Chapter 378: The Power of Heretics

The dragons wheeling through the heavens did not falter at the silver dragon Aurelian's staggering display of might. Their lives were already forfeit; slaying the intruders who had dared breach the island was now their only purpose.

What they commanded was not merely their breath and brute strength alone. With draconic magic, acting in concert, they could summon terrors beyond reckoning.

Several elder dragons gathered among the swarming host, their wings and scales flashing with magical radiance. Torrents of mana gathered around them, drawn into their spellwork until the surrounding air was stripped bare of energy. Many lesser dragons attempting to cast faltered as their magic was bled dry.

Even so, they didn't hesitate. They hurled themselves bodily at the nine heretic dragons, sacrificing their own strength to buy the elders time to complete their work.

Booming thunder shook the heavens. Colossal meteors began to fall from the firmament above, dragged down by gravity and the enchantments binding them. They swelled as they plummeted, their molten shells hardening into crystalline armor beneath the flames.

The nine dragons were small targets in comparison to the unwieldy meteors. It would be easy enough for them to evade the attack.

But they faced not one foe, nor ten, but tens of thousands of hostile dragons in their way. A living tide of dragons converged around them, their wings blotting out the sky, breath and bodies alike forcing the heretics to maneuver in narrower and narrower corridors of air.

With magic, with body, with their breath—the dragons did everything they could to corral and trap the nine dragons within range of the meteors being summoned by the elder dragons. As for whether or not they too would be collateral damage, none of them cared.

The heavens split with a roar, as if facing the wrath of a god. Thus fell a jagged spear of lightning so bright it blinded those nearby. This was no mere lightning bolt but rather the mass seventh-tier draconic spell Heaven's Judgment.

The earth split. Magma surged upward, summoned into a towering hand of molten rock that rose a thousand meters high to swat at the low-flying heretics. The forests below kindled in an instant as the very air burned from the heat.

The island's magic had been drained to support spells of such magnitude. Three such spells had been wrought by the elder dragons in concert, brimming with so much power that they were brushing up against the threshold of eighth-tier spells.

Yet the nine heretics did not panic. Their roles had been decided long before their arrival on this island.

The first to surge forward was the white dragon Doris, whom Goelia had mocked as a fool. She plunged into the thick of the onrushing host, her body bursting with a storm of impossible cold.

A blizzard unfurled, freezing not only flesh but also matter, space, and spellwork itself. For one shuddering instant, even the march of time seemed to stall at her cry.

Behind her came the green dragon Goelia, prepared. He exhaled a torrent of virulent vapor, condensed and refined into its deadliest form.

His massive body allowed him to produce and store concentrated dragonbreath at a level beyond what dozens, even hundreds, of other dragons could maintain. The vapor filled the air, covering the entire island of dragons.

Goelia could even manipulate the vapor of his dragonbreath for specific objectives. In other words, his dragonbreath wasn't restricted to unleashing a spray of corrosive acid.

Through long centuries, he had studied the anatomy of his own kind. His corrosive spray swirled into the gaps uncovered by Doris's frozen stasis, seeping into sinew and bone, unraveling the secret architecture that let dragons master their immense bodies.

The results were immediate. Goelia knew more about the bodies of these dragons than even the very dragons themselves. Those encased in Doris's frost lost, if only for a brief span, the natural resistance that repelled foreign matter and cleansed their flesh.

His breath seeped into them with ease, corroding their fragile internal structures—fragile only in a relative sense, of course. To other beings, those organs would have seemed indestructible. But to Goelia, who had long since surpassed the realm of legend, such "ordinary" dragons were pitifully weak.

The white dragon's domain of frost, bearing faint echoes of primordial law, could not endure for long. Yet the time it bought was more than enough. Wracked by spasms, the corrupted dragons plummeted from the sky like shattered stars, their bodies gouging deep craters in the trembling earth below.

The swarming hosts ahead were easily contained by two of the remaining dragons. Pompeii, the black dragon, rose up unflinching against the thunderbolt of Divine Judgment.

His body, tempered for centuries in the brutal crucible of the City of Sin, had been reforged beyond compare. For him, it would be easy enough to shrug off this thunderbolt.

A deafening crack split the heavens as the lightning speared downward. From the ground, Pompeii surged up, colliding with it head-on. The seventh-tier spell brimming with eighth-tier magic expended itself fully upon his frame.

Most of its force broke upon his near-indestructible barrier of muscle and scale. Only a sliver of penetrating current lanced into his body. The lightning crackled over his scales in the form of searing plasmic arcs that coursed madly across his form.

"It stings a little, but that's about it..."

