Incantation: Fell God Flame.
A "legendary incantation" that directly manifested the power of the Fire Giants. When cast, it created a blazing fireball said to harbor the fell god within it. Once the fireball exploded, it unleashed a terrifying conflagration that burned everything to ash.
Legend held that the fell god still lived within the Fire Giants.
Word Spirits could not replicate that power at all. Lu Mingfei could only draw on his experience of casting the incantation, using it as a model to imitate its effects by gathering pure fire elements.
Even so, it had all but become a decisive combat technique that commanded fire elements over a vast area.
It drifted slowly through the air, and even Norton was moved by the sight.
What stood before him was neither a usurper nor a Hybrid who had clawed his way up the Path to Godhood, but a new god. He had seen Constantine's memories. In those fragmented images, riddled with gaps, Lu Mingfei had only begun appearing frequently a few dozen days earlier.
Having held his authority for such a short time, he already understood and wielded his power to this degree. Given time, mastering "primordial authority" would be no difficult feat for him.
"No human like you has ever appeared in history." Norton's voice was cold and sinister. "No wonder that person was on the bus too. I thought he had come to observe me, but it seems more likely he came for you."
His words contained an enormous amount of information.
Anyone a Dragon King referred to as "that person" presumably ranked no lower than a First-Generation Dragon, and the bus was most likely that Greyhound... the passenger who had sat silently in the corner! He was another Dragon King, one who had recognized both Lu Mingfei and "Old Tang." Some strange domain had shrouded the bus back then, diverting everyone's attention. Thinking back now, Lu Mingfei realized he could not remember a single detail about that passenger.
Before he could dwell on it, Norton had already leaned forward and hurtled down at him.
In the world of fire elements, Lu Mingfei and Norton were two black holes. Within a certain radius, terrifying forces anchored the fire elements so firmly that even information detectable by the senses could not escape. The boundary of that radius was the "king's domain," something only First-Generation Dragons possessed. Both had minds far stronger than those of ordinary dragons. Even without using Word Spirits, their surging mental power naturally formed such domains around them.
Those were the flames of their minds. Ordinary Word Spirit power falling upon them was like a moth flying into a fire.
Norton had yet to form a cocoon and lacked a dragon's body. He knew the Word Spirits he could use were insufficient to hurt Lu Mingfei, and the same was true of Lu Mingfei. Even that strange Word Spirit resembling a compressed Rhine was nowhere near enough to decide the battle.
"Young new king, you still don't understand. Battles between kings can only end with blades drawing blood!" Norton's roar was swallowed by the savage howl of the wind.
He crashed toward Lu Mingfei with a storm in his wake, his absurdly long lava blade poised to cut his opponent in half at the waist.
Lu Mingfei had already reacted. Gripping his sword with both hands, he assumed the ready stance for "Arrow Step." At a particular moment, the tip of Red Skies dipped to his toes, then slowly rose, tracing a circle before him. It looked as though he was swinging it around once to build momentum. During that motion, the flames on the sword suddenly grew several times larger.
As the circle's beginning met its end, Lu Mingfei's eyes already reflected the lava edge, honed to lethal sharpness by compressed gale-force winds.
At the same time, he unleashed a horizontal slash.
A curved wall of flame, two meters tall and three meters across, extended from the sword tip. When their blades met, the wildly swelling flames enveloped Norton at precisely the same moment.
Word Spirit imitation: Ash of War-Night-and-Flame Stance.
It was the power contained within the Sword of Night and Flame, a "legendary armament" kept in Caria Manor. A horizontal slash could release magical flames, while a thrust could transform magic into a "Night Comet." Lu Mingfei used the former, incorporating the flame attack into his sword technique.
It was no simple wall of fire. It employed a crude version of the fire-element singularity used in "Fell God Flame." As a result, it burned explosively, like floodwater bursting through an opened gate. With the curved surface serving as the spillway, the torrent of flame instantly devoured everything ahead of it.
Clearly, it had not damaged Norton's noble First-Generation Dragon scales. It had merely blackened them a little.
When Norton moved at extreme speed, his elemental and mental domains underwent a process of losing their center, then settling and coalescing again. To an ordinary person, it lasted only an instant. In a war between kings, however, it was a sliver of time through which flames could slip.
Norton had miscalculated again.
He had assumed the human before him was merely a genius with considerable knowledge of Word Spirits, and rashly concluded that he could easily tear his opponent apart once he closed in. But Lu Mingfei was far too seasoned in battle. He possessed the same will, skill, and combat instincts forged on horrific battlefields.
For the first time, Norton felt that bringing this fellow along might have been a mistake.
But a Dragon King knew neither fear nor regret. Every emotion became fury, and cold, composed fury was a weapon capable of burning the world to ash-that was the logic written into dragon genes.
