“Thanks for the teleport, Archmage Seraphina. I still can't use the second seal all that well without getting myself caught in it, so your role was really important there.”

“Please just call me Seraphina, and don't worry too much about it, it was my honor. If I may ask, how do you usually use it if it hurts you though?”

Mia tilted her head then brought her left hand’s index and middle fingers in a V-shape to her chin in thought, her other hand still holding the volcanic sword.

“Mmm, it's hard to describe, so you'll see soon. I usually get creative with it, similar to how you teleported me. There is still a limit to being creative though, and I haven't been able to figure out a way to use the third seal or above consistently without hurting myself or others around me. Um, now that Noah and Evan have gotten much stronger, they said that I'd be able to try the fourth with their help.”

“The fourth? There's more? How many are there in total? How does the sword work?”

Befitting a mage, Seraphina's interest was piqued.

“Theoretically, twelve seals. The sword uses a lot of different runes that interact and influence each other in a complex runic system, but the heart of it is the Rune of Destruction. The rune is too powerful, and unleashing all twelve seals could probably obliterate this solar system, or maybe even more. Each seal unleashes power exponentially more than the last. Um, yeah.”

“Wow…solar system? What's that?”

“Oh, you guys haven't discovered that yet? It's sort of related to the planets in the night sky.”

“What's a planet?”

“Huh? You guys don't know abou- oh, Evan’s here! We'll talk later, Archmage Seraphina, sorry!”

“Sure…”

Mia and Archmage Seraphina were currently floating a hundred meters above the demiplane dome.

Neither of them knew the extent of the damage within the dome since everything outside it was serene, but Noah's weary tone had been picked up by Mia and communicated to Evan as well, so he had hurried his way back from the offshore island.

Down in the trees below, Mia watched as Evan placed a short man he had been carrying on his shoulder down on a tree and fire a red flare.

Then, with a big slingshot, Evan shot towards Mia in a parabola, while a teleporter of the rescue team materialized and picked up the dizzy short man on the tree, then vanished.

When Evan arrived beside them, Mia noticed the activation of magic circles made of string under both his boots and on both his palms.

‘Those are Deceleration spells. If he wants to accelerate instead, he can rapidly deconstruct the deceleration spell and construct acceleration spells at the same locations. After all, the difference between the deceleration spell and acceleration spells are slight. He can do that on the fly. By varying the mana supplied and the spell depicted by those circles, he's able to freely manipulate his altitude and accelerate in the direction he wishes to. As always, he does these incredible things so casually.’

“Hey, Mia. It's been a while, hasn't it?”

“Yeah, it has.”

With warm smiles, they greeted each other like old pals and not like that of friends who had not seen each other in over a year. Mia raised her hand, and pulled a talisman out of thin air.

“I'll contact him now. Noah, we're ready over here.”

—

Within the dome.

A man stood floating on a piece of rock on a lake of blood before a dragon.

At this point, it would've been more appropriate to call it a larger drake. After all, the biggest difference between a dragon and a drake was the wings. The black dragon had one wing brutally torn off, the other one barely hanging on by a cracked bone. Two long slits of skin and muscle had been torn off along with the wings.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

The man also had two long slits on his back, but his Ripped Wings were clean wounds, being by design. The blood that had gushed out of it with vitality was now down to mere streams pouring down his back.

One of the eyes of the dragon, formerly shining with intelligence and pride, was now a gory mess of clawed gashes, tears, blood and pus. The other was significantly dimmer than it had been, and full of anger with hints of exhaustion.

All over the body of the dragon were indentations, a show of the tenacity of the scales as well as the weakness of its innards. The indentations were charred black, with many black lightning shaped char markings as well.

The man was in equally terrible condition.

From the outside, he looked alright, barring the claws that were chipped and cracked in several spots, but despite the blood that accumulated at the spherical barrier enough to fill it up halfway, he did not use it as ammunition, though he very much was capable of doing so. Unlike the start of the fight, he could no longer fight while pushing himself to a hundred and twenty percent, so he had to limit the use of blood manipulation.