Pompeii's mutter was laced with disdain. The pricking pain in his flesh was nothing compared to the torment he had endured in the City of Sin, suffering beyond anything these dragons could imagine. He withstood the storm alone. Then he turned his head back toward the blue dragon behind him.

"Susumi, are you ready?"

The blue dragon did not immediately reply, but the sudden surge of plasma across Pompeii's body was proof enough that Susumi had finished her work.

Pompeii's maw curled into a grim smile. Opening his jaws toward the three elder dragons still weaving their spell, he unleashed his breath.

A black dragon's breath was the least remarkable of all dragonkind: it was simple fire laced with a hint of corrosion. Its flames lacked a red dragon's searing heat, and its corrosion fell far short of a green dragon's virulence. What it lacked in essence, Pompeii compensated with raw, terrifying physique.

The thunderbolt continued to hammer him, but he bore it all. Susumi's art took the scattered overflow of lightning that his body could not contain and channeled it inward, weaving it into his core.

Then, Pompeii loosed it. His unremarkable dragonbreath became a vessel of retribution that hurled the lightning's full force back upon its casters.

A pillar of lightning lanced through the sky from Pompeii's maw, denser, swifter, and deadlier than the original strike.

The three elder dragons, still locked in their incantation, were unable to evade. Blackened fissures split their bodies. In an instant, they were hurled from the heavens, sundered by a blade of pure concentrated power.

A thunderous cascade followed. High above the rest of the nine dragons, Caesar cradled a blazing sun in his claws. With a gentle thrust, he sent it surging upward to meet the falling meteors.

Those meteors carried more than fire and momentum. Each was inscribed with suppressive wizardry: spatial seals and shackles meant to bind the heretics. If they weren't destroyed, they would become a significant hindrance.

"The rest is up to you."

Caesar inclined his head to the bronze dragon Beolo. The conjured sun was his gift, tempered and restrained for his comrade.

"No one but you could forge it so perfectly. This amount of power is perfect!"

Bronze dragons were the least lifelike of dragons. Much of their anatomy was forged from peculiar metals, including the hollow cavity where a heart should have beat.

What filled their bodies wasn't blood, but instead pure energy.

This structure was their weakness, but also provided them with a singular gift: the ability to draw in energy with their core and unleash it in short, catastrophic bursts.

Beolo seized the sun, pressed it into the opening at his chest, and absorbed it into his core. Never before had he attempted to take in such vast force.

Unrestrained, it would have annihilated him from within—but Caesar had crafted it perfectly, leaving it bound for harness. Now, the energy flooding his being made his very soul surge with exultation.

"What power..." he exhaled, a shudder in his breath.

Scarlet energy spilled across his form, forming a translucent carapace like a crimson mantle. He launched upward, afterimages trailing behind him as he ascended at breakneck speed.

The meteors never reached peak velocity. One after another, Beolo smashed them to ruin, sundering them into a rain of blazing crystal fragments scattered across the firmament.

Below, the colossal hand of molten rock conjured by the elder dragons clashed with an equally massive skeletal claw—a construct of bones ripped from the island's depths, the remains of ancient dragons.

The bone-claw had been wrought by another of the nine dragons: Mog'Kaw, who possessed dominion over death.

Though his own flesh had long since perished, twin flames of soulfire blazed in his hollow sockets. From his body spewed black necrotic smoke, which dragged the buried bones from the earth and forged them into his weapon.

Yet such power was beyond a lone dragon to sustain. Orbiting unseen about him, so small as to be nearly invisible even relative to just his talons, was Biqu, the faerie dragon.

Faerie dragons were beloved by magic. They were born as mages from birth and easily became legends in their youth. They would only grow stronger thereafter. Not only that, they could even temporarily transform their bodies into pure magical essence.

Biqu was stranger still. She possessed the unique ability to slip into another dragon's body and amplify their magic beyond measure.

How vast was that amplification? Vast enough that what Mog'Kaw had summoned was not merely a gigantic claw.

𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

The earth was torn apart as a skeletal dragon over a kilometer long clawed its way free. Even "colossal" felt like a lacking adjective relative to the monstrous being. Though incomplete and lacking a lower body, it was more than enough to take on the kingdom of dragons.

It drew Mog'Kaw and Biqu into its skull, sheltering its summoners within its cranium of bone.

The bone dragon seized the hand of magma, laughably small in comparison to the size of its body, wrenched it from the earth, and flung it into the swarming ranks of dragons. Countless wyrms were crushed and hurled to the ground like leaves in a storm.

Having cleared the path, the bone dragon, a juggernaut of ruin, carved a path straight toward the Dragon God.