Is damage useful when it won’t allow you to kill your enemies?

What if the same could be said for speed?

Or utility?

…

The dragon stared at all the options and tried to think up some way any of them helped him in the immediate case, but simply could not. None of them resolved his situations alone, only another year of growth would bridge the immense gulf between him and the wyvern. Even if he improved his offensive capabilities to that of a gold tier, the opponent would still smite him in a single blow.

So, he actually had to give up? The revenge he desired so much was simply out of reach.

Although, there was another option.

He smiled goofily at the possibilities, and filtered his choices to those which seemed best in the long run, but with effects in the present he deemed useful.

That left just three options now. Emulative true form, Stormbringer, and Bolt raining, but he very clearly drew towards Stormbringer due to its ability to bring about ‘calamities’.

“Is the calamitous effect of a bringer something related to fate, or is it purely due to the destructive nature?”

[There is no fate involved. The sheer scale of storms which may be summoned are so great that it would result in mass ecological migration in slightly ‘bad’ cases]

Forcing tens of thousands of beasts from their home was considered slightly bad?

He avoided the obvious question and came to see a possible use for Stormbringer. As it very likely could summon insane cloud formations which exceeded the steel tier, in which case aggravated the crab a lot more. If that ended up happening, then perhaps he could create a calamity which left him as the benefactor…

With every second he felt it more and more likely. While raining lightning on opponents from above held great potential, perhaps even more than Stormbringer, he knew that the concept of storms far exceeded what existed on any of the eight worlds. Some cosmic storms capable of tearing apart stars exist, and he fully believed that a combination of space and the Stormbringer bloodline one day opened up that possibility. There wasn’t anything else to truly discuss.

He just might have picked Emulative true soul for the attempt to merge multiple spirits together, or Sky cataclysm if it wasn’t terribly misconstrued by the Nexus’ failed attempt to understand it.

Well, it took a bit longer than expected, but he finally said the words. “I pick Stormbringer Ice-cream.”

Nausea overcame every sensation for the next few minutes, as much as he believed to have adapted after six of these damn evolutions, but things were never so easy. He put up with the tossing and turning as his body melted into a considerable mess of goop and reformed under the impressive direction of bloodline energy. This energy all moving in specific manners according to the Nexus’ will is what intrigued him most though, as everything appeared just as random as when casting a skill, yet all these movements came together and formed power beyond their components.

It might also be asked why he only cast spells and never skills, and that’s because of a simple part of his body.

Goopy Ice-cream doesn’t work like flesh.

As the evolution eventually came to an end, he very easily broke the wafer scale shell and climbed out with ease. His scales being weaker than the skin of most bronze tiers played a heavy role in that ease, and he accepted that some sort of permanent enhancement was needed. Which likely meant…

“That’d be rather cruel, but they certainly deserve it. I have a perfect storage place as well, just need to stop them escaping afterwards.” His mind immediately settled on going for a beast from one of the other lords who stayed on their own.

Their disappearance might draw attention, but a single dead steel tier was rarely worth questioning. Dozens had vanished from the mountain range when the lords descended, let alone between the occasional conflicts over node trees.

With that in mind, it was time for the experiments to begin once more.

* * *

Just fifteen minutes later, dark blue frills flared up as the large crystal-frilled lizard screeched at the surrounding beasts. All around, hundreds of bronze tiers watched as he brutally blew a hole through the steel tier’s body, then bit through its legs with four heavy chomps. On each, his tongue rubbed itself all over the open wounds, poisoned spines entered its bloodstream and only further weakened the beast to the point where it simply lay weakly.

Now, a legless chipmunk moaned in between heavy pants as he froze all its wounds and began to drag it away.

It lost consciousness soon after, and he escaped the node tree such that few beasts remained nearby. Certainly nothing intelligent at least. This allowed him to activate Pronounced telekinesis and rapidly pull the relatively equal-sized body with due haste.

The two travelled east, towards the central mountain, but more importantly to a significant landmark ignored by many beasts.

A battlefield of the Kandir giants and native beasts.

He pulled the chipmunk underground, and sealed its body in thick ice such that it could do nothing but lie there in agony. A clean swipe with one of the many gold tier blades gave him a smooth-cut tail to force-feed the beast with. This was just one of many, many, subjects.

If five weren’t enough to guarantee an evolution soon, then he’d try for ten. If not ten, then fifty!

