instant.
Control of the fire elent. Compression of Mana. Directed detonation.
All three were indispensable, and each one alone was enough to take an ordinary mage years to master.
And this was the sort of thing one could never simply buy.
Its power was too great. Great enough that no ruler in their right mind would ever let such a spell circulate among common hands.
The only people who could normally co into contact with a spell of this level were the old monsters of the Imperial Research Institute, the direct heirs of dukes and marquises, or the crown’s most elite court sorcerers.
Unfortunately, Ryan was none of those.
He had practiced it only three tis.
Each ti, he had done so with extre caution, never daring to pour too much Mana into it, afraid it would go out of control.
But this ti, Syl was here.
Ryan had poured in three tis the amount of Mana his body could normally store.
Every last bit of it went into the flas.
The fire pillar burned for thirty seconds.
Then forty.
Then a full minute.
At last, the flas began to fade.
The light of the magic circles dimd, vanishing one ring at a ti. The flaming hand dissolved into scattered sparks that drifted through the air. The pillar itself slowly contracted until only a single thread of smoke remained, curling upward.
Clinging to the tree trunk, Ryan looked down.
The clearing below had been completely transford.
The ground was scorched black and split open with cracks, like the bed of a dried-up river. The trunks lying all around had been burned to charcoal, so of them still spitting sparks. The air was as hot as a furnace; every breath seared his lungs.
At the center of the clearing, the creature lay still.
It barely resembled its forr shape anymore.
That seven- or eight-ter-long black body was now little more than a charred mass. Its limbs were curled inward, its claws burned down to half their original length. Its head lolled to one side, that gaping maw still hanging open, the fangs inside blackened by fire.
Its body was covered in cracked, split-open wounds. No blood flowed from them now—only charred flesh, and the occasional dying ember flickering within.
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