As his size grew, the energy gap also grew larger. With a body even bigger than the legendary Rodan, his appetite was enormous. The creatures below were plentiful, but unlike the snowfields where monsters gathered together like delivered meals, these were scattered, and eating one by one would be far less efficient.
So Belial came up with another good idea.
"I need a stable place that can provide me with a huge amount of energy."
Combining this with things he had noticed before, he soon spotted another area of sparse vegetation and bare mountains. The giant dragon dove down and landed on a peak. The wind pressure wrapped around him dispersed on its own, and Belial spread his Energy Field to sense what lay inside the mountain.
He opened his mouth, light blooming within.
"Boom!"
A very low-power Spiral Heat Ray pierced straight through the entire mountain and blasted into the depths underground. The small explosion made the mountain tremble slightly. Something below seemed to change, triggering a chain of small reactions, and then something surged up from the narrow opening.
What followed was a violent eruption. The temperature shot up as blockbuster magma sprayed out, quickly forming a small lava lake that overflowed and washed over the Black Dragon's feet. At around three thousand degrees, the magma splashed onto Belial's scales, but he showed no reaction, as it felt no different from warm water.
What interested him was what the magma contained. Its temperature was abnormally high, which meant it held extremely rich heat energy. From similar volcano-like sites he had found before, Belial judged that these magma flows spread outward underground from a single point.
With his extreme sensitivity to energy and his sense of direction, he reached a conclusion. Somewhere in this forest, there had to be a massive volcano with extremely frequent magma activity. As a node where many magma branches met, it should contain an enormous amount of heat energy.
What he needed to do now was find that volcano and absorb the energy inside to fill the gaps in his body.
"After that, I can learn Rodan behavior."
It would just mean lying in magma and sleeping for a while, which for him was like soaking in a hot bath. He had already entered Burning Mode before, so sleeping by a volcano could even count as checking in. And if there really was something buried inside like highly concentrated uranium, with God of Destruction around, he would not die.
That was the confidence of having a second life.
If it were the old him, Belial might have gone wild the moment he unlocked God of Destruction. The previous battle, however, had given him a sense of danger and a push to grow stronger. He considered himself strong, but not strong enough to act without restraint, so he decided to keep a low profile while maintaining a good dragon image.
After all, if his Godzilla-level power could beat physics into the ground, it was only normal for others to be strong in unreasonable ways too. There were no surprises along the way. Belial easily found the volcano that should have been the intersection point of the magma veins.
With Energy Field providing precise energy control and positioning, he swept across the forest at speeds over Mach six. Whenever he found a likely node, he fired a Spiral Heat Ray to test it, narrowing the search whenever magma appeared. With such a carpet-style search and his own strength, it would have been strange to run into trouble.
"As for whether anyone dared to block me along the way?"
"There's only me causing trouble for others. Anyone in my way gets killed."
His search and volcano-blasting went safely, though he did get hungry midway and casually ate a few monsters with relatively high Magic content. He also practiced his newly strengthened ice abilities, but his control over range and power was still not as precise as before. Many monsters were frozen into fragments and blown apart by storms, making them impossible to eat.
"So I still need practice," Belial said with a sigh.
For the monsters of the Dornmis Forest, a great danger had arrived. The sky had been locked in raging storms and thunder, accompanied by roars that shook the mind. The ground trembled as volcanoes were detonated one after another, magma rivers swallowing everything and reshaping the land with explosions and fires.
From time to time, impacts like earthquakes echoed through the forest. Towering ancient trees were ripped out by unstoppable storms, forming massive tornadoes. Each event came with the death of at least one terrifying lord-level monster and hundreds or thousands of others.
Worst of all were the sudden, violent Blizzard from the sky. The cold was terrifying, and the wind and snow ignored all defenses, drilling into flesh and freezing monsters from the inside out until they shattered and vanished into the storm. Within several thousand meters of these events, nothing survived, not even corpses.
After countless deaths, the smarter monsters finally realized the truth. A natural disaster had entered the forest, something that could not be described as a mere tyrant or beast. It was unstoppable and uncaring, harvesting life without pause.
Those that could still think fled desperately toward the outer regions to survive. As a result, monster numbers surged along the forest's edge. This, in turn, drew the attention of others.
A sword flashed down, splitting a massive monster in two. The man in robes remained spotless, though his expression was dark as he shook off the blade and sheathed it. Several companions dressed as Warrior also finished their fights, frowning as they looked at the corpses.
They were elites among adventurers and knew the forest's territories well. "These should have been deeper inside," the leader muttered. He knelt and checked the bloody remains, but nothing on the surface explained what had driven them out.
"What could make them flee like this?" Past experience offered no answers. His deputy spoke quietly, noting that even volcanic eruptions should not have caused such a mass migration, though the two events were likely connected.
"This job isn't worth the pay," the deputy added.
"Logan, did your drake-lizard smell anything?" the leader asked.
Logan, a rare beast tamer, was crouched beside a five-meter-long horned lizard. With partial dragon blood, it could sense things humans could not. Logan shook his head as he tried to calm it.
"I don't know. It smells something, but it's been like this the whole time."
The creature curled up and trembled, a sight Logan had never seen before. Whatever frightened his old partner was beyond his understanding. A heavy mood settled over the group.
Then, something unusual stirred in the depths of the forest.
"That condition looks familiar. Let me take a look."
"Who's there?" The adventurers sprang up, swords drawn, forming a defensive circle. Anyone who could approach this close without a sound was no ordinary person.
"Sir, who are you?" the leader asked cautiously as a tall man stepped out of the trees. Seeing the man's high-grade gear and the massive sword on his back, he softened his tone slightly.
"No need to worry," the man said. "Our interests might overlap, so let me introduce myself. I'm Lyles."
"Lyles?" The name sounded familiar.
The deputy glanced at the gear again, his face changing as he whispered to the leader. Recognition dawned at once, and the leader's expression turned respectful.
"So it's you. The dragon-hunting duke who chases dragon calamities. It's an honor."
"Don't speak to me like that," Lyles said, his dragon-like eyes sweeping the group before fixing on the trembling drake-lizard. He exhaled slowly, suppressing the stir in his body as a familiar scent reached him.
"You're adventurers, right?" he continued. "I want to buy some information from you."
"Information about a dragon."
"La la la…" Belial swayed his head and hummed a tune even he could not understand. A blue white Spiral Heat Ray poured straight down from several thousand meters up and drilled into the ground below. It punched through layers of rock and slammed into buried magma, detonating as the special components in the molten stone reacted violently.
It was like dropping a mint candy into a fizzy drink, and the magma river surged into a wild tide. The ground shook hard, and the flow rushed upward along surface Rift without stopping. The tremors spread fast, carrying heat and pressure toward the surface.
"Ugh…!" A battered monster shifted its hind claws on the ground as if it sensed the vibration. The grass that had been whipping the monster across the face also paused for a moment, and then that awareness spread outward. The unlucky survivors who had not died cleanly were jolted awake by fear and began to run in blind panic.
There was no safe direction to flee, because nothing stable remained. The only chance was to gamble that they were near the edge and pick a random direction that might escape the coming wide area destruction. A thunderous roar followed as mountains collapsed and magma burst out, forming small erupting volcanoes that darkened the already dim sky with ash.
Some poor creatures were crushed to pieces by falling rock in the first wave. Then rivers of magma at unnatural temperatures rolled in and swallowed everything. Around the volcano, the land caved in, and Rend tore open cracks that became gaping maws, with blazing magma pillars rising from plate seams to trap and kill all life present.