Up on the surface, Theresa and her companions were left completely bewildered by the sudden transmission. They couldn't begin to fathom what the Doctor meant by telling them to retreat even further away from the impact zone. They were already entrenched near the outermost limits of the operational grid; how much further back were they expected to run?
Despite her lingering confusion, Theresa faithfully followed the Doctor's instructions. She systematically gathered the entire surface presence—including the laborers and tactical staff—and guided them in a swift retreat until their boots pressed against the absolute perimeter of the sector.
Perhaps driven by an instinctual dread that a catastrophic structural failure was brewing beneath the soil, the crowd cast deeply vigilant glances across the barren landscape, looking for all the world as though a primordial titan was about to breach the earth.
Simultaneously, the elite operators had completely locked down their posture, their eyes pinned to the center of the valley without a single blink. As battle-hardened veterans of a thousand campaigns, their tactical intuition was screaming at them that an unprecedented, terrifying entity was on the verge of breaking through its cocoon.
It was a suffocating pressure that made the hairs on their arms stand up on end—a cold, primitive terror that expanded directly from the absolute root of their souls, triggering a desperate psychological panic that none of them could rationally explain.
A quiet, screaming voice echoed in the back of their minds, demanding that they abandon their posts and flee the sector immediately to secure their own survival. Yet, bound by the iron weight of their military duties, they forced themselves to stand their ground, mustering every ounce of resolve to shield the fragile civilians clustered behind their line.
But not everyone possessed the peerless, unwavering courage of Babel's elite vanguard. The civilian laborers and the local mercenary detachments had been gripped by a desperate urge to run the absolute second the atmospheric pressure shifted—only to realize, to their horror, that their legs had completely given out.
The moment that primal terror saturated the basin, their lower limbs refused to register a single neurological command. Even executing a basic, evolutionary action like taking a step backward had become an absolute physical impossibility.
The fact that none of them had openly lost control of their bladders right then and there was a monumental testament to their baseline dignity—or at least, that was the comforting narrative they desperately repeated to themselves.
"What on earth is happening down there? What are those two doing in the pit?" Kal'tsit demanded, her brow furrowing into a deep, sharp line as she marched over to Theresa's side. Even her legendary, unshakeable composure was beginning to fray under the weight of this soul-crushing aura.
Theresa's gaze remained fiercely locked on the exact coordinates where the Doctor and Jeanne had vanished. The raw currents of her Sarkaz Arts were whispering a terrifying truth: a lifeform of unimaginable power was waking up beneath the bedrock—an entity whose existence rivaled the structural scale of a Lord of Fiends.
At that moment, the monarch was tightly cradling little Amiya against her chest, the young girl trembling in her arms like a terrified, defenseless rabbit. The liquid currents of dark energy thrumming around Theresa's fingertips made it abundantly clear that she was prepared to unleash her full combat potential at a fraction of a second's notice.
"There should be no cause for alarm... The Doctor explicitly assured me that Jeanne was simply conducting a highly confidential, personal ritual," Theresa noted, though her vocal delivery carried a rare, lingering hesitation. "She merely warned that the physical displacement and atmospheric shockwaves might ripple across a slightly wider radius... or so she claims?"
Truthfully, even the sovereign monarch was beginning to harbor immense doubts. What kind of living entity possessed the cosmic weight to force a Lord of Fiends to physically tremble in fear?
Furthermore, what manner of creature could command enough authority to completely silence the restless, roaring sea of souls trapped within her royal inheritance? The thousands of ancient Sarkaz spirits that had spent millennia churning in a perpetual, violent tide had suddenly fallen dead silent, mimicking a baseline mortal holding their breath in the shadows to avoid drawing the eye of an apex predator.
Even the Gods of Yan or the legendary Aslan kings of Victoria had never managed to strike this brand of existential horror into the bloodline of the Lord of Fiends. By all the established laws of Terra, it was the rest of the world that was supposed to live in absolute terror of the Sarkaz monarch—not the other way around!
