Wingless, with a roar, the collosal dragon charged at us, descending the downward slope the giant volcano had made. The earth shook chaotically with each step it took, and the ground it walked on scorched and even melted away. The air itself was distorting due to the scorching the reptile was emitting. Its roar felt like a quake shaking the entire world.

It was coming at us fast, but thank God, not the kind of fast that would take me by surprise. Let’s say that it was a speed that would be considered very fast for a beast of its size, but it had nothing to do with the speed of the likes of Kiady or Solomo, who were straight up teleporting. If it was, it would mean our doom.

Reacting almost immediately to what was happening, Heon grabbed me by the teeth, then threw me onto her back, before hurtling down to the volcanic mountain.

Without wasting time, I opened fire, without a barrage of my own version of Solomon’s BoE. I sent out three of them.

Those are easy and rapid to process, and carry more or less the same destructive power as my Beam of Friendship two years ago.

Generally, I would always try to open the fight with a physical confrontation, but with an opponent the size of a giant mountain, this approach would be a very bad idea.

My three BoB bolted into the charging dragon.

Just like Solomon’s, upon reaching its target, the bubbles brutally exploded, unleashing lightning and destruction. No doubt it hit it, but the results were more than just depressing.

None of my attacks, effectively affected the dragon, and it continued its charge toward us.

Its scales were too tough for attacks of this calibre to penetrate through.

"Heon! Hold nothing on your side! "

I jumped off of Heon’s back and we both headed in two opposite directions.

Quite not surprisingly, the dragon chose to chase me.

Upon reaching the ground, I didn’t run; instead I did something I’ve learned from Nia's way of riding her flying spear, using a small boulder as a mini-levitating podium. Running is outdated and overrated. Flying is the current trend I’m surfing on right now.

Where I rode through on top of my flying platform. With the help of Han’s mana, I began to generate a tall tree-sized drill-like object pointing out behind me, toward the dragon, by assembling the toughest materials found below on the volcanic ground. In the span of a few seconds, eight of them were made. Still knowing that this wouldn’t inflict any damage upon the dragon, I started spinning each of the eight drills at a hallucinating speed.

At one point, each of the spinning drills stopped making a stifling noise and instead made a loud and deafening roar. I knew it was finally ready to be fired. I unleashed them, straight onto the dragon.

Eight powerful explosions reverberated at the same time, along with a roar.

The dragon took every hit and, most likely from the noise, withstood flawlessly each of my unleashed shots.

Still hurtling down the mountain while flying, I was still thinking as to what else to unleash while simultaneously processing another round of my previous attack. I fully intend to continue with this guerrilla tactic, at least until I come up with something decent, but I noticed that the dragon was also on to something.

The dragon, who was a moment earlier roaring deafeningly, was now completely silent, and God, over the years, I’ve learned in the harshest way possible that silence was never a good thing.

It didn’t take me long to figure out what was going on.

Coming at me aggressively, like a lizard after its prey, that dragon prepared a breath attack.

"Shit."

Rackling with the best of my ability, I tried to think of something decent to defend against that attack, I immediately lowered my mini-ship to the ground level.

Just as the dragon's breath attack had reached a critical momentum of being fired, the ground beneath its feet turned to mud, while simultaneously, an immense hexagonal tower-like rock-made sturdy structure suddenly emerged from the ground, powerfully uppercutting the dragon.

Though I wouldn’t say knocked up, the combo made the dragon slightly lose its balance, and its breath, already mildly fully charged, was fired randomly at the surroundings out of its mouth.

"What the…"

A giant beam of hot, scorching fire out of the dragon's mouth darted, sectioning a nearby volcano in half, like a knife through butter, before continuing its course to God knows where.

Wherever the beam passed through, blasts and powerful explosions clattered.

"Han? You think you can negate something like that? "

"I think I can, but I think it would be safer if we simply didn’t, you know, for safety measures."

"Yeah. Me too."

With yet another deafening roar, the dragon roared its irritation, if I could call it that.

My earlier action didn’t seem to have hurt it in the slightest, for it was now back to its charge once again.

Slightly behind the dragon on the left, Heon appeared, firing a powerful light beam at the dragon from its left side.

Her beam attacks didn’t seem to have inflicted damage, for it seems that fire is a pretty bad match for her light magic.

At first, the dragon seemed to want to concentrate its charge on us, but ultimately decided to take care of Heon, who was following it closely from behind while charging a powerful attack.

"As if I would let you do this. Eat this! "

Just as it was about to turn its focus on Heon, I summoned yet another mountain beneath the dragon, throwing her off balance. At least that's what it should’ve been.

Though the dragon was taken aback by the sudden apparition of the mountain beneath him, and tasted first-hand the taste of Heon’s attack, it didn’t take it long to come up with a counterattack.

With a strange rotation on itself, the dragon uses its tail to propel the mountain onto me.

Embrazed shrapnels of the mountain were now bolting at me at a hallucinating speed.

Still sloping down the mountain, I was greeted ahead by an upward slope that sent my body straight into midair.

To summarize, I was in midair with a hail of shrapnel falling on me.

"Tsk!"

With a powerful upward slash, I sent out a giant wind blade that cleared the crumbles that were about to rain on me.

That's right, I only protected myself, so the remaining crumbles from the mountain rained below me, turning the vicinity into a hellscape.

