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BOOM!
The explosion was deafening.
Wayne had already weaved through a third round of Cero from over twenty Hollows.
The alien Hollow’s wager was officially lost.
“Tsk.
A cockroach that just won’t die.” Kaslandin’s expression soured.
Niji’s bet might not win either, but that wasn’t the point, he’d lost any chance at seven more Gillians.
Another step behind in catching up.
“Hahaha, don’t be so upset, Kaslandin.” The serpentine Adjuchas Niji laughed loudly.
He was playing at comfort, but there wasn’t a drop of sincerity in it.
“Just a small wager.
Nothing to lose sleep over.” “Hmph.
I may have lost my chance, but yours isn’t guaranteed either.” Kaslandin sneered.
The bone spurs along his back began to ripple.
The Gillians he’d summoned onto the field let out a chorus of hissing shrieks, and their dark red Ceros swung instantly toward Wayne’s position.
“Hey, hey — Kaslandin.
We agreed.
No interference.” The serpentine Adjuchas’s face darkened as he felt the shift among the opposing Gillians.
“Hmph.
Just a stinking bug.” His action exposed, Kaslandin dropped any pretense.
The bone spurs on his back rippled faster, their motion widening.
Over ten Gillians locked onto Wayne in the same instant.
“Let me kill him and I’ll hand you three Gillians.” “Wasn’t it seven?” The serpentine Hollow shook his head.
He and Kaslandin had been at a standoff for decades, long enough to know each other well.
But neither of their combat strengths was high, so they’d both stayed in the Forest of Menos, slowly building their Reiryoku by devouring Gillians.
It was a slow method, but an extremely safe one.
In truth, as rivals of over ten years, they both wanted to devour each other entirely.
That was the only way either of them could jump an entire class in an instant.
If one of them managed to break into the ranks of mid-tier Adjuchas, they’d have enough strength to protect themselves and finally venture into the inner circle.
But ten-plus years of stalemate had left them both restless.
So even a seemingly trivial wager like this made them petty about every last detail.
“You bet, you pay up.
What — you break the rules and then try to welch?” “Less talk.
Let me crush this stinking bug first!” The venom in Kaslandin’s eyes deepened at Niji’s words.
He raked the bone spurs across his back.
An invisible wave shuddered through the air.
The Gillians under his control opened their massive mouths in unison, dark red Cero rapidly condensing before each one.
“Tsk.
Sore loser.” Niji muttered under his breath.
“One of these days, I’m going to take you — hm?
Hey!
Where are you aiming that!” BOOM!
A resonant hum, and over ten Ceros erupted in unison.
Target: Wayne.
But Wayne had seen this coming.
The instant those ten Ceros locked onto him, he was already airborne, repositioning mid-leap.
He’d jumped from the chest of one of Niji’s own Gillians, a position that put Niji himself directly in the line of fire.
His foot pressed down on the Gillian’s chest.
Wayne fired Shadow Step.
One second before the Ceros hit, he was gone.
The ten-plus beams swallowed the unlucky Gillian whole, then barreled on toward Niji in the distance.
BOOM!
A heavier detonation.
An even larger Cero erupted from Niji’s side, he’d moved at last.
If he’d waited any longer, the combined shockwave from those strikes would have finished him.
The explosion tore through the air again.
Wayne didn’t wait.
He blitzed into Kaslandin’s Gillian group at full speed and started cutting them down.
Four rounds of Cero had drained the Gillians considerably.
Their recondensation rate had slowed to a crawl, and that sluggishness was exactly the opening Wayne needed.
He landed at the base of a massive Gillian.
Lightning crackled across his Blade Claws in rapid bursts.
Lightning Strike chained with Shadow Step, he swept under over ten Gillians in quick succession, touching down and vanishing, touching down and vanishing.
He wasn’t trying to kill them.
He was severing their tendons one by one, stripping away their mobility.
And his reason for doing that…
“Kas — landin!” The dust from the Cero blasts settled.
Niji burst through the haze, battered but standing.
The ten-plus Ceros hadn’t directly injured him, but they’d burned through a massive reserve of Reiryoku.
Class difference or not, that was still ten-plus Ceros hitting at once.
It had taken sixty percent of his Reiryoku just to hold them off.
“Kaslandin!
I’ll have your head for that!” The ambush had sent the serpentine Hollow over the edge.
His tail whipped into motion and he charged straight at Kaslandin.
“Niji!
That was an accident!” Kaslandin backed off several steps as the fury came bearing down on him.
Their Reiatsu wasn’t far apart, but in terms of actual fighting ability, he was behind Niji.
A death match right now, he wouldn’t die, but he’d take real damage.
