He had considered whether he should extract Zarathos's soul from Johnny Blaze's body.
Anyway, looking at Mephisto's actions, it did not seem like he had put any insurance on this soul.
However, Zod Heath had always been wary of things on the mystical side. After all, people always feel fear toward things they do not fully understand.
Even with the Power of the Divine Dragon protecting his body, Zod Heath did not dare to touch a demon's soul.
Nevertheless, he straightforwardly took Johnny Blaze off Earth. By utilizing the relationship between gravity and space, he achieved spatial teleportation.
Gravity was a power closely related to space and time. As a master of both electromagnetic force and gravity, Zod Heath could naturally exploit this connection with ease, granting himself the ability to teleport instantly.
Gravity and electromagnetic force pried open space and planetary gravitational fields, allowing Zod Heath to traverse multiple spatial nodes in a short amount of time.
The universe was vast and boundless, its sheer volume practically endless. The Milky Way alone, not even accounting for the galactic corona and peripheral matter, had a diameter exceeding one hundred thousand light-years. Relying solely on warp drive flight meant one could never hope to make contact with other civilizations. Therefore, taking shortcuts became incredibly important at this stage.
According to mathematical modeling, the universe possessed a periodic honeycomb structure. This inevitably generated a massive number of spatial nodes. One could use these shortcuts to achieve spatial jumps, instantly crossing vast distances to accomplish long-distance cosmic flight.
But if one continuously shuttled through spatial nodes, the passenger's body would be squeezed and stretched by spatial gravity due to the constant jumping. Fortunately, although Zod Heath was traversing the spatial nodes with his physical body, he used his own gravity and electromagnetic force to reduce the spatial gravity to an absolute minimum.
This ensured that even someone with Johnny Blaze's "ordinary human" constitution remained completely unharmed.
The moment of leaving a spatial node, as well as the moment of entering one, brought a suffocating feeling of the body being repelled and pulled. It carried a thrilling sensation akin to directly facing death, leaving one thoroughly addicted.
Of course, Zod Heath felt none of this. He was simply too strong.
Johnny Blaze, on the other hand, was tossed about until he was half dead, which actually ended up waking him up.
Just as Zod Heath was preparing to knock him unconscious again, the very next moment, Johnny Blaze's entire body ignited with Hellfire.
"Damn it."
Zod Heath hurled Johnny Blaze away, smashing him heavily into the mountainous ring of a planet.
This impact nearly shattered the Ghost Rider's skeleton into fine powder. An impact force of several million tons was something it simply could not withstand, even with bones enhanced by Hellfire.
With the help of the fiercely burning Hellfire, the Ghost Rider rapidly regenerated and recovered.
Right at that moment, it saw a gleam of cold light descend from the sky, followed by a punch striking out like a dragon!
"Boom!"
The ground sank. The Ghost Rider was smashed to pieces, and Zod Heath stood in the massive crater he had blasted open with a single punch.
Beneath his feet, he trampled upon the Ghost Rider's bone ashes and the still-burning Hellfire.
Normally speaking, according to the setting of Kryptonians having zero magic resistance, the Hellfire should be burning Zod Heath so painfully he would wish for death right now. However, after the Power of the Divine Dragon circulated throughout his entire body, the Hellfire merely felt a little bit warm to him.
"This Power of the Divine Dragon is indeed somewhat useful, though it feels just like a layer of protective film."
Zod Heath watched as the Ghost Rider regenerated. Immediately following that, it threw a punch. The fist struck Zod Heath's body, but Zod Heath stood in place without budging an inch, his feet as steady as if they had taken root in the ground.
The Ghost Rider's strength was by no means weak, easily reaching the level of a hundred tons or more. It was just that compared to Zod, who was already a powerhouse within the Skyfather level, it was still lacking quite a bit.
Seeing this situation, the Ghost Rider directly whipped out the chains on its body. Fiercely burning Hellfire coiled around the chains as they were flung onto Zod's body, binding him tightly.
"You are guilty!"
The Ghost Rider pulled hard on the chains, but they would not budge.
It locked eyes with Zod Heath. The Ghost Rider fell silent for a moment before walking over on its own.
"Look into my eyes!"
The Ghost Rider saw that Zod Heath was surrounded by a permeating black aura, marking him as a person guilty of the most heinous crimes and completely beyond saving. In reality, this was simply because the aura of the Hell Dimension had blinded its eyes.
Zod Heath certainly knew of the famous Penance Stare, or the Stare of Repentance, or the Stare of Judgment, or whatever else it was called.
Although he boasted of having the same level of conviction as the Punisher, as well as the willpower and resolve of Thanos, he still had no desire to gamble on whether he could survive the Penance Stare.
As a result, he applied a light amount of force and completely shattered the chains.
"Is that it?"
He reached out his hand and grabbed the Ghost Rider's skull. With a slight clenching of his five fingers, the Ghost Rider's skull was crushed to pieces.
Super-strong neural reflexes and staggeringly fast movement speeds combined together made his enemies appear as though time was paused, leaving them completely frozen in place.
Kryptonians did have the flaw of low magic resistance, but Zod Heath knew about this weakness, so he would never give anyone the chance to exploit it. Once he started moving, his speed was faster than the reflex arcs of the vast majority of enemies. He was fundamentally an unsolvable existence.
Zod raised one hand into a fist.
The swinging fist tore through the surrounding air like an artillery shell. The speed and power of the punch reached a level unimaginable to ordinary people, even causing the air to explode and creating a sonic boom vacuum.
Then, the Ghost Rider was knocked flying away by Zod just like a tennis ball. During its high-speed friction with the air, it was directly reduced to ashes by the thermal barrier.
Zod felt completely refreshed. Finding such a durable punching bag on Earth was no easy task, especially with how strong he was right now. The Hulk would probably shrink back crying after just a single punch.
None of them could take a beating quite like the Ghost Rider. With its body enhanced by Hellfire, it could completely take a full punch from Zod before shattering to pieces. It prevented Zod from feeling like his punch had not fully landed, or like he had just punched into soft jelly before it was all over.
The physical feedback was the most important thing!
However, this was still only a warm-up exercise. For a true, all-out battle, he would probably have to seek out the Mad Titan, Thanos. And it had to be a Thanos equipped with the Power Stone.
The Ghost Rider stood back up on the horizon. But waiting for it was a blast of heat vision, blazing red and illuminating half the sky, forming a wondrous spectacle resembling an evening sunset!
The completely defenseless Ghost Rider was struck and instantly turned to ash, annihilated within the ten-plus-meter thick beam of heat vision.
A massive trench was carved into the ground, vaporizing hundreds of tons of hard rock layers and drawing a dotted scar across the surface of this pale planet.
The Ghost Rider roared as it stood back up, only to see Zod raise his hand. Through atomic manipulation, a meteorite with a diameter of over fifty kilometers rapidly materialized in the sky above him.
Motherfucker!!!
The Ghost Rider really wanted to roar this out, but it was already too late.
/-\
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