[Last Episode: [He charged back in — bruised, bleeding, running on fumes and stubbornness — and the fight against Voriath Luminael continued, four against one, with no end yet in sight.]
Chapter 124, Episode 124
[Voriath's power was still climbing]
Isaac: He's getting stronger.
The Manipulator: I noticed.
Siriusniyo: How.
[Voriath, mid-parry against Beatrice's blade:]
Voriath: I'm not getting stronger. You're simply seeing more of what I already had.
Beatrice: That's not comforting.
Voriath: It wasn't meant to be.
[He caught her follow-up strike on the flat of the Chaos Nihilikinesis Sword and used the contact to redirect, sending her skidding, and turned in the same motion to answer Siriusniyo's incoming fire with a wave of void that swallowed the flame whole before it reached him]
Voriath: You are four extraordinary beings. Genuinely. I don't say that as flattery — I've fought entire wars where no single combatant matched what any one of you brings alone.. But extraordinary isn't infinite. And I am, for all practical purposes in this moment, infinite.
Isaac: You keep saying that like it's supposed to make us stop.
Voriath: It's supposed to make you understand.
[He moved — the same causality-breaking speed he'd used against Leo — and struck all four of them in the same instant, a fist to Isaac's ribs, the flat of his blade against Siriusniyo's chest, a void-thread wrapped tight around The Manipulator's wrist, a redirected gust of pressure that sent Beatrice through a collapsing chunk of battlefield.]
[All four of them hit the ground at once]
Voriath: Understand this: I am not fighting to win anymore. I already know I win. I am fighting because I respect all four of you enough to give you a real ending instead of a quick one.
[Isaac pushed himself back up, blood at the corner of his mouth, the Sutur Ignition Form guttering low.]
Isaac: Then keep giving it to us.
[He charged again. The Manipulator followed. Siriusniyo followed. Beatrice, last, wiping dust from her coat with the specific unbothered]
[And the four of them kept fighting a battle]
[Inside Death — The Dragons]
[Leo felt them before he saw them]
[The specific quality of something enormous existing nearby, the way you feel a mountain range before you round the last hill and actually see it]
[Satanael]
「Leo. Stop.」
Leo: What—
[Satanael]
「Look ahead. Carefully.」
[He looked.]
[Two shapes resolved out of the death-space's not-quite-darkness — vast, coiled, scaled things, each easily the size of a small moon, one wreathed in a permanent aura of cold so absolute the space around it seemed to forget how to hold heat, the other crackling with lightning that moved like it had opinions of its own]
[The system bar hovered up automatically, reading them]
『System Bar』
Name: Dragon (Karnak) — Ice Magic
Rank: SSS++
Ability: Copy Magic & Power, Camouflage, Infinite Extreme Ice Breath Attacks, Multiattack
Main Ability: Ice Magic
Stats: 50 (almost infinite)
Strength: 90
Durability: 80
Agility: 70
Intelligence: 100
Ability: 90
———————————————————
Name: Dragon (Tiamat Nava) — Lightning Magic
Rank: SSS++
Ability: Flight, Multi-Element Breath Attacks, Shapeshifting, Tough Scales
Main Ability: Lightning Magic
Stats:
Strength: 100
Durability: 80
Agility: 90
Intelligence: 90
Ability: 90
[Leo stared at the numbers]
Leo: Okay. Okay, so. Comparing this —I'm going to go ahead and call this a joke, right? This is a bit. This is the universe's idea of comedy.
[He gestured at the dragon stats "—to this—" he gestured at his own hovering bar, at the ten-and-fives sitting there looking suddenly very small]
[Satanael]
「Leo.」
Leo: Because if I'm reading this correctly, and I would like to be wrong, that dragon's Intelligence stat alone is TEN TIMES my entire Ability stat— Ahh Hell Nah!!!
[Satanael]
「Leo. Get serious.」
[The tone did it]
Leo: ...Right.
[He drew Shatter Nebula. The Kaos star sword and Heaven Divine Spear settled at his sides, summoned and ready, the Mana Comet Band already warm on his wrist where it had lived, permanently, since the day he'd first put it on.]
