Chapter 1310: Trapped Beast

Hackzord closed the Distortion Door with a face like cold iron.

Even the most obtuse creature alive would have recognized what had just happened. The humans had outmaneuvered him entirely.

“Those lowlifes—!” Siacis snarled. The whiskers on his cheeks twisted with barely contained violence.

“Shut your mouth.” Hackzord’s voice cut him off. “If they’re lowlifes, what does that make us — the ones who just got outwitted by them? I don’t want to hear that word out of you again.”

He leaped upward and flew toward the far end of the island.

Below him, the black smoke was still climbing in a continuous column, so thick and straight it looked less like combustion than like some geological event — a vent forced open in the earth’s skin. The flicker of fire at its base made the column pulse, almost alive. The inner city beneath it was chaos. Even at the edges of the shockwave’s reach, Primal Demon bodies were scattered across the ground at odd angles, some still, some not.

He didn’t linger on it. The milk was gone. Standing over the spill accomplished nothing; it only fed the rage, and he had better uses for that.

On the island’s southern shore, exactly as he’d expected, several boats were still visible — far enough from the island to be safe, not far enough to have escaped. In full sail. In the face of his abilities, that was essentially stationary.

He was moving to close the gap when something below caught his eye.

A figure had launched from the island’s outer edge and was streaking south at speed.

Of course. He had assumed the person who triggered the explosion had died inside it with the vanguard. But the humans had planned a full retreat — not merely an evacuation, but a deliberate withdrawal with a timed detonation to cover it. They had used a witch to set off the charges and then pulled her out.

As if she would simply be allowed to leave.

Hackzord abandoned the boats and switched targets. He opened a Distortion Door and stepped through directly into the witch’s path.

She was pale-haired, the color of bleached straw. Her expression when she saw him was genuine shock — no performance in it, the kind that lives in the eyes before the mind catches up.

He reached for her.

His hand closed on nothing.

She had moved before he could finish the motion — an explosive burst of speed that tore her several hundred meters away in the space of a breath. The shockwave from her displacement struck Hackzord and the Parasitic Eye Demons like a wall, the residual energy rippling outward in visible rings before it dissipated.

When she stopped, she had the look of someone who had spent a significant portion of what she had.

He went after her again.

He stepped through another Door — opened three hundred meters ahead of her this time, a correction for her speed — but when he emerged she was already further off, a trail of white clouds stretched behind her where she had been.

Again.

He opened the Door a third time. Three hundred meters in front of her position. He stepped through.

And stopped.

The feeling was unmistakable — the sudden weight of many gazes arriving at once, the transition from open empty sky to a space that was inhabited and watching. He had been alone in a field; now he was standing in a city center.

He looked toward the horizon and toward the coast.

Black shapes moving in from multiple directions. From the sea: iron birds, in numbers. From the land: witches and other figures. The shapes resolved as they closed — eight iron birds already arcing toward him, their formation deliberate, their approach coordinated.

An ambush.

The witch’s pattern of movement — stopping, slowing, appearing to labor for each burst of speed as though her power was almost spent — had been theater. She had been measuring out her pace to pull him here, to exactly this position, in exactly this formation.

“Ha—” Something between a laugh and the last pressure before a dam gives way. “Humans — hahaha—”

The fury reached the top.

They hadn’t only outrun his troops. They had set a trap for him personally.

He could leave. Stepping through a Door now would cost him nothing but the acknowledgment that he was walking away.

He stayed.

It was true that he was not a Magic Slayer, and that fact had always sat uneasily with him. But that didn’t mean males in God’s Stones of Retaliation could put down a grand lord.

He needed his enemies to understand who held the sky.

Eight iron birds came at him in tight formation, fire spitting from their noses—

Hackzord swept his left hand and opened a Distortion Door at his flank. The rounds vanished into it; the other side of the Door opened adjacent to the attacking birds and redirected the fire straight back toward its source. The formation broke apart as several iron birds were struck.

He registered something that surprised him: the rounds that should have been fatal had not shattered the iron birds. They left dents. The hulls held.

He filed that away and ascended — one long stride upward to bring the entire engagement below him. The iron birds strained to match his altitude, their bodies heavy and graceless as they tried to climb. They were nowhere near his pace.

He was selecting which to tear apart first when a common seabird abruptly transformed.

The Devilbeast’s jaws were open and coming fast from his blind side. His Eye Demons had not flagged the bird as a threat; it was everywhere, unremarkable, invisible in plain sight. He jerked aside and avoided the bite with perhaps a hand’s width to spare.

He was angry enough now that the anger had passed through heat and come out the other side as something colder. He spread his palm. A hair-thin black line materialized in the air between them — another Distortion Door, but reduced to a blade’s width. Anything that passed through it would not emerge whole.

