Chapter 485 - 485: Invasion [51]

Raghul was stunned.

He knew Eli was strong, but he hadn't realized he was this strong.

Wes had barely managed to react before Eli had crossed the distance between them, and within two moves, the Chosen had been killed as though his strength had meant nothing.

Then the familiar notifications appeared before Eli's eyes.

[You have killed Chosen, Wesley Kohavic.]

[You have levelled up.]

[You have received innate skill: Crimson Flesh.]

Eli didn't bother reading the details of the skill.

Whatever Crimson Flesh could do, he could examine it later.

Right now, his eyes remained fixed on Raghul.

"You're next."

He said it without hesitation and was about to move.

But Raghul moved first.

Numerous invisible tendrils suddenly burst out from his body, their presence revealed only by the way the surrounding air warped around them as they tore forward with terrifying speed. They converged on Eli from multiple directions, moving with enough force to tear through anything caught in their path.

Eli didn't hesitate.

He activated [Swap].

Raghul suddenly appeared where Eli had been standing, and before he could even understand what had happened, one of his own invisible tendrils came crashing into him.

The force of the impact sent him flying backward.

Raghul tumbled across the ground, rolling several times before digging his staff into the earth and forcing himself to stop. He barely managed to regain his footing when the temperature around him suddenly began to rise.

The air grew hot.

Raghul's instincts immediately warned him of danger.

Something seemed to loom over him, and when he looked up, his eyes widened.

A massive sphere of flame was descending from above, its surface churning violently as it tore through the air like a burning meteor.

The sheer heat radiating from it made the ground beneath Raghul begin to crack and blacken before the attack had even reached it.

Raghul lunged to the side.

The flaming sphere slammed into the ground where he had been standing.

BOOM!

An explosion erupted across the battlefield, sending a wave of fire outward in every direction.

The flames spread across the ground with frightening speed, and when Raghul tried to create distance, they seemed to follow his movements, surging after him as though the attack itself had been given a target.

"Annoying."

Raghul clicked his tongue and immediately surrounded himself with his invisible tendrils.

The tendrils twisted around his body, forming a dense defensive barrier just as the flames reached him.

The fire crashed against them.

The tendrils trembled under the force of the impact, but they held, preventing the flames from reaching Raghul as the inferno continued to rage around him.

But before Raghul could come to think of what to do next, Eli appeared above him and descended with his blade pointed directly downward.

The weapon was coated in a strange energy that seemed to distort the space around its edge, the darkness clinging to the blade not behaving like ordinary shadow but instead swallowing the light that touched it.

Eli drove the weapon straight into the barrier formed by Raghul's tendrils.

The moment the blade connected, the defensive barrier split apart.

The energy tendrils were torn open as though the blade had found the very structure holding them together, and a concentrated beam of void energy escaped through the opening, continuing along the path of Eli's attack.

It struck Raghul.

A hole was punched through his chest, the force of the impact sending him stumbling backward as blood poured from the wound.

"Gahh!"

Raghul cried out in pain, losing his balance and tumbling across the ground.

Yet before he had even come to a complete stop, the wound in his chest began to close.

Flesh crawled inward from the edges of the hole, muscle and tissue knitting themselves back together with unnatural speed until the damage was rapidly erased.

Raghul pushed himself upright.

His expression hardened.

He slammed the bottom of his staff into the ground and activated a skill.

The earth beneath him trembled.

This attack was different from the offensive tendrils Eli had avoided with [Swap]. Those tendrils had physical paths that Eli could exploit by exchanging his position with something else, but this skill did not rely on something as simple as a projectile traveling from one point to another.

There was nowhere for him to simply swap himself out of its reach.

Raghul laughed.

"I'm not going to die easily, Eli Cross."

As his voice echoed through the space, something began pouring out of his body.

It looked like fumes at first, dark and dense enough to obscure his silhouette, but the mass quickly gathered shape around him. The fumes twisted and condensed, forming enormous skulls that hovered in the air, their hollow eye sockets burning with gathered mana as their jaws opened.

Then they roared.

The sound carried the weight of something alive, something fueled by an enormous amount of mana, as the massive skulls surrounded Raghul and stared directly at Eli.

He directed the massive skulls toward Eli, and they immediately surged forward, gliding through the air like wraiths released from some ancient grave, their enormous jaws hanging open as they moved toward their target with unnatural speed.

Eli, who was already charging forward, did not slow down or attempt to avoid them.

The skulls reached him.

They struck his body head-on, and the moment they made contact, a violent burst of purple fumes erupted around him, swallowing his entire figure in a thick cloud that spread rapidly across the battlefield.

Raghul grinned.

There was no way anyone could simply ignore that attack.

The fumes were not ordinary poison. They carried a corrosive effect that attacked anything they touched, eating away at flesh, armor, and even magical defenses.

Even the strongest opponents would have to treat the technique with caution, because remaining inside the cloud for too long meant allowing the poison to work its way through their defenses until there was nothing left to protect them.

Yet Raghul's grin slowly faded.

He could still sense Eli.

More importantly, Eli was still moving.

Through the thick purple smoke, Raghul could feel his presence approaching, steady and completely unhindered.

"How?"

The question escaped Raghul's thoughts before he could stop it.

How was he still moving?

The poisonous fumes should have at least slowed him down. Even if Eli's body was powerful enough to withstand the initial contact, the corrosive effect should have forced him to retreat or find a way around the cloud.

Instead, he had simply run straight through it.

As if the poison wasn't even there.

Raghul's eyes narrowed as he watched the smoke shift.

Then he heard a scream.

It wasn't a scream of pain. There was no agony in the voice.

It was an attack.

Raghul barely had time to realize what was happening before the purple smoke in front of him suddenly trembled, and a powerful sound wave ripped through the poisonous cloud.

Several rings of compressed sonic energy tore through the smoke, expanding outward as they traveled directly toward Raghul.