Leo: Just to confirm — I can't use anything else right now. No forms, no Satanael abilities, nothing.
[Satanael]
「The seal placed on you here restricts you to your bladed arsenal and whatever Taiji Collapse abilities you've earned. Right now that's one.」
Leo: Taiji Collapse of Authority.
[Satanael]
「Yes.」
Leo: Against two ancient dragons whose combined stats make mine look like a rounding error.
[Satanael]
「Yes.」
Leo: Cool. Great. Love this.
[He rolled his shoulders, and despite everything and grinned —]
Leo: Defeating one of them is worth what, again?
[Satanael]
「A hundred-times multiplier to your stats. The dragon itself is worth two hundred times.」
Leo: So beating both of them—
[Satanael]
「Would fundamentally change what you are.」
Leo: Then let's fundamentally change what I am.
[Karnak's massive head turned toward them first, ice-blue eyes narrowing with something that looked, disturbingly, like genuine curiosity rather than hostility.]
[Karnak's voice, when it came, was a low rumble that carried through the death-space like distant thunder]
Karnak: A living thing. Here. That's rare.
Leo: Living's a strong word for what I currently am.
Karnak: Closer to living than most things that wander this deep. You intend to fight us.
Leo: I intend to try.... I need stats upgrade!!
[Tiamat's laugh was sharp lightning-crackle, amused rather than cruel.]
Tiamat: He's honest, at least. Most things that find us either flee or lie about their intentions.
Leo: I figure honesty's cheaper. I'm Leo.
Karnak: We know who you are. Your source's signature reaches further than you'd expect, even in a place like this.
Leo: Then you know why I'm fighting you.
Tiamat: We do. And we're not going to make it easy, little source-bearer. Whatever you're hoping to earn from us — you'll earn it properly, or not at all.
[Leo raised Shatter Nebula.]
Leo: Wouldn't want it any other way.
-The Fight — Karnak First-
[Karnak moved first with inevitability, the specific quality of a glacier deciding to advance]
[His breath came in a wave that froze the death-space itself in its path, the not-quite-darkness turning brittle and pale, existence itself catching and cracking under the cold]
[Leo moved]
Satanael Genesis Flash Step.
[Satanael]
「That's still available. The seal restricts abilities, not the sword's inherent techniques and also how on earth can you use the ability because i provide the abilities once i am in you regardless if we are in death itself... although limited and sealed」
Leo: Good to know!
[He deleted the distance to Karnak's flank, Shatter Nebula already swinging, and the blade connected with the dragon's foreleg scale with the specific solid impact of steel meeting something that had never, not once, been meaningfully cut.]
[The scale didn't even scratch]
Leo: That's — okay, that's a very tough dragon... it barely had a scratch
Karnak: I told you. Immune to cutting.
[The dragon's tail swept around, casual, almost lazy, and caught Leo across the chest, sending him through several layers of the not-quite-ground before he caught himself.]
Leo: what the...How heavy is his body....
Leo — Taiji Collapse of Authority
Leo: In this exchange, your immunity to cutting damage is revoked.
[He said it the way he'd said it to the Border Sovereign — plain, certain, a declaration rather than a spell.]
[Karnak felt the authority reach for him — and resisted.]
Karnak: Interesting technique. It won't work on me the way it worked on lesser things.
Leo: Why not.
Karnak: Because my immunity isn't a rule imposed on me. It's simply what I am. You can revoke laws. You can't revoke a fact
[Leo processed that, mid-dodge, as another ice breath swept past where he'd been standing.]
Leo: That's — actually a fair point.
[Satanael]
「He's right. Taiji Collapse of Authority overrides domains and mandates. It doesn't rewrite fundamental nature. You'll need something else.」
Leo: I only have the one ability.... we have less disadvantage
[Satanael]
「Then you'll need to be clever with the one ability, and the swords, and everything else you have.」
[Leo landed, breathing hard, and looked at Karnak's approaching bulk with the specific focus of someone recalculating an entire strategy in real time.]
Leo: Okay. If I can't cut through the scales—
[He raised the Kaos star sword instead, the blade flaring gold-white, star-heat building at its tip.]
