Chapter 98: The Myth-Breaker
On the outskirts of Dragonil's primary city, the atmosphere was already heavy, saturated with the pungent scent of ozone and death. Kana had only just recovered Alma's limp, inert form. Beside her, Lancelot carried Damian on his back, fresh blood still leaking from his wounds. Around them, an ominous phenomenon had just occurred: all of Alexander's clones, who had been fighting desperately only moments prior, suddenly evaporated in wisps of azure smoke. The entire city and the sky above were now blanketed in a brilliant, yellowish golden light, leaving the group utterly alone against the chaos.
Profiting from this brief, anxiety-laden respite, Lancelot turned his gaze toward Kana. His eyes, once filled with cold certainty, now betrayed a profound guilt.
"Listen, I wanted to tell you that..." he began, his voice breaking from exertion and remorse. "I... I'm sorry. For everything I did, and for trying to kill you and the others. I was blinded by"
"Shut up, Lancelot," Kana cut him off cleanly, without even looking at him, her eyes glued to the menacing sky. "There's no time for apologies or regrets right now. If we don't survive what's coming, your remorse won't mean a thing. We'll settle this later. For now, we have to finish this... and find a way to heal Alma and Damian as fast as possible."
Lancelot nodded slowly, grit teeth. A truce had been signed in blood and urgency. But they weren't given the time to savor this mutual forgiveness; the sky tore open directly above their heads.
An overwhelming, divine, and suffocating presence plummeted down upon them.
Abraham landed with a titanic crash, the metallic ground buckling into rigid waves beneath his golden feet. The thermal shockwave instantly melted the nearest structures. His imperial eyes, an immaculate, pupil-less gold, swept over the group of survivors with undisguised disgust.
"...Who is this guy?" Kana muttered through clenched teeth, her legs trembling under the sheer weight of the intruder's presence.
Instinctively, Lancelot took a step back to act as a shield, his face deathly pale. "His aura... it's terrifying. I've never felt magic energy like this."
"Why are there humans lingering here?" Abraham asked in a contemptuous voice, each syllable weighing tons upon their shoulders, crushing the resistance of the weakest.
Damian, painfully regaining consciousness on Lancelot's back, cracked open a bleary eye. His voice was nothing but a fragile whisper, choked by the ambient pressure: "What's... going on...?"
Abraham didn't even deign to reply. With an explosive impulse that instantly shattered the ground, he lunged. A massive kick of tectonic weight struck Lancelot square in the abdomen, sending him flying dozens of meters through the iron structures. The hunter absorbed the full force of the blow, spitting out air and blood, protecting Damian with his own broken body. In the same breath, without a single transition, a savage barrage of punches rained down on Kana. The sheer violence of the impacts shattered her ribs; she was slammed into the ground with such force that the resulting crater pulverized the metal into a fine dust.
It was at this exact microsecond that an incandescent trajectory sliced through the debris. Vulcan, who had somehow managed to drag himself back up further away, charged into the battlefield like a cannonball. Enraged, he had tracked Abraham's horrific energy signature, tearing through the ruins at insane speeds to ram the tyrant in the ribs.
Vulcan's impact was of unprecedented violence, but Abraham didn't even flinch. The warrior's flaming body struck the golden aura as if hitting a concrete wall. With a casual backhand swipe, Abraham batted Vulcan out of the air. The blow was so vicious and precise that the warrior's neck snapped, and he was sent crashing back into the ruins, motionless.
Lancelot, forcing his broken frame upright, and Kana, faltering but driven by a survivor's pure rage, attempted one final, desperate assault. But Abraham was untouchable. Every blade strike, every claw, every spell slid off his golden skin like an illusion, completely ignored by his inverted causality. Within seconds of an entirely one-sided slaughter, he left them all broken on the ground. Lancelot was embedded into a retaining wall that collapsed over him; Kana vomited a thick trail of blood after a visceral uppercut that tore through her stomach.
Only Alma remained, unconscious on the floor, at the mercy of the monster. Abraham stepped toward her, his immense shadow casting over the young girl's body. He slowly raised his golden foot, intending to crush her skull. No one had managed to inflict so much as a scratch on him since the start of the invasion.
