"I'll chop off your head!"
"Waaagh—!"
Lano roared, his eyes blazing bloodshot and veins bulging across his entire body.
The barbarian's frame suddenly swelled to nearly ten meters tall, every muscle sculpted like marble and radiating a primal, savage grace.
The tattoos carved across his flesh—a great bear on his back, a lion across his chest, and leopards along his legs—seemed to come alive, roaring and snarling in unison.
This was the legendary form of a berserker, the Primal Champion; his very existence embodied the raw power of the wilderness.
Lano had lost his family when he was still a child. A rival tribe had slaughtered his parents and wiped out his people, and in return he had exacted brutal vengeance, exterminating the enemies to the last soul. Afterward, he wandered aimlessly across the wastes until he met Dex Flamegold.
To him, every single member of Crimson Edge was as dear as blood kin.
And now, Grom was dead. Once again, he tasted the agonizing pain of loss.
Primal Path: Vengeance.
Lano hoisted his massive greataxe and leaped into the air. White steam hissed from every pore of his body as he vaulted hundreds of meters into the sky in a single bound.
Crimson Edge's years of tacit coordination proved true to form. The moment Lano launched into the heavens, a flurry of spells enveloped him—Greater Haste, Iron Flesh, Sanctuary, Draconic Might, Breath Ward, and more.
Across the surface of his towering, sculpted frame, ward after ward flickered to life, shimmering with multicolored magical auras.
"Die!"
Lano poured everything he had into swinging his greataxe toward the red dragon, the raw fury of the wilderness cascading downward like a deluge.
The bellow of a great bear, the roar of a tiger, and the howling of wolves erupted together. Phantasms of primeval beasts surged after the descending axe, throwing themselves in relentless waves toward the red dragon—emblems of the wild and incarnations of Lano's Primal Path.
"All this clutter..."
"Are you opening a zoo?"
Cassius gave a low growl and snapped his broad wings wide.
The presence of a progenitor dragon, no longer suppressed, flooded outward in waves of near-tangible draconic aura.
In an instant, terror filled the eyes of every primeval beast spirit. Whimpers choked their throats before they dissipated into nothingness.
*Clang!*
The sound of colliding steel and scales thundered across the sky.
With a casual sweep of his massive claws, Cassius swatted the greataxe and sent the giant barbarian behind it flying hundreds of meters backward.
Spiderweb fractures raced across the rune-engraved axe before it shattered outright into a shower of jagged metal shards—a rare, enchanted relic that Lano had personally recovered from the Feywild!
As a legendary berserker of the Primal Path, Lano's strength had reached the absolute peak of mortality. Converted into stat values, his raw score likely hit 27—an ungodly, titanic might by mortal standards.
Yet Cassius possessed a Strength score of 34.
Factoring in the disparity in colossal body size, the actual kinetic force between them differed by tens of times.
This was the purest display of overwhelming strength an atavistic red dragon could muster, devoid of finesse or trickery.
This same berserker, who had once wrestled hill giants bare-handed and choked a green dragon to death, was reduced to a helpless chick before Cassius, battered and toyed with without the slightest chance to resist.
"Lano!"
Flapping his wings, Dex rushed toward the red dragon's back, hoping to launch a sneak attack while creating an opening to shield his comrade.
Yet all he met was a wall of searing gale-force wind that sent him tumbling through the air as an immense silhouette streaked past.
In the blink of an eye, the red dragon had vanished from before him. Driven by a succession of deafening sonic booms, Cassius rocketed into the upper sky, appearing directly above Lano.
"No—!"
Dex reached out helplessly, tearing his throat in a despairing scream.
Lano was falling faceup at breakneck speed, yet there was not a trace of fear in his heart—only bitter fury gnawing at him over the clash he had just lost.
A Primal Champion possessed an extraordinarily resilient constitution. Even if he plunged from a cliff hundreds of meters high, he was confident he would survive with little more than a few broken bones, to say nothing of the defensive spells still shielding him.
*Damn it... next time, I'll carve his head clean off.*
Lano gritted his teeth in thought.
Suddenly, darkness swallowed his vision, and his expression instantly twisted.
The red dragon's massive silhouette loomed directly overhead, expansive wings blotting out every ray of sunlight.
Cassius looked down upon him, parting his jaws in a ferocious grin.
"Human."
"You know nothing... of true power."
The red dragon seized Lano's body effortlessly and climbed higher and higher.
"Curse you!"
"Red dragon! Let me go! I'll butcher you!"
The ten-meter-tall Primal Champion's eyes blazed crimson as he thrashed and writhed in midair.
Yet against the dragon's overwhelming might, all his struggles were pitifully futile. He could only watch in horror as they rose thousands of meters above the earth.
Then, Cassius tucked his wings in and plunged downward in a sheer dive, firmly gripping Lano's muscular frame as his tail trailed streaks of blazing fire.
Man and dragon plummeted faster and faster, hurtling toward the ground.
"Aaaargh—!"
A shrill shriek mingled with the howling noise of torn air.
At such terrifying velocity, the friction between Lano's back and the rushing atmosphere generated blistering, lethal heat. His toughened hide began to ignite and glow, charring black as his flesh slowly disintegrated.
At last, they struck the ground like a fallen meteor.
*Boom!*
A deafening crash shook the world.
A massive cloud of dust surged outward, and an explosive shockwave radiated from the point of impact, sweeping across the barren plains.
When the smoke cleared, a massive crater spanning a hundred meters across marred the earth, riddled with cobweb-like fissures.
*Roaaar!*
At the center of the crater, the red dragon stood tall and majestic. He flared his wings, raised his head, and let out a prolonged, reverberating roar.
Beneath his massive right talons, a charred, mangled heap of unrecognizable flesh hissed with white smoke, crackling as embers consumed it—the remnants of what was once the Primal Champion, the legendary barbarian Lano.
He was dead.
Even with a staggering Constitution of 24, Lano could not survive this cataclysmic display.
Cassius turned his head toward the surviving "dragon slayers," looking as though he had barely scratched an itch. He inclined his head with polite courtesy, held up three talons, and wiggled them gently.
The hair on the necks of the three remaining members of Crimson Edge stood on end.
This was no clash between an evil dragon and heroic dragon slayers; this was an apex predator toying with defenseless prey, and they were the prey.
Every one of them understood the red dragon's gesture: *Three left.*
"How could this happen...?"
"We were supposed to be heroes..."
Dex stared at Lano's broken, charred remains, his eyes drowning in despair.
He had never imagined that after an earth-shattering battle against "Silver Wing" Oszedro, the red dragon could still possess such terrifying power.
This "Dragon Prince" had even sniffed out their hiding place, hunting them down like a cat toying with mice—snatching them up, mocking them, and slaughtering them one by one.
Never in his life as a "dragon slayer" had he witnessed a dragon like this.
Chapter 336