Still, he did not plan to use Spiral Heat Ray often for quite a while. None of his opponents so far were worth it, and at his current level, the energy cost was high. One shot might not even pay for itself.
"Damn it, am I still stuck as a basic attack monster? I want to shoot beams in style too." He sighed, then cheered himself up. Once he grew into a Cosmic Giant Monster, he could live the life of firing beams everywhere.
Belial had realized something a long time ago. Was it not a common saying in web novels that some forest or forbidden land was filled with monsters, and the deeper you went, the stronger they became. After actually transmigrating and checking in person, he found that this made little sense.
Although monster strength did vary between regions, there was no neat pyramid where everything got stronger the farther in you went. Thinking about it carefully, that was only natural. If a monster became strong, why would it obediently stay in the deepest part and never wander outside?
Did staying deep inside offer any benefit. If not, why stay there at all. Belial had already been flying for quite a long time, and along the way the monsters he saw varied greatly in strength, without any clear pattern of increase or decrease.
His perception of the Magic environment had become much sharper. He could not give precise numbers, but telling whether an area had more or less Magic was no problem. Areas rich in Magic usually housed stronger monsters, and rather than saying abundant Magic created powerful monsters, it was more accurate to say it attracted them.
He had even seen strong monsters in places where Magic was poor. After flying for a while longer, Belial could clearly feel the surrounding temperature dropping. High in the air, waves of cold rushed past him, and although his body was not afraid of freezing, ice still formed on him, even frosting the tips of his wings.
His originally dark gray body was now covered in a layer of white frost, and the surrounding clouds grew heavy and gray-white. "It's snowing."
As he continued forward, the snowfall grew heavier. His body itself would not suffer from such low temperatures, and the only real problem was reduced visibility. Still, he felt a small spark of excitement, since he had lived his entire previous life in the south and had never seen snow before.
This was his first time seeing it in person. Otherworld still followed a planetary model rather than a flat sky, with a sun and a moon hanging above. He was probably flying toward higher latitudes now, though he could not tell whether it was north or south.
This planet was far larger than the small broken one from his past. He had flown at least thousands of li and yet felt little overall change, rarely seeing humans, and noticing no difference in gravity. "Hmm… is that a Mammoth?"
He lowered his flying height slightly. The ground below was gradually covered in snow, vegetation was far sparser than before, and the leaves were an odd dark color, tending toward black. At a glance, the world seemed stripped down to black and white.
A group of massive creatures was walking across the ground. There were dozens of them, each larger than the biggest African elephant, covered in thick gray-white fur. Their heads even had heavy bone-white armor plates.
Two huge tusks extended downward, their flattened tips like shovels, resembling the Mammoth he remembered, though with some differences. "So this is Otherworld. How strange."
Belial's eyesight was sharper than a hawk's, letting him see everything clearly even in a blizzard. What puzzled him was not their appearance, but how such a sparsely vegetated environment could support such a large herd.
If they were truly herbivores as they looked, their daily food intake would be enormous, with tens of kilograms of waste each day. With dozens of them at once, would they not devastate the environment like he did. Belial did not know whether the land could endure it, but he knew one thing.
"Then, for the sake of protecting the environment, it's time for me to strike hard."
Grrr… What was that, something dared make a sound near him. Too frightening, better eat something to calm down.
"Roar!"
Belial spread his wings and revealed his claws, his gaze locking onto the target in an instant. His heart thundered as every bone and cell in his body entered peak condition. A strange light flashed in his eyes, the unmistakable gaze of an absolute predator.
In the next moment, his hind claws kicked back, a faint glimmer of Magic Array flashing before vanishing into the blizzard, and Energy Field expanded instantly. The air screamed as a massive body over thirty meters long dove downward at terrifying speed.
"Wuu…"
That was the leading one, the largest and strongest of the herd, something like a leader, which he temporarily labeled a snowfield elephant. Driven by a restless impulse, it had been leading the group forward, until it suddenly paused.
With their body structure, they could not look up at the sky, and their vision was poor. Yet every other sense screamed warnings at that moment. Its keen hearing caught the sound of a colossal being tearing through the air, a sound like blades that brought cold even through thick fur.
It was the sound of death. Its small eyes widened, invisible claws gripping its heart as fear reached a peak it had never known. The air in its lungs felt squeezed out, and before it could even cry out, something far greater arrived.
In the next instant, a violent blizzard swept in from the front. "ROAR!!!"
The blizzard was blown apart by a terrifying roar, revealing the horror it could not hide. A dreadful black dragon appeared, horned back faintly glowing, wrapped in biting frost, its abyssal jaws wide open.
Its vast wings nearly covered everything ahead, and the shadow they cast crushed any thought of resistance. The deafening roar and raging winds made it hard to even stand, making it clear that even with all their strength, they were unworthy to be called opponents.
It tried desperately to see the dragon clearly, but much of that immense body was still shrouded in white snow. Then the black dragon seemed to blur, as if it made some motion, and that was all. It could no longer think.
"First… to the last."
A swing of sharp claws ended nearly ten snowfield elephants in an instant. Belial first dealt with the largest and strongest one that looked like the leader. Its powerful body, thick fur, and even a momentary frost armor were all meaningless.
Such beasts, dozens gathered together, could rival a tank formation if they charged. Yet under the crystal claws of the dragon, their value dropped to nothing, their defenses no better than slightly thicker paper. They were torn apart with ease.
Striking alongside was a flexible, scythe-like tail tipped with crystallized bone spurs. With simple acceleration from Energy Field, it broke the sound barrier in an instant, so fast even afterimages were hard to see.
The tail tip sliced through several bodies and skewered others like beads on a string. As for the remaining survivors, the massive wings beat once, and two enormous storms filled with icy air and lightning swept them up.
It was bone-piercing cold, something they had never felt despite their thick fur. Before the ice could reach their marrow, surging lightning burned through their flesh, racing through their bodies. They trembled for a moment, and then they did not.
Living in cold climates and adapted to it as they were, they still could not withstand a dragon that used an absurd amount of Magic with crude spell structures to freeze all survivors into solid lumps. In less than three seconds, an entire herd of giant elephants was wiped out.
"Just as expected of me."
"Ah, this one got smashed a bit. Whatever, I'll eat it anyway."
Belial glanced at the scraps of flesh and bone on his claws. As the dragon calmly enjoyed prey whose total mass far exceeded his own, deeper in the even colder snowfields, more snowfield elephants and other monsters moved.
Driven by the same restless feeling, they headed, fast or slow, toward some deeper place. A faint, unknown light flickered in their eyes.
"Thirty-eight cases this month. Is that right?"
"…My lord, yes."
The young clerk with a still-awkward face kept his head lowered, hands folded behind his back, fingers rubbing together on their own. He did not bother fixing the glasses that had slipped slightly down his nose.
"Let me see."
The room itself was not large, and a fire crackled in the fireplace beside them. Even so, perhaps because of the wind slipping in through the half-closed window, the clerk felt as if the cold was thick enough for snow to fall indoors.
A pair of finely crafted sword and axe hung above the fireplace, carefully polished, their edges faintly cold with reflected light. The smooth metal mirrored a tall figure wrapped directly in animal hides.
He had a face cut sharp as stone, a high nose bridge, deep-set features, and a short beard, carrying the rough presence unique to the Northlands. Yet his medium-length blond hair was neatly braided into several tight strands.