Chapter 95: Dragons vs DRAGON.
While the silence of clemency enveloped the tragedy of the hall, the capital plunged into a dimension of an entirely different terror. The atmosphere no longer belonged to mortals. The pouring rain, washing away Lancelot's sins at ground level, clashed here with an invisible dome of pressure. Each drop of water turned into electric vapor before it could even touch the two Titans facing each other. Alexander rose vertically into the air, heading toward Abraham. His ascension was slow, devoid of any visible magical artifice, carried solely by the force of an inverted gravity he mastered to perfection. Cutting through the curtains of rain that sizzled at his passage, his silhouette stabilized, positioning himself ten meters from Abraham, the Ancient Dragon freshly awakened from his golden prison. Alexander's scarlet gaze absorbed the faint glow of distant lightning, while Abraham's eyes remained rigid; cold as the steel of ancient conquests, Alexander's gaze locked without a blink on the colossal entity. Abraham towered over him by three heads, his residual dark granite skin radiating a heavy, suffocating heat.
« Return to your tomb, Abraham, » Alexander commanded.
His voice, calm but amplified by a vibration of pure mana, cut through the rumbling thunder.
« Your place is no longer among the living. You have nothing left to do here. »
Abraham closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, then let out a low laugh. It was not a burst of joy, but a visceral resonance, a low-frequency rumble that propagated through the air, vibrating the eardrums of the rare survivors on the ground and shattering the last intact stained-glass windows of the palace spires.
« You have changed quite a bit since those days, Alexander... » the dragon said, slowly tilting his massive neck to look down at him. His pupils, resembling dead suns, pulsed with an orange-gold glow.
« Tell me, haven't you become a little stronger than the brat who once trembled in the shadow of my altars? Although I wonder... if your power is as great as you claim, why is the kingdom in such a pitiful state? »
The Dragon let a sadistic smile stretch across his lips, revealing sharp teeth carved from black rock, before adding in an atrociously light tone:
« On my way here, an insignificant human was standing in my tomb chamber. He undoubtedly believed his party tricks would be enough to block my resurgence. I crushed him under my heel, like an annoying insect. I didn't even bother to remember his name. »
In the distance, hidden within the dark folds of a collapsed curtain wall, Dominus observed the scene. His fingers caressed the hilt of his dagger, but his heart was no longer in it. Abraham held Luppy's head in his right hand, catching him by the hair. The vanguard of his conspiracy was dead. The situation was slipping entirely out of their control, tipping into a war where the slightest residual shockwave could dissolve a top-tier mage.
« Staying here is useless now, » Dominus thought, a bitter line marking the corner of his lips. « This guy is probably even stronger than Ivar and Baku. He will kill me if I stay here. »
Shrouding himself in her mantle of distortion, her began to step back into the shadows, erasing her magical trace to discreetly prepare her retreat, abandoning Dragonil to his fate.
Suddenly, the thread of dialogue snapped. Abraham's gaze left the Class S mage to slide horizontally toward the ground of the courtyard of honor. There, among the white marble debris and bloodied mud, his eyes landed on Flora. The young queen, her orange hair soiled with soot, lay unconscious. Noel held her tightly against his chest, his own body shivering under the effects of exhaustion and the magical pressure radiating from Abraham. A defenseless boy protecting a descendant of the sun dragon lineage. Abraham's smile widened, becoming a demonic slit. For the Ancient Dragons, certain lineages were genetic anomalies that had to be purged from reality so the original order could be respected, especially since the history of peace between dragons and humans was caused by Flora's ancestor, the first Dragon King Rayoce. In an infinitesimal span of time a fraction of a second so close to zero that the movement of photons seemed frozen in the air Abraham vanished from Alexander's sight. His speed was not a matter of physical displacement, but a brutal compression of spatial coordinates.
