D.I.O - CH 308

*** Leviathan ***

Rumble…

Whoosh!

Huge dark clouds gathered in the sky. A fierce wind blew from all directions, and heavy thunder rumbled incessantly.

“What happened? What’s with this unusual atmosphere? Didn’t Arthur launch his finishing blow… but it doesn’t seem like that guy is going to die anytime soon.”

“Damn it, it’s still not over…”

“We don’t have Arthur anymore, so now we’re left to deal with that monster…”

Although the collective combat power of the users was surprisingly powerful, it was absolutely not at the level necessary to face off against a transcendent. The reason they were able to fight Tan on somewhat equal footing so far was because Arthur was in charge of the Masters’ attacks.

The other Masters could only play assisting roles in the combat; they weren’t able to take the lead in attacking Tan. Now that their side’s main attacker had bowed out, if Tan outputted the same attacks as before, they’d surely be defeated.

“Argh… Arthur!! Ah!!”

Tan grabbed Ascalon’s handle and let out a pain-filled groan. Tan wasn’t neutralized or in a moribund state. His monstrous HP, as the Beast of the Apocalypse, was too large for him to simply fade away and die after suffering a mere human’s attack.

But, even so, he couldn’t pull Ascalon out from his chest.

/“Until the day you die, that sword will never fall out. Ascalon has anchored to your soul, so even if you survive this battle, the wounds and pain you suffer now will be with you forever.”/

Crack. Crackle.

Tan’s body was crumbling. As Ascalon, which was embedded in his heart, took root with the assistance of Tan’s enormous reservoir of magic power, his soul, feeling a sense of crisis, was beginning to shed its human form, which Tan had been using as a shell.

“Argh…!!!”

Tan screamed out. And at that moment…

Tan’s body exploded.

“What… what’s going on?!”

“Everyone, back away!”

When Tan’s body exploded, bits and pieces of his human body shot out all over the area. To be precise, the unfolding scene was a phenomenon closer to an expansion than an explosion. Surprised by the sight of Tan’s humanoid body instantly turning dark blue and seemingly covering the entire world, the Masters screamed and scattered in all directions, but the spreading dark blue qi energy was faster than they were.

Crack!

Crack!

The dark blue qi energy chewed and swallowed the Masters who came into contact with it as if the qi energy was a hungry ghost. Among the Masters, some were able to avoid the qi energy by retreating to a safe distance, but those who couldn’t were sucked into it.

Rumble!

“Try stopping it! Do any spells work?”

“It’s not responding to any of our spells! I don’t think it’s natural or magic related!”

Seeing the Masters screaming as the unavoidable dark blue qi energy wave approached them, Cruze threw her sniper rifle onto the ground and stood up. Her aura powered sniper rifle dispersed into particles and disappeared, which freed up some of her memory. However, Cruze needed much more memory than what she freed up from the sniper rifle, so she utilized her hidden card.

“Operate Divine Weapon! Crown of Nihility.”

After her murmur, a brilliantly shining white crown appeared atop Cruze’s head. The Crown of Nihility, her Divine Weapon, allowed her to instantly amplify her memory. And with that increased memory, Cruze materialized a new weapon.

“Operate Earth Breaker! Come out and smash everything! Smash everything Earth Breaker!”

The 4th Stage of Civilization strategic weapon, Earth Breaker, which controlled the forces of attraction and repulsion and manipulated spatial vectors, soon appeared. Earth Breaker wasn’t originally intended to be used as a personal weapon; it normally only appeared on a few Terra-Class giant warships. However, presently, Cruze reproduced it in the form of a [sword].

Earth Breaker manipulated spatial vectors and the direction and size of a designated force. In other words, Earth Breaker defied the laws of physics and the conservation of energy.

Theoretically, if the given input energy was infinite, the output of Earth Breaker would also be infinite. What was even more frightening was that Earth Breaker could control directional force while maintaining free range of movement. Due to these characteristics, Earth Breaker was mainly used for terraforming or destroying entire planets, hence the name Earth Breaker.

Whoosh!

