'Well, I feel that with my current strength, I can seemingly match the Lightning Bear and the Basilisk in terms of pure brute strength and explosive attacks. However, the Basilisk's gilding ability and its currently useless Petrifying ability are actually quite terrifying.
Although its poison breath is also quite strong, it doesn't have much effect on me because my poison affinity acts as a deterrent and a shield inside my body, making me fairly invulnerable to most poisons of the same strength.
It still can't deal with all of the basilisk's poison perfectly, because the basilisk's realm is at the 2nd level of the Superior Student's realm, so its poison is several levels stronger than mine.' As Thiago watched the battle from the side-lines, he also made a rough mental comparison between the Lightning Bear, the Golden Basilisk and himself in terms of strength, to better gauge his current fighting ability and skill.
'On the other hand, the Lightning Bear doesn't have the same fancy, hard-to-defend skills, but that doesn't make it any less terrifying or powerful. The Lightning Bear's power and strength lies in its enormous explosive power and attacks imbued with the Lightning Element, which greatly increases the destructive power of the attack.'
It's not for nothing that the element of lightning is known as the most destructive and powerful on the Red Star, and those who are born with an affinity for lightning, although it's rather rare, can later enjoy high status in certain forces or institutions, provided they successfully reach a high realm.
Or they may even be cultivated by some great powers the moment their talent is discovered.
Obviously, lightning affinity is not as grand as it is made out to be, and it is not as revered in most places in the Red Star, because the most important thing that ultimately reigns supreme is still strength.
This means that only the strong are worshipped, and it doesn't matter if you're a weak student realm cultivator with a lightning affinity, no one will take you seriously.
Actually, it has to be said that Lightning isn't really the strongest element, and only has certain advantages in combat because of its destructiveness, but if you look at all the elements objectively, each of them has certain merits and certain advantages that the others don't have, so all in all most of the elements are relatively equal in strength, with a few exceptions like Darkness and Lightning, but that is only in certain situations.
Suddenly, Thiago was jolted out of his thoughts as he heard a defeating roar of agony emanating from the golden basilisk.
"Roaaaaaahh!!"
He saw that the basilisk, apparently unable to dodge a blow from the lightning bear, had been struck in the side by one of the bear's razor-sharp coated by lightning, claws, breaking the scales at the point of impact and tearing a chunk of flesh from its body.
Although one of its legs was still gilded and therefore unusable, the bear had managed to charge quickly towards the basilisk, catching it off guard.
Immediately, a huge amount of green with a hint of golden blood spurted from the wound onto the bear beside it and onto the ground.
As the blood came into contact with the bear's fur, it acted like an acid and the fur began to erode and sizzle, as did the floor.
"Graaah!" the bear roared in pain as the parts of his skin and fur where the blood had spilled were corroded away and quickly backed away from the basilisk as more blood was still gushing out in a fountain.
Well, the basilisk had suffered a huge wound from the unexpected attack, but it was nothing life-threatening, and so the wound closed quickly after twenty seconds, leaving only a huge scar in the process.
The basilisk was ignited with even greater fury after having been inflicted with a wound for the first time, then it already had been before and viciously lunged forward to assault the bear, who also reacted swiftly and dodged to the side.
It was just that the bear wasn't used to being able to use only three of its four legs, so it wasn't quick enough and was still hit by the basilisk's ferocious blow, which was a mixture of its venomous breath and the physical attack of its huge snake-like body.
"Bam!" rang out the collision of the basilisk's body with the bear, as the bear was also thrown backwards by the massive inertia of the basilisk.
A few seconds passed and it seemed as if the bear was not able to stand up again in a short time, as there was no reaction other than lying on the forest floor right now.
Seemingly certain of victory, the basilisk flew to where the bear lay buried in the ground, ready to deliver the final blow.
It was just that something unexpected happened next, but to better understand this we need to go back a few minutes... Having watched the battle for this length of time, he had already come to the conclusion that the basilisk would emerge victorious between the Lightning Bear and it, so he had decided to prepare for when the Lightning Bear would be defeated, in order to launch a surprise attack on the Golden Basilisk, hopefully to finish it off quickly.
