Goliath Meets the Catapult

The leviathan was now tied up. With the size and mass of the great beast, one might think that the rope tying it up would end up simply slicing through its scales, but that would be underestimating how tough its adamantine scales were.

Once every few years, one of these great beasts on the continent would shed its skin, and that skin, scale and all, was sold for the revenue of a small nation's yearly revenue. Though that was if an independent group obtained the scales. Usually, it was the Ebonreach Kingdom that would end up with them, and they would be used as the armour of the kingdom's elite forces.

Noah did not have a fancy plan from this point on. He would fight and hope things worked out.

Rocketing above the head of the titan, he made a parabola in his flight as he took a sudden nosedive above its head.

'Mimicry - Ogre!'

The ogre that plummeted down towards the beast's glabella at half the speed of sound was usually referred to as a giant by most, but now looked like a speck of dust.

That was not to say that the power contained in the ogre's figure at the moment was miniscule in any way, however. Reinforcing the already great physical strength of the ogre with his physical reinforcement of a chief-ranked warrior was Noah, his palms already clasped together above his head, primed for a spike.

'I fainted the last time I tried this, and that was coincidentally against this very monster. It's not about to happen again, though!'

Following his thought, an impact that could be heard even from the skies above the thunderclouds responded. A large wave spread, originating from the half of the body of the leviathan submerged in the sea. To a distant observer, it seemed as if the leviathan had been attacked by an invisible heavenly fist, the way the beast recoiled suddenly.

'Mimicry - Basilisk!'

Noah did not give the leviathan time to recover. Immediately, he followed up by paralysing the serpent with the paralysing evil eyes of its own serpentine brethren. This move was somewhat of a double-edged sword for Noah. The paralysis of a basilisk relied on a fear-inducing mental attack, and the mana cost to paralyse a millennia-old beast with an equally large nervous system was unspeakably immense.

But Noah did not intend to permanently paralyse the leviathan. That was impossible.

No, he wanted to disorient the beast. He was willing to bet that the leviathan, a deific apex predator, was not used to intense fights. It was an unmatched existence, after all. Just like with the Hero, the Leviathan had to have been lacking in combat experience and was most likely easily riled up.

And it was.

After Noah had delivered his ogre spike, he had begun to fall freely, and transforming into a basilisk did not change that. At the moment where his basilisk form struck fear into the leviathan, he had been mere metres away from the glabella he had struck, where he could now see a sizeable dent. Noah knew the leviathan was about to go insane with rage and that he consequently had no time to waste.

'Mimicry - Lich!'

A few dozen? No, it had to have been a few hundred times. The sea and storm, already a tempestuous force of nature, ramped up in ferocity and became nothing short of a menacing expanse of death that tore the semi-corporeal body of the lich apart relentlessly, while it regenerated with equal vigor.

Even Ariel could see the moving walls of death from where she stood on a safe boat a kilometre away, and even she had to admit that she was starting to get worried. How was any human meant to grapple with this supreme power?

'Wait. Husband's technically not a human. I guess he'll be fine!'

The gleam in her eyes that had dimmed and her expression of childlike wonder returned, and she went back to watching the battle like a tourist, observing the local scenery. She was not wrong to be nonchalant about what looked like a battle of gods. Noah was simply not in trouble.

'Big boy's really pissed! All this ruckus doesn't change the fact that I can just wait for him to tire.'

On paper, everything was going well. The rampaging leviathan would eventually tire out; Noah would pop out to tire him again; he'd hide, then tire it, then hide, repeating until the leviathan could no longer put up a fight.

Honestly, Noah also planned to use his Hydra form to poison the sea bit by bit until the local concentration of poison was great enough to kill it. Poisoning the sea itself may have sounded like an idiotic idea, but it most definitely was sound. A single drop of mana-enhanced Hydra poison in a lake of entire cities in diameter would kill any being who drank from it. This was why the Hydra was so feared on the Calysta continent and why Noah had confidence it would work.

Yet, the momentary paralysis from the basilisk had cost him almost half his mana. This told him about the kind of being he was dealing with, and he immediately understood that there was no way he could kill the leviathan with poison. Its body was just too gargantuan, too absolute, to fall to such tricks.

Well, that just meant he had to beat it up the good ol' fashioned way, though. He had no qualms about that. He let a deriding smirk break out on his face.

"Man, I mainly just picked a fight because you were supposed to be this big, scary monster, and I thought you would be a good opponent for me to grow stronger. I guess I restricted too much of your strength by tying you up. Don't get your hopes up, though; you'd kill me in moments without it; there's no way I'm even thinking of untying you."

It was when he was about to burst out of the water and turn into a wyvern that he heard it, and his expression instantly melted into one of horror.

A loud 'twang'.

A part of the rope was snapping.

"Me and my big fucking mouth."