Chapter 890: Unwilling Mercy
Bone and flesh fragments scattered with the impact, and the dragon screamed in pain before turning its neck and firing compact spheres of white divine fire, each moving with bullet-like speed.
Elaine kept dashing toward it, weaving between the fireballs, jumping and conjuring several short spears of darkness which she hurled into multiple incoming projectiles, forcing them to detonate in mid-air before they could reach her.
As she closed the distance, the dragon spun its massive body and swept its tail toward her, and Elaine, keeping her momentum, slid beneath it, emerging on the opposite side just as the dragon completed a full 360 and slashed down with its left claw.
The strike gouged deep trenches into the ground, sending a violent wave of dust and sand flying along with multiple pronged cutting waves radiating outward from its claws.
Elaine coated her body with magic power and charged straight through the dust cloud, debris and shattered rock scattering around her.
She kicked off a tumbling boulder, launched herself upward, spun mid-air, and conjured a spear of darkness which she hurled down at the solar dragon.
It raised its remaining functional arm to block, but on impact, the spear detonated in a burst of anti-divinity that shattered its claws, and as it recoiled from the pain, Elaine flipped through the air and landed on its arm, immediately sprinting along the limb and shoulder toward its head while summoning a new spear.
The dragon thrashed violently, trying to throw her off, but she dug her fingers into the cracks in its scales and held on.
With a roar, it summoned all the strength left in its body and leapt upward, whipping its head hard enough to finally fling Elaine free.
As her body spun through the air, the dragon compressed a massive portion of its remaining magic power in its maw, preparing a full-powered attack.
At the same time, Elaine righted herself mid-fall, coating her spear with death energy and anti-divinity, gravity pulling her back down as she drew her arm back, ready to throw.
The time she needed to release her spear was shorter than the time the dragon needed to finish charging an attack capable of dealing serious damage, accounting for her godslayer resistances.
Elaine knew the dragon had noticed she took less damage than expected and could heal herself, so it would pack as much energy as possible if it wanted to knock her out, a process that still wouldn’t outpace her spear throw.
But the instant she pulled her arm back, her senses detected the dragon’s remaining life force, measuring the exact amount of vitality it still possessed.
In that same moment, as her body moved to throw, her mind calculated the damage her strike would deal if it landed where she intended, factoring in resistance penetration and the increased damage caused by her godslayer nature against divine factors.
The instant result told her it would exceed the vitality the dragon had left.
In other words, her attack would KILL it.
The realisation hit her in the split second before release, and her fingers, which had begun to let go of the spear, snapped back around its handle on pure reflex, her hand locking in place.
She froze for a second, a second the dragon used to finish charging its energy and unleash its breath.
Faced with the torrent of white fire, Elaine forced herself to throw her spear, sending it punching straight through the stream erupting from the dragon’s maw, boring a hole through the centre before slamming into its forehead.
The impact slammed the dragon into the ground, while its wave of flames hit Elaine, hurling her body back into the air.
Gravity did its work, and she eventually fell back, but unlike the dragon that crashed down uncontrollably, Elaine managed to land on her feet, though she immediately staggered several steps and collapsed onto her back.
She took a deep breath, sweat beading on her brow as her arms trembled.
’I...couldn’t...’
Slowly, her expression hardened as she clenched her teeth, pushed herself upright, and broke into a run toward the fallen dragon.
She extended her hand, conjuring another spear with darkness-attributed magic, charging as she shouted and slammed it down, smacking the dragon’s head back into the ground as it tried to lift itself.
Stomping on its cracked and bleeding skull, Elaine raised her spear, coating it with anti-divinity, and aimed for its eye.
Just before the tip could touch, however, her body froze.
"!!"
Her hand shook violently, sweat sliding down her brow as she bit her lip hard enough to draw blood and tried to force herself to move.
But no matter how hard she pushed, her body refused to obey.
Seconds passed, and the dizzy dragon jerked its head upward, knocking Elaine backwards.
