The Strongest in Our Neighborhood - Chapter 74

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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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Our Neighborhood’s Strongest (74)
‘Damn it! A Duke-rank demon!’
Noxscasarsis flinched in shock as his breath exploded in a shower of petals and dissipated.
Even though the space had transformed into that of the Demon Realm, a dragon’s breath carried Destruction-rank destructive force.
Impossibly, the petals this demon had hurled possessed that same Destruction-rank power.
Shwoooosh…….
As the naked man moved his hand, a petal the size of an ogre shot forward at terrifying speed.
‘Absolute Shield!’
In his haste to manifest a shield, a formidable barrier materialized—one powerful enough to withstand Composition-rank magic power.
Boom.
But the moment the barrier collided with the petal, it shattered instantly, and a fragment of the petal grazed his throat as it passed.
Noxscasarsis noticed that the scales wrapping his neck had been severed, along with the skin beneath.
‘Every bit as strong as my breath! I’ve heard that Duke-rank demons are formidable, but this…!’
Now he understood why even an Ancient-grade dragon couldn’t face a Duke-rank demon alone.
Shwoooosh…….
As the man moved his hand again, this time two petals came flying.
‘Only breath can stop them…….’
But regrettably, breath couldn’t be unleashed in rapid succession without pause.
For now, he countered with Composition-rank Lightning Magic, striking at the petals, but he couldn’t shield himself from the shattered fragments the way he had before.
Splat.
A hole the size of a grown man’s forearm tore through his right wing, and blood streamed from his torn cheek.
‘Ungh! I might actually die today.’
Seeing three more petals descending, Noxscasarsis unleashed his breath.
Roooarrr…….
Crash, crash, crash…….
Jang Gain’s hands flew in frantic patterns—sword in one, blade in the other—as he batted away the hair of the female demon, which had twisted like rope before stretching long and stabbing at him like a spear.
‘Damn it! Her swordplay is weak, but using her hair as a weapon makes her incredibly troublesome!’
And worse, the hair served as a defensive tool as well.
‘How am I supposed to cut through that hair to reach her neck? Is there no way?’
Shwoooosh.
In that instant, a few strands of the female demon’s hair scraped across Jang Gain’s cheek.
Just a few strands, yet his skin felt thinly sliced.
‘It’s like a razor blade!’
As he deflected the hair and dodged, blocking her attacks wore him down—his wounds multiplied and his footwork grew strained.
‘I have to find a way…… Wait! Wind!’
Watching her hair carefully, Jang Gain noticed it was susceptible to wind currents.
Wind from the Wind Character Technique alone couldn’t alter the trajectory of her hair, but wind summoned by a high-grade spirit would be strong enough to twist its path completely.
‘Silron! Push this female demon’s hair back for just a moment!’
Calling to Silron, the high-grade wind spirit, with his mind, Jang Gain felt a powerful whirlwind erupt in the empty air. The wind immediately swept the female demon’s hair back from her face.
‘Now!’
In an instant, more than a meter of energy surged from his blade’s tip, and Jang Gain concealed a single strand of Strong Thread within that energy.
‘What?’
Jang Gain’s eyes widened in surprise.
The thickness of the Strong Thread, which had been too thin to see clearly before, had swollen to the thickness of a noodle strand.
‘Is it because of the density of demonic energy?’
While noodle-strand thickness hardly qualified as genuinely thick, it was more than five times the original thread’s width.
Squelch.
The extended Strong Thread sliced through her neck as she retreated, and in the bargain severed several of her hair strands as well.
Weightless.
In an instant, the female demon’s head lifted into the air.
She stared wide-eyed, unable to accept that her neck had been severed.
Jang Gain reached out with his left hand, caught her floating head, and quickly opened a sub-space to thrust it inside.
Having already decapitated demons and sealed their heads in sub-space several times before, the motion was swift and practiced.
“Silron, well done. Without you, I wouldn’t have cut her neck so cleanly.”
-Because she was a demon, her hair was like wire.
