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MHD Chapter 34: If Nothing Lives, Nothing Can Be Taken
🕑 Added 2025-06-29 23:18:54 +0000 UTCFaced with this situation, Logan began to understand Chameleos’ objective. It wanted to completely destroy the Ancient Tree’s ecosystem through this massacre, forcing the Rathalos population to abandon the area due to a lack of food, and ultimately seize control of the Ancient Tree for itself.
As for whether the collapse of the ecosystem would have any impact on it?
Not at all.
Chameleos’ poison mainly affected monsters; it had little impact on insects or plants. Even if the current ecological chain were to collapse, as long as the Ancient Tree and this leylines node remained, the ecosystem would eventually regenerate.
It would simply become one centered entirely around Chameleos.
Of course, that was just what Chameleos believed.
To Logan, this Chameleos was completely insane!
Though it was an Elder Dragon, it wasn’t one of those 'forbidden' beings that existed outside the bounds of nature. Recklessly destroying the ecosystem was bound to trigger the world’s backlash.
And that kind of backlash usually came at the cost of one’s life.
But that was a matter for later. If possible, Logan still wanted to try driving it away again. The consequences of a forced migration were simply too immense to ignore.
Just like last time, Logan absorbed Aki’s flames and charged into the toxic mist, searching for Chameleos’ whereabouts.
But this time, it wasn’t just Aki in the sky—every remaining Rathalos in the Ancient Tree region was circling above the thick fog.
However, just as Logan had predicted, Chameleos was no longer letting its guard down.
As Logan used partition tracking to search for its position, the creature was constantly on the move, deliberately slowing his pursuit.
And just as Logan narrowed down the search zone to a specific range, Chameleos sensed him—and vanished.
That’s right.
It had completely abandoned any notion of direct confrontation. Relying on its invisibility and the complex terrain of the Ancient Tree region, it slipped past the vision of every Rathalos in the sky and departed in a different direction!
When the mist finally cleared and not a single dragon remained in the area, Logan was left overwhelmed.
So this was its plan: a guerrilla campaign, a slow-boil massacre that would wipe out every living thing in the Ancient Tree region.
It seemed that as long as the Rathalos population hadn’t entirely vacated the area, Chameleos had no intention of engaging in a head-on battle.
What Logan had feared most all along was now reality—Chameleos was exploiting its unique traits, shedding the pride of an Elder Dragon to adopt evasive guerrilla tactics. A Chameleos acting like this was without a doubt the most difficult and troublesome foe imaginable.
It was a walking natural disaster—and against such a catastrophe, ordinary creatures didn’t stand a chance.
He too was powerless.
Staring at the dissipating fog, Logan returned to the nest, feeling defeated.
A Chameleos that had cast off all restraint and unleashed its power without hesitation—such a creature was utterly invincible to ordinary beings.
You couldn’t even locate where it was, and faced with that vast, all-pervasive, and deadly poison mist, there was simply no way to fight back.
"Roaarr!!" (What a scoundrel! An absolute scoundrel! How can a creature like Chameleos even exist in this world?!)
Logan roared in frustration. Aki stood beside him, watching calmly.
No matter what Logan decided, she would support him unconditionally—even if it meant risking her life to fight Chameleos.
Logan was on the verge of losing it, but thankfully, his frustration hadn’t clouded his reason.
He instructed the Grimalkynes to prepare for evacuation. He would try once more to stop Chameleos. If he failed again, he wouldn’t hesitate any longer—they would leave.
...
In the Elder’s Recess, a massive Elder Dragon cloaked in silver-white metallic armor, with four legs and two wings wreathed in constant whirlwinds, swallowed a rare mineral teeming with life energy.
Sensing something, it turned its gaze toward the Ancient Forest—as if something was calling to it from afar.
It didn’t dwell on the feeling. As a fully-grown Elder Dragon settled in the Elder’s Recess, there were few things left in this world that could pose a threat to it.
Unfurling its immense wings, a powerful updraft lifted it high into the sky. With a subtle beat of its wings, the colossal body cast a sweeping shadow as it soared toward the Ancient Forest.
For Chameleos, unleashing that wide-reaching green toxic mist was clearly a great drain on its stamina.
Since the last incident, it hadn’t appeared for five whole days. Only the increasingly active leylines energy remained as proof that it was still somewhere nearby, shamelessly absorbing the earth’s energy to replenish itself.
This time, Logan chose to go on the offensive—venturing out to search for any trace of Chameleos.
But among all Elder Dragons, Chameleos was the best at concealing itself. How could tracking it be easy?
And with the Ancient Forest’s terrain being so complex, it could simply crouch somewhere dense with trees and not even fully activate its camouflage. That alone would be enough to ensure most creatures would never find it.
After several days of fruitless searching, Logan had to abandon the unrealistic idea, left only with growing anxiety as he waited for Chameleos to make its next move.
Sure enough, a few more days passed, and the poisonous fog returned—only this time, Chameleos had shifted to the other side of the Ancient Tree.
