Davies and Melinda had gotten out of the banquet hall and were now waiting for the valets who had gone to bring their cars, or in Melinda's case, to get her driver to bring her car over. Davies had already released Melinda's hand and was about to speak when he suddenly felt a sharp stinging pain on the back of his neck.

"Ouch," he reacted sharply to the sharp pricking feeling on his neck. 

It felt like someone had jabbed a needle into the back of his neck out of nowhere and his hand quickly reached out for the back of his neck to find out what was causing the sudden sharp pain but he suddenly noticed something moving at an alarming speed in the direction of Melinda's neck.

Due to the sudden pricking pain at the back of his neck, he was at full alert so he easily detected something that he wouldn't otherwise have noticed unless he was in combat mode, and by sheer reflex, his hand moved to swipe away whatever it was that was moving towards her neck.

He was trying to use his mana to form ice on his palm so he could slap the attack away should it be something dangerous that shouldn't come in contact with his hand, but surprisingly his mana didn't respond to his attempt to control it on time and he felt the sudden sting of being impaled by something sharp once again, but from his palm this time.

"Argh," the annoying sharp pricking feeling was back at full force in his hand, but that didn't stop him from quickly maneuvering his mana with more force this time to form an ice wall around them and then made sure to cover the top with ice as well for full protection.

Melinda was surprised by the sudden attack from unseen assailants and quickly looked at Davies to check if he was injured by the attack now that they were covered.

Now that they were covered Davies quickly took this opportunity to check what had caused the pain only to find a dart stuck into the palm of the hand that he had tried to use to block what was coming at Melinda, he quickly checked the back of his neck only to find a similar dart stuck into the back of his neck which he roughly pulled out without showing the slightest sign of pain on his face, after all the only reason he had reacted sharply at the pain just moments before was that it was sudden and unexpected.

Davies and Melinda looked at the darts that he had just pulled out roughly from different parts of his body and an apprehensive look appeared on their faces as they realized that the weapon that had been used was darts.

If the darts used were normal darts there would have been no need for such apprehensiveness on their faces, but these darts had empty cartridges that symbolized that they had previously carried some sort of suspicious liquid which was now deposited inside Davies's body.

"Fucking hell," Davies cursed as he examined the darts and came to an annoying realization.

'I somehow got a double dose of whatever poison these things carried,' he thought internally with raging annoyance. 

As for how he knew that the liquid that the darts carried was poison? Well, you don't shoot darts into people to give them medicine.

That was only done for animals, and he was pretty sure that apart from his sometimes depraved and animalistic thoughts that only he and Miya knew about, there wasn't any other part of him that screamed "animal", so there was no way the ranger wannabes that shot these things at him mistook him for a rhino in the wild.

Another thing to note was that the second dart had been shot at Melinda, but he had ended up being the one shot because he had reflexively tried to block the attack. This only signified bad news, for someone to attempt to shoot him and as well as one of the strongest people in the whole city, then the person was confident that just one dosage of the poison was enough to do the job, but he had unluckily ended up with two doses.

'FUCK!' 

How did the assailants even know of their locations and their movements?

They had only been outside the banquet hall for a few seconds and for them to be attacked in such a short time only meant that they were being watched and someone was simply waiting for the perfect moment.

Someone had gotten this close enough to harm him without him realizing it. Davies raged on the very thought.

"Are you feeling o-" Melinda wanted to ask how he was feeling when suddenly,

"Mana zone," he muttered, and his mana responded and began billowing off of his body in surprising amounts pushing Melinda back a bit and shattering the ice walls he had formed to protect them.

"Ice field," with his feet as a focal point, ice began to spread out and rushed around him in all directions at high speed.

"Snowfield sensing," he immediately activated the sensing ability that used ice to help him to detect things in his surroundings that he couldn't detect easily with his eyes or his other senses.

He was not planning on letting someone who had tried to attack him get away from his grasp without paying for the consequences of his action in blood. 

Though this was a major reason for his sudden explosive actions, it was not actually the main reason for him to take such an explosive action as he could easily use other means to try to find out the culprit, the main reason he was actually blasting out his mana without care was that he had felt a slight effect of whatever poison that was deposited inside his body via the darts.

The poison was making him lose control over his mana which was a very bad thing because, if he allowed his mana to run errant inside of his body without being able to control it, it would greatly damage his body and have terrible long-lasting effects… if it didn't kill him first, especially since he had gotten a double dosage of whatever the poison was.

The poison probably wasn't supposed to be this quick acting but since he had taken a double dosage even though that was not his intention, here we are. 

What was scary was that Davies was normally very resistant to poison but since this poison affected his ability to control his mana rather than attacking his body directly, his poison resistance wasn't able to do anything against it.

This was why he was pumping out his mana at high speed and trying to use it explosively while trying to get rid of the danger around him before he became incapable of using his mana and collapsed or imploded because, due to one of his blessings, namely, Ice Dragon Heart which was SSS-rank, he was capable of harnessing and holding more mana than almost every Mega.

The amount of mana that was present in his body was at least ten times the amount someone at the same power level as him would be able to hold in their body, and normally, he was usually proud of such an ability, but there was always that one day when blessings could turn to curses.

For Davies Lake, that day was today, because his extraordinary blessing which would always give him an edge in every one of his fights, was now working against his chances of survival. 

There was no foreseeable future where he would ever run out of mana because of this blessing which not only allowed him to harness and hold such large and potent amounts of mana, but also recharged his mana at an inhuman rate, but he was definitely going to try.

He had never actively tried to run out of mana and he would have been excited to try something like this if it were another day, but with the current circumstances that he was in all he cared about was wasting some of his mana, hopefully, find and smash the culprit to death and then quickly find a method to deal with the poison that had turned his body into a ticking time bomb.

He already had an idea to deal with the poison, but he wasn't looking forward to it as it was not a method he would want to use willy nilly as using that method had terrible consequences, but since he didn't have much of a choice that was probably the method he would end up using anyway as there was no time to try to create an antidote to the poison in his body… but for now, someone was going to pay.

As Davies's ice spread around more while he was also using his 'snowfield sensing' skill, he suddenly detected something and without waiting or bothering to confirm, he called out,

"Nilfheim's rain x100"