Chapter 364: Looks like we both have secrets, huh?

FWOOOSHH

Lucian moved away, creating distance between the two of them. Then, he stared at the demon hovering in front of him with a confused look on his face.

"What the hell did you do?"

That attack made absolutely no sense.

He was watching Neroth all this time, his newly enhanced senses were still difficult to control, but when it came to the enormous mass of Energy of Suffering surrounding Neroth, it was practically impossible for Lucian to lose track of it.

He had felt every little fluctuation, every little movement, every little shift in pressure and yet...

When the ground beneath him exploded...

He felt... nothing.

There was no energy that gathered, no attack that he saw form, Neroth didn’t even move, nor did the massive chunk of demonic energy surrounding him.

The ground beneath him just... exploded out of nowhere and Lucian...

He had absolutely no idea how that was possible.

Just then, Lucian’s face changed as his instincts screamed.

Something was wrong.

Lucian trusted his instincts and moved, or at least... he tried to.

He was too late.

BOOOOOOOOM

The ground beneath him exploded. Lucian did manage to shift sideways, but that probably only made the situation worse.

Once again, the explosion caught him.

"!!!"

His entire body jerked in burning pain. For a fraction of a second, he only felt heat.

Then—

There was nothing.

The entire left side of his body had disappeared. His left arm, half of his chest, several of his ribs, a massive section of his abdomen, his hip and his left leg...

It all disappeared.

Splurt

Blood exploded through the air, Lucian’s remaining body was thrown away like a broken doll.

Thud

He crashed through the remains of a wall, shattering the stones on his way, then, his body rolled across the ground before finally stopping.

When the dust finally cleared up, Neroth stared at the sight in front of him in silence. For a short moment, even he didn’t move.

He just stared at Lucian, lying there with half his body gone, in a puddle of his own blood.

Then—

It happened again.

Neroth’s eyes narrowed, focusing his entire attention on the sight in front of him.

Lucian’s shoulder, the one that no longer had an arm attached to it, suddenly shuddered.

Then—

FFRWOOSH

A bone came out, a thin white structure pushing out through burned, torn flesh. Right behind it came more, then another, then another.

The bones lengthened, forming his elbow, forearm, wrist, the shape of an entire arm reconstructing itself in less than a second.

After the bones came the blood vessels, thin red-black strands spreading over the bone like roots. They branched, connected, muscles began growing together with the vessels.

Fiber after fiber, forming Lucian’s unnaturally dense, compact muscles and it all happened so terrifyingly quickly that even Lucian stared at the sight in utter disbelief.

"...what the..."

Together with his arm, his ribs started reforming. Bones pushed out of his spine, they curved, connected, and reformed. His destroyed chest reconstructed itself piece by piece, organs regenerated beneath it, then the flesh appeared and Lucian’s skin followed.

Just like that, his hip reformed, then his leg, femur, knee, shin, ankle, foot. Every single structure built itself at a terrifying speed.

Lucian watched his fingers form in front of his very eyes, then, the skin closed over everything.

The blood on the ground remained, but Lucian—

He was whole again, almost as if nothing had happened. The only proof that something had even happened was the blood on the ground, the craters the two explosions formed and Lucian’s torn clothes.

Lucian himself stared at the sight with an absurd look on his face, he didn’t notice it the first time, but when it happened again, he saw and noticed everything.

The entire process didn’t take more than two seconds.

It was... terrifying.

Lucian took a deep breath as he clenched his newly formed fist. It didn’t feel any different, he was... completely fine.

"...okay."

Lucian blinked.

"That was... very, very cool."

He praised.

Then, he moved away from the ground and hovered in the air instead.

The second attack was also enough for him to notice something else. He didn’t see the Demonic Energy move because Neroth didn’t use demonic energy to trigger the explosion.

It was something else.

An energy he couldn’t feel.

Lucian looked around again, at all the destruction around him, the ruined ground, collapsed buildings, vampires lying down with grave injuries.

Neroth alone wasn’t capable of doing damage to this extent.

His body wouldn’t be able to take that much demonic energy and would perish much quicker than he expected.

Using demonic energy to cause all this was a big risk and Neroth wouldn’t take that risk, not when he was so hell-bent on ending his life.

So...

How did he do it?

How did he cause damage to such a massive extent?

And the more Lucian thought about it, the more obvious the answer became.

The Crimson Hearth.

Neroth had complete control over it and considering it was Arcelis’s final layer of protection, a formation that was supposed to protect them from sudden foreign threats they couldn’t deal with on their own...

It wouldn’t be surprising if there were explosives buried inside Arcelis’s ground and... the Crimson Hearth had control over those explosives.

Once that thought formed completely, Lucian seemed sure of it.

He stared at the being hovering in the air and his face turned solemn.

So the ground was off-limits and who knew how many weapons the Arcelis had hidden inside their precious formations.

This battle...

It wasn’t going to be easy.

Lucian’s face turned solemn.

Just then, Neroth, who had been staring at him in silence till now, suddenly spoke up.

"You... You shouldn’t have been able to regenerate like that...

How did you do that?

What did you do?"

He asked the same question Lucian asked him before and the moment Lucian heard that—

"Looks like we both have secrets, huh?"

He grinned.

"How about this? You tell me how many hidden weapons there are in the Hearth and I’ll tell you what happened to me?"