Mid Evening - Mid Spring : Central Sirathan Mountains

It'd been a little over 2 years since I had left Morva Asari now and, although there have been some mishaps, things had been going well.

I spent every waking moment training with Ilios or experimenting with magic, and my effort was really paying off.

But it wasn't just general strength and mana usage that improved. Through a tremendous amount of trial and error, I had come up with a far stronger and far more efficient explosive than anything I had made previously.

On earth, it would likely be classified as a cubane explosive as it uses an 8 carbon molecule as the base, but that was where the similarity ended. The variant I made was far stronger and more unstable, making it a complete monster in terms of explosive yield.

In short, it acted generally similar to Octanitrocubane from earth, but instead of nitrogen and oxygen to spark the combustion (the nitrogen carries the oxygen to keep it stable), I used oxygen and hydrogen and I would make the cubes interlocked with one another when I made it.

It required quite a bit of space mana to interlock them, but it let me stuff a horrific amount of explosive potential into a tiny package.

But I, of course, didn't stop there. Once the cubane was all made and interlocked, I stuffed the space in and around it with more hydrogen.

At the end of it all, I had created a non-nuclear explosive with a similar explosive potential to non-fusion nuclear weapons, but that didn't necessarily mean it was practical.

At the end of it all, it was still both quicker and more efficient to just use regular fission nuclear magic if I wanted to go that big. On top of that, after a lot of risky practice, I could now compress a watermelon sized clump of uranium or plutonium down into the size of an apple, which, through an unintentional discovery, increased its yield further.

The denser I made it before pulling away my mana and letting it go supercritical, the more violent the explosion. -It's still nothing compared to fusion but I'm still too scared I'll blow my own head off with that..-

It was a reasonable concern, but for whatever reason, I took it to the extreme. Whenever I got deep enough into practice and thought about trying it, I assumed I was at my mental limit and forced myself to take a break.

Although I can't say it was a good habit, it at least ended up working out. Whenever I got too nervous to continue experimenting or simply I needed a mental break, I just shifted gears and trained with Ilios!

Eventually though, that training started to lose its effectiveness even with handicaps like artificially ‘increasing gravity on ourselves’ [1].

Put simply, we couldn't handicap ourselves enough for the training to actually be difficult on anything other than our stamina.

But that didn't exactly mean I had no options. -Is it finally time?-

When leaving Morva Asari, Amara convinced me to come here to train, saying it would be better than the desert, but even though I was skeptical at first, the more I thought about it, the better the idea sounded.

- Flashback ~

"I know I said earlier that the monsters in the desert were quite strong, but wouldn't they still be too weak for you?" Over the months we spent together, Amara had come to think I was an older elder that just regressed my human form's age a bit and used illusion magic to look demihuman.

It gave her a decent ballpark of my strength, even if it was still a bit low. "Yeah, but it's better to have a punching bag than nothing at all."

"But what if you actually fought monsters that would give you a bit of a challenge?" Her smile turned sly.

-What could she..- "Where would that be?"

"Although its very dangerous, it isn't unheard of for dragons to fight sea creatures in the shallows." [1]

Her idea hit my mind like a sledgehammer. -Wait, that's actually.. really smart..-

The monsters in the ocean were simply incomparable to those on land in terms of strength, and to add to my disadvantage, underwater was their home turf.

I had a complete and utter disadvantage in the water. -But.. couldn't I use aura pressure to make the ocean feel like really really dense air?-

- End of Flashback ~

Although it seemed like an odd way to word it, I thought that I could use the pressure from my aura to counteract my buoyancy and have it feel like I was just fighting in thick air.

Currently though, it was just a theory I hadn't tested, but, since I hit the bottleneck in my training, it seemed like that time had come. -Lets try it in a couple weeks, after my mana and magic training session.-

Although I was excited to finally give it a try, I was still in the middle of a spar with Ilios that had been going on for several days.

*Wham-Crunch*

Narrowly dodging Ilios’s attack, I pulled back. “Haha, missed m-”

Cutting off my voice, I saw something unusual in the distance.

As I abruptly stopped the spar to look in a different direction, Ilios redirected his paw from my face into the ground.

*CRUUUNCHHH*

The strengthened stone training area simply couldn't handle the impact and shattered, but I still didn't turn my head to look at it.

