Vera shouted as Ham pressed her lips together and lowered her head. With no other choice, she began to activate Empathic Communion in this desperate moment.
"This time I must connect to Sylvia and get spatial ability so we can escape…" "This time I must…" "I must…"
Ham did not enter the Empathic Communion space. Instead, her eyelids grew heavier and heavier, and her body felt like it no longer belonged to her. No matter how she struggled to stay awake, it was useless, and her eyes slowly closed, then opened again.
"Die, insects! This time I really can't take it anymore, give me—ahhh!!!"
Just as Parak tried to push his gathered fist forward, a massive explosion and scorching flames instantly engulfed most of his forearm. The giant reeled as fire spread over his entire arm before slowly fading.
Through the feedback of Magic, the pain hit Parak directly. It was not just burning heat, as he felt his life itself draining away. The arm shriveled at an alarming speed until all sensation vanished.
"Crunch, crunch…" "…Ham?"
Vera opened her eyes and stared blankly at the shadow looming over her. Ham had stood up again, chewing on something, flames still lingering around her fist. She turned her head without speaking, only the sound of chewing coming from her mouth.
Her face was unchanged, but her eyes were completely different, freezing Vera in place.
"I should've logged in earlier. Now my mana bar is almost empty." "This account isn't built well enough. This is rough."
The Magic gained from barely swallowing one of Parak's arms was not enough for Belial to act freely. He frowned slightly and looked up at the massive figure before him. It had been a long time since he had seen something as big as himself.
Belial had been watching through his friend Ryan Waters the whole time, peeking at the fight from afar, and the controls made his fingers itch. Once the huge monster appeared, though, the situation clearly turned bad. He immediately realized something was wrong.
"This is bad. With just these two teammates at their current level, they are done for."
Even though Ham and the others had access to someone's skill pool, their own foundation meant they could not bring out enough power. That level was nowhere near enough to deal with Parra. Watching them get beaten made Belial want to snatch the controller and take over himself, but for now that was only wishful thinking since he was still too far away from them.
"So is there any way to airdrop myself over there remotely?" he muttered. "The scale I tossed over earlier still is not enough to block this."
Belial remembered throwing a small piece of scale before, but its use was limited to positioning and barely keeping them alive. It was nowhere near enough to let him punch someone directly from a distance. Still, as the saying went, if you think hard enough, there were always more solutions than problems, and one idea came to his mind naturally.
He had always hated those people who relied on Clone all day to talk trash, but now Belial had a small thought of his own. "If they can open alternate accounts, why can't I?" he said to himself. "And if this channel works both ways, then if they can come over, I should be able to go over too."
Once the idea clicked, Belial began to separate a part of his own body and pushed it along that thin connection using the same light and dark power. The process had to be careful, and the other side had to be connected as well, so after waiting patiently, Belial finally felt the link come online.
"Drop the controller. Let me handle it!"
He rushed in at the right moment, bumping into something along the way, but Belial did not care. With clear excitement, he linked into the new body, and discomfort hit him immediately.
"This setup is way too low end. The body is weak, and there is barely any Magic."
Belial frowned, realizing this was not even one percent of his usual strength. The kid really was too weak. On top of that, the power he could use was limited, and many skills were simply unavailable.
Skills like Spiral Heat Ray were completely out of the question. He could barely use a bit of Energy Field, and everything else was heavily cut down. Overall, his usual Godzilla lineage skills were basically unusable, and even Magic was hard to work with due to the lack of his own System and a strong physical setup.
"The only things with low enough cost that I can still use are basic elemental control and some abilities inherited from Rodan."
Ham raised her head, facing a fist far stronger than her own. She forced the last bits of her remaining Magic to ignite into a small flame. Using the little Energy Field she could still activate, she found a weak point in that fist made purely of Magic and compressed the flame slightly before striking with extreme precision.
The flame slipped into a tiny flaw that even Parak himself had not noticed. Inside, it burned like fuel meeting oil, rapidly expanding and lighting up nearly half of his body. His entire arm shattered like fragile glass, and the conceptual power spread onto Parak himself, ignoring his Laws and completely destroying the arm with decay.
Belial did not waste the burning energy and pulled it back to replenish his Magic. His mana pool was painfully short, and he had never fought such a poor battle before. Chewing it down and swallowing with effort, he moved his body slightly and checked the time he had left.
"The connection will only last three more minutes. Fine."
Ham lifted her head again, and the emotion in her different-looking eyes was an odd eagerness. "Three minutes. I will try to wipe out everyone here."
"…Ham? Is that really you?"
Looking at the black-haired girl whose presence felt completely different, Vera asked blankly.
"My hand! My hand!"
Driven by pain and rage, Parak continued swinging his remaining arm, smashing a giant fist toward Ham. The black-haired girl glanced at him, and a sudden sense of dread made Parak pause for a moment. In the next instant, the shadow vanished from where it stood and charged straight into the crowd of Demonkind like a tiger among sheep.
"She is coming! Kill her, now!"
Some of the Demonkind who reacted raised swords, shields, and prepared Magic Array and rituals. Very quickly, though, they dropped one by one. The black-haired girl tore through the crowd in a brutal slaughter, using hands, feet, shoulders, elbows, and even the tail behind her as weapons, each strike finding a fatal flaw.
This way of killing was something no human should have been able to imagine. The efficiency was terrifying, and the attacks came from angles no one expected. Belial might not understand martial arts, but he knew how to control, and even with heavy lag, it did not matter as long as he calculated positions and openings.
Within ten seconds, he determined the most efficient killing path, and the carnage spread across hundreds, nearly a thousand enemies. A light graze of her arm was enough to make bodies burst apart from the inside, as if infected, with heads cut off before they even realized it. The scattered Magic was captured by Energy Field and fed into the mimetic muscles around her, growing stronger like a snowball.
By the time Parak reacted, the black mist-wrapped Ham had already slaughtered nearly a thousand Demonkind. "Damn insects! Die!" Parak roared, his mind fully consumed by rage as he smashed his remaining fist into every position, ignoring the deaths of his own side.
It was completely useless. Her movement was almost like teleportation, impossible for him to track, and aside from killing more of his own people, he achieved nothing. Belial calmly absorbed all the nearby Magic without mercy.
"The big one can wait. Clean up the small ones first and refill some mana."
Ham grabbed a Magic spell released from a mage formation with her bare hands, dismantled the array with ease, and reverted it back into raw Magic and elements. Her mana recovered further, and an aura that should not have existed began to surge from her body.
The black mist spread into a storm and grew denser, completely wrapping around Ham and turning her into a terrifying monster. Amid the swirling mist, it vaguely compressed into a massive dragon head that looked savage and cruel. With each roar, it greedily devoured the surrounding life, leaving almost none of the remaining Demonkind alive.
The black mist expanded again, and a terrifying Great Dragon formed, its size nearly doubled and built from pure black despair. Ham hovered in the air, wings beating behind her, her pupils lit with what looked like burning fire. Fear rose in Parak's heart as he stared at the black mist eroding his mind.
"What… what are you?" he asked. "You are not the same dragon as before. What are you really?"
Recognizing the familiar black mist, Parak's pupils shook violently, disbelief covering his face as he pointed at Ham. "You… you are the one from that day…"