Chapter 95: The Lightning Giant

A bloodline transformation?

This was a quasi-wizard who walked the path of bloodline sorcery. At such a moment, it would be a lie to say he was not nervous. After all, among all apprentices, bloodline apprentices were widely regarded as the strongest in direct combat against opponents of the same rank.

Take the fellow before them, for example. According to the annals of history, the Rampaging Giant Ape was a powerful magical beast with a life tier as high as the fifth rank. That also meant this man, so long as he could keep purifying his giant ape bloodline, possessed the potential to ascend to a fifth-rank wizard.

If he truly had the fortune to reach that level, perhaps he would then worry about having no road left ahead of him. But for now, he could fully enjoy the immense benefits brought by bloodline transformation: a formidable body, overwhelming strength, a towering and imposing frame, and an unyielding, battle-mad desire to fight to the death.

Stirred by the power of the Rampaging Giant Ape bloodline, the green-armored man's consciousness had already grown somewhat chaotic and blurred. Beating his own chest with huge hands, he let out a frenzied roar at Grem.

Well, perhaps this was the bloodline path's only flaw: it was all too easy to fall, for no apparent reason, into bloodline frenzy, thereby losing the reason and composure that wizard apprentices should possess. Of course, there were also bloodline fanatics who did not consider this a flaw at all. In their eyes, ferocious battle intent could rouse their hunger for combat and let them unleash even greater power. Compared with that, losing a little sanity hardly mattered.

"Don't you need to prepare?" Mary said with a bright laugh as she stepped away from the hillock. "Be careful, once this fellow transforms he doesn't even recognize his own family! I'll be looking forward to what you show me next!"

Grem looked up at the Rampaging Giant Ape, as though it could bestride heaven and earth, and gave a wry shake of his head. At last he removed a small leather pouch from his waist and tossed it to the ground. As the mouth of the pouch opened, brilliant magical radiance spilled out.

Swoosh, swoosh, swoosh...

Five translucent high-grade wind crystals flew from the pouch and slowly stabilized in midair. The instant they appeared in the air, a sharp, piercing howl of wind rose across the hilltop. Vast quantities of wind element, drawn by some mysterious force, madly surged toward the motionless elemental crystals, whirling and shrieking around them.

Wind itself was formless.

Wind particles were invisible as well.

Yet when so much wind element gathered together, the azure tornadoes became visible to the naked eye.

The wind arrived with such speed and violence that the dark sky seemed sliced into countless thin strands. The converging wind element quickly condensed around the five wind crystals into a humanoid body and limbs.

An azure body, azure arms and legs.

Once the giant blue form took shape, a new elemental crystal flew from the pouch and shot, with a whoosh, into the giant's broad chest. The next instant, at the top of the giant's thick body, a blue head struggled into being. Its features remained quite indistinct, with no eyes, ears, nose, or mouth.

If the first five high-grade wind crystals were used merely to construct the body, then this quasi-wizard-grade wind crystal was used to prop that body up; it built the blue giant's bones.

Yet even that was not all.

A small sun rose from within the pouch.

Bright, searing elemental radiance and a crackling barrier of lightning. The moment this final core crystal fused into the blue giant's body, it brought with it an indescribable and marvelous transformation.

If the giant had seemed dead and lifeless before, then at this moment, it was alive.

The colossal body stood five meters tall; its skin was blue, yet it was draped over with a layer of golden armor. Its hands and feet were not as slender or nimble as a human's, but arms, palms, and fingers were all present in full. Even as two small golden suns lit up where its eyes should have been, a magical shield built purely from static lightning appeared in its massive left hand, while in its right hand a lightning spear formed, brilliant enough to blind.

Added to the vortex shield of wind and the lightning armor enveloping its outer body, its personal defenses were simply astonishing.

Lightning was itself a mutated branch of the wind element, so their fusion met with no obstacle at all. The five wind crystals scattered throughout the giant's body and limbs continuously gathered wind element. Part of it condensed into a wind body with tangible substance, while the rest was continually refined and strengthened by the core crystal, transformed into lightning energy, and used to sustain the lightning giant's bottomless demands.

The four-meter Rampaging Giant Ape and the five-meter Lightning Giant stood across three or four dozen meters from each other, coldly facing off.

The Rampaging Giant Ape, transformed from the green-armored man, was brutish and savage in appearance, yet when confronted with a powerful enemy of unknown strength, it also showed a degree of restraint and gravity. Still, the crushing pressure brought by the Lightning Giant further stirred its rage. From its massive nostrils poured torrents of hot white breath, and its giant hands, as broad as millstones, pounded the ground with thunderous blows.

