Chapter 539: Just Lies
The black flames slowly consumed the last fragments of history in the ancestral hall. Each piece of broken marble was more than stone—it was a relic being reduced to rubble by a single being. And that being… was Strax.
He opened his eyes again. The embers in his irises burned like dead stars being reborn.
Three elders remained standing, protected by hastily conjured barriers, enchantments imbued with centuries of ancestral magic. But none of it mattered. They were Western words against a storm. Runes against an earthquake.
And he charged at them.
Strax advanced in his draconic form with a roar that cracked the ground. His claws tore through the air, striking the first shield. The impact threw the elder against a pillar. The second tried to counterattack, casting beams of holy light that ricocheted off the black scales of the Demon Dragon. The third retreated in panic, conjuring portals, but none of them opened—the pressure of Strax’s presence overwhelmed the magical space.
Elyssar stepped forward, her eyes wide. “He’s going to kill everyone! I need to stop—”
A firm hand gripped her shoulder with surprising strength.
Scarlet.
“No.”
“But he—”
“If you go in now,” said Scarlet, her voice firm as tempered steel, “you will die in a single strike.”
Elyssar turned, indignant. “He’s not that strong! That’s an exaggeration! I know the elders! They’re millennia old!”
Ouroboros laughed. A deep, sincere laugh, as if she had heard the most absurd thing in the world.
“He is stronger than me and Tiamat,” she said, with a certain pride. “Perhaps back when we were True Dragons, we could have competed, but in this era? He is very strong.”
Tiamat, standing beside her, shook her head, causing her golden hair to spread out like a solar halo. She snorted, as if it were obvious.
“Of course he’s stronger. I wouldn’t accept or love someone weak.” Her expression carried a bitter tenderness. “But even for me… what he’s doing now exceeds my expectations.”
In the hall, Strax realized what many would have noticed before: his colossal form made quick movements difficult. The three elders—desperate—began to adapt their tactics. Containment spells began to work in gaps. A trap activated under his hind legs. Lights began to appear at the edges of the hall.
Strax roared again, but this time… it wasn’t anger. It was focus.
And then his form began to shrink.
Like shadows retreating at the end of an eclipse, his draconic form collapsed in on itself. Scales retracted. Bones broke and reshaped with thunderous sounds. The wings receded like veils of smoke.
In seconds, the black giant was replaced by a humanoid figure—the original Strax.
His bare feet touched the bloodstained floor. The clothes he wore seemed fused with energy itself, red and black like glowing coal. In his hands, two swords: Zuri, the living blade that pulsed with the will of chaos, and the Sword of Scathach, his inheritance, whose silvery white blade still whispered songs of vengeance.
The three elders froze.
And then he advanced.
The first tried to protect himself—an arcane barrier arose, powerful, bright, but one blow from Zuri was enough to shatter it like old glass. The elder fell, his chest split open from side to side, without even time to scream.
The second raised transmutation spells, trying to merge with the walls. Scathach’s blade struck him first. Silent. Lethal. A clean cut across the neck, and the blood evaporated before it touched the ground.
The third tried to flee.
But Strax appeared behind him before he could even complete the incantation.
One spin, two blades, and the body was cut into three pieces before he realized he was dead.
Strax looked at the corpses. The smoke rose in almost respectful spirals.
“Five down,” he said, in a low, almost emotionless voice. Then he turned slowly to Elyssar.
She shuddered.
“I won’t kill you just because you know my mother,” he said firmly. “But that doesn’t mean I trust you.”
Elyssar nodded, her eyes brimming with tears. For the first time, she felt small, truly small in the face of a force she couldn’t comprehend.
Strax turned to the last remaining elder.
The oldest of them all.
The one who, until then, had remained motionless, perhaps trusting in ancient pacts, or perhaps simply paralyzed by fear.
Strax smiled.
It wasn’t an evil smile. It was a determined smile.
“How about we talk?” he said casually, the blades still dripping with blood.
The old man didn’t answer. He was sweating profusely, his lips trembling like leaves about to fall.
Strax walked up to him. “You will die, of course,” he said, closing the distance. “But you can save the cities. Your disciples. Your libraries. Your children.”
The old elder fell to his knees. He was crying. “P-Please… I… I was only following orders. I always obeyed.”
“Whose?”
“The high council! Not just those of Caelum… there are others. Ancient instances… underground empires… black dragons of the Abyss… Ignisar answers to them, not us!”
Elyssar opened her eyes in fear, she thought that these “Black Dragons of the Abyss” were just ancient stories with no truth to them. She herself, as a member of the council, had never heard of them…
Strax approached, kneeling before the old man.
He wiped his face with the hilt of his sword. A pause, a breath.