As he had been thinking of which attack would be the most effective, he had come up with the idea to from a spear out of his mana instead of using his usual three skills, namely Poisonous Black Mist; Shadow Thorns and Shadow binding, which would not be of that much use in this situation in his opinion.
And just as he had come up with that notion, he surprisingly received a system notification.
[Congratulations! You have created the skill: Shadow lance]
'Wow, so I just created a new skill by having an idea for one, that's pretty cool,' Thiago marvelled to himself after seeing the contents of the notification in front of him.
After that, Thiago had another brilliant idea, which was to build up his attack inside his Inner Word, so that the Golden Basilisk had no chance of anticipating his attack.
What is meant by building up his attack in his inner world is that Thiago sends his mana from the outside world into his inner world, where it accumulates and condenses into his attack, constantly strengthening it until it is time to launch it.
'Sounds like a good plan to me, so let's do it,' Thiago mentally encouraged himself, not really sure if it would work since he had never tried to send mana from the outside into his inner world before.
However, he was delighted to see that his idea actually worked, having tried it a few seconds later and seen no failure.
Now back to the present - Thiago had already covertly mobilised a huge amount of his mana and put it into his inner world, making his attack stored in the inner world already quite formidable as it had been amplified many times over by most of his mana.
His newly created Shadow Lance had already been put into action, forming a huge and formidable-looking black and dark lance in his inner world, just waiting for its moment to be unleashed upon its opponent.
'Alright, now!' yelled Thiago in his mind, as he quickly after took out the formed lance form his inner world with his soul sense.
This worked because he was able to move everything to and from his inner world with his soul sense, which was a very vital feature at that moment or else this type of attack would have not been possible for now.
Just as the golden basilisk was about to reach the lightning bear, it felt a huge threat with its sixth sense but unfortunately it was too late...
Not far from the basilisk, a huge lance, at least five metres long and fifty centimetres wide, appeared in the air and moved towards it with incredible speed.
The basilisk tried to dodge, but it was too late, and with the lance taking only a fraction of a second to reach the basilisk, it simply had no chance in this duel of speed. If the golden basilisk hadn't been under the influence of the Fury Stone's fluctuations, the lance wouldn't have posed much of a threat to it, as its ability to think was a key factor in its fighting ability, as well as its reaction time.
At this point, some may wonder why the Fury Stone did not affect Thiago's mind, and the answer was simple. It was because Thiago had left an imprint of his soul sense in the stone, which acted as a kind of protection, as the fluctuations would deliberately avoid his mind due to the soul imprint.
A modern analogy for the concept of leaving a soul-sense imprint on the Fury Stone could be compared to adding a security password or biometric identification to a digital device.
Just as a password or fingerprint scan would prevent unauthorised access to a device, leaving an imprint of one's Soul Sense on the Fury Stone acted as a form of protection, preventing the fluctuations of the stone from affecting Thiago's mind. It's as if Thiago had added his own unique biometric identification to the Fury Stone to protect his mind.
Now that this has been cleared, lets return to the basilisk's situation now.
As the basilisk had been top slow and could not escape in time the lance consisting of compressed dark mana and imbued with poison mana as well had rammed itself into its rather vulnerable head.
Despite the extremely hard and defensive scales on its head, it only took a microsecond for the lance to penetrate them and thus breaching the outermost protective barrier of the basilisk.
Although the skin underneath the scales was also a barrier of sorts, being quite hard, it could not stop the lance, which was able to penetrate the skin in basically no time by the least bit.
The lance then proceeded to pierce the basilisk's own frighteningly hard skull, which was the last barrier the basilisk had.
The moment the skull was pierced, the outcome was already decided, as there was no way for the basilisk to stop the lance from piercing his brain and soul from that point on.
And it came as foretold, after the lance had pierced his skull, it pierced his entire head in no time, protruding from the other side with huge amounts of blood, brain matter and other tissues spurting from the wound, while the golden basilisk slowly fell to the ground, unable to support its quickly deteriorating body.
"Ha ha! Very good, it worked! I am such a genius to think of that, Hehe," Thiago exclaimed after seeing his attack successfully spear and mortally wound the Golden Basilisk.