It snapped its jaws at her, but before it could bite down, Arthur appeared, grabbing Elaine by the collar and lifting her clear while his other hand clamped onto the dragon’s maw and slammed it into the earth.
"You lose."
Before the dragon could react, there was a wet, crushing sound, leaving only a fist-sized sphere of flesh, compacted by overwhelming gravity.
A strange sensation then washed over Elaine as energy poured into her body from sources she couldn’t perceive, the unfamiliar feeling sending goosebumps along her arms.
Understandable, considering this was her first time experiencing a ’Level Up’ from a Devour Class Universal System.
She instinctively rubbed her arms when Arthur’s voice reached her.
"Elaine, are you okay?"
The girl flinched, bit her lip, and nodded lightly.
But before she could finish the motion, Arthur’s voice sounded again, deeper this time.
"Elaine, are you okay?"
The change made her shudder, and she looked down, afraid to meet his eyes.
For a moment, she wanted to nod again, but instead, a tear slipped from the corner of her eye, and she slowly shook her head.
"I... I thought I could do it," she whispered, her voice breaking, "but I froze. I can’t... I can’t finish it."
Arthur sighed softly, lowering her to the ground and rubbing her hair gently, and just as he opened his mouth to speak, Elaine grabbed his other arm and muttered, "I-I’m... sorry, I’ll try—! OW!"
She reflexively held her forehead as Arthur’s hand, which had been rubbing her hair, flicked her forehead, and as she looked up at him in shock, Arthur said,
"That’s enough out of you, young lady."
Right then, Crim, who had stepped away to watch the fight, jumped down from her vantage point and walked closer, her gaze shifting from Elaine to Arthur.
"Arthur, could it be that—"
"She’s a good combatant? True," Arthur said, interrupting Crim. But before the vampiress could clarify what she actually meant, he continued.
"Unable to kill her opponents? Unfortunately, also true."
Elaine trembled slightly at this, and Crim didn’t miss her reaction, narrowing her eyes.
Behind her, Yujin blinked in confusion, tilting his head as he asked,
"She can’t kill? Isn’t that like the one requirement to be h—"
"Shut it," Crim snapped, silencing him without even glancing his way.
The vampiress’s attitude surprised him, but Crim paid him no further mind and turned her attention to Elaine, recalling the earlier battle.
’Not a single hesitation in any of her attacks, all until that one that could have killed the dragon. She realised her strike would have finished it and hesitated just long enough that by the time she acted, her attack, weakened after piercing its flames, wasn’t enough to kill it.’
Crim only needed a few seconds to form a hypothesis about Elaine’s issue, sighing softly as she shook her head.
’That’s not my problem to fix, but...’
"Arthur," she called, and the silver-haired progenitor nodded slightly.
"I know. There’d be a lot of EXP wasted since I can’t gain EXP from anything here, and she’d miss the bonus for the last blow. Still, she contributed enough to its death that she definitely gained enough to raise her level by a dozen.
And besides..."
Arthur extended his left hand, producing a bloody crystal of light. He tossed it toward Elaine, and as she reflexively caught it, cracks ran through it, the divinity inside spilling into her arms.
"She can make up for the lost EXP with that."
It was the divine spark of the dragon, a crystal embedded in its heart that allowed it to pump divinity through its body, something Arthur had extracted just before crushing it to death.
In the hands of Elaine, an Ancient-Breed godslayer, it was nothing but a source of raw power, a concentrated well of energy she could absorb to strengthen herself.
As she absorbed it, Arthur snapped his fingers, lifting the other four restrained divine creatures that had been summoned by his earlier taunt into the air, then gestured to Crim and asked, "Which one do you want? I’ll weaken it just enough so the kid won’t die trying to fight it."
Crim glanced at the four creatures—two bird-like, a winged snake, and a large flying squirrel—and silently pointed at the winged snake.
Barely a minute later, Yujin found himself being chased by a now-wingless snake spewing green poison, desperate to defeat him so it wouldn’t end up crushed like the golf ball-sized orb of flesh that had once been the solar dragon Arthur had held up in front of it.
