Bone spurs even grew in some places, making the overall form more ferocious and terrifying. The now larger and stronger Black Dragon had changed not only in appearance, but also in presence due to God of Destruction. At a glance, it looked like the perfect example of an evil dragon.
After thousands of cycles of time, the body was essentially restored, yet Belial still slept. One thing remained dormant. The reactor in his chest.
This was the greatest energy drain. Most of the power he had swallowed was pumped into it, reaching an astonishing amount, yet it continued to devour energy like a greedy beast. The output and operational power were far greater than before, and if Burning Mode were activated again, it could endure even higher temperatures.
Because of this, the process took an extremely long time, but there were still two resources left. The collapsed Divine Kingdom and the decayed Authority. One served as kindling, and the other, as shown by the former the Lord, could be used to ignite.
Decay could be understood in many ways. While the use of Fire of Decay looked like burning one's life for power, for Godzilla it meant something else. It could greatly increase energy output efficiency.
With all other conditions ready, ignition began. A long-forgotten hum echoed once more through Snow Mountain. Belial's body temperature rose rapidly, his surface heating like hot iron as the surrounding snow melted.
Steam billowed upward, and shockwaves rippled out as energy was released at high efficiency by Authority of Decay. The central reactor grew hotter, the hum became sharper, and the dorsal spines lit up with orange-red light and crackling arcs.
Belial's eyelids trembled. He opened his eyes.
A massive shockwave burst outward in an instant, spreading like a nuclear blast. Rocks were hurled away, snow was instantly vaporized, and the sky above was laid bare.
When Belial fully woke, the first thing he saw was a sky without a ceiling. The air around him was still warm. As he shifted, he realized he was lying in magma formed from melted rock.
"Ugh… ah, finally finished loading." The Great Dragon exhaled, and the unstable energy inside spilled out as a Spiral Heat Ray, blasting a huge hole through the clouds.
"That feels much better." Belial scratched his head, sensing subtle changes in his body.
"I was about to blow up in Burning Mode before. I think I swallowed something too. Forget it, I do not really understand it anyway." "That Rodan guy dropped some good loot though. I seem to have grown again, close to sixty meters, and I am pretty hungry."
The rebuilt skeleton had stretched his size further, and the cost was hunger that needed filling. In short, it was time to find something to eat.
"I think I have been here before. Why does it look so different?" Precise spatial sensing told Belial he had likely visited this place, yet the flat-topped peak and the magma lake beneath him felt unfamiliar.
As he looked around, he noticed something that caught his attention. Down in the snowy ground below, a tower tip jutted out. Half of a massive bell was buried there.
"Wow, so there was something like a buried ruin under here."
Using Gravity Tornado, Belial dug out most of the remaining mountain by force, then carefully cleared the debris until he could finally see what had been buried inside. It looked like a temple, finely made and ornate on the outside, but judging from the overall layout and scale, it was only a fragment of the original structure. A statue shaped like a goddess was carved quite well, yet badly damaged, with even the entrance shattered, and he could not tell how old it was.
"Places like this always make you wonder if some the Lord type will wander in someday and suddenly get a lucky break. I mean, it really looks like… uh."
Belial's massive body clearly could not fit inside, but peering through the gaps was no problem, and he did not dare use much force. He strongly suspected that if he pushed even a little, the whole thing would turn to dust. Even so, he did not sense anything related to Magic or any special features.
He spread Energy Field over the area and used Gravity Tornado to probe every detail inside and out, only to confirm one thing in the end. It was truly just a broken place, with nothing of value at all. While looking around out of curiosity, he accidentally twisted down part of the ceiling with one hand, which made things a bit awkward.
"Alright, looks like I was overthinking it. This really is just an empty ruin."
Disappointed, Belial had thought he might finally get a turn at some the Lord-style luck and stumble upon a miraculous ancient site. But the place was so small that it would not even be enough to stage a few scenes for a the Lord, and there was almost nothing else left. Thinking about it, he felt it made sense, since reality had far more nameless junk heaps than dangerous ruins filled with treasures and opportunities.
Since he had already knocked down the ceiling and could not put it back properly, Belial stuck his huge head through the opening and looked around inside. The interior was empty, with nothing at all, and even the windows were completely broken. There was only a decorative sculpture of a sword stuck into a cracked stone pedestal.
"As expected of Otherworld, this whole sword-in-a-pedestal Holy Sword routine shows up everywhere, and this sculpture does not even look that good."
Belial glanced at it casually, finding nothing special, not even a flower carved onto it, and he felt nothing at all from it. From the few inherited memories he had, he did recall that things like Chosen Hero were a specialty of Otherworld, and without exception they were all extremely strong. The memories only carried the impression of overwhelming power, likely because no dragon ever survived seeing one strike, and by scale alone, a single swing could make even Mariana Trench back off.
"I wonder if I will ever meet a Chosen Hero. And if I do, will I be able to beat one once I am fully grown?"
He casually picked up the stone pedestal and the sword, only to find that the sculpture was actually assembled from parts, so Belial separated them to take a closer look. There was still nothing special about either of them. The only issue was a small accident.
"Huh? This thing really cannot take much abuse. It broke right away."
Realizing he could not put them back together, Belial felt a bit guilty and tossed them back inside, then tried to make up for it by placing the ceiling slab back over the opening. With that done, he lost interest. "Well… I should go eat first. I am out."
With the faint guilt of having scratched a historical landmark, Belial beat his wings and flew away from Snow Mountain. Inside the hall, the plain sword and the stone pedestal lay on the ground without the slightest reaction.
"…"
The now even larger and more vicious Black Dragon shot straight into the clouds, and as he flew, Belial began to familiarize himself with this slightly unfamiliar body. He could feel that this was still the same snowfield as before, and it seemed he had slept for quite a long time, though he did not know whether the ecosystem he had slaughtered too hard earlier had recovered. After waking, his casting ability had improved again, with all forms of Magic conduction flowing extremely smoothly through his body, which had also become much stronger, and his speed now exceeded three times the speed of sound.
His vision had also improved further, but compared to simple eyesight, he sensed something else. Even with his eyes closed, he could "see" where life was located. Or perhaps it was more accurate to call it souls.
"So this is what changes come from fusing with the God of Destruction. That is pretty interesting."
"Oh right, what about that broken template that did not even show a name?"
The thought suddenly came back to him. Remembering why he had gone to that Canyon to fight that Rodan in the first place, Belial immediately questioned the remnants of the System in his head. His blood pressure spiked when he realized that after the task was completed, the prompt had vanished, leaving nothing at all and no way to find it.
Belial was stunned. "So you are not even giving me a new mission here? Are you bugged or what?"
He felt his teeth grind in anger, with a trace of disappointment, but considering that the gains this time were indeed substantial, he was not that furious. If he had never gotten it, it did not count as losing it. Being smashed that hard before, having some bug was probably normal, so he comforted himself that way.
Then his fierce gaze locked onto a familiar herd of snowfield elephants on the ground below. "Daring to enter my sight when I am in a bad mood. You are courting death."
From nearly twenty kilometers away, facing those monsters that had barged into his view, Belial did not hesitate to strike. That distance would only take a moment to cross. Perhaps because he had slaughtered too much before, he instinctively thought of freezing them in one combo and then finishing them off.