Tongues of fire roaring like crimson thunder and a deep, angry gaze. As Yoichi finished loading his right uppercut, the Dragon King's energy began to flow through his veins again.

Time seemed to slow down as his hand moved closer to Taisuke's resigned face. The Demon Hunter was grown enough and experienced enough in combat to know that his time had come.

Knuckle by knuckle, Yoichi's hand impacted against his enemy's face.

The first contact with the draconic warrior's hand burned his skin until it was consumed.

His already damaged cheeks were torn further apart, and the force of the punch was so devastating that it displaced his brain inside his skull.

The sensation Taisuke felt was as if he had been hit by a speeding train. The bottom-up trajectory had made the punch even more unpredictable and precise.

Using maximum kinetic energy and drawing a perfect attack trajectory with his body, Yoichi delivered the best attack ever performed.

Taisuke's armor was a typical archer's suit of armor made of studs and useless accessories. From the top of it, the Demon Hunter's neck began to tear like a sheet of paper.

Many thin cuts joined in the same direction, forcing the head to make a decidedly unnatural upward movement. When the cuts became one, the archer's head snapped off his neck.

Taisuke's eyes closed and his mouth opened in a grimace of extreme pain. The accumulated blood in his swollen veins sprayed into every direction as if it were a geyser.

In addition to the detachment of his neck, his windpipe also followed that movement, slithering away from Taisuke's body like a snake that had just been flushed out of his lair.

The sounds of that scene were indescribable and the enemy's head took part of his entrails with it, throwing them into the air like confetti at a carnival.

The macabre spectacle inaugurated by Yoichi's attack colored the hilltop red, and the silent Valley of the Northern Waters welcomed another dead body into its green arms.

The corpse of Taisuke, deprived of his head and dignity, fell to the ground like a rag doll. His head made a parabolic trajectory in the air before falling a few feet away from the wounded Takuma.

"Fuck! Fuck!" the Grimbrook warrior gasped in terror, backing up onto the grass. With one hand, Takuma clutched the wound on his side; with the other, he dragged his body away from the head that had fallen to the ground like a meteorite.

Before returning to a standing position, Yoichi waited a few moments. If Taisuke's body would have crumbled before his eyes, the young tamer would have realized it was a clone.

The enemy's blood also dripped from Yoichi's eyelashes, misting his gaze. His lips, his eyes, his nose: every spot on his face was covered in the Demon Hunter's blood.

*thud*thud* - Taisuke's head rolled to the grassy ground, heading dangerously over the edge of the hill.

His split trachea still poked out at the end of his neck, and the eyes of his face were now wide open and bloodshot, as was his mouth.

"Kenji?" Yoichi called, turning quickly toward his Oracle. The Tamurei's metal head was in the little dragon's jaws and was slowly crumbling under the pressing action of its teeth.

When a small red sphere floated out of the ghost demon, Yoichi had no more doubts. He had indeed succeeded in defeating an experienced Demon Tamer. He too had been unable to resist the draconic power.

"Screek!" Kenji rejoiced, opening its mouth wide and dropping the remnants of the metal head. In addition to the XP orb that had just sprouted from the defeated demon's body, an identical sphere appeared from Taisuke's headless corpse.

"Is... Is he... dead?" Takuma stammered, whose appearance was growing paler.

Yoichi deactivated Kenji's skill and his arms returned to their original size. When he looked more closely at his partner's appearance, he ran towards him.

"Takuma! Your wound! You look terrible, man!" the young Goldhaven warrior exclaimed as if he had already forgotten that he was completely soiled with the blood of a dead man.

"I... I gonna be... aagh..." - Takuma was unable to respond to that statement, and as he leaned towards Yoichi, he risked falling with his head to the ground, losing his senses.

Fortunately, Yoichi was able to foresee that sudden movement and grabbed his partner, preventing him from suffering further damage.

Takuma and Karasu were exhausted and the red-haired warrior's wound did not look good. Lifting his body and loading it onto his shoulders, Yoichi carried his friend to the small forest at the foot of the hill.

With Kenji's help, he also carried his scarecrow demon, reduced to an inanimate heap of wood and straw.

Next to the bonfire, the young tamer from Goldhaven laid his friend on the grass previously flattened by his body. He lifted his yellowed tank top and looked closely at his wound.

The cut caused by Taisuke's blade was quite superficial, but without careful treatment, he would have risked infection.

Takuma was unconscious and because of that, Yoichi was able to continue with the healing treatment undisturbed. Up until that point, he had always been the one to be healed, not the healer.

The only first aid knowledge Yoichi knew came from the book 'Fundamentals of Demon Taming', but when he read that chapter, he paid little attention to it.

Even though the cut was superficial, Takuma's wound was still bleeding. "I need something clean to cover the wound and keep the blood from coming out," he thought aloud as he looked around.

Seeing no useful items nearby, he checked inside his bag before tearing off a piece of Takuma's clothes.

Amazingly, that country warrior's backpack was very neat. Everything had been carefully packed and enclosed in sheets of paper tied with strings.

The urge to browse through that bag was great, but the young tamer could not let his friend bleed to death. Digging through Takuma's junk, at the bottom of his backpack, sterile gauze and two small ampoules containing ointments.