Alex descended into the veil while ignoring the effects it was having on him and directly headed to the place he knew Vaal hazok made it's nest. The inside of a massive elders skull that it had created a pile of rotting flesh in to sleep under. Alex knew of the elders weakness to fire and gathered his energy in his lungs as soon as he saw the pile of flesh shift at his presence. The moment the foul elder revealed themselves he released a gout of master rank fire right at it. "SHRIEK!" The elder screamed as the higher tiered flames rolled over it dissipating it's effluvia and flesh coat while badly burning the scales below.-
Vaal hazok wasn't a stupid creature and protected it's eyes the moment it felt the heat , preventing it from going blind. Still once the attack was over the elder was wheezing and gasping as it's charred skin cracked and peeled revealing the cooked muscles below. 'I feel cheated! I expected this damn thing to actually put up a fight but it's practically dead on it's feet!' Alex thought angrily. Had he not used the element that was the bane of Vaal hazok he might have had a decent fight but a high rank version barely surviving his master rank flames is already impressive enough , even if it didn't seem like it.-
Alex dispatched the helpless elder mercifully by stabbing it through the eye and brain before biting off a chunk of flesh from the corpse with a grimace and swallowing it. With this his [elder dragon] trait reached eight out of ten and he gained two traits , [effluvia resistance] and [death walker]. He already had the first so that trait just went up by a level while the second trait was surprisingly enough legendary ranked.-
What it did though confused Alex a bit as the traits description in the system was that "The more corpses are in the surroundings the stronger the user". 'The fuck is that supposed to mean?' Alex thought irritated at the whole thing and left the veil. He didn't notice how the effluvia in the veil sank into his body as he left either. A few people were confused when they saw Alex return to astera with a diablos rather than an elder dragon but quickly got over it.-
The next day Alex woke up and headed out to go try and find a deviljho , which for some reason had eluded him since he heard about it. He knew that he didn't have long before nergigante showed it's ugly mug out of hunger since the elder dragons it hunted sudden vanished. As a result he wanted to get the deviljho hunted before this happened since he was honestly curious about what traits he could get from it. Deviljho was an odd creature that was not an elder dragon yet exclusively used the dragon element and was comparable in strength if not even greater to a degree.-
There was a couple of reasons why the species was not considered elders despite this impressive level of power. First was that the species was still susceptible to traps and tranqs that for an elder were little more than irritants. The second was that the species had very short life spans normally as if they ever failed to get a meal in time they grew weaker exponentially fast until it kills them. The second reason actually tied into the the third reason , which is to say the species had a massive fatal flaw.-
The deviljhos who actually survived long enough to find a mating partner are also just as likely to eat them as impregnate them from their maddening hunger. The females of the species who survive the mating process tend to also immediately turn on the male in an attempt to devour them for sustenance. This resulted in a species like could get snuffed out of existence by bad luck and as a result failed to be classified as elders since no one knows when the species will die off. 'Probably no time soon.' Alex thought seriously as he remembered how freakishly hard to kill the members of the species were in the game.
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