But noticing something is one thing; whether you can escape it is another.
The gap between their speed and that of the Red Dragon was far too great. Watching the enemy in the sky behind them rapidly draw closer, the centaur chieftain had just prepared to let out a shrill roar, ordering his tribe to scatter—whoever could run, ran.
But before his order could be issued, deadly azure Missiles began to fall like a torrential downpour.
"Thud! Thud! Thud!"
Each Missile was like a heavy shell, carving a brilliant arc through the air before slamming into the ground.
To be precise, they smashed into the bodies of the centaurs.
Those azure Magic Missiles trailed dazzling tailflames as they descended from the heavens, each one striking its target with Precision.
If someone on the scene had tried to keep count, they would have discovered that not a single Missile missed; every Missile launched completed its kill on a target while both sides were moving at high speed.
The centaurs that were hit let out piercing, miserable screams.
Their tough muscles, in the face of that pure and overwhelming Magic Power, were as fragile as paper. With the sound of bones shattering, they pitched forward, their forward momentum sending their out-of-control bodies plowing deep furrows into the grassland. Blood foam gushed from their mouths, and their four legs spasmed and thrashed uncontrollably against the ground.
Even the chieftain of the centaur tribe—that male centaur with reddish-brown hair and a shoulder height of over two meters—could not escape the Magic Missiles that rained down like the tears of death itself.
His four hooves were pounding at full tilt, his body undulating over the prairie like a streak of scarlet lightning.
But the pressure behind him only grew closer, heavier.
Feeling that mortal threat, he dug his ankles into the earth and shifted his center of gravity sharply to one side, attempting to use a sudden turn to shake off the danger rapidly closing in behind him.
One could see that streak of scarlet lightning that was his body suddenly veer in another direction.
Yet, even after he completed the abrupt turn, the threat behind him did not vanish.
On the contrary, it was still rapidly closing in!
"Boom!"
The Missile was not going to halt its flight just because of the flicker of astonishment in his heart. Like an arrow falling from the heavens, it pierced straight through his body, instantly shredding and destroying the muscle groups that controlled his forelegs.
Unable to maintain his balance, he immediately lost control mid-gallop, his entire body plowing a deep gouge into the earth like a fired shell.
In the sky above, the Red Dragon slowly descended.
Gauss looked over the centaurs below, most either already dead or grievously wounded and unable to move. He casually flicked out a dozen clumps of clay; the instant they left his palm, they solidified in midair, and a dozen clay goblins dropped to the ground like "beans cast to become soldiers."
These clay constructs would swiftly finish off any centaurs on the ground who still had a breath left.
After completing the kill, they would dissect the corpses of these Demons on the spot, extracting the materials Gauss needed.
If even the bodies of bottom-rung Demons like goblins could yield valuable materials, all the more so for centaurs.
As for the centaur remains left after the materials were harvested—such as the centaur chieftain and those other Elite Level centaurs—they could still be fed to the Red Dragon Hephaestus; not a bit of it would go to waste.
After all, flying consumed a fair amount of energy for Hephaestus. So long as the toxins contained in Demon flesh and blood could be ignored, the energy and nutrition they provided were quite considerable.
As a Red Dragon Beast, Hephaestus possessed the body of a Giant Dragon; digesting a few Demons was naturally nothing to him.
In fact, with the purple-quality Talent [Feast] he now possessed, Gauss wouldn’t suffer many side effects even if he ate Demon flesh and blood raw.
It was just that his long-standing human habits still inclined him to light a fire and cook Demon meat before eating it.
Besides, he was picky about what kinds of Demons he ate. Stuff like goblins and Kobolds—he just couldn’t bring himself to put those in his mouth. As for centaurs, after thinking it over, he decided to pass as well.
The main thing was that their upper bodies still retained a form very close to human.
He had a mental block about that, and if he remembered correctly, once prions worsened, the fatality rate was one hundred percent. Though he had no idea how much human blood ran in a centaur’s veins, he still felt there was no need to gamble.
The Demons he chose as food were mostly those that overlapped with what humans would eat.
Things like crabs, cattle, frogs, and the like.
Of course, if that first meeting with Hephaestus counted—when he’d taken a raw bite out of him—then he had technically eaten dragon as well.
Unfortunately, at the time he’d been in a state of extreme power output and hadn’t had the leisure to savor the taste of dragon meat.
Thinking of this, he turned his head to glance at Hephaestus, who had already started eating.
The dragon didn’t seem to have any aversion to centaur flesh. Perhaps because he’d never eaten it before, he was devouring it with relish.
But suddenly, a cold wind blew over him, and his whole body shuddered.
As if some sixth sense had been triggered, he turned his head to look behind him. Gauss was standing in the distance with his arms crossed, watching him.
"Roar~"
For some reason, his heart clenched, and his blood-smeared maw slowly curved into a strangely human expression.
Maybe from spending so much time around people, he’d learned to mimic a few human facial expressions.
"Forget it."
Gauss shook his head.
Given Hephaestus’s size and Life Force, slicing off a few chunks of meat wouldn’t cause him much harm—but since the dragon had already pledged himself to Gauss, there was no need to eye him like that. Otherwise, it would be a bit too tragic.
Besides, Hephaestus was hardly the only dragon in this world.
As if their hearts were linked, Hephaestus let out a quiet sigh of relief the moment Gauss changed his mind.