Devouring Dragon Heir

Klaus hovered high above the sanctuary's icy terrain, suspended in the pale sky like a solitary star.

The air beneath his boots rippled faintly with the shimmer of his aura; his presence was like that of a god.

Far below, the icy mountain loomed, its colossal frame protruding upward through the clouds.

In between the summits of mountains stood one that was almost double the size of the others.

At his level high above the sky, the wind screamed as it rushed past his form, cold enough to slice through flesh, but for Klaus, it was just a breeze of gentle air.

He looked at the central mountain.

Its structure was thick and unyielding; the layers of ice were so densely compacted that they shimmered like glass.

The world around the mountain was quiet without a sign of any commotion. Klaus had instructed his summons to leave the area.

Slowly and deliberately, Klaus extended his right hand.

His index and middle fingers remained straight and aligned, while the remaining fingers curled inward into a tight fist.

It was a stance he was using just for show; otherwise, he could use the skill he was about to invoke with just a silent command from his thoughts.

The air around his hand trembled faintly as his mana began to gather, an invisible current tugging at the thin clouds above.

With unerring precision, he drew a perfect circle in the space before him.

The motion was smooth, as if his fingers were gliding through water, leaving behind a faint trail of golden light.

When the circle closed, his hand shifted, fingers weaving a complex series of patterns inside its boundary.

He drew a complicated but mysterious rune, which he could have just drawn with his mind, but using his fingers gave him quite a sense of thrill.

The rune glowed brighter, golden light pulsing through its lines in a slow, steady rhythm, like a heartbeat.

And then, reality shifted.

Around him, the air shimmered, and from the empty sky emerged thousands of sword diagrams, appearing silently at first, each one suspended in the air like an entity on its own.

They were all glowing with a golden light. Soon, more and more of such sword diagrams filled the sky, threatening to rain down at any time and devastate the land below.

Soon, a light humming vibration spread across the space, with which the diagrams also started energizing.

The diagrams rotated slowly, and then suddenly the swords ignited after being infused with the fire element.

One after another, the golden swords burst into flame.

The soft light was devoured by a searing red glow, the heat radiating from it pushing back the freezing air.

The temperature surged, melting the frost from Klaus's shoulders and sending thin rivulets of water hissing into steam. Even the clouds seemed to recoil, parting as the heat bled upward into the sky.

Klaus's gaze remained steady. He then suddenly flicked his wrist.

The swords obeyed without hesitation.

Thousands of blazing blades streaked downward, each leaving a comet's tail of crimson fire as it cut through the atmosphere.

They tore the clouds apart, raining toward the mountain with unstoppable momentum. The first impacts shattered the silence.

Explosions thundered across the range, each strike tearing great chunks of ice and rock from the mountain's edges.

Shockwaves rippled outwards, flattening nearby ridges and sending avalanches roaring down the slopes.

Even though the swords had fallen in symmetry, it still caused an uncontrolled chaos and destruction in the valley.

The swords fell in perfect synchrony, their impacts forming a massive boundary around the mountain's base.

The ring of swords glowed like the rim of a forging sun, enclosing the icy, titanic mountain in a cage from which there would be no escape.

Klaus's lips curved into a faint smile.

He raised his hand once more, then snapped his fingers.

The world seemed to hold its breath.

BOOM** x999

The countless swords detonated at once, releasing a concentrated burst of star energy fused seamlessly with his fire element.

The combined force was indescribable. Waves of blazing energy collided and merged, each resonance amplifying the next until the air itself screamed under the pressure.

The mountain groaned, its vast body trembling like a living thing in its death throes. Fissures tore through its surface, splitting apart walls of ice that had stood unbroken for quite a long time.

The destruction accelerated. Shards equal to the size of large houses splintered and disintegrated before they could fall.

The very core of the mountain was ripped open; the massive formation of stone and frost was reduced to nothing under the relentless onslaught.

In less than a handful of seconds, the towering spire was gone. All that remained was a drifting cloud of glittering frost, suspended in the shimmering haze of residual energy.

The mountain's shadow vanished from the land as if it had never been there. Avalanches and landslides occurred in the nearby adjacent ranges due to the sheer aftereffect.