And that kind of damage in the open Forest of Menos was an invitation.
Who knew which other Adjuchas might sense the commotion and come calling?
One bad move and they’d both fall.
That was not how he wanted this to go.
“That stinking bug deliberately redirected the attack onto you!” Kaslandin threw out the words in his own defense, and they landed.
Niji’s charge stuttered.
He glanced, almost involuntarily, toward the Gillian group where Wayne was lurking.
“My lord!” Wayne spoke up the instant he felt both Adjuchas focus on him.
“Lord Niji!
Order our Gillians to attack theirs — now!
This is the best chance to wipe them out!” “Hm?” Niji hadn’t thought about it from that angle.
But he did possess intelligence.
His degree of enlightenment wasn’t top-tier, but a few seconds was all he needed to grasp what this lowly little runt was getting at.
“Right.
Why didn’t I think of that.” The realization hit.
He spurred his Gillians to condense Cero immediately, catching the opposing Gillians exactly when their old strength was spent and new strength hadn’t yet formed.
Over ten Ceros swept straight through them.
A chain of heavy crashes followed.
In a single volley, Kaslandin’s Gillians were wiped out.
The two or three left standing were too depleted to matter.
“Hahahaha!” Niji roared with laughter at the sudden reversal.
“Kaslandin, you reaped exactly what you sowed!
Hmph — we’ve been at each other’s throats for over ten years.
Time to settle it!” “Niji, what are you trying to do!” Fear bled into Kaslandin’s shout.
He had never been built for straight combat.
Outnumbered and outclassed as things stood now, fear was the only reasonable response.
“What am I trying to do?
Wipe you out, obviously!
Maybe my Reiryoku can break straight through lower-tier into mid-tier in one go!
Hahahaha!” Niji laughed as he closed the distance.
Behind him, his Gillians stirred and began advancing alongside him.
“Niji, you want to kill me?” Kaslandin’s fury cracked into a cold laugh.
“Hmph.
Do you dare?
Don’t forget, I have that lord behind me.” “That lord?” The voice belonged to Wayne.
He’d already slipped out of the blast radius, suppressed his Reiatsu, and tucked himself beside the Gillian he’d been tracking all along, the big one, the same large creature that had been part of Niji’s group.
“Could it be the ruler of the Forest of Menos is nearby?
What level of existence is this ‘lord’ he’s talking about, exactly?” “So what?” Niji answered, perfectly calm.
“Once I devour you, I’ll be a hair’s breadth from mid-tier.
Then I flee deep into the inner circle.
No matter how capable he is, can he teleport to wherever I end up?
And honestly, would the Lord of the Northern Forest really hunt me down over a piece of trash like you?
Hahahaha.
Now be a good meal and become part of my Reiryoku.” His words fell.
Niji swung his tail and charged straight at Kaslandin.
“Niji, you dare!” Kaslandin’s roar erupted from him, and a Cero as thick as his arm blasted toward Niji.
At the same moment, Niji directed the Gillians just behind him to fire again, grinding down Kaslandin’s Reiryoku in a continuous drain.
Then he himself surged forward.
The two Adjuchas-class Menos Grande collided.
“Perfect.” Wayne smiled.
He pushed off with his toes and shot forward like a shadow.
Not toward the Adjuchas fight, he wasn’t suicidal.
With his current strength, tanking even a single casual hit from either of them would be a stroke of luck.
Full power from an Adjuchas was a different matter entirely.
No, he was heading for the fallen Gillians.
This was the opening he needed to strip their masks.
It wouldn’t go unnoticed by the two Adjuchas, but neither of them had the bandwidth to care.
Kaslandin, he despised Wayne, but he had zero room to split his focus right now.
And Niji?
Weigh the Reiryoku cost of a few Gillians against the Adjuchas-class meal standing in front of him.
Anyone could work out that math.
Even someone with no toes, which, being a serpentine Hollow, Niji probably wasn’t.
Besides, it was Wayne’s shout that had handed him this windfall in the first place.
So he looked the other way and let the little ant have its scraps.
The ant couldn’t absorb that much Reishi anyway.
Even if it evolved into a Gillian right now, so what?
Niji didn’t give it a second thought.
What neither Adjuchas could have anticipated was this: after collecting over ten masks, Wayne tossed only a single small piece into his own mouth.
Everything else he stuffed directly into the mouth of the one surviving Gillian on the other side.
“Mmmm…
raaahhh…” The great creature let out an excited shriek as it received the feeding.
The surge of Reishi pushed its Reiryoku, already teetering on the edge of advancement, into sublimation.