Leo: —maybe I don't need to cut them. Maybe I just need to make them very, very hot.
Kaos Star Sword — Star Ball!!
[The star at the sword's tip flared to a size ten times larger than any sun, condensed heat pressing outward, and Leo drove it directly into Karnak's foreleg — a burning one]
[Karnak roared — the first sound of genuine pain he'd made]
Karnak: What the.... impossible how can you damage my tough scales with just a mere sword
Leo: A mere sword??... this isn't an ordinary sword...
[But the dragon's ice responded instantly, flash-freezing the burn site, sealing it, the Copy Magic ability reading Leo's star-heat technique and beginning, terrifyingly, to adapt a counter to it in real time.]
Leo: Wait, is he copying my—
[Satanael]
「Yes. Karnak's Copy Magic reads techniques used against him and builds resistance. You can't use the same trick twice.」
Leo: That is deeply unfair.
[Satanael]
「Welcome to fighting an SSS++ dragon.」
[Leo switched again — Heaven Divine Spear now, the weapon flaring with a cascade of elements, light and shadow and void layered into a single thrust — and drove it toward Karnak's throat, the one point on the massive body that seemed marginally less armored than the rest.]
[The spear connected]
[It didn't pierce, but it staggered — the combined elemental weight forcing Karnak's head down, off-balance, and Leo used the opening to land three fast strikes with Shatter Nebula in quick succession, each one a different angle, each one testing for a gap the scales hadn't yet adapted to]
Karnak: What the–....
Leo: Don't underestimate me...
[The fight ground on — long minutes of Leo cycling through weapons, techniques, angles, Karnak adapting to each one just slightly slower than Leo could invent the next, the two of them locked in a genuinely brutal war of attrition that left Leo bruised, breathing hard, his coat torn in a dozen places, and Karnak's scales scorched and cracked in patches that his regeneration was, very slowly, starting to struggle to fully seal.]
[The turning point came when Leo, exhausted and improvising, did something that wasn't strategy so much as desperation shaped into an idea]
Leo: it's rather i use Taiji Collapse of Authority to apply the air around him instead of himself
[Satanael]
「Explain.」
[Leo, mid-dodge]
Leo: He said I can't revoke what he is. Fine. I'm not touching what he is. I'm revoking his domain's authority over the space he's breathing his ice through.
Taiji Collapse of Authority — Environmental
Leo:In this exchange, the space between us does not answer to Karnak's authority. It answers to mine.
[The next ice breath came — and travelled through space that no longer recognized Karnak's command over it]
[The breath weakened, scattered, arrived at Leo's position as a fraction of what it should have been.]
[Karnak went very still]
Karnak: You found the loophole.
Leo: I found a loophole. Whether it's enough is a different question.
[He pressed the advantage — Shatter Nebula and the Kaos star sword working in tandem now, cutting where the scales had weakened from repeated burns, burning where the cuts had opened gaps — and slowly, brutally, the massive dragon's guard began to fail.]
[The final blow came from the Heaven Divine Spear, driven with everything Leo had left, directly through the throat-gap that three separate strategies had spent the last twenty minutes carving open]
[Karnak went down]
[The death-space shuddered with the impact]
[The Fight — Tiamat Nava]
[Tiamat had watched the entire exchange without interfering — a specific, deliberate patience that Leo recognized, distantly, as respect]
[She moved the moment Karnak's body hit the ground]
Tiamat: My turn.
[Leo, already exhausted]
Leo: Can I get a minute—
Tiamat: No.
[Her lightning came in a wave that didn't just strike — it localized, warping the space-time around the strike zone into something that made dodging genuinely, mathematically difficult, the bolt arriving from multiple temporal angles at once.]
Leo: Both manipulate time and space.??
[Leo barely got Shatter Nebula up in time, and the impact sent him skidding hard]
Leo: She's faster than Karnak.
[Satanael]
「Her agility stat is twenty points higher. You noticed correctly.」
Leo: Thanks for the confirmation, very helpful, very timely.
[He pushed back to his feet, every muscle screaming, and looked at Tiamat's crackling form with the specific focus of someone who had nothing left except technique.]
