Chapter 608: The words of a dragon of destruction
The sky tore apart with black thunder as Strax advanced in his Black Demon Dragon form.
Each beat of his colossal wings was like the impact of colliding storms, and each movement carried the promise of ruin. The very atmosphere twisted around him—the pressure of his aura spread like an invisible wave of terror, corroding the air, crushing the ground, and tearing silent screams from the earth itself.
He wasn’t just flying.
He was hunting.
And the next island before him wasn’t a destination, but a sentence.
Rage boiled in his chest like a heart forged in a furnace. With each beat, demonic energy exploded through his veins, and his black scales were tinged with crimson reflections, as if fire were bleeding from within. The words echoed in his mind, simple, brutal, obsessive:
Destroy. Tear. Annihilate.
When it opened its mouth, the roar that escaped wasn’t just sound.
It was cataclysm.
A deep, ancient, bestial roar—as if the world itself were being ripped apart from within. The sonic impact made the entire island tremble like a fragile boat in a raging ocean. Trees twisted and toppled as if begging for mercy. Rocks shattered into fragments. Rivers churned violently, as if trying to escape, and the surrounding sea retreated in desperate waves.
And in response, the land reacted.
From the ground, from the shadows, from the cracks, and from the very air, creatures began to emerge.
Dozens. Hundreds. Orcs armed to the teeth, misshapen beasts with bone fangs, gigantic serpents made only of gnashing skeletons, trolls covered in crude iron plates, lesser demons spitting black flames—a whole horde, as if in eternal readiness, waiting only for the call.
And that roar had been the trigger.
The trigger.
They all advanced on him.
The island had awakened to fight him.
But Strax did not retreat.
He would never retreat.
His reptilian eyes closed for an instant, and then his aura exploded.
An invisible wave, a shock of pure presence.
In the blink of an eye, he mapped the entire island.
He felt every crawling creature, every trembling leaf, every pulse of magic hidden deep within the earth. There were no secrets before him. There was no hiding place. The island was a stage, and he was the executioner ready to put an end to the show.
And so, without hesitation, he opened his jaws.
The first breath of demonic energy came out like a colossal torrent of negation.
It wasn’t fire, it wasn’t wind, it wasn’t lightning.
It was the sheer absence of existence.
Wherever it touched, reality simply ceased to exist.
Creatures screamed for only a fraction of a second before being reduced to dust. Trees became nothing more than ash suspended in the air. Mountains crumbled into sand, as if they had never existed. The sea parted in boiling steam, evaporating in columns that reached the sky.
And then, in the heart of the island, only a colossal hole remained.
In a single breath, Strax had erased everything.
For an instant, silence.
Only emptiness and the metallic smell of destruction hung in the air.
But then… something moved.
Out of nowhere, ancient runes began to glow in the void. Symbols floated like serpents of light, stitching reality together with arcane threads. They intertwined, danced, rebuilt. And the island, stone by stone, tree by tree, river by river, creature by creature, began to reassemble itself.
Everything returned.
Everything was reborn.
As if his fury had been but a useless breath against an unbreakable eternity.
The Black Dragon raised his head.
His incandescent eyes burned with a fire that wasn’t just hatred—it was wounded pride.
And, in a deep tone, his voice echoed like thunder: “…You think you can stop me?”
Strax’s chest heaved, his draconic ribs expanding like walls, and the air around him burned with the heat of his breath.
This time, it wasn’t just fury.
It was concentrated hatred, ancient, dense, a hatred that seemed to carry with it echoes of forgotten ages.
When he opened his mouth, what came out wasn’t just a puff—it was the end of an entire era condensed into a breath.
The air shattered like shattered glass, cracking into lines of energy that snaked through space.
The ground of the island shook as if it had a life of its own, groaning in despair, until it began to melt into rivers of incandescent magma.
Reality itself screamed as the beam tore through space, sweeping every corner of the land, erasing history, erasing time, erasing existence.
And then, in the midst of that devastation, something happened.
The words escaped his mouth without him even realizing it.
They weren’t chosen. They weren’t planned.
They were pure instinct, ripped from the depths of his being like a genetic memory that should never have been awakened.
Words that belonged to no man.
Not to demons, not to gods.
Dragon words.
“Destruction.”
The instant the sound echoed, the world changed.
It wasn’t magic.
It wasn’t power.
It was law.
Reality buckled. The very fabric of existence buckled before that absolute order. The attack didn’t just erase the island—it erased the runes that held it together.
They tried to reassemble themselves, as they always did, emerging in luminous fragments that intertwined to stitch reality together.
But the Word denied them.
And in the shock of that denial, the runes shattered like fragile paper dolls, dissolving into particles, unable to resist.
Every symbol, every line, every stroke was consumed by the void the Word dragged behind it.
This wasn’t ordinary destruction.
It was the impossibility of it ever existing again.
And then, silence.
Nothing remained.
No creatures.
No rocks.
No trees.
The entire island had become a sepulchral void, a colossal crater where the sea retreated in circles of foam, fearing to fill the space.
Strax’s chest heaved, heavy, and black smoke escaped his nostrils like mist from an unquenched volcano.
His eyes burned red, but behind the anger was something new: shock.
He didn’t know what he had done.
He didn’t know how he had said it.
The Dragon Words were myths—legends told in whispers, of primordial creatures who shaped the world when time was still in its infancy. They said only the oldest dragons, those who had witnessed the birth of the sun, could speak them.
And yet, he had said them.
Without thinking.
Instinctively.
His claws trembled. He stared at them, feeling not only the power—but the burden.
In his mind, memories, fury, doubts… and a breath of fear.
“…What the hell… did I just do?” he muttered.
But there was no time for an answer.
The horizon shivered.
The wind brought with it dust, ash, and a new weight.
Symbols began to form, far more complex than before. They weren’t simple runes. They were colossal arcane circles, each larger than mountains, covering the sky, the sea, the air. Lines of gold and purple light danced like constellations, recreating reality on an even grander scale.
They didn’t just stitch together the void.
They tried to subdue the space Strax had opened.
The Black Dragon closed his eyes, and then he smiled.
A cold smile. A dangerous smile.
That wasn’t the smile of a man. It was that of a predator who had sensed the trap—and decided to crush it.
“So this is it…” His voice echoed like thunder shattering the world. “Do you want to trap me in a game of endless reconstruction?”
Strax’s body ignited in black flames, each scale burning like live coal.
When he roared, the sound pierced not only the air, but the ocean itself, which rose in titanic waves as if obeying him. The heavens shattered with thunder.
In that instant, Strax wasn’t just Strax.
He wasn’t just a dragon.
Nor a demon.
He was the embodiment of ruin, the ultimate predator, the decree of inevitable doom.