The swamp was no longer silent, the rhythmic popping of poisonous bubbles had been replaced by the whistling of death and the cackle of a madman.
Dreleon's golden eyes burned through the grime on his face, glowing with a renewed, predatory brightness.
He didn't feel fear.
Fear was a luxury for those with something to lose, to the mad lion king of the Swamp, this intruder wasn't a threat—it was a feast.
It was a challenge that finally made his blood boil hot enough to melt the poison in his veins.
"Hahaha! Finally!" Dreleon's voice was a jagged rasp that shook the hanging vines. "Someone who doesn't go down after ten rounds! Hahaha!"
He launched himself from the vine.
With his dominating style, he fell like a jagged stone, his skeletal fist cocked back.
The figure in the shadows stepped into the dim, green light of the swamp, produced by the poisonous insects living in the dark.
It was a lion—massive and imposing—but unlike any Dreleon had ever seen.
Its mane was a deep, forest green with a faint, shimmering golden hue hidden within the strands.
Its eyes were piercing purple, and its body was shrouded in a shifting, blurry aura—a color so difficult to pinpoint it seemed to hurt the eyes to look at it directly.
The Green Lion simply opened its maw.
Thwip!
Another silver needle, cold and lightning-fast, hissed through the air.
Dreleon didn't even blink.
He tilted his head a fraction of an inch to the left, feeling the heat of the projectile as it grazed his cheek.
He didn't back away.
He used the momentum of his descent to close the gap, his eyes locked onto the intruder's open mouth.
"My turn!"
Dreleon's fist slammed into the Green Lion's jaw.
The impact sounded like two boulders colliding.
The intruder's head snapped back, its heavy mane whipping through the air.
Dreleon didn't give it a second to breathe.
As the Green Lion stumbled, trying to regain its balance, Dreleon dropped to the ground, coiled his skeletal legs, and lunged upward.
His claws, long and jagged from years of neglect, unsheathed with a metallic ring.
He drove them deep into the intruder's stomach, carving a massive slash mark through that strange, blurry aura.
A spray of dark fluid hit the mud, and the Green Lion let out a low, vibrating hum of pain.
Sensing the shift in the battle, the intruder's emerald eyes flared.
After retreating five meters it spat another needle, but this time, it manipulated the projectile with its aura.
The needle began to rotate in a wide, lethal diameter around the Green Lion, creating a spinning shield of whistling steel.
The silver needle whirled with a terrifying frequency, creating a blur vacuum of whistling wind.
Dreleon stood just outside the reach of the spinning shield, his skeletal chest heaving.
The sight of this green-maned beast—this creature using a technique that felt like a mockery to pure physical fight—sent a flare of white-hot agony through his brain.
It wasn't just poison anymore.
As the poison was becoming less effective.
The memory was trying to claw its way out of a grave.
The Green Lion stopped its rotation for a fraction of a second.
Its emerald eyes locked onto Dreleon's sunken sockets.
"I am Dreleon," the intruder declared, the aura around its body flaring into a blinding, unidentifiable hue. "The King of countless forests and the endless sky. You... are nothing but a shadow in the mind."
The name hit Dreleon like a physical punch to the soul.
Dreleon?
The stinging pain in his head intensified.
Every syllable of that name felt like a needle being driven into his gray matter.
He remembered.
He remembered the heavy, warm scent of the jungle, his training at the small age of three and the pact with the princess.
He remembered a King who looked down at him, and had expectations he couldn't yet meet.
He remembered the betrayal of the Turtle and the cold, shifting eyes of the Snake.
He wasn't a mad lion king of the Swamp.
He was the soul pact of the divine jungle lion princess, a royal with unmatched authority.
He remembered his goal, to make a world without slavery.
The Green Lion began to move, the rotating needle accelerating for a killing blow.
But Deleon was not there, he after understanding everything and remembering, he ran towards the river.
With a sudden, explosive burst of his remaining strength, Dreleon leaped away from the fight.
His skeletal feet kicked up a spray of toxic mud as he sprinted toward the edge of the river-bank.
The Green Lion paused, its emerald eyes widening in confusion.
It expected a fight to the death, it expected the madman to break himself till death, yet.
It did not expect a retreat.
Dreleon reached the edge where the dark, slow-moving river of pure toxins flowed.
The water was a deep, oily black, thick enough to dissolve the skin of a lesser beast in seconds.
It was the heart of the Thousand Poisons formation, or so he speculated.
He looked back one last time, his golden eyes glowing with a terrifying clarity that bypassed his skeletal frame.
He wasn't running away.
He was going to the one place which can destroy this hellhole.
He was going to wash away this poisonous valley.
"Hehehe..." a final, soft chuckle escaped his lips. "Moonlight... watch me fight." Just as he said this the final craze on his face also disappeared, replaced by the calmness of sea.
Without a second of hesitation, the skeletal lion leaped.
The black, poisonous water rose up like a shroud to meet him.
There was a single, heavy splash, and then the surface of the river closed over his head, leaving only the ripples of the oily current and the stunned silence of the Green Lion standing on the shore.