Chapter 552: Breath of Destruction
Strax moved like a calamity incarnate. Each blow was a sentence. Each step was a death sentence.
Black dragons swooped down on him in droves, but it was useless. A single slash from Zani split the sky in two, and the bodies shattered before they even touched the ground. The world around Strax was no longer a world—it was an execution ground.
Explosions lit up the underground city. The buildings, once colossal and ancient, now crumbled like sandcastles under the tide of his fury.
“YOU ARE NOTHING!” he roared, cutting down seven dragons at once. The clones’ entrails fell like grotesque rain. The ground was a pool of blood, but with each drop, Zani sang louder. The blade glowed with an incandescent red, pulsing, alive — bathed in the essence of dozens of profane beings.
Ignisar floated above, his expression no longer one of superiority. It was one of analysis. Like a scientist observing an experiment that had spiraled out of control.
Strax saw it. In the midst of the slaughter, he saw that look.
“You took my mother’s body…” he said, almost calmly. Zani slowly spun in his hand, as if eager for the next act. “I want to know why. What pathetic reason justifies this, Ignisar? Why use her?”
Ignisar crossed his arms, floating slowly backward as a group of new dragons launched themselves at Strax.
“Because she was perfect,” he said, with a sadistic smile. “The body closest to the draconic ‘primary form’. And you know… everything perfect must be broken. Remade. Rewritten.”
Strax disappeared in a burst of energy.
The dragons coming toward him were cut down in an instant. Broken bones, flying limbs, heads separated from bodies before they even understood what had happened.
He reappeared above Ignisar, blood dripping from his hair.
“THEN I WILL BREAK YOU,” he said. “UNTIL THERE IS NOTHING LEFT TO BE WRITTEN.”
Ignisar disappeared with a distortion in the air, reappearing meters above. But Strax did not even follow him. He knew that this enemy liked to provoke, to talk. It was not worth wasting energy on empty words.
There was something more urgent.
A scream echoed below.
Scathach.
Her body pulsed. The transformation accelerated. The horns had already changed color—from bright red to absolute black. Her body began to glow from within, as if something divine and monstrous was being born there. With each attack from the others, she grew stronger. More monstrous.
Scarlet staggered. Her body trembled. But her eyes burned with a different kind of strength: it wasn’t fury. It was faith.
She approached Scathach’s battlefield.
Tiamat and Ouroboros tried to restrain the creature, but they were repeatedly thrown aside, like rag dolls. And yet they returned.
But it wasn’t brute force that Scarlet sought.
It was memory.
She knelt among the stones and began to whisper. Her hands trembled. Her eyes filled with tears. But her mind… her mind was a sharp blade.
“Scathach… remember the summer on the Myrrha plateau?” she murmured, activating a partial intrusion mental spell. A thread of silver energy stretched from her forehead toward the beast that had once been her friend. “We destroyed an entire mountain training. And you thought it was funny that I tried to pretend I could keep up…”
Scathach hesitated. A single slowed step. Her left eye flashed briefly with a different color.
Scarlet continued.
“And… and that day you were drinking alone, talking about Albert… saying he was ‘too proud to admit he loved you.’ You blushed just mentioning his name…”
A roar shook the heavens, but there was something there. A lower note. A hint of confusion in the beast’s cry.
“Remember when you saved me from the Soul Eater Worm’s cave? I… I was trapped… and you went in there alone. Alone! You pulled me out of that thing’s jaws without batting an eye. You’ve always been that, Scathach… not a weapon. You were my sister. My protector.”
The beast’s heart faltered.
The scales around her chest flashed blue for a second. Long enough for Tiamat to see. Long enough for Ouroboros to hesitate.
“She can hear us,” said Tiamat. “She’s in there!”
“Keep going, Scarlet!” shouted Ouroboros, even with blood dripping from his mouth. “PULL HER BACK!”
Scarlet reached out with a trembling hand, channeling more of her life energy. She wasn’t just talking. She was handing over memories. Forcing Scathach to relive them.
And inside the beast’s mind…
…Scathach saw flashes.
The cave. The dim light. The smell of blood and fear. Scarlet in tears.
The training. The mountain collapsing.
Albert. Smiling. His hands stained with paint. The lilac sky above them.
