Damien shot forward without care and began wildly throwing punches into the incoming horde of beasts.
He had already checked their strength level with his awareness, and none of them were strong enough to cause him concern. The main problem was, their numbers seemed endless.
'My awareness range is around 10,000 kilometers right now, yet I still can't see an end to this beast tide. What kind of place is this to contain such a massive number of beasts?'
He had obviously fallen into this abyss from the ancient temple, so logically speaking this space should be the underground of the Trial World. But how could there be such a vast underground abyss that nobody had discovered yet?
Damien didn't spend too much time thinking about it. Instead, he focused his attention on slaughtering beasts.
Although there were plenty of faster ways to go about it than his current method, he actually wanted to use this opportunity to test some things.
'It's been so long since you were born, but I haven't had the opportunity to properly use you yet. Go wild! Show me what you can do!'
Damien transmitted his thoughts to the Void Flame, which flicked its tongues in excitement. He spread his arms wide and summoned forth the flame that was unique to him.
In this abyss, the flame was almost invisible. Small flickers of golden light were the only indication that it existed in the first place.
With Damien's motion, the flames spread forth like a tsunami, consuming everything in their path. The shrieks of beasts soon rang out through the abyss.
But the Void Flame wasn't a simple flame. In the first place, the reason Damien named it such was due to its main characteristic which matched the ability of his Void Essence.
As burnt beast corpses piled up, they began to turn into pure essence that was absorbed by the flame. With each beast that died, the flame seemed to rage on stronger.
The tsunami became wilder and fiercer, spreading until hundreds of meters were covered in a sea of flames. In the next instant, that sea became a typhoon.
The flames burned through the air in the abyss, climbing into the air as if it was a ladder. With the way the flames whipped and whirled around, multiple tornados of flame had soon taken shape.
Damien watched in awe as the beasts within a certain radius of himself were all burnt to ash the second they stepped into the flames. The radius kept expanding, eclipsing multiple kilometers in only a few minutes and still growing.
'Couldn't I just stand here and watch this beast tide be reduced to nothing?' Damien wondered as he watched the flame.
Although he did need to give it a significant amount of mana at the start, the mana cost had rapidly declined as the flame grew. It was because the flame used the essence of the beasts it devoured to sustain itself instead of wasting Damien's own mana.
'A self-sustaining flame that burns brighter the more it kills. It's pretty much perfect.'
Damien nodded in satisfaction. But he was never one to stand still and let others do the work for him. Even if the flames were growing rapidly, they could only expand around a kilometer every five minutes. With this kind of speed, it'd take a few days to clear out all the beasts within the abyss.
Instead of waiting for that to happen, Damien rose to the sky and rapidly flew past the 10,000-kilometer range that his awareness could detect. Since he could still feel his connection to the Void Flames, he wasn't worried about the beasts he left behind.
'Even after spreading my awareness from this point, the beast tide still seems endless. There's no way this space is beneath the Trial World, and there's no way these beasts are naturally acting like this. There must be something afoot. But I can try to figure that out later. For now, I should properly make use of this beautiful exp farm that's been provided to me!'
Damien let go of the mana he was using to fly and let gravity take him down to the ground. In fact, he even used vector control to increase the momentum of his fall.
Boom!
His impact caused a crater tens of kilometers wide to form in the ground of the abyss. The beasts within that area were all smashed to a pulp by the following shockwave.
'Let's get to work!'
Damien's nails sharpened into claws and his teeth into fangs. He charges into the beast ride and wildly ripped apart any beast he came across.
Hours passed.
Limbs and guts of beasts flew through the air and blood began to form rivers on the ground. Damien was still charging through the beast tide without even a hint of exhaustion on his face.
This kind of battle, he was utterly suited for. He was emitting torrents of mana like it was nothing, not even caring about consumption during a long and drawn-out battle against multiple enemies.
After all, why would he?
"Devour."
With his call, Void Essence gushed out of his body like a plague and eclipsed the area tens of kilometers around him. Every beast corpse in the specified range was efficiently turned into nutrients that quelled Damien's exhaustion and replenished his mana.
Every time he felt even a hint of exhaustion, he'd repeat the same move and return to peak shape. Against a large number of weaker enemies? No matter how many of them came, Damien would kill.
Hours passed once again.
By this point, Damien's kill count had already reached the tens of thousands. All of these beasts were at 3rd class, but they couldn't compare to the likes of the Apostles and those who could actually give Damien trouble.
And those tens of thousands were just the beasts Damien had killed with his own hands. He erected his vector shield to passively block the beasts around him and turned to look into the distance.
Even though he had traveled thousands of kilometers away in his killing spree, he could still see the flickers of gold on the horizon. What once looked like a little candle wisp was now the size of a raging storm.
One had to remember that the majority of the Void Flame was black. The gold was only a small portion of it. And if that small portion was blazing like a sun at the moment, how big was the blackness?
'Looks like it's become so big that it can no longer support itself solely with the essence it gains from devouring.'
Damien thought as he watched the flame. From a while ago, he had noticed that his mana consumption had become preposterous.
A black hole slightly bigger than Damien's body was rotating behind him and rapidly sucking in the ambient mana in the atmosphere to cope with this loss. Even Damien himself had to continuously devour beasts for the same purpose.
'It's convenient until a certain point. Well, it's only natural that a flame of that size would become inconvenient to sustain. Once I become powerful enough, though, even this much won't be a problem.'
Although the Void Flame could indeed grow and be self-sustaining with the essence it devoured from its enemies, the amount of essence it needed would grow along with the flame.
Now that the flame itself was an ocean ten thousand kilometers in size, the beasts in the vicinity couldn't quench its thirst anymore.
If it wanted to maintain its current size over a long period of time, it's need to consume tens of thousands of beasts every minute. Even with the massive size of the beast tide Damien was currently facing, this kind of consumption was impossible to sustain.
'Come back.'
Damien transmitted his message to the Void Flame. Although it transmitted back its unwillingness, it still complied with his order. Soon, that massive sea of flames disappeared from the horizon and a small hand-sized ball of flames returned to Damien's palm.
Seeing how the tongues of flame emitting from its body seemed to be drooping sadly, Damien smiled.
'This flame is surprisingly cute.'
"Did you think we were done?" He said out loud. The flame made a motion as if it was peeking its ears up.
Damien's smile grew wider. "Look at how many beasts are left here. How can we possibly be done? Go ahead and start again. I won't stop you until you reach the same size as last time."
The flame danced joyfully and rushed back into the ever-increasing crowd of beasts. Once again, it started its journey to grow from a ball to a limitless ocean.
