Badge in Azure

Chapter 1504: Ascertaining Weaknesses (Part 1)

The black aura surrounding the blood-red cage was dispelled by the light of the magic, and Saleen saw a repulsive man appear inside the cage. However, all connections he had with the Eternal Control Shard were cut off altogether.

It was not the shard that was the problem, but that the difference between Saleen and the Heretic God was just too great.

The shard seemed to have disappeared altogether. The Heretic God possessed Figo's body and was locked in the blood-red cage. Nearly 100 heroic spirits were taking control of the magic array, turning the cage into an indestructible prison. The Heretic God was no longer able to return to its plane. There was no way it could have escaped.

There was only one way out for the Heretic God, and that was to break the cage and kill everyone standing in its way.

The cage did not present much of a problem to it, but then again, there were three very powerful beings eyeing what was inside the cage.

Those three were none other than the Goddess of Myers, the general and the grandmaster.

All of the others were not even close to powerful enough to take on beings like the Heretic God. Their only use in the situation was to maintain the integrity of the blood-red cage.

Saleen examined the Heretic God carefully. He had purified many of the Heretic God's underlings, and he knew just how powerful it could have been. The Heretic God looked rather ugly. It had the frame resembling that of a frail, weak monkey, with a very huge belly. Furthermore, the Heretic God had a tail, and that tail had hair all over it. The fur on its face was even thicker, yet its head was patchy.

It was no surprise that it had gotten incredibly angry when the goddess said that she would have illustrated its appearance in detail and spread it everywhere.

The best way to infuriate someone was to hit them where it hurt, and that worked the same with gods as well.

The Heretic God had rushed there and therefore had brought nothing with it. It had never guessed that its believer would be locked up in a cage, and worse still, that the cage was something that it was unable to easily break out of.

The grandmaster acted first, casting Fireball at the cage.

Saleen knew, even back when he was at level one, that despite being powerful, Fireball was not actually a good choice most of the time. Such magic spells cost too much to cast and were difficult to control as well.

However, the grandmaster's powers were such that the cost would not have been much of a problem for him.

The Fireball was only the size of a bowl. It was crimson and looked unassuming.

The Heretic God stopped howling altogether instead concentrated on the attack that was flying slowly toward the cage.

The Fireball did not change in any way. The Heretic God opened its mouth after the spell entered the cage and blew out a whiff of black aura, shrouding the Fireball. It did not want the Fireball to explode. The poisons contained within the Fireball were so potent that not even a god like it, who was versed in the art of poisons, would have wanted to deal with them.

That black aura isolated the spell. The Fireball cracked on its own after being shrouded by it, shooting Ice Moon from within. The crescent-shaped Ice Moon was extremely sharp, and it cut up the black aura as if it was something solid.

What had just happened had something to do with the power of rules, and Saleen took the time to commit what he saw to memory.

What the grandmaster had demonstrated with the power of rules of water was something that Saleen was capable of learning. The Ice Moon spun around and cut the black aura to pieces before freezing it. The Fireball looked entirely unharmed, and its temperature spiked again.

That Heretic God bared its fangs at the Fireball and swallowed it up. It actually intended to use the energy of that Fireball to work on its oracle's body.

Despite its ferocious and eerie appearance at the moment, it had not actually managed to conquer Figo's body completely. The method of advent through taking bodies of others had a lot of shortcomings. The Heretic God had been too confident and acted too urgently when showing up to kill the goddess.

A god who had just been resurrected would have served as a very good supplement to the Heretic God, after all.

"General…" the goddess said in a solemn tone. She turned around and looked at the general, saying, "Drag this out as much as you like. The divine personas I gave you will only last you a day outside. You really think it's so easy to shake free of your graves? You wouldn't have been trapped for such a long time if it was. If we can't kill the Heretic God within the day, I will leave, and the Heretic God will come and destroy your graves before it does anything else.

The general was exasperated. With the way the goddess had phrased it, if he were to simply continue to keep his hands to himself, he would have been the one at fault if things were to go south.

The general swung his flail about, and the metal balls on the weapon clashed together, bursting with frightening power. The number of sparks dancing between the balls grew, and each of those sparks seemed to burn continuously without end.

The head of the flail slowly took on a fiery red color.

The general leaped up and charged toward the outside of the cage before bringing the flail down hard.

The cage remained unscathed, and the sparks from the flail shot inside of it. The Heretic God began to wail. The sparks seemed as if they were going to stay in existence indefinitely, and every single one of them dug into its skin.

The Heretic God had an extremely frightening amount of power of the Source, but the general was also a level 18 professional. The rules he wielded were level 18 ones, and not only had they caused the Heretic God serious damage, but they also made sure that the resulting pain was something unforgettable.

That grandmaster did not dare to make any moves after that. He was able to see that the goddess was maintaining the integrity of the blood-red cage. She would have made a move otherwise. She was busy trapping the Heretic God within the cage and keeping it from returning to its divine kingdom. Doing so required a very huge amount of power.

It was very, very difficult to keep the Heretic God caged. The only one who did not attack was Saleen.

