Hard Carried by My Sword

Chapter 266

Leon took a single step forward and blasted Icarus Wing at full power from his back. With a crashing sound, the sound barrier shattered as he shot into the sky.

The size difference between him and Cerberus was overwhelming; staying on the ground was only going to get him crushed. Between striking from above or striking from below, there was no question which gave the advantage.

Facing a beast straight out of a mythical story, Leon felt time stretch thin. Every color drained to black and white, and even the sounds reaching his ears broke apart into slow, segmented fragments. He was in a world where even arrows would seem to crawl like worms.

But even in that stretched-out moment, Cerberus’s eyes moved just as they would normally, tracking the exact angle from which Leon approached. One massive forepaw was already raised, ready to swat him out of the sky at any moment.

His reaction speed is absurdly fast. If I charge in like this, it’ll kill me in one shot, Leon thought.

Cold sweat trailed down his spine. The hair peeled back by the wind resistance sent a chill up his ears.

Leon met that fear head-on and immediately found his escape. He couldn’t slow down. He couldn’t retreat.

If his speed diminished in the slightest, that forepaw would crush him. Even if he blocked or deflected it, the damage would be massive. Allowing the monster—whose raw strength and durability far surpassed a human’s—to land the first blow would be fatal. So, there was only one path forward.

Super speed cornering!

He wasn’t falling back. He wasn’t slowing down. He was going to push forward and carve a path straight through.

Leon’s eyes flashed with resolve. And then, with another explosion, one wing of Icarus Wing suddenly vanished, while the opposite wing ballooned to more than twice its size. The propulsion that normally pushed him evenly from both sides lurched violently toward one direction, and the straight line of his charge twisted hard.

At a swallow’s speed and with its agility, he snapped into a sharp turn, cutting across the air in a chaotic zigzag. Even Cerberus, watching from three directions at once, had trouble following his trajectory.

Now!

Leon narrowly avoided the descending paw and drove his sword into the opening of that instant. Golden Aura surged along the blade of the Holy Sword. El-Cid’s training assignment was shoved into the back of his mind.

This was not the time to hold back. Fight Cerberus while limiting his strength? That was practically suicide.

“Grand Chariot, Heavenly Jade, Second Form: Merak.”

A streak of swordlight slammed into Cerberus’s nape. The violent impact rang out as the attack bounced off, and Leon’s expression hardened.

It wasn’t that the attack did nothing. Through the Stigma of the Observer, he could see a faint wound. There was the smallest split of skin where the blow had landed.

“It took Merak head-on, and that’s all the damage...?” he muttered in disbelief.

He hadn’t expected to sever the neck in one strike, but cutting nothing more than a layer of skin was shocking.

As Leon cut through the air behind Cerberus and flipped his stance, the three heads turned in unison and spewed fire—a deep violet flame—straight at him. Leon started to dive through, trusting in the fire-resistance of his cloak, but a sudden unease forced him to blink.

There’s no heat.

This wasn’t fire produced by combustion. El-Cid immediately grasped the truth.

—Dodge it, dummy! That flame burns the soul!

There was no way ordinary fire existed in a Nether dimension, where life and death were blurred, and heat and cold had no meaning. What looked like flame was merely similar in shape. Its nature was fundamentally different.

“Tch, my cloak...!”

Leon twisted out of the way of the three converging blasts. The edges of his cloak, grazed by the violet flames, crumbled into black dust, though its functionality remained intact.

Even a high-tier artifact couldn’t fully resist that ability. Leon didn’t even want to imagine what would have happened if a living body were engulfed by it.

—It bypasses physical defense completely. Block with the Holy Sword or burn your Aura to counter it.

“That’s a real pain,” Leon muttered in annoyance.

The Nether Valley’s nature already prevented him from using the Stigma of the Guardian. Now, he had to consume Aura just to defend himself. Leon was facing an opponent with terrible compatibility.

A direct hit meant severe injury or instant death. Even blocking drained his energy drastically. In a prolonged fight, that burden was enormous. Even so, Leon didn’t hesitate for even a heartbeat as he dove toward Cerberus.

