The frozen shell cracked, the bones snapped, and its heart stopped long before its body shattered under the weight of Belial's magic. The mind of the Icefang Dragon didn't even have time to process its failure. It was over. Just like that.
The energy it carried was absorbed by Belial's field, but all that remained now was a pile of crushed ice and broken shards where a proud predator once stood.
Belial frowned. "...How am I supposed to eat that?"
He had expected something more out of a creature bold enough to attack first. He thought it would put up a fight. But instead, it had gone down in one hit.
He blinked, puzzled. "Why pretend to be strong if you can't back it up?"
Belial eventually managed to dig out a single item from the heap of shattered ice that hadn't been completely destroyed.
It was a pair of amber-colored sabertooth fangs, though even those were soaked in freezing energy. Just a little pressure, and they crumbled into dust.
That's exactly what happened. One second he was holding them, the next they were nothing but icy fragments.
As for the rest of the flesh? Well, if you had a taste for shaved ice and a weird sense of flavor, maybe you could stomach it. But for Belial, food wasn't about taste anymore.
His sense of taste had long drifted away from anything human. Raw meat? That was nothing.
As long as it had nutrients and was packed with magical energy, he'd eat it without hesitation. He'd even eaten dirt and rocks when he was starving.
There was a time he pinned down a fire-breathing beast, made it roast itself, and then ate it, but the result was disappointing. Most of the energy and magic had burned away during cooking.
Human cooking wasn't just about making things tasty, it helped make food easier to digest, got rid of poison, worked like an external stomach. But to someone like Belial, that didn't matter.
To him, fatty raw meat dripping with blood actually tasted sweet, and it kept all its energy. Even those mana-rich minerals he'd munched on before? They crunched like biscuits.
Depending on the kind of magic inside, they had different flavors, some sweet, some salty.
At this point, if someone made him eat regular human food again, he probably wouldn't taste anything at all. If he had to pick his favorite meals, though, the answer was obvious: energy. Pure, powerful energy.
Radiation, for instance, a massive burst of power. That kind of meal gave him a deep, satisfying feeling that no fancy dish could match. If he could, he'd eat a nuke for lunch without a second thought.
"Huh. This breath attack... kind of interesting," he muttered, pawing through the melting ice and snow where the Icefang Dragon had fallen apart.
The remains were already scattering in the wind, blown across the frozen wasteland. Still, something didn't sit right. That breath, the icy blast, it felt like it had another layer to it, something he hadn't quite figured out yet.
So he brought in a few more magical beasts to test it.
The first dozen or so? Gone. Instantly frozen, their bodies shattered into the snowy air, joining the Icefang Dragon in icy death. Not exactly the result he was going for.
"Still needs some tweaking," Belial said to himself.
He lowered the power a little and widened the spread. In an environment like this, cold, lifeless, his strength naturally got a boost. Ice and snow poured from his mouth in sheets, whipping forward in a storm of white.
The wind was sharp enough to cut. The beasts caught in the blast felt like they were being stabbed all over by icy blades. The cold sank into their bones, gripping their lungs, choking their breath.
Blood thickened and froze. Their organs turned frosty. And then something even weirder happened.
Some of the magical beasts, especially those with their own ice-aligned powers, started reacting in strange ways.
Even though the invading ice energy wasn't too different from the one they already carried, it overwhelmed everything. Their own inner mana started to fight back. It was like a rebellion.
The native ice energy inside them clashed with the foreign force, merged, and then turned against their bodies. The outcome was always the same.
The beast froze solid from the inside out, its body breaking down, before the pressure of so much unstable mana caused it to explode. Not because of an outside attack, but because its own energy turned against it. Internal destruction.
Belial opened up his energy field and placed a claw on one beast's head, watching the whole thing happen up close, every twitch, every snap of energy running through its mana channels.
He could feel the body ripping itself apart. The organs failed. The brain collapsed. The physical form shattered into frozen dust.
And yet, something about the whole process made him stop and think.
This method of attack, the way the foreign mana tore into a body and caused it to fall apart from the inside, it felt familiar.
"Oh..." He remembered.
That's exactly what happened to him when he devoured that shard. His body had been hit by a wave of freezing energy, every muscle and organ frozen solid. He should've died right then and there. But his G-cells refused to give in.
They adapted, grew new organs, and fought back, devouring the invading energy instead.
And now? Maybe because he had absorbed that fragment… his own ice powers carried the same kind of invasive, corrupting effect.
To find out for sure, he kept experimenting.
The results were consistent. One by one, more magical beasts wandered into his range and unknowingly became test subjects. Those with ice-based powers always died the quickest.
The moment Belial's ice energy touched their own, it was like watching a magical meltdown, like stuffing a sandwich with unstable mana and watching it explode.
Their bodies froze inside and out, locked in a brutal clash between their internal mana and the foreign energy that invaded them. It was the same pattern every time.
The beasts' own ice mana reacted violently to his, triggering chaos from within. It wasn't just a regular ice attack, it was a complete internal rebellion. And once the organs gave out, no creature could keep fighting.
This kind of internal detonation was nearly impossible to guard against. Even the toughest beasts had a weakness inside.
In short, anything with an ice affinity was completely countered by his power. Even stronger defensive types didn't last. Once enough damage built up, they entered what Belial could only call an execution zone, past that point, survival wasn't an option. And it wasn't just limited to ice-aligned targets.
Those without an affinity simply took longer to die. The cold slowly soaked into every muscle, every drop of blood, and when it reached deep enough, the results were the same.
Could it be that his breath attack had evolved, carrying a deeper ability to stir and trigger ice-aligned mana?
He decided to test it again, this time skipping the breath. Instead, he used regular ice magic.