Then, a shrill, piercing whistle nearly unbearable to the human ear tore through the atmosphere.
A blue flash, a comet of pure, condensed energy descended from the heavens at an indescribable velocity. The sudden disappearance of all the clones finally made perfect sense: Alexander had recalled every single ounce of his power into a single point to return to the front with absolute striking force.
**BAM!**
The strike was unmitigatedly savage. Charged with a raw, concentrated intent to destroy, Alexander's foot slammed directly into Abraham's chest. The kinetic shockwave was so violent it instantly vaporized the cloud cover for ten kilometers around. For the very first time, Abraham's heels deeply plowed through the metallic ground as he was forced back several steps, his eyes wide with genuine surprise.
Alexander stood before him, breathing heavily, his muscles strained to their absolute limits. His body was marred by deep cuts and golden burns, but his regeneration was already active, crackling as his flesh knit itself back together in real-time. His normally warm gaze had turned cold, dark, entirely emptied of humanity. Only the pure instinct of a supreme predator remained; his eyes were those of a wild beast poised to kill.
"Why are you attacking them?" Alexander asked in a low voice, vibrating with an ominous threat.
Abraham slowly ran a hand over his pectoral armor, right where the strike had dented the golden material. His eyes widened with a gleam of pure, ecstatic madness, and his face split into a cruel, almost delighted smile.
"Alexander... You're back already?" the dragon uttered with an incredulous laugh. "And yet, I blasted you to the Moon with a single strike. I thought gravity and the vacuum of space would hold you a bit longer. You impress me..."
Alexander didn't blink. His red eyes remained locked onto the Dragon of Gold.
"Only two minutes, Abraham," Alexander replied coldly. "Only two short minutes have passed since you ejected me from the atmosphere."
A few meters away, lying amidst the debris, Vulcan painfully cracked open an eye upon hearing those words. A shiver of pure horror shot through his broken body.
"Two minutes...?" Vulcan thought, in complete psychological shock. "This entire massacre... Obliranca, Kana, me... we were trampled in less than 120 seconds? We couldn't even last two minutes against a monster like this..."
On the ground, Damian, his vision blurred and his body broken, let out a faint sigh of relief, a toothless smile forming on his bloody lips. "Alexander... you came..."
Lancelot, propping his shattered silhouette against a piece of wall, widened his eyes as he observed the newly arrived fighter's destructive red aura. "Is... is that him?" he asked breathlessly, his throat tight. "Is that him, the famous Alexander, one of the five Sacred Dragons?"
Kana, despite the excruciating agony tearing through her stomach, felt hope suddenly rekindle in her chest. Her eyes lit up with joy amidst the blood covering her face. "Yeah... that's him. We're saved..."
Abraham, completely ignoring the insects at their feet, began to laugh again at his true opponent.
"Because I enjoy it, Alexander! Seeing the fragility of your precious friends shatter beneath my fingers is the only worthwhile entertainment in this ruined world!"
Alexander closed his eyes for a fraction of a second. In the silence of his mind, voices from the past echoed with mechanical clarity those of the Hunter Association's high officials validating his reports, the standardized cheers of the crowd during national crises, and the whispers of generals: "Sir, you occupy the peak. As the Number One of S-Class, you are the strongest hunter on the continent."*
His eyelids snapped open. The red glow vanished, instantly replaced by a fluid sheet of pure ebony a gravitational distortion so incredibly dense that the air around his boots liquefied into black arcs. The metallic ground began to sink, forming a flawless bowl ten meters wide beneath his mere stance.
"To me... all of that was just a label," Alexander said, his voice slicing through the whistling atmospheric pressure. "I never asked to be a symbol of strength, or to be at the peak of the S-Class, and even less to be a Sacred Dragon... That is what the 'me' from a few months ago would have said. Except today, if this world needs a monster to kill another monster... then I will occupy that space. Look at me carefully, Abraham, because this is the last thing you will ever see in this world."
A low rumble rose from his chest.
To be continued...