Chapter 380: The Argent Kingslayer

Several of the heretic dragons had already hurled themselves into battle. Each fought their own fated struggle, matters that could not be postponed or avoided. All these clashes served a single purpose: to pave a way forward for the silver dragon Aurelian to take on the Dragon God.

The bone dragon's monstrous bulk surged forward, its jagged horns ramming another from the front. It drove the living dragon back with unstoppable momentum, pushing it back against a mountain before then crushing the mountain itself. Fragments of stone rained down like meteors.

This bone dragon Mog'Kaw was a mysterious entity, and the only of the nine who faced neither family nor friends. Instead, blocking its path were several elder dragons. Though formidable in their own right, even they faltered before the sheer immensity of his bone summon.

In this world, size itself was strength. A vast body meant strength sufficient to bear its own colossal weight. And if such a body could move as fast as an ordinary dragon did, then its bulk alone would be a weapon beyond reckoning.

Such was the monster born of Mog'Kaw and Biqu's magic: a bone dragon enlarged a hundred times over, yet moving with the swiftness of any dragon. Its strikes, magnified by its size, became impossible to dodge.

A wall of flame roared from an ancient red dragon flying high above, but the bone dragon's talons merely blocked the inferno with a claw. From below, a black dragon burst out of the ground, talons clamping around the bone dragon's exposed spine where its lower body had failed to form. The black dragon wrenched at the bone dragon with all its might, trying to drag it aside.

Parrying the inferno had destabilized the bone dragon's balance, and black dragons had the most superior physical strength among all dragons. The two fold assault managed to topple the bone dragon, but Aurelian gave them no chance to finish it off.

Silver radiance flashed like lightning. Blade in hand, Aurelian became a streak of argent light that flickered toward the ancient red dragon's flank. She flashed all about its body with slashes too fast to follow, until the red dragon's body blazed with wounds that cut to the bone.

The ancient dragon found itself rent by countless gashes in the blink of an eye. Then, a jet of argent energy burst from its neck, vaporizing flesh and sinew alike. Its head and half its neck dissolved into ash, leaving behind ghastly white bone, bare and gleaming.

The bone dragon slammed its talons into the earth, claws digging dozens of meters deep. The black dragon heaved, scoring trenches across the ground, strewing shattered stone in its wake.

But even its strength faltered against the bone dragon's. With a heave, the bone dragon steadied itself, then whipped about and brought its colossal fist down in a savage blow.

Its bone claw crushed the black dragon, shattering its skeleton and rupturing its organs from the concussive force. The dragon's body was driven deep into the earth, soil and stone erupting upward in a storm as the ground quaked and split apart.

The bone dragon rushed straight toward the Dragon God. It had conserved much of its energy for this very moment, until the majority of the dragons had been restrained by the heretics, leaving the path to the Dragon God clear.

The dragons that had withdrawn from the earlier clashes now rallied as they swarmed to intercept the bone dragon. But they were as leaves against a storm, far too slow to overtake its headlong rush. They could only trail in its wake as it thundered toward their king.

"Are you ready?"

Mog'Kaw's soulfire flickered, his voice transmitted toward his partner with a pulse of mental energy. The faerie dragon Biqu shimmered beside him in the form of living mana.

"Ready. I'm storing up mana to empower my amplification ability. This blow may not be enough to strike down our king, but it will surely clear Aurelian's way."

The two heretics conspired within the bone dragon's body. Necrotic energy streamed out from its skull, flooding the monstrosity's frame until black smoke poured from every bone.

From afar, it seemed like a towering skeleton wrapped in a storm of death, blotting out sun and sky. It was bearing down on the Dragon King with unstoppable momentum.

A translucent barrier of energy rose up before it, as high as a wall. At last, the Dragon God's guardians had revealed themselves: three ancient dragons with the purest of bloodlines, each advancing toward transcendence. They were the strongest of all who dwelt upon this isle, and now stood in defense of their god.

The barrier, dense and unyielding, trembled as the bone dragon slammed into it. It slid backward hundreds of meters, gouging the earth with huge furrows, yet the barrier did not break. For the first time, the behemoth's rush was halted. Now came the counterattack.

Time itself stilled. One of the ancients, a blue dragon, with its racial affinity for prophecy and time strengthened to the utmost, invoked a weakened Temporal Stasis spell instantly.

The world froze; even the bone dragon, with one claw raised to smash at the barrier, hung motionless within the temporal prison.

Meanwhile, the ancient red dragon began to swell with blazing light as he prepared to launch a fearsome attack.

Crimson radiance erupted from his chest, flooding his body till it blazed incandescent, his body a furnace of pure destruction.

This was to be the bone dragon's requiem: a breath of annihilation, his full power distilled into a single, catastrophic attack. As one of the Dragon God's three chosen guardians, he wielded unmatched destructive might, his blow magnified beyond measure when paired with the time-binding blue dragon. Few beings could survive even one such breath.