Who… who am I?
The beast’s cry became a roar of despair.
“MORE!” Tiamat shouted. “SAY MORE!”
Scarlet fell to her knees, coughing up blood, but shouted with all her might:
“YOU CALLED ME MASTER, SISTER! YOU… YOU TOOK CARE OF MY DAUGHTERS! I TOOK CARE OF YOU!” Her voice broke. “YOU HAVE A SON NOW, COME TO YOUR SENSES, YOU GIANT IDIOT!!”
Scathach took a claw to the head. She roared. She staggered. Her eyes glowed a distorted purple and gold. But something inside her fought back.
Meanwhile…
Strax had become a force of nature.
Ignisar launched five columns of black energy. Each one could destroy a city. Strax broke them with the back of his hand, effortlessly. His eyes were glazed, his teeth clenched.
“Why?” he shouted, appearing before Ignisar. “WHY HER? Of all people… why use HER?”
What was happening in Strax’s body was not something that could be explained normally. In fact, a dragon feels things much more than an ordinary human being. Even a normal dragon. As a Demonic Dragon, it could be said that he feels emotions 800 times more than an ordinary human being when he is at his peak.
He was irrational, his questions no longer mattered, it was just a way to let his body release the stress and calm down. Something that wasn’t working, after all, with every second that passed, he became more furious.
The air around Strax began to vibrate. It wasn’t just heat—it was a complete distortion of reality. The stones beneath his feet began to melt, forming rivers of magma that flowed through the streets of the underground city. The structures still standing cracked, screamed as if they were made of living flesh, and then collapsed under the growing pressure emanating from his body.
Strax clenched his fists, his teeth grinding. The sound of his bones expanding was like muffled thunder. The veins in his arms pulsed with incandescent red light, and his pupils began to split, thin as those of a hellish serpent.
“Use… my mother…?” he muttered, more to himself than to Ignisar, who still floated above, watching with that damn look of scientific interest.
A crack opened in his shoulder, as if his skin were splitting. But inside there was no flesh. There was magma.
“YOU TOUCHED HER? YOU USED HER AS A TOOL?!” Strax yelled, his voice becoming deeper, drowning out all the explosions around him.
The scales began to emerge, one by one, like molten metal crusts emerging from the skin. Red. Hot. Burning like the living crust of a volcano. The entire floor shook. The ceiling of the underground city began to crack, as if the world above also sensed the impending collapse.
“Damn…” murmured Ignisar, for the first time with a note of fear in his voice.
Strax staggered forward, his arms already larger, his fingers lengthening and becoming claws of living obsidian. His back ripped open, wings of magma bursting into flames. His body was in transition—but it was an unstable, chaotic transition, without control.
It wasn’t just anger that was transforming him. It was ancestral instinct. It was the cry of a primordial dragon that had been silent for ages… finally emerging.
Strax roared.
And the world responded.
The cave ceiling split with the sound. Fragments of rock fell like an asteroid shower. The entire city shook as if a cataclysm were happening beneath the earth. And it was.
The dragon was no longer just inside him. Now, it was him.
His scales pulsed between deep red and bloody gold. His eyes were two slits of pure flaming hatred. And his mouth… his mouth began to glow. The light came from within. An absurd concentration of thermal, cosmic, ancestral energy.
Ignisar began to move. But it was too late.
Strax opened his jaws.
A muffled roar was followed by absolute silence, as if the world had held its breath.
And then…
The beam was released.
It wasn’t just fire. It was a river of concentrated magma, a breath of liquid death that cut through the air like a cannon from hell. Everything it touched evaporated. The black dragons still in flight were obliterated in an instant. The towers, the laboratories, the halls carved into the rock—everything disappeared. The ground was torn up, melted, rewritten as a crater of living fire.
The attack lasted only a few seconds.
But it was enough to exterminate an entire civilization.
When the beam ceased, the city had ceased to exist.
In its place, there was only boiling magma, incandescent rocks, ashes flying slowly through the air… and the continuous roar of a dragon still burning inside.
Strax gasped, still in transition. His form was no longer entirely human, nor entirely draconic. It was something on the threshold of absurdity. His muscles trembled with the power unleashed. The energy around him writhed as if being sucked in by his presence.