Thud.
Shortly after, the headless body thrashed about before crashing into a pool thick with blood.
The intense battle ended in an instant.
Even as Jang Gain stood victorious over the female demon, he remained dazed for a moment.
-What acrid demonic energy! Eh? That’s the green dragon Noxscasarsis…… Wait! The one attacking is a Duke-rank demon!
At Silron’s words, Jang Gain turned his gaze toward the naked man sitting on a flower bud, scattering petals, and the dragon whose body was covered in wounds.
“Wait—is Noxscasarsis getting absolutely crushed?”
He’d fought that dragon once before and knew how formidable it was. He’d expected even a Duke-rank demon to hold its own in a fairly even match, yet it was barely clinging to life.
Silron nodded in agreement with Jang Gain’s observation.
“At that rate, it’ll be dead soon.”
‘I barely managed to defeat a Count-rank demon with Silron’s help… will my attacks even work on this Duke-rank demon?’
He glanced sideways at the headless female demon’s body, still writhing.
‘Well, whether they work or not, I have to give it my all. If the dragon dies like that, I’m next.’
Jang Gain flew straight on Silron toward the naked man who was busily working his hands among the petals.
“Ha! I was too busy toying with the green lizard to notice… but even so, you’re a mere sprout that sprouted from me, and already you’ve been cut? How unexpected!”
The naked man, seeing Jang Gain approach, flicked a single petal forward.
Jang Gain knew that petal had blocked the dragon’s Breath, so he abandoned any thought of clashing with it directly and adjusted Silron’s flight trajectory to dodge sideways.
Whoosh.
Yet the petal, as if it had eyes, curved in the same direction Jang Gain evaded.
‘Damn it! The Demonic Qi in that petal is horrifying enough, but it can even adjust its trajectory like the Patriarch’s Yigeo Eorgang!’
He’d watched the Patriarch and elders spar occasionally, so he knew how tricky and difficult to counter the Yigeo Eorgang was.
Jang Gain altered Silron’s flight path, frantically dodging petals while clenching his teeth.
‘I’ll have no choice but to use the Yihwa Technique that the First Elder employed to counter the Patriarch’s Yigeo Eorgang! Fortunately, my Strong Thread has thickened enough that I can nearly replicate the First Elder’s technique.’
Jang Gain extended his sword wrapped in Strong Thread toward the enormous petal hurtling at him as if to split his body in half, then rotated his body to twist the petal’s trajectory with his blade.
Crunch-crunch-crunch…
Though he was clearly using the Yihwa Technique to redirect the petal, his joints twisted from his wrist through his elbow, shoulder, and down to his waist.
‘Damn it! I’d anticipated there might be unimaginable force packed into it, but just redirecting its path dislocated so many joints!’
Overcoming the excruciating pain of his bones dislocating, he finally managed to change the petal’s direction. Jang Gain hurled it toward another petal flying at the dragon.
Boom-boom, crack-crack-crack…
When the two petals collided, a massive explosion erupted and space trembled.
Crunch-crunch-crunch…
After throwing the petal, Jang Gain twisted his body in the opposite direction to realign his dislocated bones.
“Ho! Even for a Sword Master, you shouldn’t be able to deflect my attacks with a blade, yet you have quite remarkable skill! I thought Bekartha had simply grown careless, but it seems that wasn’t the case!”
Smack.
As the naked man licked his lips, every hair on Jang Gain’s body stood on end.
‘Unluckily, he has an expression similar to the Patriarch’s!’
The peculiar expression of an absolute being looking down on all things beneath him.
It was written across the naked demon’s face.
“I managed to deflect one Blood Flower petal. I wonder if you can deflect two?”
The naked demon waved his hand, and this time two petals flew toward Jang Gain.
‘This… this is insane!’
Jang Gain’s teeth clenched so hard he thought they might shatter.
‘Deflecting two petals simultaneously using the Yihwa Technique is impossible with my current ability…’
How could he survive this?