But just as he loosed his high-intensity breath, the Temporal Stasis shattered. Time began to move at its usual pace.

The red dragon faltered, startled. Below, the bone dragon shuddered violently. Ambient mana surged rather than ebb away. Power spilled out from its bones. Was this... a corpse explosion?!

Never had such a spell been wrought on so vast a scale. No necromancer could normally fill such a gargantuan husk with sufficient death mana.

Yet with Mog'Kaw's mastery and Biqu's fearsome power of amplification, the impossible had been achieved.

"No!"

The ancient red dragon felt a surge of dread. The energy gathering within him burst forth prematurely in a blazing column of searing light that pierced the heavens. He had to stop the corpse explosion before it reached a critical threshold.

But his intent meant nothing. The sudden urgency of the explosion left no room for thought, no time to question how the temporal stasis had been broken in advance.

Aurelian's form flickered into being behind the ancient red dragon's back. A silver spear of radiant light pierced straight through his heart, the very core of his power. In that instant, the vast energy he had been amassing unraveled chaotically. His fearsome breath, meant to annihilate all who challenged the Dragon God, dissipated with his death.

The red dragon's bewildered final thought mirrored that of the ancient blue dragon, whose eyes had widened as Aurelian appeared before her in a gleam of argent. Her tail had transfigured into a silver whip-blade that sliced cleanly through her neck.

Then came the corpse explosion, the likes of which had never before been seen. The dead bone dragon exploded in a series of shock waves that ripped across the sky.

The island of dragons was shaken to its very foundations as the waves of force tunneled into the earth. The seas along its shores sent hundred-meter waves heaving upward. The mountains fared worst of all: those closest to the blast shattered into flying rubble in an instant, scattered like sand in the wind. Peaks further out, caught in cascading shockwaves, toppled one after another until whole ranges lay broken.

The barrier cast by the last ancient dragon stood directly in the path of the blast at point-blank range. It held the explosion in check for just a heartbeat before both the spell and its caster were annihilated into powder finer than ash.

The force of the explosion roared skyward. Clouds that had long choked the heavens were swept clear for leagues around. Sunlight pouring down in dazzling sheets, only to be dimmed by the roiling clouds of dust the blast had hurled upward.

Those lesser dragons who had pursued the dead giant were spared the worst, if only by their lacking speed. Unable to keep pace with the titanic struggle, they had lagged behind. Even so, the blast caught them like a tidal wave, hurling them down toward the land, the impact triggering fresh quakes in the shattered earth.

In the center of the isle, untouched, unmoved, stood the Dragon King, Wendel Myx.

Its golden wings enfolded it like the robes of a statue, Its figure immovable, Its body unmarked by the storm that passed. It was the strongest of them all. Even having granted portions of Its might to Its "faithful," Its body retained Its unassailable strength.

Perhaps only one dragon among them could breach that defense...

Through the storm of smoke and dust a silver dragon surged aloft in a blaze of argent radiance. Nothing remained to bar Aurelian's path; every obstacle had been scoured away. The power she had long withheld, hoarded for this moment, now surged in anticipation of full release.

She climbed higher and higher, a streak of silver cleaving the firmament, leaving behind her not a fading afterimage but a tangible trail of light—an outpouring of pure energy from her own being. She was forging a blade vast enough to bring down a god.

At last the Dragon God's true size was revealed. His body dwarfed hers by dozens of times. Against that gilded colossus, her usual silver blades would scarcely cut the flesh, let alone penetrate bone. But the weapon now trailing behind her, the argent greatsword she had conjured that was dozens of times larger than her own body, was a weapon worthy of deicide.

Her chest heaved. The wellspring of power she had carried since birth—a power unlike any dragon's, vast beyond measure—had been left utterly empty. Hollow weakness coursed through her.

But she did not falter. Once this deed was done, there would be time enough for rest.

Raising the colossal sword of silver, wrought from every drop of strength she possessed, Aurelian lifted it high before the gaze of every dragon present. Then she struck at the god of their kind.

The blade of silver smote the golden body of the Dragon God.

This supreme vessel of flesh and scale, which no force of this age had ever marred, parted before her weapon like ordinary meat. The sword carved down, stalling briefly upon bone before advancing inexorably until Its giant form lay sundered, cleft in twain.

𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

It was a scene almost absurd in its simplicity: the clash between the strongest of swords and the strongest of shields.

Yet this, too, was part of the nature of war. Years of effort, centuries of preparation, had all culminated in the single stroke of a silver blade that slew a god.

Before the eyes of every dragon, before the children of the Dragon God themselves, Aurelian's argent blade fell. The golden body of their God split in two.

Something broke. A taut link snapped in the hearts of his worshippers. Chains unseen shattered. Time itself seemed to falter.

And in that silence, Aurelian, spent and trembling, heard a voice in her mind—a weary voice, faint but familiar.

"Well done... Haha."