Fusing Space Claw, he fired his fist like a charged particle cannon. Countless acceleration spells aided it, and white light exploded behind his elbow as Rend tore open elemental fusion. The punch carried incalculable power and slammed Ludwig straight into the ground.
The force spread outward, expanding the hollow by hundreds of meters and still growing. All affected Nanometal was pulverized at the microscopic level. Farther out, waves of metal-laced earth rolled like a tsunami, shaking the land as if from a massive quake.
The fact that Ludwig was driven underground instead of pierced through was because Belial locked the force tightly onto him. Both plunged deep into the nanometal City the Lord body, while surface buildings collapsed inward without the seed's ecological support. Bella struggled with overloaded instruments, while Lilith stared at the expanding pit that now spanned thousands of meters.
That single punch not only buried Ludwig but sank most of the nanometal City the Lord body. The chain reaction would likely cause quakes and new volcanoes, and the map would need redrawing. Deep in the pit, only the soul-burning core and a shattered head of Ludwig remained.
The Nanomachines body kept collapsing, wrapped by a force he could not shake off. Even absorbing nearby Nanomachines could not stop it. He survived because he abandoned most Clone bodies and diverted the force, and because Belial wanted to finish him properly.
That was why he was not killed in one blow. This was not a death Belial allowed. Realizing he could not even choose life or death, Ludwig froze, then burst into mad laughter.
He laughed as his body failed and his soul burned beyond repair. He mocked himself and his enemy, calling Belial a monster without arrogance because he never regarded anything as equal. He sensed another awakening being below, drawn by his soul and coming to devour him, but he did not resist.
"Take it. Devour me. You will have to face that monster too." Belial found Ludwig's head and dragged it out with Gravity Tornado. The head was ruined, metal skull exposed, still laughing strangely, which he took as fear-induced madness.
Then he noticed something wrong. The weight was far too light. He looked down without hesitation, electricity flaring as a magnetic storm surged along his back spines, building acceleration loops that focused power at his mouth.
"Charged particle cannon." In an instant, a blue beam shot downward with a roar, shaking the land. The nanometal city ruins collapsed deeper as a large portion of the the Lord mass below vanished.
A presence Belial hated cried out after being grazed by the aftermath. It fled, taking most of Ludwig's remaining soul and about three fifths of the buried nanometal city mass. Belial cursed loudly, hoping nothing else would crawl out later.
When Bella and Lilith came back, both of them were still a little stunned. For Lilith, it was because the Lord had been trading blows evenly before, then suddenly stood up and killed the opponent in one move. The contrast was shocking, so strong yet acting restrained, and she could not understand why.
Bella was confused for even more reasons than Lilith. Evil God pollution did not only cause direct material damage, but also led to chaos, fragmentation, and even loss of rules at the level of Shard. That kind of damage was extremely troublesome to deal with.
The only way to repair it was like dealing with mold, waiting for it to naturally fade. You had to wait until its influence weakened to almost nothing, and until the world's own corrective force repaired itself. Under normal circumstances, there was no shortcut.
And then there was what she had just witnessed. She saw the physical constants around Belial change sharply, all values soaring, followed by several bursts of ultra vibration waves that directly destroyed Nanomachines at the microscopic level inside Shard. After that, Belial calmly ran two circles through the Evil God-polluted ecological domain and forcibly corrected the rules inside it, purifying the pollution, or more accurately, overwriting it.
What was unbelievable was that the area really did look restored afterward. In just a few days, plants had begun to sprout again, and the observation equipment she left there showed no abnormal influence at all. A whole regional ecosystem had been reshaped with casual ease, along with the deeper layer of rules themselves.
After returning, Bella immediately used the bit of material cut from Belial, along with some new knowledge barely recovered from the old database, to update her equipment and continue her research. In order to study Belial again, she even took a few hits during the process, but fortunately they were familiar enough now that she was not beaten down to fundamental particle collapse.
"You have been researching for so many days and still cannot figure much out," Lilith said. "And about you sneaking down there before, I have not settled that score yet." She paused, then added, "Back during the big fight, you said you detected a second recovering Evil God. Why are you not nervous at all?"
Lilith opened the laboratory door and walked in. Bella was still working with the piece of material from Belial when she replied, "I did find the cause, but do not think I discovered nothing these days." She continued calmly, "Judging by how absurd that dragon is, that unrecovered Evil God had better keep pretending to be dead, or it will truly be finished."
The cause of everything was not that complicated. Even though the database had been thoroughly scrambled by Ludwig's rough handling, it was still enough to restore the truth of what happened back then. A heavily damaged Evil God with deep erosion of Authority had once fought with her and several others, and because it was extremely hard to kill, they had no choice but to use drastic measures.
After finishing off a passing Ludwig to prevent energy and machinery from reactivating that Evil God, Bella shut down most of her own programs. She separated her energy core alone and sealed it into a spatial gap. Then she crushed the entire nanometal city, that fortress, onto it, suppressing the Evil God from both physical and spatial levels and freezing everything there with Nanomachines so it remained dead but not completely destroyed.
Later, the seed used by Ludwig that could erode and alter the surrounding ecology turned out to be a creation of that Evil God. It directly eroded the seal itself and became part of him. That was why the earlier battle was effectively two against one, two old monsters from a previous era with almost no health left fighting a young and vigorous opponent.
All of their dramatic combination attacks were shattered by Belial. With only one heavily wounded remnant left, there was not much it could do. Still, Bella worried that the one who escaped might start eroding ecosystems again and carry out large-scale slaughter to restore itself.
That was why she immediately flew around after the fight and scattered detectors everywhere. She also noticed that Belial was searching as well. When she realized that Belial's detection ability for ecosystems and souls, the two things Evil God craved most, could easily cover the entire world, she ran the calculations again.
As long as that thing dared to show itself before recovering much, it would be pinned down and killed by Belial immediately. After reaching that conclusion, Bella relaxed considerably. It felt like suddenly having a powerful backer guaranteed.
She did not stop working, but she shifted her focus onto Belial. "Yes, even though I still do not know what his true essence is, I discovered many interesting things from the side," she said. "His mere existence rewrites surrounding rules and even overwrites the rules of other Evil God. He can devour souls, and his spirit and body are already fused as one."
She hesitated, then added, "I even found that he can accept faith. Yes, you could actually try praying to him. Do you know what such an existence would be called by your standards?" Lilith fell silent, and Bella sighed, "Alright, let me keep testing."
After patrolling three times in search of the escaped enemy, Belial landed in a valley near Sky Island. Not finding the enemy made him unhappy, but life went on, and he was certain that if an existence of that scale appeared in the world even for a moment, he would detect it instantly and respond at light speed.
After fusing with a planet, he had gained new abilities, including an extremely powerful reconnaissance skill. The escaped target had already been subconsciously marked for pursuit by him. As long as it was within range, he could roughly know its location and just spend some effort to rush over and destroy it.
For now, that coverage was roughly the entire world. Compared to others of the same kind, it was not even remarkable. This ability differed from directly scanning with Energy Field, functioning more like a premonition, similar to having a marker on a System minimap rather than a vague arrow underfoot.
"Where exactly did that thing run off to," Belial muttered. "I scanned the whole planet and still saw nothing." He even wondered whether there was something wrong with the skill's judgment.
As for combat abilities, the skill sets of Godzilla Earth overlapped a bit with SpaceGodzilla. His current Gravity Tornado had been integrated into gravity manipulation. In turn, particle acceleration was strengthened, and with enough practice, it could approach true particle control.