The two immediately became locked in a deadlocked clash of blades.
Their figures were like two meteors, breaking the sound barrier as they tore through space. When they clashed, the meteors collided with flaming tails streaming behind them, and thick, brilliant arcs of static electricity flashed and vanished. The lava blade and Red Skies struck each other countless times. All manner of flame Word Spirits rose along their edges, only to flicker out at once under the pressure of their overlapping domains.
Face-to-face, there was only heat radiating between the two kings, warping the air. Flames were not permitted to exist!
The fiery, serpentine sword light of "Bloodflame Slash" detonated together with King's Flame. The arcing light of "Night and Flame" shattered the claws and fangs of Blackflame Prison. Turbulent fire elements, driven out of the kings' domains by wind pressure, exploded into dazzling fireworks. Through the gaps between those fireworks, two figures moved at extreme speed, entwined in combat. They melted everything along their path, yet not a glimmer of fire could be seen.
Chapter 62: Unconscious
The Executive Department agent looked up.
The building had been utterly destroyed. Less than a tenth of its overall framework remained. Hard concrete had cracked and crumbled like tofu before some unknown force, leaving only ruined pillars at the corners and twisted, broken rebar. Any natural force capable of this would qualify as a disaster, but what natural disaster confined itself perfectly to a single three-story building?
Backlit by the helicopter's searchlight, the outline of the ruins resembled vicious claws thrusting skyward from deep underground.
"What's the situation?" a gentle voice asked behind him.
The agent turned and saw a young Asian face: Ye Sheng, an A-Rank agent of the Executive Department.
"So far, we haven't found any traces of alchemical materials. It's as though the entire Alchemical Matrix vanished into thin air. About thirty percent of the building's physical structure is also missing... it looks like a hand reached down from the sky and grabbed the house." The agent repeated the advance team's assessment of the ruins.
At the same time, he studied the refined young man before him with curiosity. There was a quiet authority in his features, an elusive quality the agent had only ever sensed in his own superior. Rumor had it that this Chinese man had once led a team through an S-rank mission without a single injury. He was now a popular rising star in the Executive Department.
For this operation, headquarters had sent him to command the heavy fire-support team.
Ye Sheng had learned some of the details aboard the helicopter, but seeing the scene with his own eyes was even more shocking. If a hand really had taken away the upper half of the building, its owner would have to stand at least a hundred meters tall! Even a dragon's bones and muscles could not support a body of that size.
"Where are the wounded?" Ye Sheng asked.
The agent pointed him toward a row of military tents the medical team had hastily erected on the Gobi.
Inside the tents were quite a few Executive Department personnel with minor injuries. They had all belonged to the operational teams lying in ambush on the roof and beside the building. When the suspected dragon awakening occurred, every electrical system had instantly cut out, and many had fallen or scraped themselves in the darkness. The unluckiest fellow had landed butt-first on a cactus. He was still lying facedown on a bed, his heavily bandaged backside sticking up.
Ye Sheng walked past them, trying to piece together what had happened.
First, the incident had occurred abruptly. When contact with the entire operational team was severed, not a single member had managed to send a warning to the command center.
Then came the greatest mystery-that tremendous power had clearly been unleashed by a dragon. Despite being inside an Alchemical Matrix designed to suppress elemental reactions and weaken mental power, it had easily destroyed the reinforced building. The force had even been quiet and restrained, leaving almost none of the Executive Department personnel seriously injured.
Ye Sheng reached the beds at the far end of the tent. A fellow with a white blanket wrapped around his whole body like a cloak was sitting beside one.
Apparently, when the medical team found him, he had been buried in a triangular space formed by two ceiling slabs. He had kept telling the rescuers, "I'm type B! Type B!" His will to survive had been exceptionally strong.
Later, the medical team had given him a basic examination, discovered there was absolutely nothing wrong with him, and told him to get the hell out of the military tent.
But he had flatly refused to leave, insisting that he had suffered psychological trauma and, as a patient, needed a hospital bed. The person in charge had long heard of this infamous "eighth-year" loser and, having no other choice, assigned him a bed beside his teammate.
"Fingel," Ye Sheng said.
"Hang on, hang on!" Fingel did not lift his head, his attention fixed on his laptop. "I've got a great hand this round!"
"You're playing the offline version." Ye Sheng closed Fingel's laptop.
"So what? You look down on computers?" Fingel complained loudly. "When robots wake up and the war between humans and machines starts, people like you will be the first they kill!"
"Then I'll be a hero who died fighting for humanity, while you'll be what we call a damned traitor." Ye Sheng actually joined in his banter.
"I'm German. Your system doesn't apply to me," Fingel retorted stubbornly.
Ye Sheng was in no mood to keep arguing. His expression turned serious. "I'm here to ask you for the precise details of what happened during this incident."