In the very short moment it took me to dispose of the barrage of rocks, the dragon took the opportunity to close the distance on me, completely ignoring Heon once again.

Like a maddened beast, it leapt from the sudden upward slope from earlier, giving it, for a few short seconds, the impression that it was flying.

Brandishing my sword, I mustered my Beam of Friendship.

It only took a fraction of a second, but it was enough for me to unleash it.

My attack was immediately followed by Heon’s breath attack; she, thanks to her speed, had circumvented the upward slope, and appeared somewhere below and behind the jumping dragon.

An immense gleam of light was unleashed at lightning speed toward the dragon from my FoB and a giant ball of light from Heon’s mouth, both engulfing the reptile entirely within a giant explosion upon contact.

Engulfed in a cloud of smoke and fire, the dragon’s body crashed heavily on the ground with the sound of a loud thunderclap and the quake of a thousand erupting volcanoes.

Somehow, the chase came to a halt.

The dragon stopped, and so did I.

Of course, I wasn't either an optimist enough or naive enough to think that this was enough to end the fight, let alone kill that monster, but valuable insight could be collected from our earlier attack.

Heon, like a bolt from the sky, returned to my side.

And both of us scrutinized the giant smoking crater ahead of us.

I would say that no movement was felt from the dragon, but that statement would be refuted by what happened next.

Both Heon and I evaded sideways, to avoid what was coming from beneath us.

A giant breath of fiery fire scythed from the dragon's mouth, darting upward straight into the sky from the ground.

With a mighty roar; the smoke it was engulfed in, instantly dissipated, revealing once again the primordial dragon, unarmed from our attack. That being said, somewhere on its scale, churns and incandescent burns were visible in certain areas we hit.

Nothing seemed to effectively affect this monster, not my BoE, BoF, not even Heon’s powerful beam.

The damage we inflicted on it was, let’s say, insignificant. All we've done so far is slow it down.

If I had to compare our fight so far, it was like fighting a mountain barehanded.

Right now, the dragon was back on its legs again.

The dragon, this time, didn’t immediately return to its charge. Instead, it spoke once again to us, "I remember... your kind,... I remember them,... What are you here for? Revenge?"

Due to the nature of the dragon's way of speaking, it was really hard to tell to whom she was speaking, but from the content of her words, I could understand that those words weren’t for me but rather for Heon, for she, as soon as the dragon finished speaking, roared viciously back.

"So it isn’t revenge, then why?... you!" This time, I could tell to the bone that you were directed at me, "Where did you steal that sword? Where is Mon?! Where is she?!"

Her question just ended when Heon roared furiously at us.

She was surrounded by countless white star-like sparkles, giving the impression that she was as close to the divine as a clueless man would imagine a light-beast creature would be, but as someone who had traveled with Heon for some time now, I knew that what she was exuding the most right now could only be associated with intense anger and a strong sense of feral ferocity.

Today, it was my first time witnessing Heon getting so angry. This, in fact, wouldn’t be unnatural for a light-wielding magical beast, but for Heon, who has always been behaving rather gently and proudly, this felt very out of place.

I'm not sure what the dragon meant by vengeance earlier to Heon, but she was urging me to prepare myself to end this fight.

I don’t know what history they have together, but I know what I’m here for and if it’s what Heon wants, then it will be done.

We were now at the bowl-shaped foothill between two volcanoes.

The dragon, noticing that none of us were interested in civilized discussion of any form, involved itself in a strange stance.

It didn’t take me long to notice that the temperature had changed along with it.

Letting out a sharp bestial scream, the dragon reared back and maintained its claws high for a good ten seconds, then heavily slammed the ground, causing a powerful blast.

Not only did this cause quakes and a powerful ripple to be unleashed, but it also engulfed the entire area in a sea of flame, which we didn’t have a hard time protecting against, but it also awakened every sleeping volcano in hundreds of miles around, giving place to what I could only describe as an apocalyptic scene.

Crackles seeped through the ground, from which columns of fire emerged, rising high into the sky.

"Tsk."

"Monster, that’s not a fire primordial for nothing."

Most of my most powerful attacks involve the use of a wide area of damage, something that would be quite practical with how big this dragon is, but still less effective in a curved area like the one we were in a few moments ago.

Which is why I chose to draw the dragon here.

For the convenience of the landscape for me.

But also, it didn’t like the idea of fighting a "Fire" Primordial dragon next to an immense volcano like the one from earlier.

If it was an option, I would’ve taounted or baited this dragon to fight me in a deserted area or even a forest would do, but those couldn’t be found in hundreds of kilometers around here.

I took a deep breath in, then, raised my sword high in the sky, embedding it once again with lightning, while Heon was roaring a howl as impressive and loud as the dragon’s.

It was true that so far we hadn't even inflicted anything upon that dragon yet, and it was true that what we did so far was run away from it, but it didn’t mean that we were at the end of the rope yet.

I didn’t train for two years just for this to end here.

No.

What has happened so far was merely the beginning. Serious stuff is going to happen now.

To my command, the whole sky darkened, teeming with thick gray fog and rippling lightning.

Raising my head into the sky, I announced, "Alright folks, it’s the time and place for a rampage."

With that said, we charged, Heon taking right while I took left.