Show Them What You Can Do, Mahdi!

--What exactly did the Immovable Fortress represent?

Clad in armor of silver-gray traced with flowing scarlet patterns, the knight strode forward with heavy steps.

The explorers at the very edge of the formation naturally moved aside. They sensed danger—a deadly crisis they absolutely could not withstand, an enemy they absolutely could not face.

No one blamed their retreat or weakness, because everyone present felt a suffocating pressure and a chill as though they had been plunged into polar ice water.

Yet the young knight paid no attention to the people parting around him like seawater split by a reef. He merely took a deep breath.

The golden-red mist in the air, formed from the power radiating from the Source of Dragonblood, churned and swirled. Now, however, the knight swallowed it like a whale gulping down the sea. As his body gradually absorbed that pure power of dragons, a wonderful sense of ease welled up within him.

Within a body already tempered to its utmost limit, muscles and blood vessels tougher than steel, bones and organs alike began to reveal crystalline lattice-like patterns after drawing in the Source of Dragonblood's power.

Beneath skin so pale it was almost translucent, as fragile-looking as porcelain, lay an incredibly dense body, tough and heavy. Now, like a metal crystal charged with electricity, it shone from the inside out.

Patterns. Silver-white structures almost like metallic grain proliferated through his flesh, densely multiplying like veins and capillaries. They evenly covered every inch of the knight's body, inside and out, as though an even tougher layer of skin had grown beneath his own.

Those were dragon scales. Fine silver-white structures formed a scale-armor pattern: the Dragon-Scale Armor Hilliard had once possessed. This ascended organ, which should have evolved from the Silver-Scaled Bastion, had temporarily halted its development