Saleen was growing frustrated. Without the Lightning Moon, his attacks would have been but a joke to the Heretic God. He knew this because, if the general's flames had been thrown at him instead, he would have burned away until there was nothing left of him. The Heretic God, however, simply remained howling in pain, and it did not seem to be dying any time soon.

The grandmaster's attack also allowed Saleen to see what grandmaster-ranked mages were like. Every single-target attack magic spell cast was imbued with an offensive capacity comparable to forbidden curses.

Those magic spells hit the Heretic God and caused huge openings on its body.

It was worth noting that those openings were not wounds. While the Heretic God was simply possessing its underling's body, it was still nonetheless something like a nation of its own. None of the attacks worked. No pebble thrown into the sea could have done any harm to the sea itself, after all.

The grandmaster was actually using magic to tear openings on the nation formed in the Heretic God's body, taking parts of the matter away and destroying them.

The Heretic God actually retaliated. All four of its limbs continued to attack the blood-red cage. The black mist that it blew from its mouth had already spread outside the cage.

Saleen suddenly sensed the Lightning Moon returning to its place above him.

The goddess's voice could be heard from the depths of his soul, saying, "Destroy the black aura with electric snakes. The heroic spirits won't be able to hold on for long otherwise. The cage is about to break!"

Saleen acknowledged her and began to secretly cast Dance of Electric Snakes using the Lightning Moon.

Only a little more than a dozen snakes appeared, but things were then different from how they had been in the past. Every single electric snake was strictly controlled by Saleen, and they would not dissipate as easily. That was the result of all the practice he had done on Figo.

Practicing spells without a target was practically pointless to mages.

Every single electric snake dug into wisps of the black mist and destroyed them using electrical discharges that came from their bodies.

The black mist that had sought its way through the cage was purified by the electric snakes, while the Heretic God looked on with baffled eyes, leaving a bunch of attribute-less granules on the ground.

The Heretic God turned around to look at Saleen, who returned a fierce glare. Three-hundred and sixty million lightning rune danced in his eyes, dealing a great impact on the Heretic God's Source.

"Yield, Heretic God." Saleen's voice was plain, devoid of any imbued skills, yet it contained the power of lightning rules nonetheless.

"You ignorant kid. I shall send everyone that has anything to do with you to h*ll and torture them for millions of years…" the Heretic God said.

"You good-for-nothing idiot. You really think you're so d*mn powerful just because people go about calling you Heretic God? Look at yourself. You're in a cage now. What's the difference between you and a monkey?" Saleen asked.

The Heretic God was so provoked by what Saleen said that it let out a shrill howl. That howl contained powers different from before. Dozens of heroic spirits were so stunned that they fell to the ground and blacked out.

However, such attacks had their cost. The grandmaster took the opportunity to throw light magic into the Heretic God's body, which the Heretic God hated the most. The general's flames dug into the Heretic God's brain as well, burning the Heretic God so intensely that its orifices began to smoke.

The Heretic God was totally vexed. Its power had been such that even if it were to take on all three of them in a fair fight, it still would have held its own. However, the way it advented was problematic, and it ended up being trapped in a blood-red cage by the goddess, preventing it from bringing even ten percent of its usual powers to bear. But then again, its defensive capacity remained entirely intact.

Having such formidable defense was utterly useless in that case, though. Despite both the grandmaster and the general bringing out their greatest attacks, both of them held their strongest equipment, which was in stark contrast to the Heretic God showing up completely naked.

Saleen actually had more up his sleeves as well. While he was incapable of using the power of the Signet of Silence, he had nonetheless mastered some rules of the three-eyed people. As Saleen had advanced, the third eye on his forehead grew to have more than one type of power.

Saleen opened the third eye on his forehead, and a beam of white light shot forth. The beam was actually the power of light that Saleen had been storing for over 1000 years. It was difficult for Saleen to accumulate such powers of light, as he was of a body of water element. The power of the light element resulting from elemental conversion was not pure, preventing it from being stored in the third eye.

As such, the power of light had been something accumulated by other mages, which they had cast on Saleen, and he, in turn, absorbed them.

Saleen had withstood countless attacks for over 1000 years, so much so that he had trained his third eye to develop a skill for absorbing the elemental powers of enemies. That beam of white light hit the inside of the cage, lighting the entire cage up and dispelling all of the black mist within. The Heretic God's body could be seen, completely lit up.

The Heretic God panicked. It was still unaccustomed to being fully exposed before others. Saleen took the opportunity to use the Signet of Silence.

The Heretic God was not even aware of anything happening, as time had stopped for only a split second.

Saleen saw the Heretic God's weakness—its tail. The entire tail was fake. There was a very neat cut at the base of the tail, which was a result of being cut by others using weapons.

The damage from that weapon was so great that even when the Heretic God switched bodies and reformed its body anew, it was still unable to repair the tail. The one who cut its tail off had completely severed the power of the Source on that part of its body.

That ugly tail was but an illusion. That cut was the Heretic God's true weakness, and it was difficult to defend.