The swords flickered once, then dissolved into motes of golden light, vanishing into the cold air.

The execution of the skill was over.

This was the fourth form of his skill, Stellar Sword Descent, which was now at transcendent rank after reaching the EX rank and had unlocked an additional effect.

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Kill Name: STELLAR SWORD DESCENT

Rank: TRANSCENDENT

Description: Skill developed by the apostle of stars.

FIRST FORM—STAR TOUCH: Infuse the sword with starlight and other elements to deliver a clean upper strike, causing massive damage to the target and surroundings.

SECOND FORM—SONG OF THE STARS: Deliver a brutal combo of sword strikes, completely dominating the enemy, each strike as destructive as a meteor.

THIRD FORM—STAR SWORD'S CRY: Unleash a beam of star energy infused with the host's elemental laws to obliterate an enemy.

FOURTH FORM—STELLAR SWORD FORMATION: Summons thousands of stellar swords to rain upon the battlefield, encircling and devastating all within range. At the final signal, each blade detonates in unison, unleashing a resonance of star energy that erases everything in its domain. It can be infused with any element and concept to manifest varying effects.

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He had tested it in various forms, each time uncovering new depths of devastation.

In its pure state, it could scour landscapes clean of life and structure alike.

But its true brilliance lay in fusion with elements and with concepts.

When Klaus infused the strike with ice, the battlefield froze in an instant, encased in super-dense frost colder than any normal ice attack.

Even the hardest materials turned brittle, shattering under the slightest strain.

When he used the earth element, the ground itself disappeared, caving inwards as subterranean layers collapsed, leaving deep depressions where solid earthen land had once been.

With the darkness element, the soil turned black and foul. The domain got so corrupted that undead creatures began clawing their way to the surface, as though the land had been claimed by a death god.

And with fire, which had been the most recent test, it had proven an ice mountain could vanish without so much as rubble left behind.

One thing he understood was that the variability of elemental application with the fourth form was much greater than that of the previous form of the sword skill.

Next, he wanted to test his concepts, but the system stopped him from attempting the skill with concepts.

The system told him that concepts were not like his elements.

Infusing a concept into something required much more mastery than simple control, so he first needed to increase the comprehension percentage to a significant level before trying to infuse it into skills and objects.

Still, the system gave him an idea and scope about the potential effects of these concepts if used with this skill.

With the corrosion concept infused, he could probably create a cursed land like in the case of the darkness element, but the effects would be much more devastating.

Anything inside the domain will corrode, and at some point, when his mastery reaches a good level, he will be able to corrode even space and time itself, and also any other type of energy, given that he attains a mastery much greater than what he currently has.

In case of telekinesis, Klaus would be able to blast off or dissipate the matter inside the domain like he did in his previous fight with the nobles, but once he reaches a very high level, he will be able to control atomic vibrations.

Once he reaches that level of atomic vibrational control, he will become a god among gods and will be able to create and destroy even black holes at will.

"Whoa, whoa, stop system, you are making me too excited," Klaus said as the blush that had crept onto his face faded as quickly as it came, replaced by a quiet smile of the kind worn by someone who had glimpsed godhood and accepted it as inevitable.

"Well… no worries. I'll get there eventually," he said to himself reassuringly.

He turned away from the fading cloud of ice and light.

In the blink of an eye, the Sanctuary dissolved around him, and he found himself once more in the familiar stillness of his own room.

His subdomain had partial intelligence and could recover itself from any damage done using a bit of Klaus's vast mana reserves.

He had been busy for days now, he had summoned monsters without pause, building an army whose numbers now swelled to twenty-five thousand.

Klaus had made the lich the commander of the legion for now and had told him to organize the army the way he liked.

It was not a conventional recruited army but a summoned death army, which fed only on Klaus's mana, treating him as their absolute master.

So he was not worried about organizing the legion, as he knew that his tribe leader trait was useful in that sense, although he felt that the trait was A-ranked. Its effects had been diminishing previously, but then, after he had gained the death legion skill.

Now the tribe leader trait had practically become useless, as the skill of the death monarch had shown similar effects but with much more intensity.