By the time Ahmed realized what was happening, it was too late.
He was suddenly aware of Osho moving towards him while his beast tried to rip him apart to no avail.
'What is he doing? If he gets caught between the two of us, he's screwed... wait.' His eyes widened as he looked up, and his face paled.
High in the sky, a massive twister could be seen forming rapidly, the wind moving to create a large funnel with them in the center.
'What in the...?' His thoughts trailed off, then he gritted his teeth.
'It can't split its attention while preparing that. I will take him out before then!' Ahmed turned and shouted.
"Sol!" His shout reached the lion, and it briefly paused before it raised its head and roared.
Like him. It was aware of the massive attack Gale was preparing, and it knew that tanking it would not end well for it, so it was determined to end the fight by taking out Osho.
Ahmed smashed his fists together, and at the same time, the energy around the lion surged as both their auras erupted.
Suddenly, the surroundings lit up like someone had brought the sun into the forest, bathing everything in golden light. However, a lot of the light was smothered by the powerful wind of Gale's incoming attack.
They didn't pay it any mind, though, their attention focused on Osho.
Osho narrowed his eyes as he sensed the surrounding Mana become turbulent.
The air distorted from the heat, and the ground started melting.
Osho started to sweat profusely within his armor, and he could see his Mana shield being burned away by the intense heat, but this was just the beginning.
Above him, a miniature sun with its own gravitational pull appeared.
It was thirty meters in diameter, shooting off its own small solar flares in the surroundings as space itself started to get seared by the unbearable heat.
'A little help here.' Osho said to Gale through their bond. While he was confident in his abilities, such an attack would instantly eviscerate him, and with the tornado finally touching down, there was nowhere else to run.
To be clear, he wasn't just standing still. The moment he sensed the attack coming, he immediately attacked Ahmed, using the same logic they wanted to use against him by taking out the Tamer first.
However, it seemed like whatever attack they were preparing didn't just carry immense power, but it also caused their Vitality to spike, as no matter how Osho attacked Ahmed, even with lethal attacks, he didn't fall.
'Coming.' Compared to the tense situation, Gale didn't sound bothered in the least. Instead, he was just enjoying himself.
Osho was about to make an annoyed comment when a strange scene occurred.
His vision seemed to... tilt, and then his surroundings expanded. Every inch around him seemed to stretch out infinitely, and for a moment, he felt like he was looking at an infinitely vast surface reminiscent of the sky.
But it only lasted for a moment, and everything snapped back into place like a rubber band. However, he now found himself hovering above the massive tornado that was now beginning to shrink.
'That... wasn't teleportation.' Osho stated with a frown.
'Yup. You were still within the range of my domain, so I just shortened the distance between the two of us and allowed you to appear here.' Gale chirped, like displacing the position of someone who was more than a kilometer below him in an instant was just a fun trick.
' .. You seem to have the habit of just doing stuff that defies reason.' Osho sighed, and Gale laughed.
'Funny you say that when you made me. Anyway, watch this!' All of a sudden, the speed of the tornado increased exponentially as the column of spinning air began to shrink rapidly.
In the center, the small sun Ahmed and his beast summoned started to glow brightly, with rays of light occasionally peaking through small gaps in the rapidly shrinking tornado.
However, as Gale tightened his turn and the tornado became tighter yet faster, the light of the small sun was almost completely smothered, and the only light that escaped was from the top at the eye of the tornado.
There was a muffled explosion as the attack detonated, and ordinarily, it was meant to expand rapidly at the speed of light, engulfing and erasing everything within a hundred meters radius before explosing is a massive blast that drowned everything in its radiance.
However, Gale judged such a thing to be too disturbing, so once the attack detonated, he simply... dropped his domain on it.
The weight of the sky. His sky, was more than enough to completely drown whatever the attack was meant to do, completely nullifying it.
At this point, the tornado had shrunk to only be around ten meters thick, and the speed was so extreme that, despite its small size, virtually everything in the vicinity was being pulled into it like a black hole.
The others had to retreat even further to avoid being caught by it, and even then, Osho could see them hanging on to various objects with the aid of their beasts just to avoid being pulled away.
'Uh, Gale?' Osho asked carefully, hoping that the bird wasn't going overboard.
'No worries, I'm done. But first...' All of a sudden, the blue markings that lined his body lit up in a brilliant flash of sky blue.
Gale finally stopped shrinking the tornado, and instead, he hovered above it while spreading his wings, letting out a mighty screech that reverberated through the surroundings.
Above him, it almost looked like the sky itself had descended to assist him, and Osho was genuinely flabbergasted by what he was seeing.
Before he could question it, though, Gale made his move.
His beak glowed an incandescent blue as he aimed his body down the center of the twister like it was a gun barrel, then he accelerated instantly.
There was a flash, and then the whole world was drowned in a blue light.
Every spectator had to shield their eyes as sky blue light engulfed the surroundings.
A sound like several nuclear bombs going off at once erupted as the ground for dozens of kilometers in every direction trembled and shifted, with bulges appeared all over the place while a circular indentation a mile in diameter appearing in the center.
Then came the shockwave.
Layers of earth were uprooted from the ground, and the surrounding trees were stripped of their bark and almost fell.
Ellie didn't hesitate and created a barrier of crystals to protect the group, and just in time, too, as the shickwave washed over them, causing the barrier to tremble violently, but thankfully, it held.
It was only after the loud sounds stopped that she hesitantly canceled the barrier, and when everyone looked, they were taken aback by the scene of destruction.
For about a mile, everything was just gone.
Trees, rocks, grass, everything that had been at the epicenter of that attack was gone, not even their atoms remaining.
All that remained was Gale, and a pair of Beast and Tamer who looked like they had seen a ghost.
The golden lion, which originally looked regal and powerful, was cowering on the ground, and Ahmed was on his knees, his eyes trembling with disbelief.
In the end, Gale didn't want to kill them, but he wanted to send a message.
They were not his match.
Osho slowly descended as he stared at the absolute center of the attack. A hole ten meters in diameter could be seen, and when he looked down it... he couldn't see the bottom.
He glanced at Gale who flew over to hI'm and took his place on his head.
He wasn't tired after that attack, just satisfied.
'That was fun!' He said gleefully, and Osho just blinked before unconscious reached up to scratch Gale's chest, making the bird trill with satisfaction.
However, Osho's emotions were anything but calm.
He knew Gale was strong. Heck, he probably knew that more than anyone else. Gale was his beast, after all.
However, what he witnessed just now was far, far beyond anything he could have guessed, and a sense of doubt started to creep into his heart.
'Could all beasts with Legendary rank potential do things ? No, that can't be.' He shook his head. He'd watched videos of a few of the Legendary Rank Tamers in their early days, and while they'd been outstanding, they'd never performed feats even remotely close to what Gale had just done at the Apprentice rank.
So it made him wonder, did Gale truly only have Legendary Rank Potential?
It was times where he severely underestimated the concept that Gale employed. Thɪs chapter is updated by novᴇlfire.net
After all, if Gale's entire theme was freedom and being unbound, and his concept made it so that things he deemed as restrictive automatically started to lose their hold on him...
Why was the upper limit of his growth not a part of the things he could deem as restrictive?'