The battle between the two of the resumed as the wolf beastman leapt at Orou with his greatsword, wildly swinging at the spot where Orou was. Orou rapidly retreated backwards and looked for any signs of weakness from the wolf beastman, he was way too fast and way too strong in his current state, no beastman should be able to move that fast. He noticed that the wolf beastman had never stopped crying and that with each swing of his greatsword, he lost a bit of the strength he had gained. Once more Orou had to jump out of the way of the greatsword, but he was too busy observing the beastman that he didn’t realise that the wolf beastman had chased him to a spot where he couldn’t dodge.

Orou crashed into one of the nearby tables and practically smashed it in half, avoiding getting slashed in half. Still, the greatsword was too fast to completely avoid and the next second Orou saw a part of his tail being separated from his body and flying towards the wolf beastman. The blood waves rushed towards his tail in order to try and minimize the damage, but the waves did nothing to stop him from feeling the pain that Orou currently felt. Even though Orou missed a part of his tail, Orou knew that this was a moment of life and death and ignored the pain he felt, opting to make as much distance between them as possible.

Guided by his blood waves, he quickly reached the walls of the Moonhall Casino. He turned around to look at the wolf beastman, but as he saw what the beastman was doing, he focused in on a spot a few meters in front of him and started to quickly construct a pillar of spirits, the outline of the most powerful spell that he knew. Once upon a time, this spell seemed like an unclimbable wall to him, a spell that he had practice day and night to successfully cast, but now, it was merely a simple spell that required a lot of spirits.

As Orou looked at the wolf beastman, he saw that the wolf beastman was still chewing on the piece of his tail that was chopped off. The wolf beastman crushed the scales with his bare teeth, drank the blood and chewed on the meat of Orou’s tail, looking like he was enjoying a great feast. Seeing that someone was eating his tail made Orou feel weird and uncomfortable, enough so that he had to stop looking at the beastman and concentrate solely on his spell.

The wolf beastman’s eyes flared red as he finished chewing on the tail and looked towards Orou with hungry eyes. He let out another howl as he dropped his greatsword and dropped to all fours, starting to sprint towards Orou with an even quicker speed than before. Orou was planning to make sure the pillar would completely burn the wolf beastman to ashes and thus was adding more spirits than was required, but he quickly realised that he wouldn’t have time to complete the spell if he did that. The wolf beastman was rushing with at a speed that was hard to track with eyes and he would reach Orou in a few seconds. Orou had no way of knowing when the wolf beastman would arrive before, so he simply did what he knew best and that was to rely on his instinct for support.

The wolf beastman jumped off of the ground and leaped towards Orou, and that was the exact time Orou chose to complete his spell. A golden pillar of light that had saved him once before came from the sky and threatened to disintegrate the wolf beastman, if not for a miscalculation on Orou’s part. He had underestimated the wolf beastman’s speed and before he even knew it, the wolf beastman had reached Orou. Still, Orou’s efforts didn’t go to waste as a third of his body, including his legs, was practically turned to ashes and the rest of his fur was lit on fire. He howled in pain and decided to take out his anger and pain on Orou, using his nails and teeth to slash at Orou’s throat.

The wolf beastman’s teeth ripped out a chunk of Orou’s flesh and his sharp nails dug underneath Orou’s scales, prying them off of his body one by one. Orou waved his tail around to try and get the wolf beastman off of him, but he was hanging on for his dear life and doing his best to injure Orou in the process. The only thing left in his arsenal was to fight back with his own two fangs, digging deep into the wolf beastman’s flesh and pumping his venom into the beastman’s body. The wolf beastman didn’t resist Orou’s fangs and decided to wage a war of endurance, inflicting wound upon wound of Orou’s body, seemingly lost in the pleasures of eating Orou’s body.

Orou was bleeding from every single spot on his body, a pile of his scales were floating on the small pool of blood that came from Orou’s body. His consciousness was growing faint, but Orou knew that he had won this fight. Slowly but surely, the wolf beastman moved slower and slower until eventually, he had trouble lifting his hand. He was still alive, but Orou made sure that he couldn’t ever recover even if he did wake up. He was growing hungry and he was losing an extreme amount of blood, but he knew he would be fine, he had suffered worse than this. The blood waves dutifully did their job of closing his wounds and slowly regenerating his flesh, though it would take weeks before he was combat capable again.

Only now did Orou realise that there was still a battle going on upstairs. He dragged his injured body across the floor and left a trail of blood behind him, but he was going to get up there and see what happened to Grizz even if it killed him. He took several minutes to crawl up the stairs and he took the time to listen for any sounds of combat, but all that he could hear were faint voices. Finally, he had climbed up the stairs and he saw what was the outcome of their fight. Both Nim and Grizz were lying on the floor and talking to each other. Grizz looked quite similar to Orou in the fact that he was rapidly bleeding out, but he was still barely moving. On the other hand, Nim was lying on the ground completely motionless, his face completely pale and his voice shaking.

“Although you poisoned me, you’re going to go down together with me. That’s what you get for sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong,” Nim’s monotone voice was barely audible, but still enough to provoke a reaction from Grizz. He tried to shout, but all that came out was a whimper: “Fuck you old man. I’ve never treated you as a father in the first place, but then you had to bring this upon yourself by targeting Aria and then me, I don’t plan on dying here. Any second now the battle downstairs will be over and I’ve got confidence that he will prevail.”

Although Orou still wanted to observe for a bit, he saw that Grizz was close to dying and that this was the perfect chance to reveal himself. He slithered forwards and expected a reaction from either one of them, but all that he got was silence, he had forgotten that they were staring at the ceiling and couldn’t see him. Orou slithered over to Grizz and gathered his remaining will to try and heal him. He started to draw the curved line in the air, the spirits unsteadily shaking with each burst of pain from Orou’s body. If this was in the past, his concentration would have been disrupted half-way through, but he had learned a lot about magic and the manipulation of spirits, steeling his will through the many battles he had fought.

A faint and soft glow enveloped Grizz and he shouted in both pain and happiness. Now that he had seen what happened to the wolf beastman, Orou could swear that he saw something black and tiny floating around Grizz before being attracted to his pocket. Grizz tried his best to stand up, falling down multiple times in the process, but eventually, he stood up. He flashed a grin to Nim and took a dagger out from his boot, slowly approaching Nim.

“Do it,’ were the last words that Nim spoke before Grizz drove the dagger into his throat. He kept stabbing and stabbing, his entire hand was covered in blood but he still continued. He took minutes to completely behead Nim before weakly picking up his head and raising it up in the air. Nim’s expression was calm, not that you would expect from a dying man. Grizz looked outside of the window before he managed to spew out a few words: “Let’s go down, they’re most likely expecting us.”