Trusting his words, Azzy nodded and dismissed the wolf before he summoned the hourglass.
Turning it upside down, he spoke, <strong>"Soul skill: Chrono Rewind."</strong>
Pouring his soul energy into the hourglass, he activated the skill. As the white sand slowly falling onto the sand, meanwhile, the beast felt some invisible force is dragging it upwards.
It roared and tried to resist but the force appeared invincible.
He didn't know how many hours or days he was rewinding its time but within a few seconds, it reached the surface of the volcano and then was forced to lie on its back and float on the lava.
Only then, it realized the force disappeared.
As its eyes captured the sky, it then saw a boy was standing on the edge of the volcano, looking at it while holding a seemingly ordinary hourglass.
Azzy quickly dismissed the hourglass as soon as he saw the platinum grade Volcanus king.
He immediately summoned the death scythe that's almost twice his size and raised it over his head.
Azzy didn't waste time to attack using the soul skill.
<strong>"Soul skill: Slice of Death."</strong>
His eyes turned pitch black with no visible pupils while his weapon was greedily absorbing every drop of his soul energy.
The monster frowned as it sensed some unfamiliar energy from above. When it tried to sense its power, it felt the energy wasn't comparable to the aura it sensed earlier.
However, thinking of the earlier events… first, a terrifying aura, then, forced to float on the lava, and now the energy from the scythe… it felt the three are connected as they happened one after another.
The beast somehow stood up on its four legs without drowning and then, controlled the lava beneath it to rise towards the top.
Finding the beast coming towards him, Azzy thought the situation turned out better since he doesn't have to waste the attack on provocation.
He swung the scythe towards the uprising lava where the beast was standing.
A huge arc filled with death energy cut the air as it traveled towards the target at a fast pace.
Just as it was about to hit the Volcanus King, Azzy saw it suddenly disappeared.
No… It's more like it drowned itself into the lava.
The attack hit the lava and sliced into two parts, making its way towards the bottom.
As time passed, the arc became thinner and smaller. Eventually, it disappeared after 10-15 seconds.
Meanwhile, due to the disturbance caused by the energy attack, the uprising lava only became wilder and its temperature and speed suddenly increased tremendously.
If Azzy either would have at least about the volcanoes, he would have found something is off about the behavior of the lava in the volcano.
There are no tremors, no gasses being released. It was just lava that was rising as if it became angry.
But, he was too young and didn't have a proper education either. So, he didn't find anything amiss and thought it was normal.
So, he didn't put his attention on it and looked for the beast. "Where did it disappear, all of a sudden?"
He activated his aura sensing again to sense its location. "Eh?"
He sensed its position didn't change a bit.
"Did it become invisible or something?" Azzy wondered as he was looking at the visual of the aura while the beast appeared invisible. "I see… This is why the attack passed through its body and hit the lava. That was some convenient ability."
"Azrael, use the flying card, now." The Reaper reminded him to fly away as the lava almost reached him.
Azzy, who was in the middle of his thoughts, quickly took out the gold-grade flying card from his storage card.
Unlike the skill cards, the item cards such as flying cards, storage cards, disguise cards, levitation cards, etc… don't have ranks but were divided into grades.
They can be used by any soul-rank Arcana master as long as they continue to supply soul energy to them.
The higher the grade, the greater their quality and consumption of soul power will be…
It was one of the items given by his grandpa when he left for the Death clan.
Due to not getting any opportunity to use it, he didn't use it, until now.
Using the flying card, as he rose up in the air and got out of the range, the lava flew out of the volcano and started to flow down like a river from all sides, joining the lava lake.
Since there's no presence of humans around except for himself, Azzy didn't care about the volcanic eruption and focused on locating his target.
He found the beast was now ended up somewhere in the middle of the lake.
"Hmm?" Azzy stared at it, intently, for a while as he sensed its aura was becoming slightly stronger. "Is the beast absorbing the fire energy?"
Since it appeared invisible, Azzy thought attacking is only a waste of time and soul power and just concentrated on the flying card to go near to it.
Even though it was his first time controlling it, Azzy was able to go in the exact direction he intended to go.
The flying card traveled straight until it reached the spot and halted, a few meters away from the beast that was standing on the lava and was constantly absorbing the fire energy from it, just like he expected.
A few minutes later, the density of its aura grew further. Azzy felt it is now far stronger than the Galarian beast.
Soon, the invisibility wore off and he saw the quadrupedal beast that used to be in maroon-color was now golden. The black spikes on its back now grew bigger and sharper. The hoop over its head was gone while its golden eyes turned red.
*Roar*
It let out a powerful roar before raising its head to look at Azzy.
"Now that you aided its mutation, get ready to free the lava spirit too." The Reaper's voice echoed in his head.
"Eh? Lava spirit?" Azzy was taken aback. "What are you talking about?"