Even if he had to suck this mountain dry, he’d get repayment for the lantern. Not only a weapon which could save his life in the direst of moments, but perhaps his only way to acquire bloodlines above his own without relying on random chance! However, he’d given it some thought and came to a series of excellent observations on how to grow stronger.

The first of which was obvious…

Go to battlefields all over the continent!

With thousands of corpses casually strewn all over the place, he could easily assimilate hundreds of Rare or Advanced bloodlines!

But also, he picked this battlefield as the holding place of the beasts because it held two bloodlines he wanted so badly. Before he left to capture something else, he gathered a few Spiritcaller bones to gain just a few more percent on its assimilation, but he knew it would take a few days at the least to assimilate it fully.

This speed completely crushed his slow search from months ago, when it might have taken entire weeks just to complete this bloodline.

But the other bloodline he wanted was even clearer…

“Elder guard bones. Also, those divine bones within. But there’s no way for me to go inside right now, unless the divinity within me repels their will. It won’t hurt to try…” Although he said that, it represented an unprecedented risk to do so.

With his captured chipmunk still fast asleep, he approached the ball of bones which he opened long ago, and stared within at the now-inert bone, it laid there so casually but held so much danger that he almost refused to believe it. As he approached once more, every inch of his body prepared to repel its control as the runes lit up. Swirls of mana began to coat him, but with an awakened mental space he came to realise that the influence of such bones was so weak that he resisted it automatically.

But then… the flows dimmed? They stopped any attempt to control, and instead shied away. In fact, from the way such mana purposely retreated into the bone, it was clear that whatever will remained within, now feared him.

But still, he didn’t want to risk eating the thing… Not without security that is.

Snow seemed to fill the ball, and the image of two buildings on a mountain grew firmer by the second, almost as an instinct, he saw the bone quiver in response. Its mana retreated further, and even the Divinus runes shone brighter in response. But none of that helped in any way, the thing was completely unable to fight back, and now came the first attempt to shatter it. He formed a Plasma arc, and commanded the spirit to reinforce it regardless of the aura cost. Drained by half in a single move, he saw the originally white and blue arc gain transform to white-gold, similar to the Divinus runes in colouration yet emitting two completely different types of power.

While an unimaginable strong thing, he could tell the bone weakened too much over the years. It was cleanly sliced in two as the arc of light hit it, a dry sizzle filled the space, but it didn’t matter as the rune-covered bone dropped into two halves with the runes slowly dimming once more…

However, now, they completely died out. Though he still saw them on the bone’s surface. Static… And truly asleep.

The two smaller pieces were tough to swallow, but still manageable. He knew he could teleport the bone into his stomach directly, but refrained from it due to lack of need. And so, the assimilation, another slow one, began. Fortunately, it’d been massively sped up by his evolutions and improvements since his initial discovery of the place.

[Consumed Divine phalanx Kandir giant bloodline! Assimilation progress 0%]

That only appeared after roughly 3 minutes of prompts which told him about an ‘unknown’ bloodline. Like every assimilation which functioned similarly to this, he muted the Nexus to keep his sanity intact.

“This is a waste of time. I thought I might have absorbed some more divinity, but if not… These two will do for now.” He spoke of the Spiritcaller and Elder guard bones, seeing no use in hunting a hundred, or possibly more, Divine phalanx bones.

Even if they gave something beyond Extreme+, which he expected, the time required to find and assimilate all the bones required weeks. Although, he did have the time…

“Fine, I’ll see how many I find. If I get 1% from each it’ll be worth it,” he came to a conclusion and stuck with it this time. For the rest of the day, he watched the first prisoner and ate a moderate pile of Elder guard bones. At the same time, chaos broke out at the node tree from which he stole the chipmunk, but the crane who commanded it didn’t send out any specific search parties. He successfully got away with it, and this time aimed for a node tree to the north which belonged to some other sort of insect king. Perhaps it was a beetle? He never paid much attention to that place.

But the target in question was whatever steel tier he found which failed to adequately fight back

And just one day after the crane’s subordinate vanished…

Another disappeared from that insect lord’s arsenal…

A few days later, a lone steel tier disappeared from its home.

One week after the dragon returned to his home west of the central mountain, he sat deep below the battlefield, and watched the five beasts chained in ice and snow, writhe in pain and fear. He viewed them apathetically, as tools for his future growth. Just as they would kill him if it meant strength too…

For each one, he stuffed a sweet, creamy, lump of ice cream, down their throats.

Whether they wanted it or not.