Chapter 1217 (2/2)

Even as Ileot activated the powers he had created, he narrowed his eyes. The mountain of roaring energy around him stirred. Of course, she would be prepared. The Ghosthound is her subordinate… But the real question is how his image became so much more powerful than it was earlier…

Ileot’s power crackled and spat as he blasted it forward across the Great Rift and hit the other floating stone island. As the white lightning and flames spread outward, it became a huge wave of sparkling light that engulfed that island. It was a sea of luminous diamonds. It was a beautiful way to die. Ileot distantly felt Randidly’s image of the World Tree fade and his power began attacking the remaining combatants on the far island.

Ileot didn’t bother to protect those individuals who had been on the island, but neither did he attempt to focus any power on them; they were all secondary targets. Them being injured by the attack was a nice bonus, but Ileot would face Vualla only after the Nether King had been finished off. He would deal with one foe at a time.

After annihilating the remaining stone in the area and knocking away the other bodies, Ileot’s energies curved back on themselves and began to whirl like a tornado, grinding away at the Nether King’s exterior.

Bit by bit, its liquid armor was forced away. Ileot’s hand, the one holding the single tongue of horrifyingly condensed flame, spasmed as his eyes were trained on that figure. As its exterior is ripped away… only then…

However, it appeared the Nether King understood Ileot’s plan. Rather than letting him grind away at it and face its core, its body began producing quite a quantity of the strange liquid that functioned as its skin. It became a battle of endurance. Sighing, Ileot forcefully continued to rip those defenses away. More and more of his liquid Aether drained away. But the tedious game of chicken did give him a bit of a chance to reflect on what he had seen from Randidly Ghosthound’s image.

Very quickly, Ileot identified three factors as to why the image had improved drastically in power. But even after finding those three things, it was hard for Ileot to believe that these explanations really justified that overwhelming image that had stilled the entire battlefield.

Not even Ileot could deny it. The World Tree had been breathtaking in a way that shouldn’t have been possible. It had felt real.

The first reason Ileot noted, and perhaps the most understandable reason for the jump in strength, was that the Ghosthound fueled his Skill using liquid Aether. It would certainly explain an improvement, but it left Ileot with a lot of questions. Hed hadn’t detected any liquid Aether in the Ghosthound in their previous encounters. And given the horrendous difficulty in condensing liquid Aether…

Perhaps Vualla provided him some liquid Aether…? But no, that shouldn’t be it either…

Although explaining away the Ghosthound having liquid Aether by using Vualla was convenient, it was directly contradicted by the second factor in Ileot’s analysis: that the liquid Aether that was used by the Ghosthound was almost perfectly synchronized with his image. It had a multiplicative effect on the image’s potency. And if he hadn’t condensed it himself, that sort of synchronization would be almost impossible.

And honestly, the image and energy had been basically perfectly aligned. Ileot had never heard of liquid Aether taking so well to an image before, even if someone had spent a hundred years repeatedly refining a single drop for a specific Skill.

Ileot’s eyes narrowed as he maintained some attention to his current task. Luckily, the skin of the Nether King couldn’t keep up with him burning all of his liquid Aether. With every rotation of his energy around its body, its defenses were being sheered away. Slowly, Ileot Swacc raised his hand.

But it’s the third reason for the Ghosthound’s strength that is the most dangerous… Ileot hummed to himself.

Because the reason that the image had proliferated so quickly and so completely throughout the battlefield was due to the fact that it ran along the hotly contested divide between Aether and Nether. That is to say, that image could move seemingly freely between Aether and Nether. It could exist safely in either. Those cracks of space opened up by the damage the two energies did to each other were filled in an instant by that energy. Those cracks had become roads for that image.

In that way, the image had frozen the efforts of both sides. Because it was relying on the energies’ weights on either side to keep the other from acting to dislodge it. And it had worked.

For the duration of its existence, both sides had been helpless before it.

The Nether King’s defenses became so thin that the liquid covering its chest was more insubstantial that gauze. Ileot flicked his wrist and sent that small tongue of flame shooting forward. The timing of this was extremely important. As Ileot had noted earlier, the exterior acted as a defense, but also as a limiter on the Nether King’s abilities. Once that defense was breached, the Nether King’s capabilities would transform radically.

Which meant Ileot needed to inflict a deep wound before that transformation could be completed.

In a second, that tongue of white fire crossed the gap between the two figures and arrived next to the Nether King. Clenching his other fist, Ileot increased the ferocity of the swirling vortex of white lightning around the Nether King. That last bit of liquid Nether armor was evaporated by Ileot’s assault.

After the Nether King then… best to suppress the Ghosthound as quickly as possible. His powers are unpredictable.

OOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNNGGG-

A reverberation at an entirely different level of volume shook the surrounding area as the Nether King’s core was finally revealed. Ileot smashed that core with that condensed tongue of flame and sharply cut off the noise.