“But it’s not like this is my first time fighting with a disadvantage!”

It had been the same against Nephren-Ka, and the same against the Death King. If he went in timidly just because the power gap was massive, he’d never get even a sliver of victory. The weak must never miss the moment to struggle for a win.

Despite overpowering Leon in every measurable way, Cerberus snarled in irritation as he approached, sulfuric fumes spilling from its three jaws. Just like the legends that placed the Netherworld deep below the earth, its monsters often shared traits with subterranean minerals. Cerberus, the hound of the underworld, was no exception. freēwēbηovel.c૦m

Even standing on all fours, its heads soared twenty meters above the ground. Every pore across its massive body flared open.

And then, from each widened opening—bigger than a human finger—spilled thick, black, reeking vapor, like concentrated smoke.

Phosphorus. Normally combustible and poisonous, though black phosphorous was less volatile than white. However, refined and intensified within Cerberus’s body, it was dozens of times more potent.

The moment it mingled with the Nether Valley’s mist, the phosphorus ignited and seized control of the surrounding space. The temperature surged instantly, heat distortion rippling across the air.

“It’s trying to restrict my movement, huh?”

Leon clicked his tongue. He’d expected a mythic monster to be intelligent, but to deploy a counterstrategy the moment it lost track of him? He couldn’t just wait to see what would happen next. He had to stop the spread of the phosphorus before it boxed him in. Before diving in, he unleashed a beam of swordlight.

“Sun Sword, Crimson Lotus, First Form: Prominence.”

A thick pillar of golden flame raced along the sword’s path and erased every trace of phosphorus that blocked his way, carving open a wide corridor. With a blazing sword flame more than thirty meters long, Leon gripped the hilt and charged straight through.

This time, I’m cutting you properly.

Using only Grand Chariot couldn’t leave more than a flesh wound. He had to chain his techniques or use Grand Chariot in combination with the Sun Sword to maximize his output in order to overpower Cerberus’s monstrous durability.

Cerberus seemed to sense that determination. All three heads roared at once, and a three-layered shockwave detonated outward, shaking the Icarus Wing.

It wasn’t just a sound attack. The roar distorted the very waves of force, and any creature of low caliber would have its internal mana flow disrupted outright. Someone at Leon’s level—an Aura Master—would only stiffen for an instant, but even that was enough for Cerberus to exploit.

“Dammit...!” Leon muttered as exactly that happened.

Cerberus was the kind of monster that could turn a split-second pause into a killing blow. During the fraction of a second Leon stalled midair, the beast’s massive forepaw came crashing toward him with terrifying force.

There was no time to dodge. Sensing it instinctively, Leon clenched his teeth.

“Sun Sword, Crimson Lotus, Second Form: Flare.”

If he couldn’t evade, then he had to meet the blow head-on. He drew up the power surging within him like lava and struck toward the descending wall of pressure that felt as heavy as a collapsing sky.

The Holy Sword, now a mass of blazing fire, collided with Cerberus’s forepaw. The recoil blasted Leon out of the air and slammed him once into the ground before he sprang back up immediately.

A heartbeat later, Cerberus’s opposite forepaw slammed down where he’d been, gouging out a crater wider than a small pond. Regaining altitude with Icarus Wing, Leon closed in again, studying the beast, specifically the forepaw he’d just clashed with.

Barely a mark. So the forepaws it uses to attack are even tougher than the rest? I hit it with Flare, and it only singed the skin...

In truth, everything except the heads seemed to lack exploitable weak points. Unlike the skull, whose outline was visible even through the hide, the rest of Cerberus’s body was absurdly sturdy. Layers of hide, muscle, and bone several meters thick shielded its torso.

Even if Leon used Corona to enhance himself and unleashed a slash of chained techniques, he doubted he’d cut through in a single stroke. Which meant the only real targets were Cerberus’s three heads.

Leon tore through the burning phosphorus with Icarus Wing and dodged the thunderous strikes raining from above. One exchange had already taught him the truth: this wasn’t the kind of force he could redirect with finesse.

