Return of the Fallen Volume 7 Chapter 38
As Kazuki released this hellish scream, foul smoke drifted out from his armor as his flesh started to burn and melt inside the metal suit. The Motozu was taken aback as it watched this scene play out. After a moment or two, Kazuki’s nightmarish screams faded and his voice fell silent.
Towering over top Kazuki, the Motozu looked down at Kazuki in equal parts confusion and surprise. Inspecting Kazuki closer, the ancient beast found that Kazuki was no longer breathing and his heart had completely stopped.
“I was curious earlier as to why you hadn’t attacked me with much magic. You knew my scales were tough against physical blows but then you used magic close range on my eye and destroyed it. I thought you might have heard the legends about my scales and how they can reflect magical energy and that’s why you used your magic so close to me because you knew I wouldn’t be able to close my eyelid in time and your magic would enter directly. I thought you knew this but then you go and use a magic attack and hit my scales. Were you just lucky earlier or were you just a fool?…No matter, you have already died.”
The large creature felt dissatisfied and still full of rage.
“Even after death, why is that dark energy still antagonizing me?”
The ancient beast could still feel dark energy pulsing from around Kazuki’s neck. The moment it mentioned this though, like a candle being snuffed out, the dark energy vanished as though it were never there in the first place.
The Motozu grew suspicious of this and lifted its front foot before smashing it down atop Kazuki’s limp body once more.
*Bang*
No resistance…
Kazuki still was covered in the armor so his body wasn’t crushed to a fine paste but there was also no movement whatsoever.
“To think this little bastard was this troublesome and then just dies because of a stupid mistake. How vexing.”
*Clank clink clang*
At this moment several metal rods fell out of the air and landed on the ground. Looking at them, the Motozu saw that it was just the lightning rods Kazuki had made earlier during their fight. It was only natural that they fell out of the sky with Kazuki dead. The Motozu soon paid them no mind.
It was at this moment that one of the rods, out of nowhere, flew directly towards the creature’s destroyed eye. The Motozu hadn’t expected this but it was still quicker than the rod. Its eyelid slammed shut as it batted away the rod before turning its rage toward Kazuki. Looking down below, Kazuki’s heart was once more beating just fine and his breath had returned. That alone was infuriating but the teasing grin he wore was one that said fuck you a million times over.
The ancient beast felt such rage and humiliation at this moment it no longer cared about anything else. It would squash Kazuki with everything it had or it would flip the ocean in the process.
Lifting both feet up at once, the creature that was already as big as a mountain now towered even higher. Placing one foot over the other, the Motozu came down with a force enough to crack the continent in half.
As it came flying down, it still saw that stupid smile on Kazuki’s face and became lost in its own rage. It came down with all the speed and force it could muster. The moment its blow was about to land, something completely unexpected happened.
The rods that were lying as still as dead doornails, all of them suddenly sprung up and were now upright. Not only that, the tips of each one were now shaped into a fine point like a needle. The Motozu saw this and its single eye went wide in shock. It had used all of its own strength and force to come down atop Kazuki, and the two were now far too close to one another, it had no time to stop its attack, only slow it.
The creature did its best to pull its front feet back towards its chest and even fired several beams of energy from all of its horns at once to try and change its trajectory slightly and slow itself to some degree. It did all of this at the last second and it had succeeded. Its force and speed had been reduced and it changed its trajectory had indeed changed a bit but it simply wasn’t enough.
All at once, dozens of rods had penetrated through its incredibly tough scales. Not only did it pierce through the scales but the force from the great beast combined with its mountain-like weight, even as the ice was breaking and collapsing beneath it, the rods tore through not just one foot but both.
The beast jumped backward the moment it felt this self-inflicted wound and tried to remove the rods as quickly as they had entered but Kazuki was already on the move. With the long rods inserted in the creature’s front feet, Kazuki changed their shape in an instant and made them form a huge circle, connecting one end from the other. They could no longer be removed, at least not by this creature.
The creature realized this in an instant and turned its fury on Kazuki. Beams of energy came together on its horns but Kazuki was a step ahead. The moment the rods penetrated the creature’s front feet, and it lost focus, up above the rest of the rods shot down from the sky. The creature had been so distracted and so consumed by its own anger it hadn’t noticed that all of the rods had yet to fall.
All at once, these rods had come raining down like meteors but their intention was not to smash, rather to wrap instead. The rods came together and reduced in number. They went from hundreds to eight in an instant. These large eight rods came over and unfurled themselves like big blankets before wrapping each of the horns of the creature in a layer of orichalcum.
The moment it tried to fire its magic, there was a rebound of such magnitude that it actually knocked the creature back. This creature could not destroy the god metal with its magic and since there were no scales covering the ancient beast’s horns, the horns had no protection like the rest of its body did. A few of its horns broke then and there and several more were had long thick cracks running through them.
*ROAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRR!*
Like a volcano erupting, the creature roared out in madness.
Its magic had been sealed and its front feet could not come apart no matter how it struggled.
“IF I CAN’T DESTROY YOU WITH MY POWER! THEN I’LL JUST FUCKING EAT YOU INSTEAD!”
The creature opened its large mouth in an attempt to swallow Kazuki whole. This though was another mistake. Kazuki casually waved his hand and the remaining chunk of god metal in his ring appeared in the beast’s mouth and was shaped into long spikes as well.
The Motozu’s eye widened in shock. It tried to move its head out of the way but since its feet were basically cuffed together its’ movement and balance were affected greatly and it became a hell of a lot slower. Kazuki forced the spikes deep into the creature’s mouth and the creature could now no longer clamp its jaws shut.
“Never again will I be eaten. Only I will devour and not the other way around.”
The creature watched on in horror as Kazuki’s eyes rapidly healed. His helmet flipped back revealing his face regenerating at a rapid rate.
“Now that things are like this, will you listen to me or should things just end here. Either way, things will go my way, so I suggest you no longer force it. Do you understand, nod if you do.”
Anger, rage, humiliation, hatred, loss, the Motozu refused to surrender. Kazuki saw this and sighed.
*Haa*
“So be it.”
Kazuki started to press one of the spikes into the roof of the creature’s mouth. Slowly he allowed it to drill upward. The Motozu quickly understood what was about to happen. With much fury and indignation, it reluctantly nodded its head.
“Good. If I remove the spikes from your mouth, will you try and eat me again?”
The Motozu stared hatefully at Kazuki in silence before once more nodding its large lion-like head reluctantly.
Kazuki removed it and the first words from the creature’s mouth were spoken with intense animosity.
“You tricked me. Playing dead like a coward only to sneak attack me. How vile.”
“Did you like that little technique. I have near-perfect control over my entire body. I can stop my heart as if it were nothing. Even if it were completely crushed I could continue to pump my own blood with my power as I repair it. As for it being cowardly and this about sneak attacks, everything is fair in battle. To call me vile is just the talk of a loser. In the end, we never would have fought in the first place if we were being reasonable. All of this, you deserved every bit of it.”
The eye of the Motozu glared fiercely at Kazuki. To it, Kazuki was like an insect, yet he, again and again, spoke as if the two were equals. At the same time, it had lost to this tiny human. The humiliation and shame this brought were almost unimaginable.
“Hmph, you say I deserved it, yet you are the one who entered my territory with that dark energy around you. You were purposefully antagonizing me, you declared your intentions the moment you came here. On top of that, you even tried to trick me, saying you wish to talk. Lies, you came here to fight. That dark energy gives you away fully.”
Kazuki grabbed the compass around his neck and understood instantly.
(Zetrazz, you fucking bastard!)
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