TitoVillar
patreon
MHD Chapter 121: Arch-Enemies in the Sky
🕑 Added 2025-08-14 06:44:20 +0000 UTCAlmost at the same moment, Aki sensed something was wrong and quickly soared into the sky. But this wasn’t some fair, regulated arena fight—
Almost at the same moment, Aki sensed something was wrong and quickly soared into the sky.
But this wasn’t some fair, regulated arena fight—it was the wild, untamed outdoors, a life-and-death battle.
Not for food. Not for territory. It was purely because, deep in their bones, Seregios and Rathalos carried a natural, instinctive hostility toward each other.
This kind of situation was common between Rathalos, Astalos, and Seregios. Among these three, any time two of them crossed paths, they would attack without the slightest reason, continuing until one side retreated—or died.
This was why, although Rathalos had many rivals sharing the same ecological niche, overlapping territories, and similar habits, only Seregios, Astalos, and the Leviathans among the sea-dwelling species were recognized by the Guild as true arch-enemies of the Rathalos.
No commands were needed. The two tempered Seregios immediately dove toward Aki. They had plenty of experience bullying female Fire Wyverns and knew exactly how to target one most effectively.
What’s more, having spent so long in the New World, they had undergone changes of their own. They knew perfectly well what those metallic-looking scales on Logan and Aki represented.
Even so, they understood that male and female Fire Wyverns fought in seamless coordination. And while they believed that in a three-on-two fight there was no way they could lose, they still decided to split Logan and Aki apart and crush them separately—just to make the victory even easier.
From another perspective, this also showed their confidence in the strength of their leader—the berserk-form Seregios.
Logan read the tempered Seregios’ intentions instantly. He moved to intercept, trying to link up with Aki, but before he could act, blade scales ripped through the air so fast they left only ghostly afterimages.
Flames surged across Logan’s body as his Charred Body rapidly reinforced his scales. With a sweep of his wings, he whipped up a wind pressure, trying to block the incoming blade scales.
The Seregios’ blade scales looked large, as if they’d be heavy, but in truth they were incredibly thin and light, able to drift with the air currents. It was precisely because they were so light that a Seregios could carry such a massive body without much burden.
Unfortunately, Logan had underestimated the leader’s strength. These bronze-hued scales were razor-sharp and faintly wreathed in black mist. Even after tearing through the wind pressure, the remaining force still left pale marks across Logan’s scales.
With a furious roar, scorching flames leaked from the corners of Logan’s mouth. The Seregios leader, refusing to back down, let out a shrill, rooster-like cry as its wings beat, whipping up howling gusts.
Riding the storm winds, the Seregios leader shot forward with astonishing speed—closing in on Logan in the blink of an eye. Its zygodactyl talons, so unlike a Rathalos’ feet, ripped through the sky like claws of doom, wrapped in black mist as they slashed mercilessly toward Logan.
Logan spun, his tail trailing flames as he evaded the strike. Twisting his body, he appeared above the Seregios leader, like a blazing fireball spinning at high speed. The massive spines along his wings were like a row of jagged daggers, and using the momentum of his spin, he drove them down viciously toward the Seregios’ head.
This counterattack was pushed to the extreme—swift, lethal, almost impossible to avoid for an ordinary creature. Yet the Seregios leader still managed to react, twisting its body and using the air currents stirred by Logan’s spin to add a rotation of its own.
The blade horns on its head, which had been folded back, suddenly snapped forward.
[Clang!]
When the spines and blade horns collided, the impact rang out with the sharp, metallic sound only steel meeting steel could make. The piercing noise even sent out visible soundwaves that rippled through the air in all directions.
If an ordinary hunter had been caught in that soundwave without the aid of those miraculous “earplugs,” they’d likely have clutched their ears instinctively—and perhaps even felt so sick from the high-pitched noise that they’d vomit.
The result of that clash left Logan genuinely surprised.
He hadn’t expected the creature to react in time at all—and not only had it reacted, it had even managed to counterattack in the same motion.
And Seregios wasn’t even a brute-force fighter. Logan, in this third growth stage of a Rathalos, with the Powerhouse Trait amplifying his strength, could wrestle against a Diablos head-on—overpowering its struggles, flipping it over, or even hauling it a short distance.
