Lacius looked at the crack on his body that’s caused by releasing faith energy beyond his current limit with calmness.

  After gaining that blessing, Lacius knew that his regeneration speed had increased to an incredible degree. Unless it’s a wound on the level of severed limbs, everything will heal with time.

  Lacius looked down at the hole he had created and jumped downward from wall to wall to control the speed of his descent.

  Soon, he could already see the ant queen and its guard standing inside a massive man made, or to be exact, ant made cave. Around the cave, there are many tunnels with ants crawling out of it.

  Lacius felt fighting against too many ants at once will be pretty troublesome. So, he activated his blessed power that has been slightly reinforced with faith energy and caused those small tunnels to collapse.

  With that, the ants won’t be able to send reinforcement until they dig another tunnel.

  While he is busy collapsing those tunnels, the ant queen has ordered its guard to surround Lacius and attack him.

  Being surrounded by eight Level 2 giant ant, Lacius used his blessed power to cause a part of the ceiling to collapse and fall into them.

  Except for the recently promoted ant that’s unlucky enough to have its head being cracked from a massive boulder. Most of the Level 2 ants survived thanks to their enormous body and strong carapace.

  After handling the Level 2 ants, Lacius dashed toward the ant queen, who screeched and slashed her mandibles at him.

  Lacius unsheathed his sword while controlling the ground below the ant queen’s leg to collapse. The collapsed ground caused the ant queen to lose its balance and allow Lacius to easily parry her attack.

  The loss of balance also allows Lacius to launch a sneak attack by spending some faith energy and his blessed power to raise a super compact earth spear that pierces through the ant queen’s abdomen.

  While the ant queen screeched in pain, Lacius got closer and slashed his sword at the ant queen.

  The moment his sword hit the ant queen’s carapace, it emitted a spark and released the clanging sound of metal against metal.

  “I guess my sword attack is of no use against it,” Lacius muttered as he retreated upon seeing the ant queen has broke free from the earth spike that pierced it.

  He then felt something and focused his eyes to look at the wound on the ant queen’s abdomen.

  There, dark mists gathered as the wound on the ant queen healed in an instant.

  This made Lacius recall Gratian’s resurrection like ability after he became a demon king.

  “This is going to be troublesome.” Lacius said while glancing at the Level 2 ants that has broke free from the collapsed ceiling.

  He checked the amount of faith energy remaining within his body and started his second round of attack.

  Lacius first targeted the Level 2 ants by collapsing another part of the ceiling.

  With the Level 2 ants taken care of, Lacius looked at the ant queen who has been busy releasing eggs

  Before those eggs could hatch, Lacius turned the earth above the ceiling into massive stalactites that pierced the back of the ant queen.

  He controlled the ceiling above the eggs to drop down and shattered all of them.

  After using so many fancy maneuvers, Lacius can feel the cave getting unstable. Which forces him to waste some of his power to reinforce the cave’s wall and ceiling.

  The ant queen, who has been injured, screeched in pain as it glared at the invader with its beady eyes.

  With its huge but probably not so smart brain, it felt it has ran out of option, and decided to engage Lacius in a melee.

  The ant queen charged toward Lacius like a massive locomotive that ran out of control.

  To handle it, Lacius simply waved his hand and summoned reinforced earth spikes that pointed toward the ant queen.

  With its incredibly hard carapace, the ant queen easily shattered the first few earth spikes by running through it. But the following earth spike became harder as Lacius got more time to reinforce it even further.

  It forced the ant queen’s mad charge to come to an end as it need to evade the earth spike that can easily pierce it with the help of momentum.

  Lacius, who saw it, felt pity. ‘If only that thing is stupid enough to charge at my spike.’

  And so, both sides engage in close combat amidst a forest of spike that Lacius has summoned.

  ***

  Inside the Divine Space, Cedric watched the battle between Lacius and the ant queen.

