Chapter 588: Tiamat’s Firstborn

Maggie’s white fire spread outward from her boots in a widening ring, licking up through every crack in the basalt.

I lay where I had landed, flat on my back in the grey dust, and my snapped collarbone ground against itself every time I breathed. Ilse stood over me with her obsidian horns lowered and white-hot fire dripping from her talons. Neither of us moved. Neither of us had to.

’Okay. I’m alive. Somehow.’

The Dragon of Thorns had stopped as well. All three colossal heads hung back from the small figure in the torn black habit, their clusters of red eyes fixed on her, while the raw red meat along their necks twitched and knit.

Maggie didn’t look back at me. Her silver chain slid off her forearm and pooled in the dust beside her boots, and she turned her raised palm toward the beast.

The bottom dropped out of my spirit well. Almost everything I had left ripped out of my core at once, feeding a miracle of that size into the physical world.

The Burning Cathedral erupted out of the dragon itself.

Spires of white holy fire tore upward through its charcoal scales and impaled the crimson flesh from the inside out. The towering architecture of flame locked together into a cage, trapping all three necks inside a rigid frame of burning white. The dragon shrieked and thrashed against the bars, but wherever the holy fire touched, it unmade the flesh and turned the corrupted meat to grey ash.

Maggie didn’t stop there.

With a flick of her wrist, she unleashed Stigmata Sentencing. Golden nails of condensed light materialized in the air, each one humming on a high, steady note. They drove downward like artillery shells and buried themselves precisely in the charred gouges I had burned into the beast’s flanks earlier. The dragon convulsed as the golden light tore its old wounds wide open again, pinning the whole body to the stone floor.

Still flat on my back, I coughed up dry rust, my well suddenly dangerously close to empty.

Off at the far edge of the shelf, past the white glare of the cathedral, Devant stood up from the boulder where he had been sitting. He held his dented tin cup in his left hand.

He took an unhurried sip, as pleasant as ever: "I believe I will stay out of this."

Then he reached across his waist and placed his hand on the hilt of his katana.

’Oh no. He’s actually going to fight.’

Devant drew the blade. It didn’t ring against the scabbard. It made no sound at all, slipping into the air like a shadow peeling off the rock. The metal was a deep, impossible black that swallowed the light around it.

Devant turned the steel so I could see it, polite as a host introducing a guest: "This is Kurotsuki. It is a very blunt sword."

The blade was flawlessly sharp.

What followed happened so fast that my Tactical Omniscience grid fractured trying to track it. Devant executed Moonstep. One moment he was standing at the edge of the shelf, and the next he was hanging in the air directly above the dragon’s pinned chest-head.

He didn’t swing with his arm. He turned his wrist and let the blade’s own impossible weight pull him through the air, and a thin ribbon of violet light traced the arc behind it.

The beast’s jaw came cleanly off its hinges. The cut was so smooth that the flesh took a full second to notice it had been separated. Blood hadn’t even started to spill before Devant moved into Hundred-Step Dominion.

The space around the beast shattered into a three-dimensional grid of intersecting violet lines.

Devant moved through that grid like light through a prism. He bounced from point to point with his boots touching nothing but air, changing angles so violently that my eyes gave up on his body. All I could follow was the black streak of Kurotsuki.

He launched Violet Severance. A crescent-shaped wave of warped space carved straight through the Cathedral’s bars and passed cleanly through the dragon’s left neck. The neck sheared in half, and the heavy top section slid slowly off the stump.

Devant rebounded off a falling rock and flipped backward into Heaven-Piercing Draw. A black scabbard materialized in his grip. He sheathed Kurotsuki in mid-air and instantly drew it again, and a vertical pillar of violet force erupted from the floor and split the right head perfectly down the middle, right between its cluster of red eyes.

He landed on the highest spire of the Cathedral and balanced on the white fire without so much as scorching his boots.

He looked down at the ruined titan and murmured pleasantly: "Violet Night. One Hundred Million Cuts."

Devant disappeared into a storm. Razor-thin lines of violet light filled every inch of space the Dragon of Thorns occupied. I stopped seeing separate strikes. There were only lines, crossing and recrossing faster than the grid could count them, until the beast’s charcoal scales, its fangs, its skeletal wings and its raw red meat had been diced into perfect, uniform cubes.

The titan came apart, held up in the air by the sheer density of the slashes.

Devant reappeared on the ground beside me. He didn’t even look out of breath.

Then the violet light faded.

The millions of cubes of dragon flesh didn’t fall. They snapped back together like footage running in reverse. The bone reattached, the red meat knit itself whole, and the charcoal scales locked back into place. Within three seconds, the Dragon of Thorns was roaring again, completely unharmed, its three heads snapping wildly against Maggie’s cage.

Devant’s cuts did incredible damage, but they were only cuts. There was no holy fire in them, nothing to unmake the corruption, so the flesh just went back where it belonged.

Devant watched the beast thrash, healed and whole, and nodded to himself, satisfied: "I am very good at this."

’No you’re not! It healed everything! We have to do it together.’

I forced myself up onto my knees, my collarbone grinding, and tightened my grip on Wren’s hilt. The only thing that stopped the regeneration was Purifying Flame. Maggie had it pinned, and Devant could open the flesh, but somebody needed to drive fire deep into the seams before the cuts could close.

I shouted over the roaring wind. "Light! Read the grain!"

Light stepped out from behind a shattered boulder. He had lost his wyvern. His left arm was burned black and hung dead at his side. He didn’t say a word. He just raised his unbroken steel sword in his right hand, his blue eyes cold and distant, and stared at the thrashing, regenerating mass of the dragon, reading the grain of its healing flesh.