A huge repulsive wave collided against the rushing dark blue qi energy. Although she had been using Earth Breaker as a kind of vector cannon, Cruze instinctively knew that she wouldn’t be able to completely block the power radiating outward from Tan’s body.

Cruze’s judgment was proven correct. Her huge repulsive wave pushed the dark blue qi energy with terrifying momentum and somewhat changed its direction. The sight of the weakened and receding dark blue qi energy wave was truly majestic, but Cruze soon turned pale.

“Damn it! If I could have deployed Earth Breaker for 12 seconds, I would have been able to completely neutralize the qi energy attack!”

Cruze had even activated her Master Skill, Repeated Phantasm, but even so, Earth Breaker only operated for 4 seconds. If she only used it as a vector cannon, she would have been able to operate Earth Breaker for 20 seconds, but the power output under that operation wouldn’t have allowed her to weaken Tan’s attack. However, the moment she reached her materialization time limit, another being jumped into the fray.

“Earthquake, Part Two.”

The command was uttered with a whisper, but to Cruze, the words sounded like roaring thunder. Cruze suddenly realized that Arc hadn’t used a single drop of magic power during the entire battle and had been spell chanting the entire time. Throughout her long-winded spell chant, Arc had accumulated an immense amount of magic power. In this manner, Arc was able to output a tremendously large amount of magic power all at once.

However…

“You idiot! Stop immediately!! No matter how powerful the Blackyak Sect’s battle spell chant is, it can’t stop that attack!”

There was a limit to the power a single Master had. Though some Masters had realized their superpowers incredibly quickly and reached high levels, their given game-play time was too short.

If users were given 10 years, 100 years, or even more time… then it may have been possible to produce a collective attack that could neutralize Tan’s. However, as of right now, the only ones who overcame the absolute wall of time and achieved power output beyond their gametime were the Irregulars.

Because of this, after shouting a warning, Cruze focused on summoning Earth Breaker once more. She was concerned that her Divine Weapon would only operate an additional second without any other memory support skills and that she’d have to face a permanent stat loss, but she judged that, with Arthur now out of the picture, she was the only left that could contend against Tan.

However, before she could resummon Earth Breaker, Arc’s magic spell triggered first.

“Wailing Wall.”

Crack.

As her black armored fist struck the ground, the ground, which had been flattened like a mirror from Tan’s sweeping qi energy wave, rose up with tremendous force.

“What? Huh? What is this?”

Cruze and the other Masters were left speechless after witnessing the inconceivably large output of magic power that exploded out in an instant. The ground shook fiercely. Like the surface of a wavy potato chip, ridges started to form on the earth’s surface. It was as if the entire Earth’s crust had been compressed and split apart.

Boom!

With a single blow, the entire surrounding terrain, extending for tens of kilometers to the left and right, was lifted, effectively blocking the dark blue qi energy wave from advancing. This phenomenon was possible because the earth itself was reinforced with Arc’s magic power.

Whoosh!

As the retreating Masters saw a wall of earth, which could easily bury quite a few cities, suddenly appear between them and Tan, they collapsed onto the ground in surprise.

“What? What happened?”

“Is everyone okay?”

When they came to their senses, the earthen wall had already pushed to the area where the filming crew was filming the battle. As they checked their HP and status, the Masters saw the dark blue qi energy gathering and increasing in size on the other side of the earthen wall. Tan’s figure could no longer be seen.

“Arc… who the hell is she?”

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Even in the midst of all that was going on, Cruze looked towards Arc. Even though she had exerted a near-miraculous output of magic power, Arc seemed relatively calm and relaxed.

“Cruze, just now… that attack…”

“Yeah.”

Cruze answered while barely maintaining control over her wildly undulating aura power.

“It was an Ultimate Magic Spell…”

Cruze was taken aback. She was thoroughly confused… there was no prior context to justify such growth, especially from a user who was largely a nobody for Cruze. If Merlin had deployed such a spell, she would have understood, but a user, who Cruze thought was just moderately accomplished at best, was able to release such a powerful ultimate magic…

However, the situation on the battlefield was so urgent that Cruze couldn’t afford to watch Arc in amazement for long.

Thud!