In a fraction of a microsecond, without the human eye or magical sensors being able to register the slightest movement, Abraham's colossal mass materialized, his silhouette cutting off the light above the two dragons. His right fist, massive as a cliff face, was already launched in a descending course. This strike did not merely seek to hit;
charged with an infinite magical density, it generated an atmospheric pressure capable of liquefying bones and pulverizing the Earth's crust several kilometers deep. Noel and Flora were going to be killed instantly.
PAFF!
A sharp, short snap of terrifying clarity tore through space.
At the crucial thousandth of a second, just as the fist's trajectory entered the death zone of the two, Alexander used his substitution technique. An instantaneous spatial inversion. In the sound of a pneumatic implosion that sucked in the ambient air over ten meters, Noel and Flora's bodies were teleported fifty meters away onto a bed of stable debris. In their precise place, Alexander appeared, his legs anchored into the marble ground, his two arms crossed in an "X" right above his head, his ebony gauntlets opposed to Abraham's descending mass.
BOOM!
The impact did not produce the sound of a metallic collision, but a seismic explosion. The shockwave was so powerful, so condensed, that it instantly swept away the storm clouds for thousands of kilometers around, revealing a dark sky as night had fallen. On the ground, the impact cleared the courtyard: the rain, the mud, the stone debris were swept away, volatilized by the air friction. The brute force of Abraham's strike was greater than anything Alexander had anticipated. Despite his perfect guard, his boots slid across the marble before the ground beneath his feet gave way completely. Without a cry, the rank 1 Class S was lifted off the ground, propelled toward the sky at superluminal speed. His silhouette pierced the stratosphere in a line of blue fire, tearing through the Earth's upper atmosphere before being projected into the vacuum of the cosmos, straight toward Earth's satellite. In less than half a second, Alexander's body struck the surface of the Moon head-on. The impact against the seleniter celestial body was of unheard-of violence.
On Earth, Abraham didn't even bother to look toward the sky to check the state of his victim. He slowly brought his right arm back to his torso, the golden plates that composed his shoulder sliding over one another with a grinding sound. His brows furrowed, expressing deep annoyance as his eyes landed once more on the coordinates where Noel and Flora had just landed.
« Why is this girl, Flora, still alive? Wasn't Vaeris supposed to have cast a curse on her long ago? » he asked, his rumbling voice shaking the air above the crater.
« The blood of traitors should have died out with the old world… A dragon that bows before humans is not a true dragon. »
He lifted his left foot to take a step forward, ready to crush the two dragons with a single stride. But before his golden sole could touch the ground, a hiss of steel tore through the thermal mist.
A silhouette stood between the Dragon and his prey. Obliranca. Her long blade, which had created a white sword of magic, was pointed toward the giant's face, its edge vibrating with a sea-green glow that seemed to devour the surrounding light. Her eyes burned with pure hatred, an absolute refusal to bend before the inevitable.
« You will not touch Flora! » screamed Obliranca, her voice broken by the effort but carrying a savage authority.
« You, who once wanted to enslave humans and kill your own dragon brothers, there is no way I will let you touch Flora. »
Without taking her eyes off the monster, she barked a brief order over her shoulder, her voice growing sharper under the pressure of urgency:
« Noël! Flee this place immediately! Take Flora in your arms and run without ever looking back! Get out of the capital's perimeter! »
Beside her, the air suddenly became unbreathable. A column of scarlet fire erupted from the ground, condensing to form Vulcan's silhouette. The dragon stepped forward with a heavy pace, his eyes narrowed into two slits of glowing embers. Despite the surrounding moisture, his thermal aura was so intense that it boiled the water in puddles meters away.
« We won't hold five minutes against that thing, Obliranca, » grunted Vulcan, his fists enveloping themselves in gauntlets of dense, almost solid flames.
« Then we will make sure each minute lasts a century. Noel must leave this zone as fast as possible, » she replied without a blink.
Side by side, Vulcan and Obliranca dug their heels in, releasing the entirety of their residual mana into a double barrier of elemental and spiritual energy, ready to shield them with their bodies to offer Noel the few seconds necessary for his escape.
To be continued…