My eyes were locked on something in the sky.

-What.. is that?- It was something flying in the air with massive feathered wings, but it definitely wasn't a bird.

Getting a bit too curious, I launched myself into the air and quickly got much, much closer.

-What is that monstrosity..- With the body of a deer, it had panther legs and ears, a bird's beak, griffins wings, wyvern tail and dragon horns sticking out around its body.

It was a monstrosity beyond my comprehension that I wouldn't believe existed if I didn't see it for myself.

-Do I just kill it?- Clearly it was a creature that shouldn't exist from evolution but after some deep thought, I decided to leave it alone and turned back to meet back up with Ilios.

As I did though, a streak of light crossed the sky in an instant and cleanly vaporized the upper body of the creature.

It was so fast I couldn't follow it, but it was something I recognized immediately.

-I guess Ilios didn't want to let it go, huh..-

After watching its lifeless corpse fall to the ground, I made my way back to Ilios and resumed the training as usual.

At the time, I didn't think much of it, simply assuming it was some wild animal and moving on.

That wasn't quite the case though.

"1st Squadron, push forward and be prepared for battle!" There was a distant yell I heard while between experiments about 2 weeks later.

-What are people doing here?- Feeling like killing them all would cause issues down the road, I was quick to change to my humanoid form and make my way to the edge of the training area.

"2nd Squadron, halt and ready your weapons! Wait for my orders! The Mystic Beast was said to be staying here."

-Man this guy's voice is really obnoxious..- Getting a bit impatient, I walked up to the edge of the plateau and saw around 250 people climbing towards me, with half of them readying bows.

It only took a second for them to notice me. "Officer! There's a person!"

"A what?!" Instantly looking up, he met eyes with me. "What is a lone hunter (adventurer) doing out here?!"

His demanding tone coupled with his awful voice just pressed all the wrong buttons. "This is where I live, so I'm gonna politely ask you to leave."

"This is the military of Spiall. Please comply with us!" He was yet to halt his troops at all.

"Uh, no. If you continue up this mountain, I will take in upon myself to kill each and every one of you." I spoke with a palpable confidence and some of the soldiers felt it.

The instant I said those words, around half of the soldiers halted with paled faces.

Their leader didn't seem to care though. "You dare have the audacity to say you will harm the cities military?!"

"Tch.." *CRACK* *Crunch*

The man's head exploded as a steel dart flew through it.

*Thud*

Everyone who was still following orders immediately stopped to watch their leader's lifeless body fall to the ground.

"Okay, so who's the second in command here?" I was quick to scan the group of soldiers to find the strongest person, which was when I noticed a woman staring at me with curious eyes.

-That's an odd look for someone who just watched their leader get slaughtered..-

"Sir!" She spoke the instant I noticed her gaze. "Did you by chance already kill the mystic beast?"

"Mystic beast?"

Her eyes were full of energy. "It was a deer mystic beast that evolved extremely often, taking certain attributes from each of the creatures it killed. It was completely destroying nearby towns and wreaking havoc on cities so we were ordered to subjugate it."

"Oh.. that thing? Yeah it's dead. What's left of its body is about 9 kilometers that way."

Every soldier immediately looked in the direction I pointed.

The girl's stare didn't budge though and her eerie smile only grew wider. "Great Lord, could you bless us with your name?"

-Great Lord? What kind of cheesy ass name is that..- "I'll tell you if you guys leave me alone afterwards."

"We will immediately leave you alone and be sure to never bother you again, Great Lord!" She immediately turned to the people climbing the mountain with a threatening smile.

"Right away Cleric-, I mean Captain!" The soldiers all had a slip of the tongue as they slid back down the cliffside and started making their way back down the mountain.

-Cleric? As in the cleric rank of adventurers?- Seeing how fast everyone reacted to her orders, it seemed like her authority was far beyond just a high ranking adventurer, but I couldn't be sure.

In any case, the way she was acting was odd. "May you allow me to come up to talk with you, Great Lord?"

The name made me cringe, but I was too curious about her to care. "Sure."

Almost immediately, she disappeared from where she was and appeared next to me. -Wow, she's quite fast..-

The instant she stopped though, she lowered herself into a kneel.

-What is she..-

"Cleric Liv Sigmond greets noble dragon!"