An instant later, a faint luminescence bloomed across its enormous body.
The telltale glow of imminent evolution.
When that light clarified and hardened into a protective Light Cocoon around the Gillian, the evolution would be complete.
“Tsk…” Wayne clicked his tongue.
“Still just a little short?” He glanced at the surviving Gillians still being controlled across the field.
“Fine.
Let’s wrap this up.” He leaped.
Shadow Step took him to the shoulder of the nearest Gillian.
Shattering Slash swept out in a single clean motion, and a massive head launched skyward.
Then the second.
Then the third.
When Niji noticed his controllable Hollow Beasts dwindling, he looked back, and found almost nothing left.
The rage flared.
But Kaslandin was still the priority.
Despite the losses, Niji drove the last few remaining Gillians into a final volley against Kaslandin.
Full-force death matches between Adjuchas were rare, but once one began, both sides burned through their Reiryoku at terrifying speed.
The final Ceros from those last five Gillians became exactly the weight that broke Kaslandin.
Five dark red beams punched clean through his defenses and slammed into him.
He saw the crisis coming.
His bone spurs thrashed wildly, spending every last drop of Reiryoku he had, just enough to deflect Niji’s final killing blow off course.
The beam scraped past his Hollow Mask and screamed into the distance.
BOOM…
The thunder of the explosion rolled on and on.
Gravely wounded, Kaslandin had no choice but to run.
Before he went, he fixed Wayne with a venomous glare.
A Cero, noticeably thinner than before, shot straight for him.
The last dregs of what he had.
And yet, an enemy’s final desperate counterattack was often the most dangerous of all.
Was Wayne strong?
Yes.
Among his peers, nearly invincible.
But in front of an Adjuchas-class Menos Grande, Wayne was no different from the Gillians.
Just a plaything.
The raw suppression of class and power made taking this Cero head-on simply not an option.
But Wayne couldn’t dodge either, because he was on the shoulder of the Gillian he’d been tracking, still feeding it the last of the masks.
If he moved, the incoming Cero would very likely blow its head apart.
If he didn’t move, he’d be the one reduced to ash.
At full strength, he’d have backed himself to absorb this hit.
But he’d been pushing without restraint since the battle started.
Shadow Step and Shattering Slash chained together again and again, his Reiryoku was more than half gone.
Against something this sudden, he had nothing left to hit back with.
“Tsk…
all that planning and I still missed this?” The frustration bit at him.
The strike looked like the dregs of a spent Adjuchas, but as a final counterattack it carried a Reiatsu spike more than three times that of an ordinary Gillian.
He absolutely could not tank it.
“All that work, wasted.” A quiet exhale.
Wayne fired Shadow Step and vanished.
When it came down to absolute power, he chose to survive.
Even if it meant throwing away almost a year of effort.
Without his life, there was no next attempt.
He looked back once, reluctant, at the Gillian about to take the hit.
Shook his head.
And turned to run.
Then, one second before he cleared the blast radius, the Gillian opened its mouth wide and swallowed the incoming Cero whole.
Its Reiatsu detonated upward.
A surge far stronger than anything before, blazing with a brilliant pink light, erupted from its jaws and roared straight toward Kaslandin, and as it spread, it swept over Niji as well.
“This is, Cero Doble?
Nel?
It’s Nel!
Not Yammy!
Hahaha!
It’s Nel!
I was right!” Cero Doble.
One of Nel’s defining abilities, a Cero technique that belonged to her alone.
She swallows the enemy’s Cero, fuses it with her own Reiryoku, and returns it at doubled power, striking with far greater force than the original.
The excitement in Wayne’s voice was real.
After everything, after all that time and distance, his hunt had not been wasted.
Then his expression went hard.
Not far away stood two Adjuchas he’d just made into enemies.
Protecting an unconscious Nel from them, before, that might have been manageable.
But now?
Nel’s Cero Doble had blasted straight into Kaslandin and swept over Niji in the same breath.
After a provocation that blatant, Wayne wasn’t even sure he could protect himself, let alone her.
But reality had a different answer for him.
When the pink light faded, both Adjuchas were gone.
Not killed.
Before the blast could land squarely on either of them, they’d both used Sonído and vanished.
Kaslandin was running on empty.
Another second and there would have been no running at all.
And Niji, faced with a choice between chasing his prey or letting an ant dent his pride, had chosen his prey.
If he let Kaslandin slip away now, what he’d lose wasn’t just a little.
So both Adjuchas-class Menos Grande simply left.
Just like that, without fanfare, leaving Wayne standing in the aftermath, blinking, faintly dumbfounded.
Even though, when he thought about it, every bit of it made complete sense.
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