Chapter 841: Shilhouette

"In less than ten minutes, those water demons will sever the primary tendons in that dragon’s left wing. The mount will crash into the trench. The dragon will survive the pressure, but your Senior Praetor will have his ribs crushed by the oceanic depth within four seconds of submersion. His lungs will fill with brine, and his corpse will drift into the coral caves as feed for the hatchlings."

Jack paused, letting the silence stretch across the plateau until the only sound was the howling wind and the faint, rhythmic gasps of the trembling nobles.

"So I ask you, Councilors," Jack said softly. "Should I step in and balance the scales? Should I grant your champion a hand so that he might survive long enough to meet Rhys on the thirteenth floor?"

The question hung in the freezing air like an iron weight.

Daemon Archon’s pale hazel eyes flickered with rapid calculation, his fingers tapping against his chin as he looked at the ground.

Elowen’s lips parted slightly, but no sound escaped her throat.

To accept outside intervention was to admit that the proudest martial house in their realm was helpless without a human’s mercy.

To refuse was to watch their primary military representative die a bloody, ignominious death before their eyes.

King Maelor remained motionless at the center of the gathering, his golden eyes fixed on Jack.

The ancient monarch raised no objection, nor did he defend the failing captain.

His jaw remained set, the knuckles of his right hand resting flat against the pommel of his broadsword, waiting to see how far the Soul Warden would push the demonstration.

"Your silence is answer enough," Jack said, a faint, cold smile touching the corners of his lips. "Stand there and watch how an actual sovereign handles an ocean."

Jack did not step toward the scrying portal. He did not issue a command to Loryn or call upon the demonic legions below.

He raised his right arm straight out, pointing his palm toward the empty space between the two projections.

A dense, suffocating surge of dark mana erupted from his core, tearing through the ambient fabric of reality with a concussive, low-frequency roar.

The air on the plateau instantly dropped another twenty degrees, the frost on the cedar needles thickening into dense, white crusts as a spatial rift four paces wide tore open before him.

Jack stepped through the tear, his silhouette swallowed instantly by the twisting gray void.

High above the crashing, violent expanse of Floor Eleven, the heavy storm clouds fractured with the concussive crack of a breaking mountain.

Jack Kaiser stepped out of the spatial void, his boots stepping on nothing more than the pressurized air currents five hundred feet above the raging ocean.

The howling gale whipped his dark coat violently around his frame, the air thick with the sharp, alkaline sting of salt and the copper scent of draconic blood.

Below him, the Disaster-class Dragon was banking hard, its left wing trailing dark crimson droplets as Theo Althalos clung to the high saddle with one arm, his broadsword slipping from his blood-slick fingers.

Jack closed his eyes.

Within the boundless spiritual expanse of his core, he touched the ancient, slumbering presence that had remained dormant within his spiritual sea.

"Tharaxis," Jack spoke, his voice vibrating with an absolute, metaphysical command through his body. "Manifest."

The atmospheric pressure across the entire oceanic floor seized.

The howling crosswinds died instantly, crushed into absolute silence by a primordial, divine gravity that descended from the upper clouds.

Erupting directly from Jack’s chest, expanding outward in vast, overlapping rings of blinding white spiritual radiance, came the colossal form of Tharaxis.

The dragon did not possess the heavy, leathery wings or the jagged, volcanic plates of the western dragons that filled the Spire’s skies.

He was a serpentine titan of ancient legend.

Hundreds of paces of sinuous, muscular length covered in shimmering, pearlescent white scales that refracted the stormy light into prismatic halos.

Four massive, five-clawed talons tucked against his belly, while long, flowing white whiskers drifted through the air like tendrils of pure lightning.

His horned head, regal and ancient as the first dawn, rose above Jack’s right shoulder, his golden, slit-pupil eyes looking down upon the mortal ocean with vast, detached sorrow.

"You have held your tongue since the moment I woke up from my fight with the Herald," Jack said aloud, the sound of his voice cutting cleanly through the dead air.

"You hide behind your silence. You refuse to answer my inquiries regarding the old world. But it matters not, old lizard. I will pry the truth from your throat sooner or later."

Tharaxis did not offer a defense. The massive serpentine dragon simply shifted his coils, his golden eyes observing the dark water below as his presence settled into absolute synchronization with Jack’s mana channels.

Jack extended his right arm toward the churning sea below, splaying his fingers wide.

His body began to glow bright yellow, and yellow runic tattoos covered him.

[Astrapon’s Reign]

The heavens above Floor Eleven did not merely darken; they ceased to exist.

A dome of pure, lightless obsidian wiped away the clouds, plunging the ocean into a suffocating, pitch-black void.

The air grew dry, the ambient moisture in the atmosphere torn apart at the molecular level by the sudden concentration of high-density destructive mana.

For three long, agonizing seconds, the world was silent.

Then, the sky split.

Continuous, apocalyptic pillars of pure black lightning descended from the void.

They did not strike with the chaotic dispersion of natural thunder; they fell in disciplined, rhythmic volleys of catastrophic energy, crashing directly into the ocean’s surface within a five-hundred-pace radius centered upon the Tidefang oceanic trench.

The concussive shockwave blew the surface of the sea outward in a colossal, circular tidal wave three hundred feet high.

Where the black lightning struck, the water did not boil; it was obliterated from existence, leaving massive, temporary voids in the ocean where the bare, cracked bedrock of the sea floor was exposed to the open air.

The strikes’ intense heat fused the oceanic silt into glowing, red-hot sheets of radioactive glass in a fraction of a second.

Down below, perched on the neck of the dragon, Theo Althalos raised his uninjured arm to shield his face from the blinding, dark radiance.

The gale of displaced air nearly ripped him from his stirrups, his cerulean eyes widening in sheer, paralyzing horror as he looked upward through the tearing storm.

Framed against the black sky, illuminated by the continuous discharge of black lightning and wrapped in the colossal, shining coils of a white serpentine dragon, stood the silhouette of a human.

Theo’s throat locked.

The breath refused to enter his lungs.

The raw, cosmic authority radiating from that suspended figure was not the strength of a high-tier knight or an archmage of the capital.

It was the presence of a primordial deity looking down upon an ant.

Before Theo’s conscious mind could fully register the identity of the dark-coated figure, the blinding light of another lightning salvo burned the image from his retinas, plunging his vision into white-hot spots of pain.

Deep beneath the surface, the catastrophic black lightning drove straight through three hundred feet of water, striking the shimmering hydro-barrier of the Coral Citadel.

The ancient defensive array, maintained for centuries by the Tidefang clan’s collective life force, did not even hold for a single second under the pressure of the black lightning.