It had been a tiring battle, for both Noah and the dragon.

With a long exhale, he lowered his stance once more, and a thin layer of blood mist crackling with lightning wrapped around his fists and claws.

He sharply inhaled and swiped his arm vertically upward with insane velocity. At that instant, several long, thick, octopus-like blood-red mist tendrils burst out of the surface of the blood lake like a painter streaking his canvas with red paint. These tendrils rapidly traveled and connected Noah to various different locations on the dragon's body.

He jumped into one of the tunnel-like tendrils and greatly increased the pressure behind him while greatly decreasing it behind him, causing him to be pushed through the tendrils like a tadpole zipping through water. The dragon, already familiar with this technique, was aware that most tendrils were a decoy and that Noah would appear through just one of the tendrils, though it could not determine which one since the tendrils obscured his figure.

The dragon then jumped up and flapped its one terribly disfigured wing, planning to dissipate all tendrils of mist around it with wind. Seeing this happen, Noah increased his speed by increasing the pressure differential.

Noah appeared at the other end of the tendril connecting him to the charred underbelly of the dragon in less than a tenth of a second since he entered it. By this point in time, the dragon had already flapped once and the ends of the tendril had already begun to dissipate. With a motion that seemed too swift for the gargantuan dragon large enough to eclipse entire cities in its size, it made a barrel roll mid-jump, its tail faced towards the direction Noah approached it from. Every muscle in the dragon’s body was activated to swing its tail.

Noah, who emerged out of the other end of the tendril, found a tail heading towards him at subsonic speed. In response, he threw an angled barrier of blood between himself and the tail with a motion of his hand such that both the tail and Noah would collide into the barrier at the same time at exactly opposite sides of the tail.

Noah pulled his body around such that the side of his body would receive the shock when he collided with the tail in mid air. He was, after all, planning to collide with the tail on purpose.

Just like all other collisions in this epic battle this far, shockwaves burst out in all directions like the clap of the hands of a god when the two unstoppable forces collided. For a moment, the blood lake below opened and was split radially.

The hastily constructed angled blood barrier, forced in between the unstoppable forces, shattered into a million pieces, but it was sufficient in doing its job. Rather than canceling the momentum of each other, Noah was sent flying upwards and the extremely weighty tail was redirected downwards, albeit at a slower velocity because of it.

Noah reached the top of the dome several kilometers high in a mere instant and made springs below his feet. Once again, the superelastic dome sent Noah rocketing towards the dragon, but it had expected the move that had already been performed once before and was ready with another tail whip.

The same interaction repeated, and Noah was sent off to another corner of the dome, where he bounced off. The superelastic nature of the barrier considered, Noah accelerated with every impact, especially since the superelasticity was more than able to offset the momentum lost in the collision of Noah and the dragon. It was to the point where he himself was finding it difficult to turn his body around in mid air quick enough to place the several-meter long blood springs below him or to prime his body into a punching or clawing position. The afterimages and blood trails he left in his wake made him seem like a shooting star as he darted sound the dome several times per second.

Sometimes, Noah would land a good hit on a critical spot, but at times when he didn't, he would take damage from intentionally allowing himself to collide with the tail while the dragon’s heavily armored tail suffered none, resulting in a win for the dragon in such a collision.

Overall, Noah was even in the damage to himself as well as the damage he was doing to the dragon. With the dragon’s immense size in comparison to Noah, he was able to dodge about like an untouchable fly, thus the only real damage to Noah came from himself rather than from the dragon.

With the troll regeneration, physical damage was not his concern. Rather, the mana consumed to regenerate his body of such great mass was immense, thus his mana was what acted as his ‘health bar’ in this fight.

The fight continued for several minutes in such a manner until he heard a voice.

“Noah, we’re ready over here.”