After all, Asterion really was a unique, abnormal... Glavenus, distinct in both his habits and his fighting style.
Sitting atop the cliff, the silvery-gray Kushala Daora opened its mouth slightly. It stared wide-eyed at the bizarre battle unfolding below. If its metal scales were capable of forming soft expressions, it would look surprised right now—perhaps even wanting to laugh.
But at this moment, Asterion, who was using every ounce of his strength to wriggle all over the Rusted Kushala Daora's body, couldn't care less about that. Time was tight, the task was heavy, and he couldn't afford a single moment of relaxation. Once the Rusted Kushala put its guard up, he would never get such a good opportunity to cling to its body again.
It was fortunate that the Kushala Daora's entire body was composed of a metal shell, including its tail. It was precisely this steel tail that allowed Asterion to coil his sword-tail around it, ensuring that the great blade at the end of his tail wouldn't accidentally sever the Elder Dragon's tail during the entanglement.
Even amidst the rainstorm, the forceful collision between Asterion and the Rusted Kushala created intense sparks—literal sparks. In the clash of metal against metal, golden-red sparks sputtered and flew.
Still wriggling, still wriggling! Asterion is still wriggling!!
Thanks to the Glavenus's sufficient body length, after a burst of effort, Asterion finally endured the steel spikes on the Elder Dragon's neck and brought himself close to its head.
This style of combat was alien and uncomfortable for the Rusted Kushala Daora. To throw Asterion off its back, it even tipped its body sideways to scrape against the ground, or tried to rush into the pitch-black storm with Asterion still attached. However, Asterion stopped every dangerous attempt by smashing it with his own head.
Whenever the Rusted Kushala tried to charge into the storm, Asterion would desperately slam his head against the Elder Dragon's skull in a panic, while simultaneously using his foreclaws to pry at its neck and pull backward. It was incredibly strenuous work.
Wyvern Riding Technique!
The Rusted Kushala resisted desperately. Its long, slender neck twisted left and right, trying to turn back and bite the Asterion riding on its back. It didn't realize, however, that this was exactly the opportunity Asterion had been waiting for.
A Glavenus's predatory arsenal isn't limited to just their sword-tails; that maw of sharp teeth is a fatal weapon as well. Asterion didn't usually like chasing other dragons around to bite them, but that didn't mean his bite wasn't effective.
Once again, as the Rusted Kushala twisted its neck to snap at him, Asterion didn't dodge like he had before. Instead, he braced himself and let the Rusted Kushala bite into his heat-dissipating dorsal shell, tearing off a large chunk of it raw—but it was enough.
Asterion had finally gotten the opening he wanted.
Crunch.
The outstretched neck, the sharp teeth—Asterion's great maw clamped firmly onto the upright horn atop the Rusted Kushala's head.
It wasn't difficult. It wasn't even as hard as he had imagined. The texture of the Rusted Kushala's horn was quite crisp. Asterion had assumed he would need to chew vigorously to shatter it.
Instead, with just a slight application of force, he crunched the horn and swallowed it down.
Tasty.
Having its own horn so easily crushed seemed to stun the Rusted Kushala, leaving it unable to react. Asterion didn't hesitate; after all, a Kushala Daora has a pair of horns. While the Elder Dragon failed to make any violent counter-moves, he quickly craned his neck and bit off the horn on the other side.
There. Now the Rusted Kushala had officially become a hornless dragon.
"ROAR!!!"
It takes time to describe, but it happened in an instant. The whole sequence took less than two seconds. Asterion ate fast, and by the time he had swallowed both dragon horns into his stomach, the Rusted Kushala finally let out a somewhat delayed roar of agony.
The horns a Kushala Daora uses to command storms are not actually that hard—at least, not compared to its body. Even among its metallic outer shell, they are a relatively soft, extremely sensitive, and delicate part.
In other words, a Kushala Daora's horns have feeling. They flinch at impact and hurt when broken.
And now, Asterion had crunched them directly... Well, the sensation was probably akin to someone having their fingertips crushed, or having a needle driven under their fingernail...
