Unsealing Emptiness

Since the Snake Beast had no idea if he was even a Mage or not, then Ozul would use this to his advantage and end this as quickly as he could.

He did not venture inside since even the sound of air could be easily heard by the Beast, to keep his advantage, he stayed outside and waited for the Snake to come out.

Ozul found a place near the cave that had taller and thicker trees with a fine view all around. He decided to keep watch from there since he wasn’t sure when it would decide to come out of the place.

Unfortunately for him, it seemed that the Snake wasn’t planning to come out of its hole anytime soon. As a Rank-9 Beast, it could survive months inside without needing to come out, so a few days was nothing.

. . .

A couple of days later, Ozul was experimenting with the spheres made up of the Ball of Purity floating before him when he suddenly noticed a disturbance.

.....

‘Took it long enough,’ he thought before the black spheres vanished and he intently focused on the entrance of the cave.

A giant snake crawled out of the dark cave after a few moments. Just after coming out, it looked at the sky and hissed loudly as if announcing its presence to every Beast in the forest. This behavior was common in almost all the Beasts no matter how weak they were. Some do this for declaring their territory while some do so only to show off their might.

Ignoring the taunting display of its strength, Ozul realized that he was not close enough to the cave. If he moved now, then it would be easy to notice him. He chose to observe it for now.

Fortunately, the Snake did not go back inside instead went past it, somewhere that Ozul did not care about right now.

‘This is the chance,’ Ozul went down the trees and hurriedly shifted to the entrance of the cave.

He did not know when the Snake would be coming back, but to take it off-guard, this was the only way. He had a limited radius for him to be able to use the Ball of Purity, and attacking from the maximum range wouldn’t help with the stealth element. With the sharp senses, it would easily be able to dodge at the last second.

As he approached the entrance, Ozul did not try to hide himself anywhere near. Unless he completely wrapped himself in the Ball of Purity, the Snake would be able to instantly know his location because of the heat sensing.

The Snake being able to see him wouldn’t matter if it did not know that Ozul was not some ordinary human. He stood at a little distance from the entrance, waiting for it to come back.

. . .

Half a day passed before he noticed the dense body of Mana moving towards him from the back of the cave entrance. A moment later, the giant slithering snake came into his view.

Looking from up close, Ozul noticed that it had visible scars on its body and a smal stone like smudge of black on its head which was very prominent on the bright red skin.

Ozul knew that it was the famous Fiery Snake, which had a very rare chance to grow to even reach the Rank-8, but this one before him was definitely around the middle stage of Rank-9!

The Snake immediately noticed the little human’s presence in front of its cave. However, there was no Mana, neither did he have any prominent weapon on him. So, it felt a little confused at first, but shortly after, it hissed all the same before shooting a giant ball of fire at him.

The Beast did not stay to look at the outcome of its casual attack since it did not doubt for a second that any ordinary human would ever be able to avoid death after being hit by that fire.

Just as the Snake had entered the cave, a giant but relatively smaller pitch-black spear was thrusted at its back.

Because of the distance, the Snake was able to react to the attack as it shot fire at the approaching projectile. Only, he did not expect that the spear wouldn’t be affected by the burning fire at all!

Even then, it tried its best to keep shooting the fire directly out of its mouth together with directing its Mana at the spear in an attempt to stop it. Unfortunately for the Snake, the spear was plunged straight into its body!

Still, the Beast was able to protect its vital organs, so the wound was deep, but not fatal.

“Human!” The Snake shouted as it was about to gather its Mana to shoot in the humans direction.

However, it was at that point when several spears of almost equal size to the earlier one shot at it from the above simultaneously!

The Snake did not even realize it until all of them pierced its body from all sides, and its body was pinned to the ground brutally.

Because of the fact that the Ozul did not require any Mana or other form of energy to control the Ball of Purity, the Snake wasn’t able to sense the lumps of it hidden at the entrance.

Not to mention that it was in the middle of its attack, the Snake was agitated because of the bleeding wound. Together with the fact that it was all so sudden, the Beast even with its superior intelligence, couldn’t help but succumb to death.

Just like that, Ozul took the Rank-9 Beast down under a few minutes!

Although the Snake occasionally writhed in anguish even after Ozul had cleanly sliced off its head, he ignored it and instead went inside the cave to see if the Beast had been keeping something inside or not.

Ozul did not find anything interesting inside except for the Snake’s shed skin. He stored all of that before going back outside and making his way towards the corpse.

He hadn’t read everything about every Beast and their anatomy, but the Magical Cores are usually at the centre of their chest area. But the Snake was too long and its center would be too down below.

So he had to cut it open a little and sense where the dense waves of Mana were leaking from. Fortunately, he did not have to make a mess out of the corpse because the Core was just below the head area which he had already cut open because of the decapitation.

After taking out the Core, Ozul did not notice any obvious difference in its appearance from the previous one that he had obtained from the Vulture.

Only, its color had more of a red hue than the white of Wind Element. Others wouldn’t have been able to notice, but its quality was indeed better than the Vulture’s which indicated that the Snake was really stronger than it.

Ozul put away his thoughts and wrapped the Core with the Ball of Purity before taking it inside of himself. Again, just as the Mana was absorbed, a burst of Mana was released from every pore of his skin.

He did not care to check his improvements this time and stored the corpse of the Snake Beast and moved away from the place.

Even if there was no commotion this time, alot of blood was spilled because of him poking holes at the Snake. The smell of that blood would definitely attract stray Beasts. And if one came here, the others would follow.

After he got to a safe distance from that area, Ozul decided to rest a little.

. . .

The next day, Ozul familiarized himself with the gains. Absorbing two Rank-9 Cores had greatly improved his body and his strength overall.

Even the peak-Middle stage Rank-9 Mages would be astounded at Ozul’s feat of being able to kill two Rank-9 Beasts in such a short amount of time.

Even with all their formations and plans, they have trouble to kill at least one of them.

Ozul had yet to realize the true worth of the two Rank-9 Corpses that he had with him. These were rare even in the treasury of the Rank-9 Mages!

And the only reason that he could kill them so easily was because of the fact that he did not have any Mana and the Beasts were ignorant of the general information among the humans.

Although he hadn’t given any chance to the Snake, the Vulture wouldn’t have died if it knew that the artifact to hide the Mana of such a high ranked Mage was just as rare because masking higher quality of Mana required more effort.

Meanwhile, if it had been any other Rank-9 Mage, they would have remained alert because a human had many tricks up their sleeves and their methods of attacking weren’t as simple and crude as the Beasts who had yet to learn battle strategies.

Even then, the Beasts were able to defend against most of the attacks from the Mages because they were more sensitive to the Mana which the latter used in their every attack. And that’s where the Beasts lost their advantage when put against Ozul who had no Mana at all.