Another mass extinction of life had begun.
As Logan charged into the dense fog, the ground was littered with the corpses of countless creatures.
Having experienced this once before, Logan decided to try a different approach this time to locate Chameleos.
There was no doubt—Logan had been the one responsible for injuring Chameleos previously.
This time, he planned to exploit the creature’s hatred to draw it out. After all, for an Elder Dragon to deliberately and consciously commit acts that violated the natural order, it surely had a petty and vengeful nature.
If Chameleos discovered that the one it hated most—Logan—had succumbed to the poison mist and collapsed, would it come to check on the body?
The answer: yes!
Once Logan had roughly gauged the boundary at which Chameleos would retreat, he picked a nearby location. He withdrew the flames of his Fireborne Form, allowing them to coat only the surface of his body and around his nasal passages. Then, he feigned weakness from poisoning, letting himself wobble and plummet from the sky. He crashed through several branches before landing hard on the ground, lying completely motionless.
It didn’t take long before Logan, through his mind’s eye, noticed the sneaky figure of Chameleos creeping toward him.
That cautious demeanor was a far cry from the frenzied aggression it had shown when it had lashed at him with its tongue before.
Just as Logan was calculating the distance, preparing to strike and drag Chameleos into a fight—
Its cunning eyes suddenly darted, and without any honor or hesitation, the dragon inhaled sharply—then unleashed a blast of poisonous breath right at Logan’s “corpse.”
“!!!”
Logan, pretending to be dead, instantly sprang to his feet, beating his wings and twisting his body midair to dodge the attack. He retaliated with a massive explosive fireball he had been holding back—firing it straight at Chameleos.
He hadn’t expected Chameleos to be this wary, so paranoid that it would try to finish him off just to be safe!
Realizing Logan had been faking all along, Chameleos vanished into thin air and took off without hesitation, diving straight back into the dense fog.
Teeth clenched so tightly they nearly cracked, Logan let out a furious roar into the sky, bursting into flames as he soared out of the poisonous haze—meeting Aki’s stunned gaze with a bellow of rage.
Suffocating—truly suffocating!
Disgusting—utterly disgusting!
Logan had never imagined that an Elder Dragon could be this cautious. So what if it had been outsmarted and driven away once? Did that justify such extreme wariness?
There was no fooling it—none at all!
Lowering his gaze, he looked at the toxic miasma still lingering around his feet. It continued to greedily claim lives, but at this moment, Logan was at a complete loss.
The Chameleos was the master of guerilla tactics among Elder Dragons. Logan, with his flame-wreathed body, could ignore the poisonous fog and move freely within it.
But its invisibility rendered all his strength useless—he had nowhere to direct his power.
No wonder the Chameleos never clashed with other Elder Dragons. In this combination of toxic mist and invisibility, unless one possessed some apocalyptic ability capable of dispersing the fog and breaking its stealth, no other creature could even locate its position.
Logan let out a furious roar, full of frustration. Enraged to his core—he could do little more than howl.
Without a large-scale ability to cleanse the miasma and compress the Chameleos’s space for evasion, forcing it to reveal itself, it would always have the upper hand by default.
Just then, from the direction of the Ancient Tree, a massive flock of Rathalos came sweeping through the sky. They had heard Logan’s furious roar—and clearly sensed the emotions embedded within it. For a time, the heavens rang with the echoing roars of the fire wyverns.
Amid those roaring cries, Logan caught something unusual. It sounded as though the Rathalos had made a collective decision.
To his surprise, they began to spread out—and under his astonished gaze, they started unleashing wave after wave of fan-shaped flames into the toxic mist!
It must be understood: fan-shaped flame breaths were vastly different from explosive fireballs. Sustained fan-breathing placed enormous strain on a Rathalos’s flame sac and throat, and consumed stamina at a terrifying rate.
More critically, these relentless waves of flame didn’t just disperse the miasma—they transformed the entire area into a blazing inferno.
Watching the forest ignite and burn, Logan finally understood their intention.
So the Chameleos planned to trigger mass extinction to cut off the food supply and force the Rathalos to leave?
Very well—then let the extinction be absolute.
Beneath the flames, not even a single blade of grass will remain!
While a single Rathalos didn’t have the breath capacity to clear such a vast expanse of miasma, dozens acting together could achieve precisely that.
The reason they hadn’t done this before was simple—it was the natural instinct of all creatures to protect their environment.
This method of completely devastating an area would lead to a sudden drop in available food, disrupting the ecological chain and eventually backfiring on the perpetrator.
However, the Chameleos’s actions over these past two encounters had thoroughly enraged the Rathalos. Since they were going to leave anyway, why let it off easy? If destruction was inevitable, then let it be total!
“Roooar!”
Once Logan realized this, a fierce light flared in his eyes. He pushed his flame sac to its limit, activating the violent factors within his body, and dove headfirst into the inferno.
Let this world—burn.