At last, unable to suppress the boiling battle frenzy within, the ape raised its neck and unleashed a roar that shook the forests and mountains, then charged forward with a furious bellow, its enormous body swaying.

Grem kept retreating, and as he did so, blue light flashed continually in the depths of his gaze fixed on the Rampaging Giant Ape. One row after another of waterfall-like numbers fell from the top of his vision, until his eyes were almost flooded by the torrent of data.

But very soon, most of the irrelevant figures were discarded, leaving only the chip's scan results on that giant ape.

"Subject: Toriel. Gender: Male. Wizard path: Bloodline. Physical attributes: Strength 20 (+2), Constitution 20 (+2), Agility 11, Spirit 17 (-3)."

Faced with such bodily data, Grem could only feel awe and envy.

Twenty points of strength. With that kind of power, he could probably crush every strength-oriented magical beast in the Krayla Mountains.

Twenty points of constitution. With such toughness, even if Toriel wore no armor at all, his physical body alone would be enough to withstand the attacks of all mundane weapons in the world. Ordinary weapons without extraordinary power would no longer be able to inflict any injury upon him.

Grem even suspected that with a constitution of twenty points, if someone truly managed to sever one of his arms, he would be able to grow it back within a few days. For beings whose constitution reached twenty, limb regeneration seemed to be an inherent hidden boon.

From the data scanned by the chip, Toriel's ordinary bodily attributes should have been: Strength 18, Constitution 18, Agility 11, Spirit 20. And once the bloodline transformation was complete, both strength and constitution surged to twenty points, while his spirit strangely dropped to seventeen.

Perhaps that was one of the Rampaging Giant Ape bloodline's flaws.

Although Grem's thoughts seemed to stretch long and slow, in reality all of this happened in the blink of an eye.

And while Grem kept retreating, the Lightning Giant chose to meet the Rampaging Giant Ape head-on.

With a flick of its wrist, the lightning spear in the giant's right hand was driven, at a speed the eye could not catch, into the ape's broad and powerful chest. The small lightning storm that erupted at once instantly engulfed the ape's body.

In Grem's visual projection, the base intensity of that small lightning storm was twenty-one points.

But damage of that level was still not enough to stop a powerful magical creature whose constitution and strength had both reached twenty points. Through transformation, Toriel temporarily possessed the Rampaging Giant Ape's unmatched, fearsome body and magical resistance. The crackling currents and arcs of electricity covering his form brought him excruciating pain, but they could not hinder his movement.

With a booming cry of violent wind, the ape's massive body burst straight through the lightning storm, and it opened its fan-like giant hand to lash viciously at the Lightning Giant. Compared with the ape's wild and ferocious nature, the Lightning Giant, though larger, was far more agile and nimble.

Its body merely blurred, and the Lightning Giant evaded the ape's great hand. In the same instant it appeared behind the beast, and with a shake of its right hand, a lightning whip condensed there and shot out, coiling around the ape's waist. Ferocious, savage high-voltage current surged through the whip in an instant, spreading to every corner of the ape's body and electrocuting it until it threw back its head and roared again and again. Where the whip wrapped around it, the smell of flesh and blood scorching filled the air.

Its first strike had missed, and the pain surging through its body only made the ape more frenzied and enraged. It reached down, grabbed the whip at its waist, and with a single heave tore it into fragments. Freed from the restraint, the ape spun about and unleashed a chain of hammering punches, each wild blow bursting with a crack that tore the air as it smashed toward the Lightning Giant.

Though protected by both the vortex shield of wind around its body and the lightning shield in its left hand, the Lightning Giant's outer defenses were instantly broken through under the ape's extreme, rampaging force.

Boom.

The Lightning Giant was sent flying through the air in a blue-white streak, and only after nearly one hundred meters did it finally steady itself. By then, the front of its left hand had vanished, and a huge depression had appeared in the golden armor across its chest.

Grem, who had already retreated to the edge of the distant forest, frowned deeply.

Compared with a bloodline transformation possessing a tangible flesh body, the Lightning Giant's body condensed from wind element was simply too fragile. In close combat against such a brute focused on strength and flesh, it clearly suffered a significant disadvantage.

Still, thanks to the two layers of outer defense, the ape's iron fist had not broken through the Lightning Giant's basic defenses. Otherwise, recovery would have been much more troublesome.

In the time it took to blink a few times, golden radiance flashed across the giant depression in the Lightning Giant's chest, and it returned to normal once more.

And by then, the furious Rampaging Giant Ape had already stamped back toward it with booming footsteps.

"Don't grapple with it up close. Keep a distance of thirty to fifty meters and attack with lightning!"

Grem projected his will through the air into the Lightning Giant's core crystal.