  “I never expected Lacius to be this powerful. What a pity he seems to lack attacks that can pierce the ant queen’s defense.”

  Cedric mulled as he decided to lend a helping hand.

  He checked the store and locked his sight on an item.

  [Level 3 Consumable Divine Item, Wind Sword.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Cost: 150 GP

  Details: Slightly increase the power of wind element and the user’s affinity to wind. Contain three usage of Level 3 Wind Slash.]

  Initially, he wanted to give Lacius a Level 3 Earth Sword or Flame Sword.

  But thinking that the Earth Slash’s effect won’t be much better compared to Lacius’s skill, and that Flame Slash’s effect might burn the surrounding oxygen and instantly suffocate Lacius. Cedric finally decided on the [Wind Sword], whose Wind Slash sound like it’s extremely good at cutting through things.

  Before purchasing the item, Cedric asked the System, “Will sending this cause my world to lose balance?”

  [Not yet.]

  “Can Lacius use the Wind Slash to slash through the ant queen?”

  [Yes.]

  “Then, I’ll purchase this Wind Sword. I should give it to Lacius and let him kill the ant queen ASAP!”

  [Are you sure? Didn’t you say you plan to wait until your world leveled up to intervene and directly kill the demon king yourself?]

  “Change of plan. I felt the demon king this time is simply too dangerous to be left alone.”

  [Good choice.]

  [You’ve spent 150 GP to purchase Level 3 Wind Sword.]

  Watching his balance decrease by 150 GP pained Cedric’s heart.

  All he can hope now is for the sword to be worth its price and allow Lacius to kill the ant queen. Otherwise, there will be a giant ant infestation happening in his world.

  Holding the expensive sword that he hadn’t even touched for a minute, Cedric sent a message to Lacius before sending the sword into the Crystal Cube world.

  ***

  Inside the ant cave, Lacius and the ant queen are still engaged in combat.

  During the battle, the ants have reopened the tunnel that Lacius has closed. From the tunnels around the cave, the ant queen’s reinforcement arrived as giant ants filled the area.

  Lacius saw the sea like ants and he prepared to retreat for now. But, he changed his mind upon seeing the message that Cedric sent.

  [Take this sword. It’s called Wind Sword and has the ability to summon Level 3 wind slash three times by willing it.]

  In front of him, Lacius saw a sword appear out of nowhere.

  He quickly picked it up and tried to get used to the sword by slashing at the surrounding low leveled giant ants.

  Soon, he saw the ant queen have charged once again, and willed the sword to release its Wind Slash.

  The instant he sent his thought, Lacius can feel a breeze coming from the sword.

  He slashed it toward the charging ant queen and saw the gentle breeze turns into a massive crescent moon like wind bade.

  The barely visible wind blade passes through the ant queen right in the middle and sliced it into two halves.

  After the queen ant got split into two halves, the surrounding ants come into a pause before they continued their attack.

  Lacius casually handled the surrounding ants while focusing his sight on the ant queen’s corpse.

  From the queen ant’s corpse, dark mists began to gather and got absorbed into its body.

  The mists brought forth a miraculous scene where one of the halved body part quickly grew flesh before growing their carapace and returned into the familiar ant queen.

  Although there is no trace of wounds on its newly reconstructed body. But on its small bead like eyes, traces of fear can be seen as it released a screech that reverberated throughout the cave.

  The ants who heard the ant queen’s scream scrambled around the cave and started hitting the stones that Lacius has reinforced.

  Lacius can feel the ants are trying to destabilize the underground cave and bury him there. So, he activated another Wind Slash toward the ant queen, who somehow evaded it.

  Even though the ant queen has evaded the attack and escaped from being split in half. Its massive body couldn’t entirely evade the attack, as part of its abdomen and hind leg failed to escape and got hit by Lacius’s slash.

  Lacius took advantage of the wound and summoned a reinforced earth spike toward the ant queen’s abdomen that has been severed by Wind Slash.

