At the final moment before the connection broke, the puppets, which had been flesh without emotion, transmitted a trace of feeling. Fear, the kind an ant feels when facing a giant.
Flesh puppets severed by overwhelming mental pressure should not feel anything. Even with only instinct left, how could they sense fear at such a fundamental level of life. How was that possible.
The control core was in the brain, yet it was still linked to his own consciousness. Even so, the puppets were forced into fear. If their positions were reversed, would he feel the same.
Before Salva could sort through this, the ice storm finally struck the ground and expanded rapidly. In moments, it swept over most of the city and reached the castle itself. Cold wind rushed in, frost formed on the surface of his coffee, and outside the window everything had turned white.
The once thunderous city walls fell silent. Where humans and monsters had stood, nothing remained, as bodies frozen through by relentless frost shattered under the storm and were ground into dust. They merged with the falling snow, leaving only a dead white scene.
Ice-blue beams swept across the walls like blades, and towering ice formations swallowed the last survivors. Their throats were seized by ice, leaving no sound at all. Salva lost his spies on the walls, hidden ritual setups, thousands of flesh puppets, and several practice creations of roughly low silver rank.
Along with them, a third of the city's disguised civilian puppets vanished. By his precise timing, all of this took one minute and fifty-seven seconds. In exchange, the dragon had spent a single breath attack.
"Roar!"
The thunderous roar struck a bell in Salva's heart. The massive dragon folded its wings and landed on the city wall. With one step, the wall shattered, and a huge monster, frozen and shaking, was dragged out.
The familiar sound of flesh being torn by Rend rang out. One of the support forces meant to deal with the dragon died ahead of schedule.
Salva stood stunned for a moment, his lips trembling as he forced a few sounds through clenched teeth, ice clinging to his beard. "Dragon." "Dragon!"
Then he burst into laughter. His mutated right arm smashed the cold coffee and the table into pieces. His clothes were torn apart by his warped limbs, and mouths split open across his body as he laughed wildly.
"Ha, even reduced to a mindless beast, you still noticed my setup." "Were the puppets too crude and got found out." "It's fine. This is only a warm-up."
"I will entertain you properly. First, please enjoy this, high-tier Magic. The Prison of Aerlude."
Ritual nodes placed around the city and beyond received the mental command and activated at once. Blood was poured in, souls linked the spells, and hundreds of believers were sacrificed at each node. With careful preparation and prior warming, this massive Magic was launched in an extremely short time.
Beams of light shot upward in rings and pierced the sky. A huge binding-type Magic Circle rose, large enough to cover the entire city and much of the heavens. Layers of halos appeared around the dragon, and immense pressure formed an invisible cage that even cracked the ground.
This was not a traditional barrier, but a powerful restraint targeting a single individual within a set range. Creating a normal large barrier capable of trapping a dragon was unrealistic. In large-scale war, this type of Magic was not effective.
Against a single target, however, it worked extremely well. This was one measure Salva prepared to prevent his prey from escaping, and it was only one layer. In his eyes, the nested follow-ups were flawless, and the target could not flee.
Human thinking differed from that of other beings. Or perhaps schemers like him always believed their targets would act as planned. It was like ants forming a circle to trap prey.
The ants thought this would stop escape, but their narrow view kept them from seeing what required looking up. What they surrounded was only a tiny, insignificant part of the giant beast.
Belial knew it was a trap. But Godzilla did not run.
He stepped forward and crushed the insects that dared to scurry in the shadows.
To be honest, even back when Belial was a human in his previous life, he was not what anyone would call smart. At best, he was an ordinary person within a normal range. After becoming Godzilla, his brain could process information like a supercomputer, far beyond any human, but raw processing power was not the same as intelligence.
More importantly, as a giant beast, there were almost no problems that required careful thinking to solve. In the past, there was nothing that could not be handled by using more strength. If there was, it only meant his strength was not great enough.
So a perfect loop formed. Whenever something happened, his first thought was to solve it with overwhelming power. Occasionally he would use his super brain, and the super brain would tell him to use overwhelming power.
If one looked at everything he had done since birth, many of his actions were dangerously reckless. It was just that he was strong enough that even when death's scythe reached his neck, the blade chipped instead.
Seeing the human city below being attacked by monsters as usual, Belial almost opened his mouth on instinct and cleared the field with a single breath. But there was a reason he could always find these places so precisely. The conditions needed to attract a Beast Tide required a kind of power he desperately needed to release fluctuations, resonate with the abnormal Magic inside monsters, and stir their emotions.
Those fluctuations would appear on the system map as a general directional guide. That explained why he always arrived at exactly the right place. Once he reached the area, if that power source was within a certain range, it would show up as a clear red dot on the map.
From high in the sky, with his powerful vision and detection, Belial could already grasp the situation below. On the surface, there was nothing strange about the humans or the monsters. Salva had put in real effort, and did not feel much pain over losing puppets, so the fighting below was real, blades and blood everywhere, fighting in the name of "authenticity."
Naturally, Belial could not see anything odd with his eyes. But he could see the red dots on the map. "So this is a trap," Belial concluded after a glance.
Dozens of red dots of different sizes were scattered throughout the city, inside and outside the walls, and even buried within the walls and underground. In the past, these red dots were just experience packs, and now they could also be equated with enemies. What surprised him was that some of the red dots were humans.
Before, red dots usually meant ugly, strong, and strange monsters, or the intersection points of certain Magic Circle or structures. Now red dots appeared on both the human and monster sides, and those two sides were fighting each other. The largest red dot in the center even extended countless red threads, which on the map lined up with the defenders on the city walls.
What was this, infighting among red dots? At a glance, it was clearly an act. The other larger red dots were likely the ugly monsters buried in advance, if Belial had guessed right.
Still, that was not a bad thing. So many experience packs gathered together could be killed all at once, saving him the trouble of hunting them down one by one. "It doesn't matter how many there are, I'll kill them all the same," he said.
Having made up his mind, the giant dragon in the sky revealed his vicious fangs and began charging his breath. As his wings spread, even the preparatory motion stirred the surrounding elements and twisted the clouds into a vortex. A low hum came from within his body, icy deathlight flowed along his back spines, and vast amounts of highly condensed Ice Element surged upward through his throat, undergoing complex changes along the way.
As his understanding of certain runes within Magic deepened and his own power grew, his original freezing breath evolved as well. Just charging it drew a massive convergence of Ice Element, forming an elemental vortex centered on him. Elements and a flood of Magic gathered and compressed into a single point, Energy Field spread out, Magic Array rose around his body, and several glowing rings appeared with amplification, diffusion, and acceleration effects.
Belial decided to use this move to test them first. The damage was not especially high, but the control was excellent, perfect for seeing what the enemy was really capable of. Whether the trap was meant for him or not was unimportant. What mattered to Belial was making the other side die.
The breath energy gathered to a terrifying level, ice-blue light bursting from his throat, impossible to hide. The surrounding clouds churned violently as water vapor froze into ice once more. Since he was no longer holding back or avoiding humans, this single breath would cause at least three days of heavy snow across the surrounding region, burying the entire city in winter.