The Devilbeast recognized the threat and tried to contract back into a seabird. Its momentum was too much to stop in time. Half a wing clipped the line. Feathers and the severed wingtip scattered like petals in a gust.

Then the golden-haired witch hit him.

She came as a streak of golden light, and there was no time for the thin-door tactic. Hackzord pulled every particle of his magical energy inward and wrapped it around himself.

The impact was enormous.

The golden light shattered into splinters on contact and the force of it dropped into his chest like a hammerblow. She had taken worse — blood at the corner of her mouth, one arm bent in directions an arm should not bend. She seemed not to notice. With her remaining hand she pulled a short fire-fork from her hip.

Damn.

He opened another Distortion Door. If she fired, the round would go through and come out aimed at her own allies.

She didn’t fire.

The injury, the golden impact — all of it had been a feint to put his Door in the wrong place. She folded downward instead, accelerating past him to catch the tumbling seabird.

“I will break every one of you.” The first time he had spoken at full volume in the battle.

The highest-priority warning arrived in his mind before the echo faded.

It came from a large iron bird somewhere in the clouds below him. Through his Eye Demons’ sight, he identified the source: the witch Ursrook had been explicit about — key target, long-range attack, eliminate on sight.

Something locked onto him.

The sense of threat rose fast, faster than he could account for. Hackzord expanded the Distortion Door to its widest possible range, throwing it across every angle the attack could come from.

One of his Eye Demons drove itself into him, a desperate shove.

A flash. A duration that seemed to last and not last simultaneously. A shadow-dark cluster crossed the sky like a strike of blackened lightning. The Door fractured — not damage, shattering — innumerable cracks spreading across its surface before it blew apart in a sound like a hall of mirrors coming down.

After the Door, the Eye Demon that had pushed him: the blue light running through its body stuttered and went out. Blood and tissue and inner organs burst outward in a spray of blue-tinged fog among the still-falling fragments of the Door.

Both events in the space of a single breath. Too fast to parse.

Then it was his turn.

The attacking God’s Stone had already spent itself in breaking through. What reached him was a fragment — but a fragment was enough to take half his hand, to leave a ladder of dents across his armor. The disruption to his magical energy was total; control of his own body went with it, and he fell.

The iron birds, having finished realigning, came in.

He was still falling when he crossed out of the Forbidden Area. With the last dregs of what he had left, Hackzord opened a Door beneath himself.

The ocean rushed up — and then he was gone, swallowed by the dark.