Leo: Okay. She's fast. She's got destruction-element breath. Localized space-time manipulation. What am I working with here.
[Satanael]
「Her strength is her single highest stat. Which means her physical attacks, when they land, are the most dangerous thing she has. But it also means her defense against pure physical technique — not brute force, precision — is comparatively her weakest point.」
Leo: So don't match her power. Match her precision.
[Satanael]
「Yes.」
[Leo moved — not with force, with the exact economical precision every strike aimed not at overwhelming Tiamat's scales but at the small, specific seams where scale met scale, where flexibility for flight required gaps in the otherwise impenetrable armor.]
[The first strike landed clean — a thin, precise cut along her wing joint]
Tiamat: he is able to penetrate my tough body—
[She recoiled, genuinely surprised.]
Tiamat: That's not brute force.
Leo: No.
Tiamat: That's swordsmanship.
Leo: A hundred hours under a woman who could move a corpse three steps just by being disappointed in it. Yeah.
[Tiamat laughed — sharp, delighted, lightning crackling brighter around her in what looked almost like enthusiasm.]
Tiamat: I like you.
Leo: Please don't like me and then kill me anyway, that would be very rude.
Tiamat: No promises.
[She struck back — faster now, more focused, clearly recalibrating around the discovery that Leo's real threat wasn't power but precision — and the fight shifted into something closer to an actual duel]
[Leo weaving through space-localized lightning strikes with the desperate, improvisational grace of someone who had genuinely nothing left in reserve except the will not to stop.]
Taiji Collapse of Authority — Reapplied.
Leo: In this exchange, your localized space-time domain does not answer to you within a ten-meter radius of me.
[The declaration landed — and this time, without a fundamental-nature loophole to hide behind, it held, Tiamat's space-time warping collapsing back to normal the instant it entered Leo's ten-meter claim.]
Tiamat: That's a genuinely broken ability.
Leo: Thank you, I'm very proud of it.
[Without her spatial magic, her lightning strikes became simply fast rather than temporally unfair — and Leo, running on fumes but working with actual room to maneuver now, closed the distance and drove every remaining weapon he had into the joint seams her wings needed to fly.]
[The Kaos star sword cauterized as it cut, preventing regeneration]
[The Heaven Divine Spear's layered elements found purchase in wounds Shatter Nebula had already opened]
[Tiamat staggered, then dropped to one knee — the specific, deliberate lowering of a creature choosing to stop rather than one being forced to]
Tiamat: Enough.
[Leo stopped mid-swing, breathing so hard he could barely speak.]
Leo: You're — surrendering?
Tiamat: I'm acknowledging the outcome. There's a difference, but it amounts to the same thing here.
[Both dragons began to change a slow, deliberate contraction, scale and mass folding inward, until where two moon-sized ancient dragons had been, there stood instead two figures roughly Leo's height]
[Karnak's human form was tall, sharp-featured, ice-pale hair, eyes the exact color of glacier-blue that his scales had been]
[Tiamat's was smaller, lightning-quick even in stillness, golden eyes, hair that crackled faintly with residual static]
[Leo stared]
Leo: You're — people. You were dragons and now you're people.
Karnak: Dragons can hold both forms. It's not uncommon among the ancient bloodlines.
Leo: Is 'ancient bloodlines' doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Tiamat: More than you know.
[And then, without ceremony, both of them lowered themselves — not casually, fully, both knees to the not-quite-ground of death itself, heads bowed.]
Leo: Wait — what are you—
Karnak: You defeated us. Both of us. Fairly, without cheap tricks, without abilities you didn't have to earn.
Tiamat: That's rarer than you'd think. Most who find their way this deep either can't defeat us or defeat us through means that don't earn respect.
Karnak: We swear ourselves to you, Leo Sebastián. Wherever you go from here, we go with you. Whatever you require, we provide it.
[Leo, still catching his breath, looked at the two of them kneeling in front of him with the specific bewildered expression of someone whose day had officially stopped making sense several escalations ago.]
Leo: You don't — I mean, you really don't have to—
Tiamat: We want to.
[She looked up at him, golden eyes steady.]
