I Became A Thief Who Steals Overpowered Skills - Chapter 76

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Episode 76. Only You Fall Behind

In the midst of flames consuming the carriage.

Krash was breathing hard, ragged and labored.

His breathing was a mess.

Bone and muscle screamed for rest, while his mind felt ready to scatter in the heat of the Melting Fire Erosion.

Despite possessing the Moon Sound Body, that heat refused to fade, and his body was urging him toward his limit.

“Hah… hah.”

With each exhaled breath, Krash’s head slowly lifted.

From the Dark Sword hanging at his side, a faint flame of black fire now burned—different from before.

Meanwhile, his opponent across from him remained unscathed.

The Armed Princess regarded Krash without any significant damage.

Truth be told, neither had landed a killing blow on the other.

For one thing, Krash’s attacks had done little real damage to the Armed Princess.

The gap in their realms was simply too wide.

Yet because Krash knew every one of her armaments, he had dodged her attacks with ruthless desperation to avoid taking a hit.

Thanks to his sixth sense—that premonition-like power he possessed—he had evaded every attack he could read coming.

But that very vigilance had left his body in worse condition still.

To dodge every one of her strikes, he had been forced to push the Melting Fire Erosion to its absolute limit, even as it scraped away at his own bones.

“All that talk about hidden techniques… and you were just bluffing the whole time.”

Watching Krash, the Armed Princess swung the Three Swords in broad arcs, her eyes flashing with sudden clarity.

“Kid, was it all just a façade?”

So she’d finally caught on.

“You punk, you’re not a World Erosion User, are you? You know all my armaments, so who the hell are you really? You’re wielding the power of World Erosion. Whose lapdog are you?”

The Armed Princess’s expression had shifted to one of pure irritation.

She had grown tired of facing Krash, who dodged everything she threw at him.

And the fact that he acted as though he knew her every armament was more than just offensive—it bordered on intolerable.

Krash stared at her for a long moment, then steadied his breathing and straightened his posture.

Then, without warning, he sheathed the Dark Sword back into the scabbard at his waist.

At that strange action, the Armed Princess furrowed her brow—and then Krash spoke.

“…Did you not hear what I said earlier?”

The Armed Princess’s brow twitched.

“Stop your whimpering.”

That was the end of it.

The Armed Princess placed her hand against her chest, as though she had no more patience for this exchange.

“I do care for the children on this side, you know.”

In that moment, she thrust her hand down her throat.

When she withdrew it, she held a Dagger in her grip.

The Armed Princess wiped the saliva from her lips, her eyes burning a sickly yellow.

“But you—there’s something off about you. My instinct tells me to kill you here.”

She was the one who had hesitated to kill Krash outright, afraid of Balok’s wrath.

But she had decided to put that aside now.

Krash was not a World Erosion User.

Yet he understood all of her Armaments.

Which meant one thing: she had to kill him before he became an even greater threat later.

Clink—

The moment she gripped the Dagger adorned with a bell-shaped pendant, the atmosphere in the carriage inverted in an instant.

The air that had been burning with black flames grew suddenly cold.

As though everything before had been mere play.

Her tiger-like eyes now revealed a killing intent unlike anything before.

Krash felt his breath catch in his throat.

Before him stood an enormous tiger.

A beast with fangs bared to slaughter its prey.

From that alone, it was easy to see that she had not been fighting with true intent until now—only testing his abilities.

‘The Thirteen Armaments.’

One of the thirteen Armaments to which the Armed Princess had personally assigned numbers.

The ninth Armament—the Hell Dragon Lord.

Knowing its nature well, Krash let out a hollow laugh even before it.

“Laughing?”

The Armed Princess’s eyes twisted at the sight.

From her reaction, it was clear she knew about his Thirteen Armaments.

What puzzled him was her composure in the face of it all.

“Shua Delpia.”

Krash called her by her full name once more.

“What else are you going to spout?”

Armed Princess bristled with annoyance, and Krash gave a casual shrug.

“Just calling it out.”
“What?”

There was no real meaning to it.

It was merely a last delay, nothing more.

Crack!

The floor finally succumbed to the heat, turning to ash and beginning to crumble.

Boom!

The walls were torn away en masse, scattering outward beyond the carriage.

Despite being inside the Demon Palace, a fierce wind from outside swept through, whipping Armed Princess’s hair about her face.

Her eyes widened as she grasped the reality of it.

The moment she leaped back to escape the crumbling floor, Krash did the same.

“You bastard, what are you doing!”
“What do you mean? Wood that touches fire burns—that’s natural.”

Krash spoke with utter nonchalance, but the carriage itself told a different story.

Everything inside it was succumbing to the heat of the black flames, disintegrating piece by piece.

Crackle-crackle-crackle-crack! Boom!

The pillars couldn’t withstand the heat, shattered, and the roof was torn clean away by the wind of the speeding carriage.

Clop, clop!

At the same time, the sound of hooves came from the front of the carriage, as if horses were galloping furiously.

Yet no horses were visible—only the Grassland rushing past between the torn sections of wall.

Stripped of everything in an instant, the carriage continued to be devoured by the black flames.

Armed Princess pressed herself against the wall, dodging the increasingly crumbling floor.

Watching the ground blur past, she felt just how fast the carriage was traveling.

But clinging to the wall offered no salvation.

The black flames were consuming the very wall she clung to as well.

“There’s something I should tell you.”

At that moment, Krash—pressed against the wall just as she was—finally spoke.

“Doors burned by Ignis don’t repair, for whatever reason.”
“What?”

