Chapter 180: Fang III

The Collector broke through to the outside of the mountain in quick order, emerging from the face of the mountain in a shockwave that scattered out rock and ice. It flew high in the air, immediately gearing its senses high to perceive where the Fang specimen had went.

The Collector's sensitive hairs immediately triggered, and it registered an attack rapidly approaching it from behind it. From the speed and dimensions of the attack, it determined that it was another beam of ice. It performed the absolute minimal amount of movement required to dodge, swerving just a meter to the side as the beam arced past it, shooting forward far into the distance at high speeds, almost into the horizon, before exploding outwards in a nova of bright blue that quickly turned into an enormous sphere of giant ice crystals.

The beams were easy to avoid, but their area of effect was great and their damage and scale was severe enough that even one shot was likely going to be an incapacitating one.

"Stay still and freeze!" screamed the Fang specimen.

The Collector turned to her direction. She was floating in the air above the Collector, her rapidly rotating sphere of icy white mana still encasing her in an absolute defense. She started to charge up multiple ice beams, a sphere of pale blue forming at either hand, one in front of her open mouth, and one at her tail.

A total of four beams shot forth, and the Collector jetted through the air, dodging past them. They shot far behind the Collector, some creating huge ice formations in the air, some crashing against the surface of the mountains and creating giant ridges of frost-wreathed ice.

The Collector retaliated with projectiles of its own, shooting out a volley of purifying light shards from its chest orb while rapidly flying around the Fang specimen. The Collector was faster than the Fang specimen, capable of out-maneuvering her in the air, but her defense was powerful.

The purifying light shards, when they passed through her barrier, froze over, dimming and negating their destructive light and turning them brittle. When they hit the Fang specimen's scales, the shards shattered apart without dealing damage.

The Fang specimen turned around again and again, trying to keep up with the Collector's erratic and fast movements.

"Running and running and running!" The Fang specimen shouted in frustration. She clasped her hands together, the scales of her palms clacking together in impact, and she gnashed her teeth. Her blue aura surged around her sphere of icy white, forming into spikes of ice.

Over a hundred spikes of ice created all around her.

"Run from this!" said the Fang as she sent the spikes flying all around her, in every single direction, and it was not just one volley. She continuously refreshed the volleys over and over again, creating a veritable rain of ice spikes traveling far past the speed of sound.

The volleys were fired in such frequency that they seemed to merge together, completely clouding the sky and creating a near unbroken wave of projectiles. This was unavoidable by all means, though the ice shards were not nearly as deadly as the beams.

The Collector sheathed its four arms in a casing of magical energy as the fighter specimen known as 'Kui' did, and replicated the fighter's deflections. At hyperspeed, the Collector parried and deflected every single ice shard sent its way, its four arms moving at blurring speeds.

Shard after shard after shard of ice came to the Collector, and all of them deflected behind it. Even so, the torrent of icicles was such that the Collector was gradually forced backwards, focused entirely on deflecting.

The torrent also drove the Collector downwards, eventually driving it to the ground to one spot where it continued to deflect.

The Fang specimen was utilizing enormous amounts of magical energy, and inefficiently at that. She had to run out of mana at some point, but the Collector also knew that relying on a strategy of attrition when it itself was running now at 13% magical energy reserves was not advisable.

For now, the Collector stalled for the fighter known as 'Kui'.

The rain of shards stopped once the Collector was several hundred meters away from the specimen. When it ended, the entire landscape had changed. The mountain lands all around the Collector were completely and utterly studded with spikes of ice.

The only space untouched by the spikes was a neat three meter by three meter circle around the Collector's deflection zone.

The Fang specimen's mana surged again, reaching critical levels far surpassing anything she had outputted so far. Her dorsal fin was glowing with energy, and pale blue magical energy was crackling and swirling around her open mouth.

She was not without strategy after all. She had simply made distance to charge up a stronger attack against the Collector.

Was this the Eye of the Storm ability of the draconids?

No, something far more. That ability had been merged with the Old God's ice generating abilities, and the sheer scale of it was incomparable to anything that the Collector had witnessed from weakling draconid specimens that it had encountered prior.

"Run from this!" The Fang draconid's voice screeched through the air as she unleashed her breath attack.

A wide range beam of blue headed down to the Collector in a crashing wave so massive it was comparable to a tsunami.

The sheer volume of the breath attack must have easily been comparable to the scale of a localized natural disaster, and its respectable speed of delivery meant that the Collector would not be able to dodge this attack simply by flying upwards.

The wave of blue crashed into the Collector like an avalanche and spilled all around it, splashing upwards in a sky-reaching formation extending upwards a hundred meters in a few seconds.

Then, the blue energy stabilized, transmuting into pure ice that was of a far bluer shade than the ice around it, emitting a freezing aura that ensured that anything kept within the boundaries of its chilling embrace would have no chance of escaping.

Within the scope of a single attack, the Fang draconid specimen had created an entirely new natural landmark. A whole glacier formation stacked atop the surface of a mountain.