Emerging from his hiding place, ironically for the first time in the entire battle, he marched towards the dying basilisk, picking up the Stone of Fury on the way and returning it to his storage space.
Immediately the bloodshot eyes of the deathly wounded basilisk receded, and its usual golden with a tinge of green pupils came back to the fore.
It also seemed as if the basilisk still had a little life left in it, as it slowly and haltingly began to ask, in a hoarse and extremely weak voice, as quiet as a mosquito, while turning its gaze towards Thiago, who was rapidly approaching it at that moment: "Who are you? And why have you laid this ambush for us? Are you colluding with the humans?"
Hmm, he seems pretty intelligent to have figured out that it was an ambush all along, well, it doesn't matter anyway, so I might as well answer his questions to satiate his curiosity as his last wish before he dies,' Thiago thought before he started to reply to his question.
"I am nobody special, and as to answer your second question, well, to become stronger, isn't that how it works here in this world, no? As for your last question, my answer is straightforwardly no, since I would have no need for that. Anyways I answered your questions and now it is time to depart for you," spoke Thiago and then moved towards the basilisk who had no energy left to defend anymore or dodge away and gave him the final and finishing blow with his Shadow Thorns skill that he quickly activated.
"You're a nobody?" the basilisk spat incredulously with most of his remaining strength, while he could already see Thiago attacking and knew that his time as king and absolute ruler of this forest would probably end in a fraction of a second.
Immediately, scores of dark thorns shot up from the ground, piercing countless holes in the already mutilated body of the basilisk.
Unable to utter a sound, the basilisk's life was snuffed out by Thiago's attack, leaving nothing but an ugly mess of wounds and not a shred of its former majesty.
Thiago found it incredible that he was actually able to kill the golden basilisk, albeit with a lot of help from the lightning bear, who had wasted a lot of the basilisk's mana in the process of fighting it. Thus, weakening it to a certain extent.
Nevertheless, much of it also had to do with his own wit and coming up with the idea to use his small inner world as a place to sneakily amass and condense an extraordinarily powerful attack.
And even without these factors it wouldn't have been impossible for Thiago to defeat the Golden Basilisk, it would just have taken longer, so all in all he was quite happy with the result.
"Haha, alright, the first one is dead, now let's quickly kill the other two, and then I should have completed the mission, hehe," Thiago laughed at this moment and made his way to the lightning bear first, to completely cut off its path of recovery and counterattack, now that its mind was no longer clouded by the chaotic and aggressive emotions.
Luckily there was no movement still form the bear's side and it seemed that he had really been heavily or even mortally injured by the Golden basilisk's blow before.
After using the same skill as before, piercing numerous holes in the unfortunate bear's body and confirming its death, Thiago did the same to the Ice Serpent, who now appeared to be in a coma, having been partially gilded by the Golden Basilisk's ability priorly.
It appeared that Thiago had now completed the requirements of the mission, but there was still no notification from the system, so it seemed that he had forgotten something that was essential for completion.
Just as he was about to open his system panel and check the mission requirements to see what was missing, he noticed something glowing on the Golden Basilisk's body.
"Huh?"
Getting closer, he realised that it was actually its heart, visible because the Shadow Thorn skill had ripped open its body earlier.
"Why is it glowing so mysteriously like that?" wondered Thiago as he looked at the heart, which had already stopped beating because its owner was dead, but still glowed like that, which made him quite curious.
Unable to come up with a more reasonable explanation than that this was exactly what a golden basilisk's heart looked like, he simply decided to dig it out with his claws and put it in his storage space until he could find a use for it.
Things that go into the space storage don't go bad anyway, so it didn't really matter if he put it there.
He then opened his system panel and read through the mission requirements again, to finally conclude the quest.
"Ah, I forgot the devouring, hehe," Thiago chuckled in realization after finding the requirement to devour the Lightning Bear, the Ice Serpent and the Golden Basilisk after killing them.
"Well, that's easy, to say the least," Thiago muttered as he activated his Black Hole skill and began his first Devour of the day.
...