Dustin faced three black-haired Wight-Gilders, each impervious to weapons. He moved like smoke through fingers, weaving through their coordinated assault with fluid grace.
He no longer met them head-on. His swordplay turned sharp and unpredictable, the blade always finding a joint or the pulse of talismanic energy that bound the undead together. He struck at weak points to dismantle the whole. Metallic clangs and sharp hisses rang out as sparks flew.
One Wight-Gilder’s knee joint was pierced through by sword aura, freezing its movements in place. Another had the control talisman on its back, flicked apart by his sword tip, sending it spinning wildly like a headless fly.
The last one was the most ferocious. Its claws aimed straight for Dustin’s chest, but he slipped aside with perfect timing.
With a swift backhanded slash, his sword slid straight into the gaping maw from which it spewed deathly energy. The sword aura exploded inside, tearing the undead’s head apart from within.
In just a few heartbeats, the three powerful Wight-Gilders were reduced to nothing more than broken husks beneath Dustin’s flawless sword technique.
“Useless!” Talmor roared.
Seeing his techniques repeatedly countered by Dustin, his face darkened with humiliation and barely contained fury.
He slammed his hands together, and the cyan glow around him deepened into a dark, ominous green that seemed to swallow light itself.
“Verdant Divine Thunder-Extinguish all life!”
Talmor thrust both palms forward. A bolt of lightning, as thick as a tree trunk and radiating an unholy dark green energy, tore through the air with a scream like the wailing of tormented souls. It carried an overwhelming energy of annihilation as it crashed down toward Dustin.
This was no ordinary heavenly thunder.
Instead, it was a pseudo-divine thunder conjured from the deathly miasma of corrupt wood-element energy and amplified by dragon blood malevolent energy.
Its force was immense, infused with corrosive and decaying energy meant to erode the life essence of anything it struck.
Dustin narrowed his eyes as he faced that devastating strike. He could feel the pressure rolling from that strike exceeded the raw power of any single strike from the Dragonblood Battle Puppets.
He held nothing back, as he frantically channeled what little mystical pure energy had recovered within his body into his longsword.
The blade hummed under the strain. Cloud patterns etched along its length seemed to come alive as a miniature cyan sword dragon coiled around it.
“Dragon’s Fury Strike!” he roared, exhaling sharply.
Man and sword became one, as he transformed into an extremely condensed cyan streak that seemed capable of piercing through the void itself. Instead of retreating, he advanced boldly to meet the dark green divine annihilation thunder head-on.
He didn’t dodge or rely on flashy moves. This was a strike in its purest, most absolute form.
The cyan streak and the dark green divine thunder collided fiercely in midair, triggering an explosion far more violent than any previous clash. Blinding light instantly devoured everything.
The rampaging energy shockwave spread outward like a tsunami, whipping the spiritual liquid in the wine pools into towering waves and causing the surrounding stone pillars to tremble with rattling sounds.
The pleasure-seeking men and women who couldn’t get out of the way in time were sent tumbling with pitiful cries.
As the light dissipated, Dustin stood there holding his sword. His robes had been torn open in several places by the dissipating lightning, and a trace of fresh blood seeped from the corner of his mouth. Taking the full brunt of this pseudo-divine thunder had clearly taken a heavy toll on him.
But the longsword in his hand still pointed steadily forward.
The dark green divine annihilation thunder had been split cleanly in two by his Dragon’s Fury Strike. The residual lightning energy crashed into the ground behind him, blasting a charred crater. Corrosive energy hissed and crackled around its edges.
Talmor stared in disbelief, shock written across his face. One of his strongest attacks had actually been countered by Dustin’s direct attack.
In that fleeting moment when his focus slipped, Dustin struck. He seemed completely unaffected by the earlier clash. In the blink of an eye, he vanished from sight, and the next instant, he was standing directly in front of Talmor.
Before he could even process what happened, Dustin had closed the distance. All Talmor saw was the cold glint of steel expanding in his vision before a sense of lethal crisis instantly enveloped his entire body
He scrambled to conjure a wooden shield for defense and attempted to execute an escape technique to evade, but it was already too late.
Dustin’s longsword pierced with perfect precision through the thick wooden armor formed by countless intertwined vines that Talmor had hastily conjured before his chest, then penetrated through his left shoulder blade. Blood sprayed from his wound.
The incomparably sharp sword aura instantly surged into his body, madly destroying his circulatory pathways and the corrupted wood-element energy flowing within him.
Talmor let out a shrill, agonized scream. His body flew backward like a kite with its string cut, crashing heavily against a stone pillar before sliding down to the ground.
His left shoulder was drenched in blood. The lingering sword aura actively prevented healing and gnawed away at his very life force.
His face turned deathly pale, and his energy wave collapsed instantly. The gaze he directed toward Dustin was filled with terror and pure hatred. Seeing that Talmor was seriously wounded with just one strike, the palace fell into deathly silence.
The relaxed and mocking expressions on Lysander’s and Valindra’s faces completely vanished, replaced by an unprecedented solemnity. Malthor slowly rose from his recliner. Fury and killing intent were finally ignited in his cold eyes.
Dustin leaned on his sword, breathing slightly labored. The continuous high-intensity combat had pushed him to his absolute limits. But he still kept his spine straight, his gaze fearlessly meeting Malthor’s stare that resembled a primordial savage beast.