Tiamat: Do you know how long it's been since something down here treated us like we were worth fighting properly instead of just something to survive?
Leo: ...No.
Karnak: A very long time.
[Leo sat down — not dramatically, just because his legs had, at this point, earned the right to stop holding him up — and looked at the two of them properly.]
Leo: Okay. Tell me. Who are you. How did you end up down here.
[Karnak and Tiamat exchanged a look — the specific look of two people deciding, together, how much of an old wound to reopen.]
Karnak: We're ancient dragons. Older than most of the current cosmological structure. We had a home once — a whole world, built by dragonkind, defended by dragonkind, governed by knowledge that took us millennia to accumulate.
Tiamat: The Hypers wanted it.
[Leo went very still]
Tiamat: Not the world exactly. What we knew. What we'd built. Our persistence, our power, our accumulated understanding of magic that predates most of what the current cosmology calls 'ancient.' They wanted to absorb it into their own realm. Add it to what they governed.
Karnak: We refused.
Tiamat: So there was a war. Dragonkind against the Hyper species, in full.
[Her voice had gone quieter.]
Tiamat: We fought well. Genuinely well. For a while, it even looked like we might hold them off.
Karnak: But the Hypers were simply too strong. Not in skill. In scale. They overwhelmed us the way a flood overwhelms a wall that was never built to hold back an ocean.
Tiamat: Most of our kind died there. Karnak and I were the ones who escaped — barely. We ran, and they caught us anyway, and rather than let us continue existing as a threat or a symbol, they erased us.
Leo: Categorically.
Karnak: Yes. The same technique Voriath used on you, if the resonance I felt when you arrived is any indication.
Leo: And instead of just — ending—
Tiamat: Our existence led us here. To death. Where we've been for longer than either of us cares to count precisely.
[Leo sat with that for a long moment.]
Leo: You were strong enough to fight the Hypers directly. Toe to toe.
Karnak: We were.
Leo: And you still lost.
Tiamat: Scale beats skill, eventually. Even ours.
[Leo looked at his own hands — at the exhaustion in them, at everything he'd just barely survived defeating — and thought, with a specific cold clarity, about what it meant that these two, who could do this, had still been overwhelmed.]
Leo: Then whatever Voriath actually is at full output—
[Satanael]
「Is worse than what you just fought. Yes.」
[A pause. Then Karnak spoke again, and there was something almost gentle in it.]
Karnak: We know a way out of here.
Leo: Out of death.
Tiamat: We've had a very long time to map it. Death doesn't like being mapped, but we're patient, and we're stubborn, and eventually stubbornness wins arguments with metaphysics.
Karnak: Give us a moment.
[He straightened, and where his human hand touched the not-quite-ground of the death-space, a fracture spread outward — casual, almost bored]
Leo: You're just — breaking death.
Tiamat: A little bit. Just enough.
[The fracture widened. Through it, faint but unmistakable, light — real light, living light, the specific quality of a place that had a sun in it.]
[Satanael's human form appeared beside Leo, white hair and blue eyes steady, looking at the widening fracture with something that was, for once, genuine relief.]
[Satanael]
「That's the way back.」
Leo: You're sure.
[Satanael]
「I've been building the covenant-thread this entire time. It's ready. It just needed a door, and apparently the door was two dragons who've spent an eternity learning how to pick locks that shouldn't exist.」
Leo: Convenient.
[Satanael]
「Extremely.」
[He looked at Karnak and Tiamat, both in their human forms, both watching the fracture with quiet satisfaction.]
[Satanael]
「Thank you. Both of you.」
Karnak: You gave us something to fight for again. It's a fair trade.
[Leo stood, every part of him aching, and looked at the widening door back to the living world.]
Leo: So we go through, and—
Tiamat:And we carry you. It's faster, and honestly, it's more dramatic.
Leo: ..I'm not going to argue with more dramatic.