Then he said, “Give me the names. The cities. The symbols. Everything you know about this Empire.”
The old man nodded repeatedly, desperate.
“I’ll tell you… everything… everything…”
Strax looked at him with a strange kindness for a second. Perhaps out of mercy. Or perhaps out of final respect.
Silence fell between them.
The old man breathed heavily, his hands trembling, feeling death hovering like a hungry crow over his shoulders. Still, there was something in Strax—not just menace. There was purpose. A fury with direction. Pain converted into absolute precision.
He began to speak. His voice was low, almost a whisper.
“There is a city hidden in the Veil of Umbra, in the far reaches of the underground, called Nerazek. It is the heart of an empire that never fell because it was never revealed. Most of us believed it was a myth… until Ignisar began receiving orders from them.”
Strax listened without interrupting.
“Their symbol… a coiled serpent, with eyes made of two black suns. They don’t fight for territory… they fight for ideas. For ancestral principles. They don’t want the dominion of dragons. They want a return to the origin… where Chaos was sovereign.”
Strax’s eyes narrowed.
“Did they create Ignisar? Do they control him?”
“No… they did not create him,” the old man replied, his voice already failing, “but… they shaped him. They gave him forbidden knowledge. Runes made of forgotten language. They connected him to something that sleeps in the heart of the earth… something that even the gods have abandoned.”
Strax closed his eyes. He breathed. There was no lie in that voice. There was no pride either. Only terror.
He rose slowly. The old man lifted his sweaty, pleading face, as if expecting some gesture of absolution.
But there was no absolution there.
“Thank you,” said Strax, his voice impassive as an ancient judgment.
And then, in one clean stroke, the Sword of Scathach pierced the old man’s heart.
No pain. No hesitation.
The body fell, and blood spread like ink across the cracked stones of the ancestral hall.
The silence that followed was absolute. Even the ashes of the destroyed columns seemed to have frozen in the air.
Elyssar brought her hand to her mouth, her eyes wide, but said nothing. There was nothing to say. She had seen executions before—and wars. But nothing compared to that coldness.
Strax turned slowly. The swords dripped blood, but his eyes… were calmer.
He walked over to Scarlet, Ouroboros, Tiamat, and Elyssar.
“That’s it,” he said. “It’s over.”
“It’s over?” Elyssar asked, almost incredulous. “You killed them all.”
“Not all of them, you’re too naive,” he replied coldly. “I don’t know if you noticed, but their bodies disappeared into the shadows.” Strax pointed, and indeed, where their bodies had been, everything was gone, even the blood.
Tiamat crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow. “Fake bodies, that’s why they die so easily. They’re just manipulations.”
Ouroboros turned her gaze away. “Manipulation of Darkness,” she said, observing closely. “I haven’t seen that in a long time.”
Elyssar looked closely and it was true. The bodies had disappeared… “And what are you going to do now?”
Strax looked at her. Then at Ouroboros and Tiamat. Then, finally, at Scarlet.
“Go inside the volcano, kill Ignisar, then go down to this empire blah blah blah, find who gave the order, kill them, and go home. Sounds like a good plan, right?”
Scarlet stared at Strax for a long moment, her expression unchanged, as if she already knew the answer before even hearing it. Ouroboros let out a muffled laugh, while Tiamat just smiled slightly, the golden glow of her eyes briefly illuminating the dust in the air.
“Straightforward. Practical,” Ouroboros murmured. “That’s so… you.”
“But it’s not a plan,” Scarlet said, stepping closer. “It’s a sentence.”
Strax didn’t look away. “Do you have another suggestion?”
“Yes.” She moved even closer, her red eyes almost touching his. “We’ll go with you.”
Elyssar stepped forward, surprised. “All of you are going down to… this? To the so-called Empire of Shadows? You don’t even know what it is!”
“It doesn’t matter,” replied Tiamat, shrugging her shoulders and preparing a reinforcement spell that made the ground vibrate slightly. “If they’re messing with him, they’re messing with us.”
Ouroboros added, “Strax is the kind of imbalance that can only exist surrounded by equally unstable forces. And we… we are that chaos around him.”
Strax turned to Elyssar.
“You want answers? The truth? Then stay here. Take care of Caelum. I destroyed the top of the world, and I don’t have time to rebuild it. But if you really want to change something, start by cleaning up what’s left of the lie you called the Council.”
Elyssar seemed breathless. Strax’s words hit her like slow blades. But she knew he was right.
She nodded slowly. “I… I’ll do it. I swear.”
Scarlet held out one hand to Strax. “Let’s go.”
He took it without hesitation. The black flames returned to envelop his body, but not as destruction—now, they were purpose.
“Let’s go,” Strax said.