Delilah was sweating profusely, and even the habit she had developed during her years as an assassin failed to keep her breath stable. The red ape's sudden appearance made her run faster than she ever had.

'Wasn't he supposed to keep it busy? Why is it here? And where is he?'

Regrets poured in after the complaints.

'Why did I have to let curiosity get the better of me? Am I a cat? I could have slept after wandering around in Ashen Mountain, but I just had to tag along with him and enter the wilderness. Now my poor life might end here.'

She regretted her choice, but it was a tad bit too late.

"Where did she suddenly gain the strength to run so fast?"

The red ape frowned as the distance between them closed slower than before.

It attacked her with a fiery gust of aura, but she sensed it in time and jumped aside.

The fiery gust struck a tree, causing it to burst apart and be set on fire.

The red ape attacked her from afar a few more times, but she used the natural terrain to her advantage and dodged all of them.

"I can't use aura pressure to immobilize her either. She's out of the range of my attacks." The red ape clicked its tongue again. It was something it did when it felt annoyed.

Delilah showed no signs of stopping even though it had started to throw blazing rocks at her. Its attacks did cause her to slow down, but not a single one managed to achieve its intended purpose.

"This little runt is too good at dodging!"

Seeing that it failed to maim or immobilize her with its innate skill, the red ape felt indignant.

It remembered that there was a cliff up ahead that led to a cold river, and it looked like she would reach it before it reached her.

That was not the worst part.

The red ape dreaded the river.

It was a fire-type ability, and water was its greatest weakness, and ice, cold water was like a poison to it. It couldn't enter the river, or else it would be grievously injured, and there was a chance that it might die if it didn't get out of it in time.

But the same couldn't be said for Delilah.

She would successfully escape if she jumped down the cliff.

"I can't let that happen!"

In order to get to her faster, the red ape increased its speed by burning the false sunfire blood coursing through its veins. False sunfire blood was an impure and diluted version of Sunfire blood, and the most primal way of using it was to burn it in exchange for a temporary increase in strength, speed, and defense.

It was truly effective, as the red ape began to close the distance between them rapidly.

After a few moments, she could feel its aura pressing down on her, heating up her back and slowing her down. Her movements began to grow stiff. The cliff was nowhere in sight, and she was close to being immobilized.

Before she could lose control of her body, Delilah suddenly stopped, turned around, and glared at the beast as she raised her slender and trembling hands upwards.

In a second, hundreds of blades materialized around her out of thin air.

This was the specialty of her class weapon, and the number of weapons she could produce had increased several times ever since she formed the nascent energy nucleus.

"Fuck you!" she shouted as she brought her hands down, and the many blades hovering around her charged forward simultaneously, creating an illusion of a lake of cold, iron weapons crashing down on the red ape.

"You can make every effort to stop me. But let me tell you this. It will all be useless!" The red ape swung its staff to smash the lake of blades apart as it pounced on her. But that wasn't the only thing it did. It used aura pressure to immobilize her throughly, so throughly that she couldn't even move the energy inside her inner world and the nascent energy nucleus to activate her soul-herding ability.

'What did I think when I dared to go against an aura monster? How foolish of me!'

When her ultimate attack shattered with a casual wave of its staff, the hope in her eyes had died, and now that she was like a stiff corpse, she gave up all thoughts of resisting and closed her eyes.

'Is this how I die? It was a short and tough life. I got to enjoy it only recently. I at least wanted to experience true love before death.' she sighed in her heart, waiting for death to take her.

And so, she missed seeing who pushed her out of the way and took the fatal strike in her place. The staff crashed on shadowless's chest with a thud, snapping him in two halves. He was like a ball hit by a bat as he flew across the ground for dozens of meters and smashed through multiple trees before coming to a stop.

"Where did that come from? Damn thing ruined my perfect strike." The red ape didn't bother looking in his direction. It had seen his body break in two, so it had a good reason to believe that he was dead or breathing his last.

However, it couldn't be any more wrong. Shadowless wasn't a human. It might have a solid body that could be touched and grabbed, but it was made of shadows. It took a moment for him to fix the shape of his body and stand up.

When the red ape raised his staff to strike her dead, Shadowless threw a giant fireball at it.

Bomb!

The fireball exploded on its ugly mug.

The red ape howled in pain as it staggered back. It was a fire-type beast, but that didn't mean it was immune to explosion or high-level magic fire.