Drael felt as if an angel of salvation had appeared when he heard that voice. His face showed an unexpected joy, and he even let out a sigh of relief.
He was leaning against a cracked stone knee, his breathing still unsteady, but when he saw Daniel descending from the sky like a calm savior, his eyes filled with a sense of redemption.
A childlike smile appeared on his lips, genuine and from the heart. For a brief moment, all his fear faded away. He took a deep breath, and for the first time, he felt like life still existed.
For a moment, he had truly been terrified, afraid that he might die before getting his revenge. It wasn’t death itself that scared him, but the thought of dying before killing those bastards.
Daniel ignored him, only glancing once to make sure he was alive and not close to dying.
Then his eyes turned forward, to the strange blood-red mist and the darkness beyond it. His brows furrowed. For some reason, that thing gave him a bad feeling... no, it wasn’t fear, it felt familiar.
A cold, sharp line appeared on his forehead as he spread his spiritual sense. But what he saw within that blood mist made him feel tired for a moment.
Aside from the monsters already surrounding them, there were countless more inside that bloody mist. In fact, it looked like the mist itself was spawning those monsters.
Suddenly, from deep inside the mist came a violent sound, the chaotic roar of thousands of wings, something massive rushing toward them.
At first, he only thought there were a lot of them, but soon he realized that "a lot" was an understatement. They came like a blood-red ocean rising through the air, waves upon waves of countless creatures charging toward them.
Even the monsters that had been outside the mist now stirred, preparing for battle, attacking Daniel with no order, no formation, just pure frenzy.
The faces of the first wave were beyond words. Their skin looked like cracked marble fused with fresh flesh. Their eyes had no whites, only veins of blood, and within them, a cold flame flickered.
Their mouths weren’t just lips and teeth, they were plates of jagged bone pushing out through torn skin. Each time they opened them, a high-pitched shriek echoed, like the wail of a collapsing army.
Some of them even had human faces. But those faces showed no emotion, no fear, regret, or hatred. It was as if those faces didn’t even belong to the monsters themselves.
When they screamed, it was like a storm shaking the mountains. Millions of bloody wings turned the wind into waves that made the ground tremble, the stones hum, and the blood veins running through the peaks pulse harder.
The battle started in an instant. The monsters attacked in swarms, some dove from above, some moved in sharp lines like streaks of shadow, and others dashed through the mist to appear from unexpected directions.
Another screamed, and the ground cracked open like a living page; each fracture pulsed, birthing another monster.
Some of them spun bone tentacles around their limbs like whirling blades, and every strike they landed on the stone created waves of blood that caused new growths to sprout from the ground.
The wings of others were so rough and hard that each flap scraped layers of rock off the cliffs, scattering bloody dust into the air, dust that, upon landing, turned into fragments of living creatures.
The ground beneath Daniel began to shake. The pounding of their feet echoed like the drums of a living coffin, coming from all directions. The mountains themselves screamed, but Daniel stood calmly, his expression showing nothing but mild irritation.
Unfortunately for them, even though there were many, the strength of most was only at mid-rank A. With that level of power, they could at best make him sweat a little.
He moved, swinging The Heavens Honor with practiced ease. The white aura extended, forming a second blade of pure light in the air.
His first strike sent a wave of rippling white energy forward. Three monsters within its range were sliced in half, not torn apart, but silently evaporated in midair, turning piece by piece into glowing red dust.
Their blood spun in the air and fell, but those same droplets sprouted again moments later somewhere else.
He stepped forward again, condensing the aura of death around him. The Law of Death spread like a wave of silent cold, and every living force within range felt it. The monsters could literally smell death.
Strike after strike came at them, and they couldn’t even get close to him.
They were cut down, dissolved, vanished, but from within the mist, new sounds emerged, the sound of more monsters growing. Wherever one died, the ground boiled and birthed another.
No matter how many he killed, more appeared, sometimes even more than before.
Daniel’s face remained calm but cold. He raised his sword higher and struck again, this time combining his aura with the Law of Death.
Each time he swung, the reflection of death spread outward, burning the link between blood and stone.
The energy of death condensed into a white thread along his blade, and wherever it passed, life itself stopped.
No one knew how much time had passed, but Daniel stood among piles of corpses, still cutting, still moving, breaking the cycle of creation wherever he could.
Suddenly, a vortex of blood formed in the sky, created from the corpses of all the monsters he had slain. In its center, new creatures were being born. In an instant, their numbers tripled.
"What the hell is this? How was this even made?" Even Daniel was caught off guard for a moment.
Without hesitation, he decided to cut through it using the full power of his death aura. As his blade sliced through the vortex, the pressure of the blood wind pushed him back slightly, but he held his ground.
He attacked again, tearing it apart bit by bit, using all his mana to seal it off completely if possible.
In a few minutes, he had slaughtered hundreds, then thousands more. But new ones kept appearing. The blood veins leading toward the mountain peaks grew more active with each battle, pulsing like living arteries.
Daniel finally stopped and ascended, flying back to where he had created a protective barrier so the monsters couldn’t enter. Drael was hiding safely within it.
Daniel sighed, his gaze shifting toward the bloody ridges, the cursed peaks feeding on blood to endlessly create new monsters from earth, stone, and whatever else they could consume.
"As long as the source isn’t destroyed, killing them is pointless," Drael said, watching him return.
He had seen the whole fight with his own eyes. The sheer number of monsters was insane. Yet no matter how many there were, that man slaughtered them all without breaking a sweat.
Drael was starting to doubt whether Daniel was even human.
"Killing them is useless. Every time one dies, three more appear," Drael said grimly.
"If this keeps going, we’ll lose. My mana and yours aren’t infinite. Either we run, which makes no sense since they’ve surrounded us completely, or we go for the source. We have to cut those veins, we have to destroy the arteries above the peaks."
"I feel like this mountain range either has a will of its own or something else is controlling it," Drael added. "It’s clearly trying to kill us."
Daniel nodded. He agreed. No matter how many he killed, it never ended. He had already reached mid-rank A just from the battle alone.
The number didn’t bother him, the endless regeneration did.
Escaping wasn’t an option either. They were surrounded on all sides, and both of their mana reserves were heavily drained.
"We have no choice. We’re heading for the peaks. We’ll destroy the blood veins."
He had made his decision. Even though he could feel the horror waiting at those peaks, there was no other path forward.