The tip of his sword shifted a few inches and settled on the beast’s chest: "The chest. The third lateral plate. It wants to open downward."

Ilse didn’t wait for the command.

She pushed past her limit. A guttural roar tore out of her throat, and the dying embers of her fire flared into a blinding crimson column. Her Dragonborn form, already straining, surged again. The crimson plates on her scorched arms and neck thickened into jagged ridges, and her obsidian horns lengthened into wicked, serrated points.

She crossed the shelf in two long bounds, cracking the basalt under her boots, and threw her whole body onto the low chest-head. Her draconic strength matched the titan’s muscle. She locked her clawed hands around its snout and wrenched it down, pinning the skull to the floor by brute force.

Light called the next point. "The left neck. The fifth vertebra."

Devant smiled. He stepped into Moonstep and vanished in a blur of violet.

He appeared beside the pinned chest-head, and Kurotsuki flashed down in an arc exactly where Light had pointed. The charcoal scale parted with no resistance at all. The red flesh split wide open.

I didn’t hesitate. I triggered Feather Step and crossed the distance before Devant had even finished his follow-through, then drove Wren deep into the open, bleeding seam.

Channeling the last reserves of my well, I unleashed Purifying Flame layered under my own white-and-black fire. The holy negation pumped straight into the dragon’s nervous system. It caught the raw edges of Devant’s cut and turned the regrowing tissue to grey ash on contact. The wound held open. The flesh couldn’t knit.

The dragon screamed so loud I thought my eardrums would burst.

We didn’t stop. We locked into a brutal rhythm.

Light’s eyes had already moved on: "The right shoulder joint. Upward trajectory."

Devant flashed across the grid, and the violet ribbon severed the joint. I followed a split second behind him, slammed Wren into the gap, and flooded it with black-and-white fire. Meanwhile, Maggie tightened the Cathedral’s burning spires, crushing what was left of the beast’s mobility while Ilse held the thrashing chest-head down with her bare, scaled hands.

We took the titan apart. Cut by cut, seam by seam.

Devant opened the flesh. I unmade it.

The right wing tore off and turned to ash before it hit the ground. The left neck collapsed, its bone hollowed out by the purifying flame. The dragon’s movements grew sluggish, and its roar turned into a wet, gurgling wheeze as the holy fire ate out its corrupted core.

Light stepped forward with his cold eyes locked on the center of the beast’s chest, right where the three necks met: "The heart. It is entirely exposed."

Devant didn’t bother with Moonstep. He simply walked up to the exposed, throbbing mass of charcoal and red tissue, raised Kurotsuki, and drove the black blade straight through the middle of it.

I stepped up beside him, wrapped my bare left hand around the hilt of his katana, and poured every drop of essence I had left down the length of his steel.

The black-and-white fire exploded inside the dragon’s chest.

The unmaking blew the beast’s back out. A geyser of grey ash and white flame shot up into the dark sky. The three heads went rigid. The fangs clicked together one last time, and then the colossal body simply gave up. The charcoal scales crumbled. The flesh dissolved. The Dragon of Thorns collapsed into a mountain of dead, uncreated dust.

The system panels appeared out of the dark and hovered over the ash.

[You have slain a level 9, Profane-tier Beast: Tiamat’s Firstborn]

[New Sphere of Control Unlocked: Sovereign of the Ash]

[Aura absorption complete]

The white spires of the Burning Cathedral flickered and went out. The golden nails of Stigmata Sentencing dissolved into the air.

I dropped Wren and fell straight backward onto the crushed gravel. Every muscle in my body was screaming. The dark ink lines on my skin throbbed with a hollow ache, and my well was completely drained.

Ilse let go of the dissolving skull and sank to one knee, gasping for air while her crimson scales pulled painfully back into her skin. Light lowered his sword, and for the first time since we’d met him, his shoulders slumped. Maggie walked over to me, her silver chain dragging a thin line through the dust, and stood silently by my head. Devant was already sitting on a rock, turning his tin cup in his fingers.

I stared up at the black ceiling of the Precipice and let out a long, ragged breath.

Surviving that was so absurd that somebody had to say something.

Still staring at the dark, I muttered: "Well. I guess we finally beat the boss of this place."

The silence that followed lasted exactly three seconds.

Then the entire Precipice screamed.

It came from everywhere at once, from the rock, from the dark, from somewhere under the floor of the world. The sound skipped my ears entirely and vibrated inside the marrow of my bones. It was the sound of something impossibly old and impossibly big waking up at the very bottom of the dark, and realizing its firstborn was dead.

The pressure of it hit the shelf like a falling weight.

Light dropped to his knees. His sword clattered onto the stone as he clutched his ears, his face twisting in a kind of pain I had never seen on it. Ilse let out a choked gasp, and her hands flew up to claw at the base of her horns as if she wanted to rip them out of her own skull.

Standing over me, Maggie raised her hands to form a ward. Her lips moved fast, and the words came out louder than I had ever heard her speak: "The Light provides, the Light shields, the Light—"

The prayer failed. The golden light sputtered and died on her fingertips, snuffed out by the weight pressing up from below. For the first time since I had known her, her face moved. Her crimson eyes went to the abyss beneath us and stayed there.

I lay on the ground, staring at the black ceiling, while the sound pried my mind apart. Every thought I reached for broke in half before I could finish it.

’Ah, damn... oh no... this is...’