“Uh, uhm, this can’t be…”

The dark blue qi energy wave was blocked by the huge earthen wall, but the dark blue qi energy continued to gather and expand. Like an endlessly inflating balloon, the dark blue qi energy grew as if it was planning to cover the whole world. The dark blue qi energy rose in height against the earthen wall, and soon, the qi energy overflowed over the earthen wall.

However, the most concerning and serious issue wasn’t that the dark blue qi energy was expanding.

The really serious problem was…

Crack!!!

That great mass of energy…

Began to take on a form and mass.

“… No way…”

Most humans were unfamiliar with living things larger than themselves, but Masters were relatively unconcerned with the size of other living things. An ordinary modern person would instinctively feel fear if a dog was taller than the height of one’s own waist, but a DIO user, who often battled against huge [enemies], wasn’t as sensitive to another being’s size.

However, at this moment, the ordinary people filming the battle and the gathered Masters, who even fought against a dragon in the past, felt a similar feeling.

Rumble!

Just the act of raising its head created a gust of wind that made it impossible for anyone in the vicinity to stand upright. The being was so large that it wasn’t possible for a normal human to see and make out its entire body.

“What the hell is that?!”

“This is crazy…”

The ground shook. The scale of the newly formed being was truly enormous; unlike when the ground shook when Arc deployed her magic spell, the current shaking was a pure physical phenomenon. In other words, it wasn’t shaking because magic power was being exerted onto the earth; the earth was essentially screaming as it couldn’t withstand the load that was exerted by the being’s existence.

Ordinary humans would only feel the shaking of the ground, but the Masters, with their developed superhuman cognitive abilities, saw how the being’s large size was crushing multiple nearby cities.

The place where they were fighting was the courtyard of the Magic Tower. Considering that in the past, Merlin completely leveled Cheonan City after it suffered considerable damage from the Legion and Grotesque’s attack and built the current Magic Tower in the middle of the space, the fact that the monster could be so large as to crush surrounding cities was hard for the Masters to mentally process.

[My God… how big is that thing? It’s expanded well beyond the borders of Cheonan City and has overflowed into neighboring Onyang City… No, at this rate, it may have already entered Pyeongtaek City and Jincheon county.]

[That thing’s left leg… has reached the sea.]

[It’s tens of… no, close to a hundred kilometers tall. How can such a creature exist?]

A few Masters had boarded their flying shuttles and flew up into the air to get a better view of the monster. When they communicated the monster’s overwhelming size to the Masters below, everyone fell silent.

Dragons were considered super-large monsters, as they were often 100 to 300 meters tall. However, in comparison, the size of this monster was beyond anyone’s comprehension.

“Should I interpret this as a failure or an honor?” Quiet Heaven stated aloud.

“I’d say it’s more desperation than anything else,” Ellie responded.

Unlike the humans who were in a state of confusion, Quiet Heaven and Ellie, two of the three pets who knew the true identity of the monster, seemed detached. In truth, it was the first time they had laid eyes on Tan’s true body as well.

“The Noblesse elder isn’t holding anything back. I never would have thought that he’d bring out his true body to an outskirt planet like this…”

“Leaving that aside, shouldn’t the Elohim be mobilizing at this point…? I don’t think a lowly commoner like me fits in this mythical-scale battle …”

Tan’s true body was so large that it made one wonder if human existence and its influence were smaller than a speck of dust in the wider universe.

The dark blue skin covered the monster’s entire body, and the monster was so tall that its head pierced through the clouds. In truth, Tan possessed a completely different appearance from other dragons in the dragon species. If one had to somehow describe Tan’s appearance, one would say Tan looked like a Black Draconic Tortoise; the head was of a dragon, but the body was of a tortoise, however, this only described his overall shape. Tan’s body was also covered in scales and clumps of hair, a combination that looked grotesque.

Tan’s appearance made the Masters question whether they could put Tan into the category of a dragon. However, Tan was known throughout the universe as one of the primeval dragons that existed from the beginning of time. He was a mythical being who destroyed countless worlds and even fought against the Messiah.

“At last, he makes his appearance… The King of the Arrogant, the Beast of the Apocalypse.”

Wukong, who had been still, spoke with a grave voice.

“Leviathan.”