Chapter 1310 - Trapped Beast

Translator: Henyee Translations Editor: Henyee Translations Hackzord closed the Distortion Door with a grim face. Even the stupidest person would be able tell that they had just been completely outwitted by the humans! “Those lowlifes—!” Siacis roared furiously. His murderous intent was clear in the wild twisting of whiskers on his cheeks. “Shut up!” Hackzord interrupted him. “If they were lowlifes, than who are we, the ones got outwitted by lowlifes? From now on, I don’t want to hear you calling them ‘lowlifes’ ever again!” Then he leaped up and flew toward the other end of the island. The black smoke was still billowing upwards ceaselessly, forming a thick column of smoke. The indistinct flashing of firelight from below it caused the column to resemble a jet of magma shooting upwards from the ground. The interior of the city was in disarray. Even in places where the fireball’s shockwave hadn’t reached, there were bodies of several Primal Demons strewn in across the area at different angles, dead or alive. However, this was not what he was focusing on at the moment—the milk had already been spilt. Staying there would not make his losses any smaller and would only add fuel to his fury. If he had the energy, he would rather use it to make his enemies pay. As expected, on the south side of the island, the Sky Lord spotted some boats that had not yet gone far from the island. Even though they were in full sail, in the face of his abilities, they were equivalent to being stationary. Just when he was about to close the gap in a single stride, a ray of light below him caught his attention. A silhouette flew out from the outer region island and rapidly towards the southern side. No wonder! He had believed that the person responsible for the detonation of the explosion had been buried in the flames together with his vanguard troops. To think that the humans had actually planned a full retreat! Getting a witch to activate the explosion in order to retreat easily from the battlefield? As if it was going to be so easy! The Sky Lord immediately switched targets, opened a distortion door and appeared in front of the witch. She was a female with pale, blonde hair. She revealed an expression of shock, as if she didn’t expect him to suddenly appear. Without another word Hackzord reached out to grab her— Yet his hand grasped thin air. The female before his eyes suddenly moved with an explosive speed, tearing hundreds of meters away from him in a blink of eye. At the same time, the shock wave from her movement slammed into Hackzord and the Parasitic Eye Demons like a wall. The spell blast glistened and rippled outwards before slowly easing away. After the witch flew out a distance and slowed to a stop, she looked like she used up over half of her energy. He harrumphed and then chased her once more! He planned to close the distance in one step again, however this time just as he exited the Distortion Door, the witch was already miles away, leaving a trail of white clouds behind her. Hackzord was furious. He used his ability for the third time, thinking that he might as well open the door three hundred meters in front of the witch. However when he exited the door this time, he suddenly felt the gazes of numerous eyes on him. It was as if he just entered a city center from an empty plain. Shocked, the Sky Lord looked in the direction of where he felt the gazes— numerous black figures were coming in his direction, both from the horizon of the sea and from the land. Among them were iron birds and witches. This is…a planned ambush? So that b*tch was intentionally stopping and starting, fooling him believe that she could only perform brief moments of accelerated flight because she was being limited by her magical power? “Ha… humans… hahaha…” Hackzord laughed as his fury rapidly boiled up to its limit. Not only did they outwit his troops, they were also planning to trick him? Retreating now would be as easy as taking a breath. But he didn’t do so. Indeed, he wasn’t a Magic Slayer and it always bothered him, but that didn’t mean males wearing God’s Stones of Retaliation would be able to defeat a grand lord! He had to let his enemies know who the real ruler of the sky was! In an instant, eight iron birds had already charged towards him, spitting out streaks of fire from their heads— Hackzord waved his left hand, directly opening a Distortion Door at his side, swallowing the iron bolts that shot at him; at the same time he opened the other side of the door beside the iron birds. After the fatal iron bolts passed through the door they swept straight back towards where they came from. In an instant, several iron birds were struck and their formation fell into a disarray. But what surprised him a bit was that the iron bolts which were supposed to be fatal didn’t cause the iron birds to break apart; instead, they only left a few dents in their iron bodies. The Sky Lord quickly pushed his surprise to the back of his mind and made a stride to a higher place, putting the entire battle area under his feet. The iron birds were clearly unable to follow his pace. As much as they tried to climb up, their stupid and clumsy bodies were slower than worms. Just as he was planning to rip them apart one by one, a passing bird suddenly transformed into a devilbeast and propelled towards him with its jaws wide open! His Eye Demons hadn’t regarded the birds that were commonly seen at sea as threats at all. Hackzord dodged abruptly, just avoiding the attack in time. Fuming, he widened his palm and a black streak of light instantly appeared in the space between them. This was also a Distortion Door, except it’s width was only a finger thick, any body that passed through would not emerge in one piece. As if it realized that it was in danger, the devilbeast shrank back into a seabird. But it was too difficult to stop its momentum in such a short amount of time, and half its wings swept through the black line. The sliced wing tip and feathers burst apart like blossoms. But before he could attack again, a thunderous roar erupted once more. The golden-haired witch turned into a streak of golden light and shot straight towards him! Not having enough time to use the same tactic, Hackzord could only gather all the magical energy in his body and turn it into a shield cocooning his entire body! “Bang!” The two collided, and the immense impact caused the witch’s golden light to shatter into innumerable small pieces and raised a feeling of stuffiness in Hackzord. The opponent’s injury was clearly more serious; not only was blood seeping from the edge of her mouth, one of her arms was bent into multiple sections. Yet the witch thought nothing of her injuries. With her remaining hand, she pulled out a short fire fork from her waist. Damn! Left with no other choice, Hackzord opened another Distortion Door. If she was going to shoot, the iron bolt would be directed towards her companions. But what infuriated Hackzord was that not only had the previous attack been a guise, the witch didn’t shoot anything at him but accelerated downwards to catch the falling seabird. “I’m going to smash you all into pieces!” he roared for the first time in this battle. But at this moment, the highest-priority warning rang inside the Sky Lord’s mind—the source came from a large iron bird that was in the clouds below him. Through the Eye Demons’ view, the source was indeed the witch that Ursrook made sure to point out as a key target. He felt his body being latched on by something— Feeling an increasing sense of crisis, Hackzord expanded the Distortion Door to its biggest range, covering his enemy’s entire attacking range! One of his Eye Demons violently pushed him. There was a flash of fire. After what felt like both a long time and a brief moment, a black shadowy cluster flashed across like lightning. Innumerable cracks appeared on the Distortion Door and then it shattered apart in a deafening explosion like glass. After the door, the next victim was the Eye Demon that pushed him aside— the blue light on its body pulsated and blood, flesh, and organs squirted outwards, raising a wave of blue fog among the lingering shattered pieces. The two events occurred almost simultaneously, so quick that Hackzord couldn’t react. Finally, it was his turn. Even though the attacking God’s stone had already shattered, it still sliced away half of his hand, leaving multiple dents in his armor. The turbulence in his magical power caused him to lose control of his body, and he fell straight towards the ocean. The iron birds, having finished redirecting themselves, surged straight towards him. After he left the Forbidden Area, Hackzord used the last of his energy and opened a new door below him. Then, as if he had fallen into a bottomless pit, he vanished above the ocean.