“Urgh?!”

A wildly sweeping tail grazed past him, and the flames coiling around it severed a few strands of his hair. A little deeper, and his head would’ve been gone.

Soul-burning fire. And he couldn’t continuously defend himself with Aura either.

El-Cid snapped, —Running around like this isn’t going to open a path, you know?

“I know that!”

Shouting back at El-Cid, Leon continued ducking around the patterns he had begun to recognize from Cerberus’s forepaw strikes. For its size, Cerberus was absurdly fast, but it was still a monster. The movement of its joints revealed broad attack trajectories, which was an inherent flaw of massive creatures.

However, with three heads watching in different directions, even a slower reaction speed allowed Cerberus to easily track Leon’s movements.

“Tch! It’s got zero blind spots! I can’t find a single opening!”

Leon could push Icarus Wing to its absolute limit and outpace its reactions, but then he'd only last ten minutes at best. With reduced recovery inside the Nether Valley, such extremes were too risky. So, he only had one option.

“Sun Sword.”

Leon’s body erupted with blinding radiance as he jumped instantly to maximum output. Even Cerberus flinched, all three heads instinctively turning toward the brilliant glare.

It didn’t matter what attack Leon used. As long as it wasn’t caught off guard, it could win.

Cerberus’s conviction was entirely correct. However, what it did not expect was that Leon understood that too.

“Got you.”

“Gwok?!”

At some point, Leon had appeared atop the central head, sword raised high. The earlier flash had been nothing more than misdirection. He’d dumped a massive portion of his Aura into empty air, reducing his reserves by nearly a tenth in mere seconds, but there was no other way to create an opening against such a monster.

Cerberus finally realized Leon’s position and tried to twist its head, but Leon’s decisive strike activated before it could move: the five-sequence chained technique of the Grand Chariot, the very same radiance that had crushed the Apocalypse Serpent.

“Grand Chariot,”

One thrust to pin the target. Two slashes to bind it in place.

Three Stars in Heaven’s Jar had always been only the beginning. The true killing trajectory came after.

“Heavenly Authority, Fourth Form: Megrez.”

A slanted slash drew a sweeping arc, linking together three strokes and expanding them into a massive, three-dimensional tetrahedron. Under that crushing force of the Four Stars of Vast Heavens, Cerberus’s central head bowed, its four legs sinking deep into the ground as if pinned by gravity itself.

Even so, its resistance was ferocious. The neck muscles swelled grotesquely, bulging against the crushing weight, cords of strained flesh twitching violently. It was enduring not merely one secret technique, but four in succession, through brute force alone. Leon rotated the sword, as if paying respect to that stubborn endurance.

Even Mizar might not break through this...

But he quickly severed the hesitation. Resolve hardened within him; his entire vascular system ignited with heat, and an irresistible amount of power surged through him. He had activated Corona, the amplifying secret technique of the Sun Sword.

If he had used it from the start, he would have fainted the moment he reached the fifth strike. But strengthening just the final blow—that he could survive.

The Holy Sword shifted from gold to platinum. Once, twice, three times, the tetrahedron driven into Cerberus’s skull spun faster and faster, boring into the bone until it finally punched through, spraying blood. Or maybe it was brain matter—Leon wasn’t sure—but it splattered in all directions.

He didn’t loosen his grip for even a second. If he didn’t grind it down completely, he couldn’t count on the kill.

“Five Star Chariot.”

The swordlight, shaped now into a rotating cylinder, shredded Cerberus’s central head into fragments. It had taken dozens of seconds to pierce flesh and hide far thinner than its torso. If he had aimed for its heart, he would have run out of Aura long before reaching it.

“Huff...! Hah...! Huff...!”

Panting raggedly after emptying himself into the final strike, Leon nonetheless sprang back, ready for retaliation. Cerberus had three heads. Destroying one wouldn’t kill it.

And indeed, with a low growl, it stood firm despite the obliterated center head. The nether beast glared at him with its remaining four eyes burning with malice.

And then, a deep voice echoed inside Leon’s mind.

—Hmm. That should be enough.