The best method would be like before—twist one petal with the Yihwa Technique and use it to strike the other—but the two petals were too close together for that.
‘Ah! The Yihyeong Hwanwi!’
Was it because he’d desperately thought through the situation in that brief moment? Fortunately, the Yihyeong Hwanwi technique—said to be the pinnacle of Divine Technique—came to mind.
Of course, with his current ability, he couldn’t employ such an advanced technique.
Pop.
In an instant, Jang Gain’s body seemed to split in two, and suddenly there were two Jang Gains.
But through the Demonic Cult’s sorcery, he could create a clone.
Though the clone was an illusion, he’d infused it with enough Qi that it was difficult to distinguish which was real through Energy Detection—you had to touch it directly to tell.
‘I created this clone by learning a technique I’d once dismissed as base sorcery in order to mimic the Yihyeong Hwanwi… I never thought I’d use it like this.’
As Jang Gain created the clone, Silron split the wind and carried them separately.
As Jang Gain suddenly became two and spread left and right, the naked demon who’d thrown the petals tilted his head and moved his hand.
“A Sword Master who uses magic! How unusual! Well, one of you must be the real one.”
Jang Gain received the petal hurtling toward him with the Yihwa Technique, twisted it, and hurled it back at the naked man.
“Ah! So you’re the real one!”
The naked man saw the petal flying at him and turned to look around for more petals to launch, but his eyes widened in surprise.
All the petals that had been there before were now gone, plucked away, leaving only the receptacle.
“I was so preoccupied with the lizard that I didn’t even notice I’d used up all my Blood Flowers.”
The naked man clenched his fist and extended it toward the incoming petal from afar. Suddenly the fist swelled to the size of a house and stretched outward, shattering the petal into pieces.
And that fist continued extending, flying toward Jang Gain at terrifying speed.
“What… what is this?”
A solid fist—not even Qi—was hurtling toward him at a distance of over a hundred meters.
Jang Gain cried out in alarm and sent Silron surging upward.
Whoooosh……
Then he saw the elongated arm of the naked demon stretch out like rubber.
The naked demon’s form was humanoid, but the extended arm was covered in thick scales, resembling a dragon’s limb.
As Jang Gain shot skyward on Silron, the fist changed direction and rocketed upward after him.
‘No, surely… it doesn’t stretch infinitely?’
The fist’s ascending velocity exceeded Silron’s flight speed, so Jang Gain had no choice but to sheathe his sword and grip his halberd with both hands, unleashing the maximum force of Strong Thread.
‘Changtian Hyeol-geuk!’
In an instant, a thick strand of Strong Thread unfurled from the halberd’s blade, wide as noodles.
Jang Gain brought the halberd down in a chopping motion against the ascending fist.
Crack……
One finger struck by the halberd was severed, and with a thud, Jang Gain’s body was sent rocketing over two hundred meters into the air.
‘What… what kind of fist feels like iron……’
Boom-boom-boom-boom……
Then a dragon’s breath erupted toward the naked demon, and the demon stretched his other hand, the one not attacking Jang Gain, and swatted the breath away.
Crash……
When fist and breath collided, a massive explosion detonated, and the fist that tore through it struck the dragon’s belly.
Thud! Gaahhh……
The dragon’s stomach caved in where the fist had hit, and it flew backward, crashed into the Stone Wall, toppled it, and slammed into the ground.
Sharp pain.
Naadra, the naked demon, felt intense agony shooting through the fist that had struck the human and withdrew his extended hand to examine it.
Unbelievably, among his five fingers, his index finger had been severed and was missing.
“What? My finger’s been cut off!”
Thump-thump-thump-thump……
In that instant, a viscous Demonic Qi unlike anything before—thick and sticky as ink and glue—surged from Naadra’s body.
The ground trembled as if struck by an earthquake, splitting into fissures; space warped; and the blood covering the earth began to roil and bubble.
“Lizard, human—the games are finished! I’ll kill you both and bind you forever as thralls to eternal darkness!”

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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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