Dimensional Descent

Leonel felt his arm threaten to fracture. As he flew back through the air, his eyes couldn't help but narrow.

What a powerful creature.

That was the first time Leonel's Swift spear had actually been repelled. In fact, Leonel felt that if he had used Forceful instead, he would have fractured his own arm on impact. Without his Bronze Runes activated, his body lost quite a bit of its durability.

However, Leonel didn't seem panicked in the slightest.

His feet hit the ground, his cold and indifferent gaze locking onto the surging tentacles. It seemed that this unicorn demon was getting quite confident, it even wanted to end this battle early so that it could return to its meal. It probably even had thought of adding Leonel to that count.

Leonel's lips curled into a sneer. He didn't like feeling like things weren't fully in his control, and if there was anything the last few days had been, it was out of his control. His mood wasn't the best right now.

He was being followed by scuttling rats. The fate of his mother and his girlfriend were unknown. And now, he had no idea when he would be able to pull himself out from beneath the thumb of Mistress Oliidark.

This unicorn demon had picked the wrong time to come across. He no longer cared about the tender feeling in his collarbone.

Leonel didn't move an inch, watching as though tentacles continued to fly toward him. But just as they entered a five meter range, his Absolute Domain activated once again, but this time, it was like a raging tornado of golden flames, shredding everything in its path apart.

Fury.

Applying concepts of Fury to his Spear Force made it break apart like a volatile flame, even taking on slight characteristics of Leonel's Scarlet Star Force. There was no one in this world who could possibly understand the core meaning of fire better than Leonel could.

He embraced it all, taking a step forward and disgusting globules of violet and black flesh and blood fell around him.

Leonel brandished his spear, just the slightest violet glow appearing. His hair whipped about in the surging energy, his pale violet eyes and hair jumping to life.

"Slumbering in silence. Erupting at will."

It was a simple string of six words, their meaning deep and unfathomable.

In speaking them, Leonel's voice seemed to layer as though two entities were speaking at once, his cadence falling by several octaves with each syllable he spoke.

If one thought that Leonel took 10 months to learn just three words, they would be sorely mistaken. Leonel hadn't been satisfied to rest until he had fully comprehended the strength of calligraphy and poetry.

Now fueled by his projected Artistic Conception, the substance of his words held the weight of the world, unbridled and unfettered, unbothered and unhurried, untouchable and unquenchable.

The strike seemed to tear the world in two, even the high dark clouds above stirring.

The earth quaked and the black trees in the surroundings were ripped from the ground, their roots taking with them large swaths of earth as they were blown away.

Leonel's spear quivered in excitement. As though a roaring flood dragon ready to break out of its cocoon, its tip vibrated with its own and its body radiated a shimmering dark light.

In one moment, Leonel was dozens of meters from the unicorn demon. In the next, he appeared to its back, his hair slowly fluttering down from its raised state.

The furious light in his eyes persisted for a while longer, the elegant line he had drawn across the air still shaking the hearts of all those who had seen it.

It was fear. That single strike elicited a fear that they hadn't felt in a long while, a fear that they thought they had weeded out the moment they had stepped into the position in the Dark Branch. However, this child's strike had brought it back. At that moment, they realized that they had never gotten fear of that part of themselves, they had just managed to bury it deep.

Right then, the neck of the unicorn demon imploded, its head flying into the air and its body collapsing to the ground. Like this, a powerful demon collapsed to the ground, felled in a single strike.

Leonel looked back. He didn't seem surprised by the result. His Spear Force was far stronger after a year than most knew. Maybe only he, himself, was aware of just how far he had gone.

By this point, he could compose at will and execute it on a whim. So long as the word was in his base of prepared vocabulary, he could use it as pleased and then break it down and reconstruct it into a new phrase, sentence or composition.

To others, it would look as though Leonel had access to an endless supply of spear techniques, each more vibrant and powerful than the last, and most definitely more difficult to handle. The subtle conception was beyond what most could handle on a whim.

At this point, Leonel didn't even feel any desire to learn any spear or bow techniques, he could make his own, forming them and stacking them into powerful combinations of words his enemies could only hope to match.

Leonel put his spear away, picking up the unicorn demon's head up by its silver horn. However, at the moment he touched it, his expression flickered.

This feeling, it was like he was touching an ore. With his Earth Variant Affinity, he was very certain of this, he couldn't possibly be mistaken.

It was quite interesting. This meant that the bones of this unicorn demon could form metals of its own, something similar to the Morales family's Lineage Factor, Metal Synergy.

Leonel didn't recognize this metal, so it was probably a composite of several the unicorn demon had absorbed. Since this was a Zone, the metals should be the very same as what he had already long since memorized, so he was at least 90% sure of this. It would be 100%... but this Zone was simply too odd.

At that moment, another oddity occurred: Leonel felt his Metal Synergy Lineage Factor stir.