A deep, suffocating layer of anxiety settled behind Theresa's eyes as she stared into the distance, praying with all her heart that Jeanne and the Doctor wouldn't be consumed by whatever was unfolding beneath the earth. She could only hope their luck would hold out.
"Jeanne, my intuition is screaming that we need to evacuate this cavern immediately!"
Down in the subterranean vault, the bedrock had begun to vibrate with a steady, rhythmic pulse. The Doctor stood tightly beside Jeanne, her expression masked with intense concern as she watched the young girl maintain unbroken physical contact with the pulsing crystal, terrified that a sudden energy backlash would tear her apart.
The colossal celestial core was behaving in a deeply unnatural fashion. The brilliant amber light that had previously saturated the crystal's interior was slowly being choked out, replaced by a dense, shifting black matter that expanded outward through the core—almost as if an apex entity were utilizing this massive planetary fragment as an egg to hatch its physical form!
By this point, the Doctor was entirely certain that Jeanne was on the verge of pulling off an event of catastrophic proportions. She had managed to piece together the broader scope of the holy maiden's intentions, and that exact intellectual revelation was the sole reason she refused to flee the chamber.
Even if staying cost her her life, she was fiercely determined to witness the resolution of this sequence with her own eyes! She was going to record this exact phenomenon—a mythological reality that she would likely never have the opportunity to touch again for the rest of her days!
This was a miraculous sight that had never been documented even across the peak eras of her own prehistoric civilization: a genuine creature of ancient legend, manifesting and gestating within a mineral womb right before her eyes like a god descending from the heavens.
In stark contrast to the Doctor's academic fervor, the earth-dragons that had been happily gouging themselves on the peripheral shards a few moments prior were now flattened against the cavern floor. They lay completely paralyzed, their heavy forms shivering uncontrollably until several of them simply lost consciousness from the sheer psychological weight of the aura.
In truth, even the Doctor was beginning to experience a severe, tightening constriction across her chest. She instinctively shuffled a few inches closer to Jeanne's side, fully aware that if the pressure amplified any further, she would have no choice but to latch onto the holy maiden like a desperate tree-sloth just to keep her footing.
She had quickly deduced that this suffocating existential weight was significantly dampened within Jeanne's immediate radius. If she dared to step away from the girl's shadow, she couldn't guarantee her human heart would survive the atmospheric compression.
"Don't worry, Doctor. I command absolute authority over this child; nothing is going to go wrong!" Jeanne reassured her, her focus remaining locked onto the shifting crystal. "As long as you've ensured the surface crew has pulled back to a safe distance, we're perfectly fine!"
Jeanne poured the entirety of her consciousness into the core, her eyes tracking the dark, majestic silhouette of Fafnir as its physical anatomy gradually solidified within the amber liquid. She waited with bated breath for the apex predator to finally unveil itself to the modern world.
Truthfully, she had never anticipated that her summoning registry would manifest Fafnir through this specific methodology. Under her original assumptions, she had imagined the process would be a simple, instantaneous transaction—the crystal would vanish in a flash of light, and the dragon would instantly stand before her.
Yet, reality had taken a far more organic path. The summoning grimoire was utilizing the colossal energy reserve locked within the meteor as a physical egg, meticulously gestating Fafnir's raw power from the inside out.
If we're looking at it through that lens... doesn't that mean I'm technically hatching Fafnir with my own hands? Jeanne's mind took a sudden, chaotic tangent. What does that make me in the grand scheme of things? When it finally opens its eyes, what is it going to call me? ...Is it going to call me Mom?!
As those bizarre thoughts swirled through her head, Jeanne glanced over her shoulder, only to realize that the earth-dragons she had summoned earlier looked half-dead from the baseline atmospheric pressure.
Ah, right! I completely forgot about the absolute bloodline suppression that exists between these species! Jeanne blinked in realization. The hierarchy that separated a baseline sub-dragon from a primordial True Dragon was an absolute, terrifying law of nature.