The wings were a Rathalos’ strongest limbs, and when combined with the momentum from a spin, an attack like this could normally send a Flying Wyvern reeling—knocking weaker ones straight out of the air.
But this Seregios had managed to block the strike with nothing more than a measured twist of its body.
Was this the combined boost of berserk form and tempered evolution?
Little did Logan know, the Seregios leader was just as shocked by the outcome.
Agonizing pain, as though the blade horns were about to snap, shot through its nerves. In that brief collision, the Seregios leader had lost all feeling in the organ connecting to its blade horns. A piercing ringing filled its ears, and its mind wavered.
Those blade horns were its pride—back in the Old World, they could shear through the bladed forearms of a Nargacuga with ease, take a Glavenus’ tail slash head-on, and even chip the sharpened edge of that blade tail.
In its mind, when its horns met Logan’s spines, the spines should have been cut cleanly apart, after which it would follow through with a slash to cripple its foe in one blow.
“Miscalculation!”
That was the only thought left in the Seregios leader’s dazed mind.
The next instant, a sensation it knew all too well—and feared—tore through its body: the ripping of muscle fibers. A tide of black miasma, hidden deep within its flesh, began to ravenously devour the life force it had painstakingly recovered since arriving in the New World.
“No!!”
In a heartbeat, a massive portion of its life force was transmuted into some unknown energy. Its rationality was stripped away, but the damage to its blade horns was barely repaired.
Logan, unaware of any of this, saw only that the Seregios leader’s body, which had been listing and out of control, suddenly righted itself—and almost immediately followed up the collision with another attack.
Fortunately, Logan’s Mind’s Eye Trait let him react just as fast. He ignited a surge of flammable fluid, using the momentum of his wingbeat to hurl it straight at the Seregios leader.
From afar, the cascade of sparks merged into a blazing torrent, as though Logan’s wings had suddenly extended outward, draping the Seregios leader entirely in flame.
In an instant, the Seregios leader was swallowed by orange-red fire—transformed into a second “Fire Wyvern.”
Landing a clean hit, Logan had intended to press his sudden advantage and launch a follow-up attack—but his instincts flared. His spines tilted sharply, scraping across the Seregios leader’s blade horns with a piercing screech. At the same time, he flipped backward in midair, shielding his head with his wings and curling his body tightly as he dropped.
The next second, the reverse scales along the Seregios leader’s body erupted all at once, flaring open like an overripe pinecone. In those frenzied, blood-red eyes, a storm of lightweight blade scales exploded outward in a full 360°, leaving no blind spots.
With a shrill roar, those blade scales—carrying Logan’s own flames—shot a short distance before detonating. The already-dense barrage shattered into even smaller fragments, turning the air around it into a domain of flying shards.
Logan felt stings across his body and the outer edges of his wings—signs that the shards had cut through his outer scales. He paid it no mind. Since entering his growth stage, his Regeneration had also been enhanced.
Though he’d never formally tested it, his status panel made it clear: his Regeneration was now three times that of a Rathalos at this stage, and it was a constant effect—even in combat.
For injuries of this level, with his vast life force far surpassing that of a normal Rathalos, complete recovery would take no more than five minutes—and it wouldn’t hinder his fighting in the slightest.
The airflow driven by those blade scales even triggered an aerial shockwave, like a fragmentation grenade, unleashing a violent blast that momentarily suppressed the flames burning on Logan’s body.
Then, thanks to the heightened senses of his Mind’s Eye Trait, he detected the Seregios leader rapidly closing in—not through sight, but through his awareness of the shifting air around him.
Without hesitation, a flood of flammable fluid seeped from his scales. Pinpointing the leader’s position, he seized an extremely narrow window and ignited it in a thunderous blast.
“A fragmentation grenade, huh? Let’s see how you handle my liquid bomb.”
The much larger explosion tore through the air. At that moment, the Seregios leader was already in close, the talons at the tips of its wings about to seize the falling Logan—only to be met head-on by the scorching shockwave of a brilliant detonation.
The temperature of the battlefield climbed with the blast’s heatwave, chasing away the earlier chill and replacing it with the searing touch of summer.
In the sky, a massive orange-red fireball bloomed. Seen from above, the impact blew a great hole through the clouds, while on the ground, the desert sand rippled outward in waves from the blast’s center.