[The Return to the Primus World]
[The dragons resumed their true forms on the other side of the fracture — vast, ancient, terrible and beautiful in equal measure — and Leo climbed onto Karnak's back while Satanael's presence settled back into the sword at his hip, the human form folding away into warmth and familiarity]
[They flew through the space between death and the living cosmology, through the dimensional layers that had once taken Xuantian and Mercurius agonizing linear time to cross, the two ancient dragons cutting through all of it]
[The Primus World came into view below]
[Leo looked down at it — at the battlefield, at the fires still burning, at four figures he recognized instantly even from this height, bloodied and staggering and still, somehow, refusing to stop fighting]
Leo: There.
[Karnak dropped altitude, and Tiamat matched him, the two of them descending toward the battlefield with the specific, unhurried grace of beings who knew exactly how much of an entrance they were about to make.]
[Isaac saw it first]
[He was on one knee, Sutur Ignition Form guttering low, blood running freely down his face, and he looked up out of pure exhausted reflex at the sudden shift in the light overhead]
[Two dragons. Massive beyond anything currently on the battlefield. Descending with the calm, absolute confidence of things that had never once needed to hurry]
[He was standing on the larger one's back, arms folded, coat torn but somehow still looking like it had been chosen to look that way, hair long and black and moving in a wind that wasn't there, eyes carrying the specific serious quiet of someone who had been through something enormous and come out the other side of it changed —]
[That name was Leo]
[The entire battlefield went still]
[Voriath, mid-strike against Beatrice, froze completely]
Voriath: That's not—
[His voice, for the first time in the entire war, genuinely broke off mid-sentence.]
[Jeannette, near the Eastern World subordinates, dropped her sword]
Jeannette: —My Lordd.....
[Just tears, sudden and unstoppable, the Grand Marshal — the first subordinate, the one who had held everyone together through every hour of this — finally, completely, breaking.]
Laxcarseel: So he was playing dead all the time...
[He smirked]
Luna: Leo—
[Her voice cracked on the name]
The Manipulator: That's genuinely—
Siriusniyo: He came back.
[Beatrice, smiling wide:]
Beatrice: Told you he would.
[Ereshkigal, her voice carrying from wherever she watched]
Ereshikigal: About TIME!!
[Meltryllis, still standing at the edge of the field with her arms folded, tilted her head with mild, pleasant interest.]
Meltryllis: Oh. So that's the one everyone's been talking about.
[Isaac was the last to find words — and when he did, his voice cracked with exhaustion and blood and something that was unmistakably, helplessly, relief.]
Isaac: What took you so long, idiot?
[Leo looked down at him. At the blood. At the bruises. At every mark of the fight Isaac had carried alone since the moment he'd been erased.]
Leo: Traffic.
[He raised Shatter Nebula.]
Taiji Collapse of Authority
[The strike arrived — a thin, precise line opening across Voriath's cheek, the first wound the King of the Multiverse had taken in this war that hadn't been the product of overwhelming combined force, but of a single, exact cut]
[Voriath's hand went to his cheek, blood]
[Voriath, quietly, almost to himself]
Voriath: What... what kind of power did he use...I didn't see that coming.
[His Infinite Glass — the fragmented future-sight that had shown him every branching outcome of this war, that had predicted anything]
Voriath: Karnak. Tiamat Nava.
[His eyes went wide — genuinely wide, the specific wideness of someone encountering a piece of very old history he'd assumed was permanently closed.]
Voriath: Those are supposed to be gone. Erased. My parents—
Leo: Your parents erased two beings who were strong enough to fight your species toe to toe and still lost. And instead of staying erased—
[He looked down at Voriath. At the cut on his cheek. At the King of the Multiverse, for the first time in the entire war, looking something close to unsettled.]
Leo: —they came and got me.
[The battlefield held its breath.]
[Leo's eyes were serious in a way nobody had seen from him yet in this entire war — not angry exactly, past anger, into something colder and more absolute.]
Leo: Voriath.
Voriath: Leo.
Leo: You erased me.
Voriath: How the hell did u escape from death itself and how did you gain that dragons.dragon's..
Leo: Well my answer is that's none of your business
[He raised the covenant sword fully, Taiji energy coiling black and white along its edge, and behind him the two ancient dragons — the last survivors of a war the Hyper species had fought and won by scale rather than skill — settled into position, waiting.]
Leo: Let's finish this properly.
To be continued...