Just thinking about it was agonizing.
The rage was undeniable. If fury could manifest physically, the Rusted Kushala's anger alone would have burned Asterion into dragon ash.
Unfortunately for it, this wasn't the Warp; rage had no effect on the physical world.
However, the intense pain did trigger the Rusted Kushala's physical potential, giving its struggles a boost of strength—this time, borrowing this sudden burst of power, the Rusted Kushala finally managed to throw Asterion off its body.
Flying Wyvern! Asterion landed heavily on the distant ground, but it didn't matter.
Scrambling up immediately, Asterion positioned his sword-tail horizontally in front of him in a defensive stance before observing the movements of the two Kushala Daoras.
The situation was looking up. The Rusted Kushala was indeed furious, but anger was useless—the pitch-black storm that had seemingly engulfed the entire Wildspire Waste, obscuring the outside world completely, had begun to dissipate.
With the other silvery-gray Kushala Daora not actively manipulating the wind in the environment, the violent, condensed black tornadoes acted like leaking balloons. Losing control and containment, they released their energy aimlessly in all directions.
The wild, scattering winds blew away the raindrops and the accumulated water, and even swept away the dark clouds in the sky—the rainstorm that had lasted for days stopped in that moment. The clouds thinned, and sunlight from the heights faintly penetrated the gaps, allowing Asterion to see the long-absent sun.
"Intel Glavenus" had proven himself right once again. With its pair of horns destroyed, the Rusted Kushala had indeed lost the ability to freely control the external winds.
Among the many possibilities, Asterion had made the correct choice—if he had let this Rusted Kushala continue to use the storm to drown the battlefield, he couldn't see any possibility of survival.
But now, with that disgusting storm fully dispersed, even though the Rusted Kushala had fallen into a state of complete berserk rage, in Asterion's eyes, it had actually become weaker.
At the very least, he now had the chance to fight back. He wouldn't die helplessly amidst a natural disaster, and he even had the opportunity to run away.
"ROAR!!!"
Roaring continuously, the pain of its broken horns drove the Rusted Kushala into a frenzy. It charged furiously at Asterion, but Asterion, who had no intention of engaging in a physical brawl anymore, simply dodged.
If he hadn't needed to get in close to break the storm barrier and crush the horns earlier, Asterion would never have chosen to engage in a flesh-on-flesh, brute-force wrestling match with another dragon.
That kind of fighting didn't fit his aesthetics of dragon life at all.
CLANG!!
A crisp sound of metal colliding. And not just once; it was a continuous, unbroken ringing—like iron being struck.
In a sense, it really was no different from smithing. Asterion was the blacksmith; only before, he was forging his own sword-tail, and now he was forging a Rusted Kushala Daora.
Call it an upgrade.
Everything was just as Asterion had judged. After biting off the dragon horns and causing the opponent to temporarily lose control of the external storm, the Rusted Kushala's fighting style shifted from manipulating winds strong enough to blow a Glavenus away to relying on physical strength for close-quarters combat.
It was definitely weaker. At least on this level of combat, Asterion regained the ability to fight back, unlike earlier in the storm where he couldn't even attack and had to worry about being swept away by tornadoes.
But Asterion gradually realized another problem. While he wouldn't die without a fight now, hammering away like this... he didn't seem to have a way to kill the Rusted Kushala, did he?
The Kushala Daora's wings and body possessed a layered metallic structure. This construction allowed this great ore boulder, covered in a metal shell harder than steel, to freely spread its wings and move with agility.
Now that the storm had scattered and the escaping winds were blowing apart the dark clouds, Asterion could use the leaking rays of sunlight to clearly see every wound he had inflicted on the Rusted Kushala from the start of the battle until now.
There were only two deep wounds: one near the base of the wing on the neck, and another on the broad steel wing membrane... if that thing could even be called a membrane.
Of course, there were also the crushed horns.
Aside from those, there were just various dents and scratches. Most were very shallow, failing to inflict real damage. Only a sparse two or three were deep, yet even those failed to penetrate to the Rusted Kushala's flesh and bone.
