Sam wasted no time in attacking, plummeting from the skies towards the massive beast. At this point, his mastery over teleportation was akin to actual flight, his E Rank powers able to keep his perception at a speed far beyond gravity. Within the span of a single moment, he was poised above the monster, ready to strike. Rather than like the others, the dragon shifted out of the way of Sam’s strike, its body rippling like water. His hammer passed by it with meters of separation, and the creature let out a low noise that sounded faintly like mocking laughter.
The whirlpool started to speed up, waves as sharp and hard as razors beginning to circle its depths. With a series of hisses, the waves shot up from the frothing waters, and towards Sam. There were thousands of them, each as large as a small car. Their edges glinted in the light, and as they ascended, they stopped moving, becoming as implacable as diamond. Sam watched out of the corner of his eyes, and he teleported again, further down the monster’s body. He suspected, or at least hoped, that it would be unable to move its largest segments as easily as its head.
The monster gurgled, and suddenly, spikes of stygian water exploded from its body, spearing towards Sam’s body faster than he could think. But not faster than he could react. His body was already moving as they approached, and rather than impale him through the chinks in his armor, the spears of water, skittered off the thicker plates of Terra’s Shield. The dark metal of the armor was scratched, but unbroken.
The spears of water receded into the beast’s body, and suddenly, it collapsed in on itself, flesh and scales turning into pure elemental power. The monster’s head appeared where its belly had been a moment later, and chomped at the air, its teeth extending towards him.
Sam sent a bolt of the Dao screaming down its throat, but the monster simply opened up an aperture on the back of its body, letting the attack whistle straight through. With a curse, Sam was forced to teleport. Whatever this beast was, its level of elemental attunement was far higher than the other three monsters had been. Though, that was to be expected, given its superior bloodline.
He rose up about a mile into the sky, gathering power into his weapon. The only way to deal with a threat like this was to attack it with something too large for it to dodge. Terra’s Will rose up above his head, growing exponentially. By the time it was many times his height in length, it had already begun to crackle with the light of his Dao. Red and blue flames seared the air around the weapon, and a mantle of pure blue surrounded that, his purified mana adding an extra bit of lethality to the entire construct.
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He slammed tens of thousands of points of his mana reserves into the weapon, until it glowed like a comet. Then he brought it crashing down, using it as a focal point for an almighty beam of concentrated energy. It streaked down towards the ocean far below, a shockwave rippling through the air around Sam, blasting the clouds apart.
He was suspended there by the strength of his technique, and could only watch as it streaked towards the drake far below. The monster opened its mouth wide, and the whirlpool beneath churned mightily, sending entire rivers worth of water coursing into its body. The beast swelled until it was larger than a small town, and then disgorged a beam of compressed water towards Sam’s strike. A halo of elemental energy surrounded it, corralling it into a smaller form. It reminded Sam of the attack the Flood Titan had used against his city months ago, condensing an entire lake’s worth of water into a pencil sized beam, lending it immense strength. It had drilled straight through the city’s shielding, and yet, was far weaker than the beam leveled by the drake.
Rage of a World Unbound hammered into the water, and found a wall in its place. The entirety of the Water elemental power surrounding the tightly packed beam condensed and then surged up the length of the thin stream, impacting Sam’s skill like a bullet.
For the first time, Sam saw his Primal skill bending before the might of the monster’s technique. The water raged against the concentrated beam of Dao energy, bringing the Dao of the drake itself to the table. A powerful Dao Seed of the second stage, as were most that Sam found himself fighting in the tower, was brought to bear, and a spectral manifestation of a crashing wave formed behind the nexus point of the two techniques, lending it even greater power.
Sam roared, and pressed down with his will, draining his Dao Seed of its power. A titanic suit of armor formed behind him, crafted from plates of red and blue. It raised one gauntleted hand, and pointed at the drake. A wave of force was released, empowering the conceptual nature of Sam’s skill. With a thundercrack, the wave icon broke before Sam’s skill, and the titanic ray of destruction evaporated the suddenly mundane stream of water.
The drake was engulfed by the finger of doom pointing from the heavens, slamming into the center of the whirlpool. There was a titanic boom, and the maelstrom exploded from the inside, a tidal wave expanding out from the epicenter. The swirling waters were forcibly evaporated, along with the drake that called them home.
A depression formed in the water below, the evaporation rate faster than gravity's ability to bring the seas crashing back together. Sam watched from above as the steam cleared, to see a massively shrunken monster pressed into the sea bed miles below, its form stunted. Tendrils of water tried to reach it from the encroaching walls of water on either side, but at the time scales Sam was operating at, the pace was glacial.