Fingel spread his hands. "I put it all in my battlefield summary report."
"You said everything went black and you passed out..." Ye Sheng said. "That's the same as saying nothing!"
"Because I really don't know anything." Fingel looked utterly innocent.
Ye Sheng sighed. "Fine. I'll ask, and you answer."
"All right." Fingel shrugged.
"What was the last thing you saw before losing consciousness?"
"Pitch-black darkness. That lamp went out all at once. Honestly, the stuff your Executive Department uses is terrible. It always fails at the crucial moment..."
"If you couldn't see, could you feel anything? What about your hearing? If a dragon unleashed a Word Spirit, it must have chanted in Dragon Script. And with destructive power like that, it should have been so strong that its draconic pressure was impossible to miss."
"There was no Dragon Script, but there was draconic pressure."
Ye Sheng sank into thought at that answer.
Fingel asked curiously, "I heard you were a helicopter 'captain,' right? In charge of rockets and heavy machine guns. Why do you care about things the higher-ups are supposed to worry about? Someone's already grilled me about all this."
"There's no higher or lower on a battlefield against dragons. Everyone should fulfill their duties and be ready to shoulder someone else's burden at any moment," Ye Sheng said calmly. "Besides, Lu Mingfei is my friend. He's missing."
"Didn't you only spend a few days with him on the admissions team? You got that close already?" Fingel asked.
Ye Sheng glanced at him. "When Lu Mingfei left campus for a while after enrolling, he actually joined Jude Jiqu and me on a mission. During that mission, he practically risked his life to save us."
"He looked pretty lively when he came back."
"That's because he was rather... lucky." Ye Sheng considered his choice of words.
It really had been luck. He had drifted out of Bronze City with the current while unconscious. Although Bronze City had been opening a passage to the outside at the time, the odds were still absurdly low.
"By the way, has that freshman called Wang Wei still not woken up?" Ye Sheng asked.
"He's right over there." Fingel pointed at the opposite bed. "The kid's a little timid and afraid of people. I figure he got tricked into joining this mission, just like me. He's been unconscious ever since they rescued him."
Ye Sheng walked over and studied the fair-skinned boy sleeping on the bed. "It might be an acute stress reaction. Some patients protect themselves through sleep."
"Could be. Anyway, the doctor said he hadn't suffered any physical harm." Wearing white disposable slippers, Fingel came over too.
As they watched, "Wang Wei" suddenly furrowed his brow. An expression somewhere between panic and ferocity crossed his face, as though something terrible had happened in his dream.
Chapter 63: Fell God Flame
The fire elements were being rapidly consumed. Thrown out of balance, the elements formed violent turbulence, and a fierce elemental storm was taking shape.
It did not affect either combatant in the slightest.
Countless clashes had stripped Red Skies and the lava blade of their original shapes. Under repeated impacts of immense force and extreme speed, even alchemical weapons inevitably exhausted their lives.
Throughout the process, Lu Mingfei and Norton fought while manipulating and refining the metals they melted and captured, constantly repairing their weapons and filling gaps and cracks. They were practically fighting with blazing, red-hot sword blanks. Their deadly struggle was itself the hammering that forged their blades.
Norton's lava blade had changed comparatively little, since it had been an improvised weapon to begin with. Red Skies, however, had grown several times larger. Lu Mingfei could not preserve its elegant Han-style shape in the midst of battle, so its blade kept splitting and being filled with new material.
It now resembled the enormous, crude greatswords Lu Mingfei had used in the Lands Between. Such swords exceeded the limits of what a human could wield, and could slay inhuman things.
The two collided at extreme speed again. Their blades screamed in another clash that sent lightning, powerful convection currents, and small earthquakes rippling outward.
This time, Lu Mingfei did not charge at Norton again. Instead, he landed on ground strewn with red-hot bronze wreckage.
After fighting for so long, he had already realized this was not the real Bronze City-or rather, not the Bronze City in the real world. He and Norton had smashed through who knew how many bronze walls, yet there was still no sign of an end. This had to be a "Nibelungen" created by Norton.
In other words, it was an artificial space created through alchemy. Its interior space was folded, and time stood still. Yet the space truly existed, a modification built upon real space. One only had to cross a certain boundary in reality to enter it.
Under normal circumstances, crossing that boundary was almost impossible without the creator's permission.
Lu Mingfei panted heavily. Several wounds on his body were deep enough to expose bone. Now, the cells around them were repairing the damage at a speed visible to the naked eye: bone regrew, flesh knitted together, and scales returned to place. Norton, facing him, was not faring much better. In Lu Mingfei's hands, that greatsword could cleave through dragon scales. A dragon's exterior defenses were astonishing, but its insides were relatively vulnerable.
It was time to end this drawn-out battle.
That was what Norton thought.