  As those parts have lost its carapace, the earth spike easily pierced into the ant queen’s body.

  Lacius didn’t stop his attack and controlled the earth spike that has embedded into the ant queen’s abdomen to bloom like a flower. From the big stone spike, smaller spikes grow and cut the ant queen’s insides.

  He even controlled the spike to spin and thoroughly mix the ant queen’s innards.

  After screaming in pain for ten seconds, the ant queen finally died as disgusting mucus spewing out of the wound.

  Things that seem to be a minced internal organs can also be seen flowing in the mucus.

  Not long after the ant queen died, black mists reappeared and seeps into the ant queen’s body.

  Compared to before resurrecting the ant queen, the black mists are much fainter and smaller.

  Soon after, the ant queen’s body recovered as the reinforced earth spikes Lacius used to pierce the ant queen got ejected from its body.

  Lacius saw all that and prepared to retreat. After all, he doesn’t know how many times the ant queen can resurrect to full health.

  He has consumed more than half of the faith energy he has gathered over the last few centuries.

  Furthermore, the surrounding ants have almost succeeded at collapsing the cave.

  ***

  Inside the Divine Space, Cedric saw the ant queen resurrected once more and asked the System, “How many times can that ant queen got resurrected?!”

  [Based on the amount of NE around it, this is its last life.]

  Cedric widened his eye and sent a message toward Lacius to stop his retreat and kill the ant queen immediately.

  Inside the Crystal Cube world, Lacius looked at the message that appeared on his screen and sighed.

  [This is the demon king’s last life.]

  Knowing such a thing, Lacius decided not to retreat and dashed toward the ant queen, who was in the midst of its recovery.

  The ant queen who saw Lacius charging toward it immediately screeched while wildly flailing its limb that hadn’t fully recovered.

  While charging toward the ant queen, Lacius also created several earth spike that pierced the surrounding ants and reinforced the cave once more.

  As Lacius went closer to its location, the ant queen went into a panic and screeched to ask the surrounding ants to block Lacius’s advance.

  Lacius merely activated his earth power to push the ants blocking his way while charging undisturbed.

  Soon, the ant queen has fully recovered its body and immediately tried to escape from Lacius by digging a hole in the wall.

  But Lacius has also arrived close by and immediately slashed the wind sword in his hand toward the ant queen after activating the last Wind Slash stored in the sword.

  This time, the ant queen has no place to escape and immediately got slashed into two by the wind slash.

  As blood splashed around the place, Lacius waited and observed the ant queen’s corpse.

  He saw that this time, there was indeed no more black mist seeping into the ant queen’s body.

  “Seems it has thoroughly died.” Lacius muttered and changed his focus toward the ants.

  He reinforced the cave one more time and killed the surrounding ants by creating reinforced earth spike or slashing at them with his sword.

  After the cave has been filled with dead ants, Lacius counted the relatively bigger ant corpse and muttered in confusion. “I am pretty sure there are 8 ants that’s only slightly smaller than the ant queen. But there is only 7 carcass here.”

  He checked the surrounding to look for that missing ant but to no avail. So Lacius decided to leave the ant queen and ant guard’s carcass for now and returned to the surface through the hole he first created.

  After jumping upward for a long time, Lacius finally saw the sky that has long since darken.

  He glanced at the deep hole and activated his power to cover the surface of the hole,

  “I’d better hide it first. For now, I’ll notify the other to help me retrieve the demon king’s corpse. After all, its carapace is hard enough to block my non reinforced earth spikes.”

  “After being processed, it should be possible to turn the carapace into a shield and armors that can defend against most Level 1 blessed’s attack.”

  Lacius activated his faith energy to fly toward the nearest city, before pausing upon sensing that he merely have 20 percent faith energy remaining in his body.

  Lacius felt kinda sad upon seeing his loss.

  This battle with the ant queen has consumed the faith energy gathered for centuries.

  “I’d better walk and save my energy.”