The plasma blade and dragon beam had come to a stalemate, but suddenly, the scream of the dragon turned garbled and was cut off following Noah's all-out strike. The next moment, the hyper-accelerated plasma blade cleaved through the resplendent beam like it was mere air down to the open maw of the dragon.
For a moment, silence.
And then, from the contact point of the blade to the head of the dragon, a dome of pure light suddenly erupted outwards as a fireball of intense heat and light. It rapidly expanded and consumed everything within a fifteen kilometer radius with its all-consuming heat that reached millions of degrees. The edge of the expanding fireball would have licked the edge of the battlefield, but a certain imperceptible barrier prevented this.
The fireball, once at its maximum size, began to rise. Mere moments after it began to do so, the shockwaves arrived. These overpressure shockwaves traveled significantly farther than the fireball had expanded to, and trees outside the fifteen kilometer radius were flattened and blown away if they hadn't already been reduced to dust from the prior fight. Half the demonic forest was instantly turned to a wasteland.
This was hundreds of kilometers of land, a space multiple major countries like Eldoria or Ebonreach could have fit into.
Next came the dust. The lava that had already been spurting out of the ground like geysers from the collateral of the fight had stirred up plenty of soot, smoke, dust and earth, and the shockwaves and hot air sent all of it high up into the atmosphere.
In certain regions, firestorms merged together that added to the soot sent high up.
The sky grayed and blackened, blocking out the dim moonlight and replacing it with the bright light of flame.
The land would not see the sun for the next year.
As the fireball at the heart of such damage gradually rose into the air, a mushroom cloud that could be seen from space formed.
All this happened in the span of roughly ten seconds, and the mushroom cloud rising to the skies left the mark of the strongest combined attack of three of the ex-heroes. Swirling hot winds, a desolate landscape of lava and barren earth was all that was left, except the center. At what was the heart of the stellar brilliance manifest, a hundred meters of sparkling glassified sand lay.
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As the mushroom cloud also left the ground, the dragon's towering and overbearing figure was…no longer visible.
The stirred dust and sand from the magma that had magically shot out like geysers from the desertified region of the demonic forest caused light to abnormally scatter throughout the region. As a result, the whole place was no longer engulfed in the darkness of the night. Instead, an homogenous orange light blanketed it.
Because the landscape was so barren that there were no trees to obstruct their view anymore, the soldiers could make out a lone figure. Just a lone figure. It was almost too small to see, but by circulating mana into their eyes, the soldiers were able to cast the First Circle - Magnify.
The lone figure was a man with black hair and eyes, black robes that covered up a perfect masculine figure and an ethereally perfect face that boasted a slightly rugged impression. Most importantly, it was not a face the soldiers recognised.
In other words, the dragon had been forced to polymorph. As was common knowledge on the Calysta continent, a polymorphed dragon had no access to its spirit. Its mana was sealed. In other words, it was powerless.
Victory.
“”””””WUOHHHHH!!!“”””””
The cheers of the soldiers several kilometers away that had died down after he explosion bloomed, rose up once more.
A monumental achievement!
Three Dragon Slayers had been born today!
Eighty kilometers in the sky, acknowledged on Earth as a height near the “edge of space”, Archmage Seraphina, who was burning through the final dregs of her life with her forbidden spell, had used as much mana as she could muster into a teleport spell away from the vicinity of the blast. In her hands, she gripped the collars of Evan and Mia.
But despite the immense exhaustion of the three of them, a faint smile creeped onto their faces, and they slowly began to fall from the sky.
As they plummeted, when they reached around the ten kilometer mark, a man of the teleportation squad appeared, and the four vanished.
This sight elicited even more deafening cheers from the soldiers.
A moment later, Noah emerged from the ground. He had used his abilities as an elementalist to move fifty meters of earth below him and closed it above him to form a bunker to shield himself from the blast.
As he burrowed above the ground, he found himself face to face with the polymorphed dragon, less than a mere dozen meters away.
The soldiers were roused into another wave of cheers when Noah’s distinctive Ares form appeared, with an expression seemed to be smiling at the polymorphed form of the dragon.
""""WUOOOHHHH!""""
All three of the ex-heroes had lived, after beating a dragon! This day would go down in history, and the soldiers had witnessed it firsthand!
What none of the soldiers understood, though, was that such an expression, where the single large eye on Ares's eye squinted, was not an expression of joy.