Infinite Paths: The Raging Phoenix-Chapter 1510: Not skilled enough

As the flames licked at his skin and the air grew thick with the acrid scent of burning, Rain knew that he faced a dire predicament. Trapped within the grasp of the powerful hands, his options dwindled with each passing moment, leaving him with little recourse but to summon every ounce of his strength and willpower in a desperate bid for survival.

Rain didn’t want to use Magic Boost since it consumed too much mana, but he was forced to use it at that moment as well. After that, he punched his hands and stopped the attack while propelling himself in the opposite direction.

Although he tried to escape through one of the breaches, the hands closed them, and then Rain was forced to punch one of them to create a hole... he failed, though. There was too much energy, and the hand was too thick.

"Shit..." Rain said.

His last option was to propel himself in another direction and try to escape, but Rain eventually saw himself surrounded by darkness... the encirclement was completed, and the temperature began to increase as the hands closed in even more.

"She can’t see this... so it might work," Rain thought.

Arel’s surprise was palpable as she sensed Rain’s presence amidst the onslaught of her colossal hands. Despite her expectations, his presence did not grow weaker in the face of the intense heat and pressure surrounding him. Instead, he remained steadfast and resolute, his presence undiminished by the inferno that threatened to engulf him.

Realizing that her attempts to subdue Rain had backfired, Arel halted the movements of her hands, momentarily ceasing their advance in a bid to reassess the situation. In doing so, she inadvertently granted Rain a precious opportunity, a momentary reprieve in which he could gather his thoughts and formulate a plan of action.

As the flames receded ever so slightly, Rain seized upon the opening, his mind racing with possibilities. Though the odds were still stacked against him, he knew that he could not afford to waste this chance.

All of a sudden, the hands began to tremble violently, and eventually, they moved enough to create some holes in their formation.... Nothing escaped from them, but eventually, the hands were pushed away, and their formation was broken.

While a bit confused, Arel moved the hands a way and soon found Rain... pretty much all of his skin bad been burned and while it was healing fast, he looked like a monster... the only parts that looked fine were his fists... dark ice was covering them in the shape of gloves. She wondered why he returned to use them again, and now they resisted these many attacks.

"You are stubborn, if anything. You used the chance to absorb a lot of energy to create that. I can also feel Lok’s power has been activated. So you compressed the dark ice to pull this off?"

"I wonder, this might not be dark ice. It could be dark fire," Rain said. "At the same time, I could have used Hilo’s power instead of Loks. Who knows, this might be even the power of friendship materialized."

That was a poor attempt to taunt Arel, but it worked. She pointed her hands toward Rain again, and then the flames began to gather at a single point, converging and moving until they became giant spheres of heat.

The giant hands unleashed a blistering torrent of fire, engulfing Rain from all directions in a searing inferno of heat and flame. The scorching blast converged upon him with relentless force, leaving him with nowhere to escape as the flames encircled him.

The intensity of the onslaught grew with each passing moment, the flames coalescing into a radiant sphere of incandescent energy that cracked and roared with overwhelming power. Despite the assault’s overwhelming ferocity, Rain’s presence remained the same.

As the fiery conflagration reached its zenith, it seemed as though a small sun had been born amidst the chaos, a blazing beacon of searing light and heat that threatened to consume everything in its path. Yet even as the flames raged unabated, Arel could sense no weakening in Rain’s presence... ƒгeewebnovёl.com

"This is starting to get annoying..."

Among the machine gods, there were ranks as well... everyone knew that Lonos, Fortus, and Arel stood above the others. Arel, for example, had tricks that would prevent the weaker machine gods from fighting for more than a few minutes, and killing one of them that fast would be quite hard to pull it off.

Still, since Rain had almost the full power of three aspects and half of two others, his resourcefulness started to annoy Arel. Her current tactics were something that she was truly planning to use to weaken him and force him to talk, after all.

When Arel stopped the flames, Rain was revealed once again... he looked like a mess... like a living corpse with his body completely charred, but the wounds were being repelled insanely fast since he was using the same energy that damaged him. In a couple of seconds, he was back to normal, and even his clothes returned...

Still, Arel had enough time to see what kind of defenses Rain employed... using his knowledge of matter and void, he combined them to create two layers of defense to weaken the flames. He wanted to truly combine them, but he was either not skilled enough to pull it off, or those aspects were too incompatible.

"I was trying to be considerate, but it looks like you truly want to suffer. This will be your last chance. Surrender and reveal everything unless he wants to suffer the worst kind of agonizing death."

"I think that you can’t actually pull it off since you aren’t the strongest of the machine gods," Rain said. "Actually, any machine god can pull off my worst type of death; they just have to defeat me. Your idea of worst and mine are completely different, after all."

"Very well, we shall confirm that."