The moment those words reached her, the Armed Princess’s head snapped up.

Her eyes darted frantically across the space around them.

And within moments, she understood.

Three of the four doors had been completely consumed by Ignis and vanished.

Of them, only a single door remained untouched.

The one door Krash now had his back against.

“No, no!”

For the first time, dismay colored her voice.

Her ears and tail stiffened as she grasped the danger of the moment.

The secret of Layer 8, which Belokin had stumbled upon through Ignis, was precisely this: carriages burned by Ignis could not be restored.

This was the Demon Palace, yet beyond its walls lay a grassland somewhere in the world.

The instant the carriage’s space shattered, anyone inside would be hurled beyond the grassland’s edge.

Belokin had seized upon this chance to fell Nakcheon and claim the Thunder Star.

“So now there’s only one door left?”

Sweat dripped down his face as Krash let out a laugh edged with provocation.

Thud!

In that instant, Krash drove his back against the last remaining door and thrust it open.

Every other exit had been burned to nothing.

And what did that mean?

If the Armed Princess didn’t follow Krash through that door immediately, she would be hurled away just as the roof had been.

Inside the carriage, which continued to burn, she felt her mind reeling.

Here she’d been, stubbornly deflecting his attacks—and for what?

All the while, he’d been deliberately burning down the carriage, working to unravel it.

He’d done it by needling her thoughts, keeping her attention fragmented, unable to focus on the carriage’s fate.

Her caution—meant to divine her opponent’s strategy—had become poison in an instant.

What she needed now, above all, was boldness.

The Armed Princess’s face flushed crimson.

The moment she understood that Krash had been toying with her, fury consumed every inch of her expression.

“You bastard! How dare you—how *dare* you mock me!”

As Krash stepped backward through the doorway,

she seized the Hell Dragon Lord in a reverse grip.

Thud!

In that instant, the Hell Dragon Lord plunged deep into her heart.

Then, in a blink—in a single breath—the crimson and jet-black of the Hell Dragon Lord coiled around her body.

The moment a flower that bloomed only in hell unfurled across her chest,

horns and a tail erupted from atop her head.

Simultaneously, limbs transformed draconic—legs and arms that wielded an overwhelming presence—laid bare.

Crack!

The moment her swollen thighs gathered every ounce of strength to their limit,

her entire body compressed into a single point and launched forward.

Crash-crash-crash-crash-crash-crash-crash!

The deafening boom followed an instant too late—the carriage, already ablaze, couldn’t endure the impact and shattered completely.

But for the Armed Princess, this was all that mattered.

She meant to punch straight through the doorway Krash had passed through and tear out his throat.

Wrapped in fury, her form twisted into something like a demon—she reached the entrance in an instant.

And there, Krash came into view.

As though he had been waiting for her arrival all along.

Krash stood in the Sudden Draw Technique’s stance, breathing softly, a storm churning within his scabbard.

In that briefest flicker of eye contact between them, the Armed Princess’s eyes widened enormously.

His mind, poised for her arrival since long before, had already transcended into the realm of Sword-Body Unity.

Shiver.

Feeling the power of World Erosion pouring from Krash reach dimensions beyond anything before, every hair on her body stood on end.

“You *bastaaaaard*!”

At the same moment, realizing too late that it was already over, she shrieked a curse and raked out her lengthened nails.

They would not reach.

She knew they would not reach.

That cursed face—she had to tear it to shreds, no matter what.

Yet he gave her no respite to vent her rage.

In the next instant, a dragon’s vortex bloomed within Krash’s mind, swallowing all the flames whole.

And that meant—

the completion of a single sword.

A resonant hum—

Melting Fire Erosion.

Second Form.

Melting Fire Heaven Sword.

Crack-crack-crack-crack-crack-crack-crack-crack-crack-crack!

A tempest of black flames erupted and tore through everything, raging across the carriage interior.

The entire eighth layer shook violently as that colossal storm shredded the carriage to ribbons, finally reaching the end of what had been the carriage quarters just moments before.

“Haah… haah.”

Before Krash’s gasping eyes—

the wall, torn to tatters by the Melting Fire Heaven Sword, left not a trace behind.

And there was no sign of the Armed Princess either.

Clop, clop—

Only the sound of hoofbeats echoed from beyond the grassland.

The Armed Princess was likely tumbling across the surface grassland now—some field that connected in a twisted way to the Demon Palace—her body rocked by the force of her fall.

‘There’s no way she died from just that, though.’

The Melting Fire Heaven Sword was Krash’s full power, but against the Armed Princess wielding all Thirteen Armaments, it wasn’t enough to deal a mortal wound.

By now, she was probably fine and spitting out every curse in her vocabulary.

Next time they met, she’d come for his blood with murderous intent.

Of course, when that time came, the outcome would be very different from today.

“…Before that happens, though, I’ll probably be dead.”

Muttering this, Krash simply collapsed onto the floor.

Both his spirit and body felt sluggish and worn, drained by the effort of fighting the Armed Princess and the toll of the Melting Fire Erosion.

‘I’m never walking this razor’s edge again if I can help it.’

Without the Thunder Star, he never would have attempted this.

A soft thud—

So you managed to do it.

In that moment, the sound of wings fluttered behind him.

When Krash turned his head, a jet-black raven perched there.

“Crimson Garden, what of Lacradion?”

The Armed Princess’s task was finished.

Now that she had vanished from this space, her fragments would have evaporated by now as well.

So when Krash asked, Crimson Garden made a sound of disapproval.

You’ll need to see for yourself.

It seemed an unwelcome situation had unfolded.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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