He had, however, shaved off quite a bit of the rust from its body. Unlike the Rusted Kushala's underlying body, which remained hard, the surface layer of rust had softened with oxidation, so much of it had been sheared away by the successive slashes.
CLANG!
Another crisp metallic impact. Asterion used the force of the swing to press his weight against the Rusted Kushala, using it as leverage to vault himself to the side, dodging the Elder Dragon's heavy pounce and the follow-up air cannon blast.
A meat shield, a dragon shield... this was the first time Asterion had encountered such a situation, and the first time he had fought for so long.
This Rusted Kushala was relying entirely on its hard body to fight. It would only dodge when Asterion aimed for vulnerable spots like its eyes or head; otherwise, it was simply face-tanking everything with its body.
Asterion thought he was already a dragon with no "Dragon Morals," but he realized now that there could be something even more unreasonable than him—he couldn't even use his usual tactics to bleed the Rusted Kushala out.
Because outside the Rusted Kushala's flesh, within that layer of steel shell, there was no blood. Even leaving a deep gouge was useless.
"ROAR!!!"
The roar was to squeeze out every bit of strength from its body. Asterion swung another blade strike aimed at the head, but it landed on the back. In this high-intensity, head-on collision, Asterion didn't dare heat his sword-tail to its red-hot state; keeping it cool ensured the tail maintained its strength and hardness, preventing it from snapping directly upon impact.
But even so, after a failed strike and retracting his tail, Asterion caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye. The blade edge, which should have been streamlined, sharp, and smooth, was now pitted and jagged.
Large and small chips, edges curled inward... the sharpness was tragic to behold. For a split second, Asterion felt that if he were a Duramboros instead of a Glavenus, dealing blunt damage might have been better.
Bringing his ruined sword-tail forward and biting it, Asterion sprayed magma from his flame sac—he was sharpening the blade. Even if the sharpened blade still had large chips, it would look better than it did just now.
At least it wouldn't look like a pitted mess about to snap at any moment.
Panting heavily with loud huff-huff sounds, the prolonged battle had exhausted Asterion. But the Rusted Kushala opposite him seemed in even worse shape. After that last clash, both dragons retreated and stood their ground to rest.
Asterion even saw white saliva dripping from the Rusted Kushala's mouth. Its panting was even more exaggerated than his, looking like it was on the verge of collapse—what was going on? Is this all the stamina an Elder Dragon has?
As the battle dragged on to this point, Asterion had long since regressed to "Turtle Fist"... or rather, "Turtle Slashes." The techniques he had stolen from Hunters were thrown to the back of his mind. In the end, those were things he had blindly figured out himself; they hadn't been systematically learned or trained, nor did they fit a Glavenus's anatomy.
Unsystematic, and he didn't even know if they were correct, so as the fight went on, he returned to the simple, rustic style of horizontal slashes, vertical chops, and straight stabs.
Gasping for huge mouthfuls of air, Asterion looked somewhat miserable right now. Unlike the Kushala Daora, he didn't have a hard metal shell. In the fight just now, part of his dorsal plating had been torn off. White steam could be seen rising directly from his back, and dragon blood flowed freely.
His gaze swept vigilantly between the Rusted Kushala and the silvery-gray Kushala Daora. Asterion never forgot that he wasn't facing just one Kushala, but two—even if that silvery-gray one hadn't joined the battle between him and the Rusted one from the start.
"ROAR!!"
Maybe it sensed Asterion's wary gaze? Or perhaps it was because of the Rusted Kushala's roar?
Regardless, the silvery-gray Kushala Daora suddenly changed its posture, standing up from the cliff. It spread its beautiful wings, resembling a massive silvery-gray shield, shining brilliantly in the light.
It was precisely because of this movement that Asterion suddenly realized this silvery-gray Kushala Daora was actually much smaller than the Rusted one—a full size smaller. If the two steel dragons were to sit together, one would look almost like the other's father.
"ROAR!!!"
It actually flew up?!
————
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