With a swift wave of her hand, she immediately dissolved the summons and recalled them to her grimoire. With the creatures safely tucked away, the only living variable left in the chamber was the Doctor—who was currently behaving with an unprecedented level of quiet obedience.
By this point, the strategist's brilliant mind had slowed to a crawl. Part of her cognitive delay was rooted in the absolute, rapturous focus required to analyze the birth of a living myth, while the remainder of her energy was entirely consumed by the physical struggle to withstand the mounting gravity of the room.
Inside the core, over ninety percent of the radiant amber light had been thoroughly replaced by an absolute, absorbing darkness. The monumental reservoir of energy contained within the meteor had been drained down to its final dregs, signaling that the creature within was mere moments away from breaching its shell.
"It's an absolute tragedy that I didn't bring any recording equipment down here..." The Doctor muttered, a profound wave of academic regret washing over her. "To witness the exact moment a True Dragon breaches its womb... an epoch-making event of this scale deserves to be permanently preserved in the historical archives..."
She couldn't help but curse her own lack of foresight. Had she known the ritual would take this shape, she would have dragged an entire laboratory's worth of high-definition cinematic arrays into this tunnel to ensure this unforgettable milestone was captured from every conceivable angle.
"Huh? Oh, I've been recording the whole thing on my portable camera!" Jeanne piped up cheerily, pivoting slightly to flash a compact, high-grade recording device directly in the Doctor's face. "Do you want me to transfer the file to your terminal once we get back to the ship?"
Jeanne wasn't an amateur; she was fully aware that she might only get one opportunity to summon a legendary True Dragon across her entire lifespan. A historic, deeply personal milestone like this was something she was absolutely going to preserve for her private collection.
Besides, who was to say she couldn't format the footage into a cinematic file later on? Marketing a masterpiece under a title like The Birth of Fafnir.avi would surely pull in a fortune in royalties—it would be infinitely more thrilling than any of those generic, mass-produced Columbia popcorn blockbusters.
"If that's the case... I must insist that you secure a master copy for my personal records," the Doctor breathed, her eyes widening before she quickly shook her head to refocus on their immediate surroundings. "But more importantly, I believe we need to turn our collective attention to our own survival—because this entire sector is on the verge of an absolute structural collapse!"
The violent, shuddering tremors vibrating through the stone floor left no room for debate, and the Doctor cast a frantic glance toward the ceiling, terrified they were going to be buried alive beneath a mountain of jagged stone before the ritual could finalize.
But before she could voice another frantic warning to the holy maiden, a sharp, crystalline snapping sound echoed through the chamber. It was a pristine, brittle fracture that sounded dangerously close—leaving the Doctor to momentarily wonder if her own skull had cracked under the pressure, or if it was something else entirely.
Crack— Crack—!
The sharp fractures splintering across the cavern ceiling grew exponentially louder as the massive, shadow-draped figure within the core expanded with terrifying force. The once-impermeable crystalline shell of the meteor was now entirely webbed with a massive network of fracture lines.
At that exact moment, even the Doctor went entirely silent. She stood frozen in the shadows, her mind completely blank as she stared ahead, utterly transfixed by a majestic, impossible reality that she would boast about for the rest of her days.
A look of unadulterated, fanatical joy erupted across Jeanne's face. She hoisted her dark dragon banner high into the air, her voice ringing out through the collapsing cavern as she shouted a commanding decree toward the fracturing core:
"Awaken once more, my companion! Cast your shadow across this modern era, and force this continent to remember the legendary myth it has so foolishly forgotten! Reveal yourself—Fafnir!"
"RRRAHHH!!!"
Concurrently with her battle cry, an earth-shattering, primordial roar reverberated through the subterranean void. The colossal, terrifying draconic head shattered the remaining fragments of the crystalline shell, unleashing its very first declaration of war upon the modern world.
The catastrophic engine of devastation that had once dominated the ancient verses of the Nibelungenlied—the Wicked Dragon Fafnir—had officially marked its descent onto the face of Terra!