Chapter 1408: Dragon’s Keepers 2: Fairy-Dragon Lady-Undead Queen Last Touch!

Marcus understood enough to begin thrashing with renewed desperation. His entire body twisted beneath the invisible hold keeping him against the tree while his hands clawed frantically at anything they could reach. Broken teeth ground together behind sealed lips, and naked terror flooded his eyes as Phei’s hand approached.

Phei’s smile barely shifted.

"Oh, now you understand something bad is coming? Good. I was worried the missing teeth weren’t communicating clearly enough."

His fingertip touched Marcus’s forehead.

The world changed.

Marcus’s body went limp so suddenly that it looked abandoned.

Every muscle that had been fighting the Void released at once. His arms dropped uselessly beside him, his neck sagged forward and his eyes remained open for only the briefest instant before whatever living awareness had filled them disappeared.

His consciousness vanished.

—the resistance disappeared with it.

Marcus Heavenchild’s body remained suspended against the tree as an empty husk while something far deeper was dragged elsewhere.

Phei followed him.

The change reached him almost immediately. Strength left his legs before he could compensate, his awareness fell away from the Endless Forest as his Soul got pulled toward a place where the ordinary world no longer mattered.

His vision disappeared.

The Void restraining Marcus released as Phei’s consciousness slipped beyond the body maintaining it.

Eira was already moving.

She crossed the clearing before Phei could strike the ground and caught him against herself, one arm slid beneath his shoulders while the other steadied his head. Her wings flared behind her as she absorbed his weight without effort, their glow briefly illuminating Phei’s unconscious face and the long white hair spilling across her arm.

Marcus received considerably less affection.

His limp body dropped beside the ancient tree and struck the frozen ground hard enough to bounce once before settling awkwardly among the roots.

Eira looked down at Phei; his breathing remained steady. His body showed no distress, and everything she sensed told her his consciousness had already gone exactly where he intended to take Marcus.

Only then did she glance toward the second unconscious figure lying several metres away.

Her expression changed.

The quiet part was over.

Eira lifted her eyes toward the surrounding forest and raised one hand:

"Here we go!"

Powerful blast erupted from her body.

Black-white Void-Ice bursted outward with such overwhelming force that the clearing disappeared beneath it almost instantly. The first wave tore through the Endless Forest in every direction, crossing ancient roots, frozen streams, cliffs and enormous trees faster than sound could have chased it. Darkness threaded itself through crystalline radiance while ice and Void folded together into immense currents racing away from Eira.

The cold came with them, but ordinary frost was the least important thing spreading through the forest.

Space itself seemed to grow heavier beneath the passing power.

The farther Eira’s Essence travelled, the quieter the enclosed wilderness became, until the world around them felt increasingly detached from everything beyond the expanding boundary.

Her power crossed the first kilometre without slowing.

Then five. Ten. Fifteen. It continued until twenty kilometres of the Endless Forest had disappeared beneath the reach of her Void-Ice.

Only then did the outward expansion stop.

The power turned upward—

A colossal wall of the Void-Ice Essence and dark Void began climbing toward the night.

From within the growing enclosure, it looked less like a shimmering dome of power being raised and more like another sky slowly replacing the real one. Black-white currents twisted across the rising surface in enormous spirals while layer after layer of Eira’s power settled over itself and condensed. Stars disappeared behind the gathering darkness. Frost raced across the upper branches of ancient trees, and the outside world became increasingly distant with every heartbeat.

The immense wall curved as it climbed. Its distant edges bent toward one another high above the forest canopy until the enormous arcs finally met.

The dome sealed!

A deep pulse rolled across the entire enclosure.

Ancient trees throughout the twenty-kilometer region bent beneath its weight, branches bowing low before slowly rising again. The tremor travelled through frozen streams, stone and deep roots, reached the opposite side of the immense shell and returned as a faint vibration beneath Eira’s feet.

She remembered the first time they had attempted something like this.

Kyle.

Back then, none of them properly understood what an Original Progenitor Soul might unleash when cornered inside its own Soul Realm. They had prepared, but preparation born from theory had limits, and when Kyle finally resisted Phei’s enslavement, the spiritual upheaval had been violent enough for even Eira’s containment to fail at swallowing everything cleanly.

Shockwaves had escaped and the Endless Forest felt the test of that.

Whatever slept inside a Progenitor did not rage quietly when something reached into its Soul and attempted to place chains around it.

They had succeeded anyway.

They had also learned.

Tonight would not repeat that mistake.

Eira lowered her gaze briefly toward Phei resting unconscious against her before looking toward Marcus. She had no intention of allowing a meaningful tremor to leave this place.

Her eyes shifted toward Dragon Lady.

"Little Sister."

Dragon Lady understood before anything else needed to be said.

Crystalline white radiance erupted around her smaller form.

Her silhouette vanished inside the brilliance as Dragon Essence surged outward, frost lifted from the ground in glittering sheets while her body expanded with breathtaking speed. The radiance climbed beyond the treetops before enormous snow-white wings unfolded from within it, their first movement sending a heavy pressure through the canopy.

Crystalline silver-white scales caught the black-white glow of Eira’s dome.

Then Void-Ice awakened between them.

Black-white radiance flooded along Dragon Lady’s immense one before pouring outward from her in vast frozen currents.

Her power struck Eira’s barrier from within.

Void-Ice answered Void-Ice.

The entire inner surface of the twenty-kilometre dome brightened.

Enormous crystalline veins began branching over the black-white shell, spreading in every direction as Dragon Lady poured her Essence into Eira’s work. Some grew broad enough to resemble frozen rivers suspended across the artificial sky, while finer threads raced between them and filled the spaces in between.

Silver-white crystal thickened over black Void.

Blue-white light pulsed through it.

The two powers did not compete as they recognized one another, locked together and became harder to separate than either would have been alone.

Another heavy pulse travelled through the enclosure as the reinforcement settled.

Eira waited until the movement across the dome steadied.

Then she turned toward the Undead Queen.

"Queen."

The Undead Queen smiled.

Death Essence awoke in such a corrosive beautiness of it!

Black-violet Essence rose around her feet in great silent streams and climbed through the frozen clearing. The atmosphere changed as it gathered, carrying none of the living violence of ordinary cold. Eira and Dragon Lady’s Void-Ice held the merciless stillness of primordial winter and emptiness, while the Queen brought something different.

The silence after the final heartbeat.

The cold of abandoned graves.

The stillness left behind when every living thing that once mattered had already departed.

She raised one hand toward the dome.

Death surged upward. Black-violet Death Essence currents entered the existing barrier without colliding with either layer of Void-Ice. They slipped between them instead, threading themselves through the enormous structure and filling spaces the frozen powers had left untouched.

The artificial sky of the some darkened.

Black-violet rivers spread between silver-white crystal and black Void until the entire enclosure seemed to carry several different silences at once.

The Queen had not joined them simply to make the barrier harder to break.

Her purpose lay deeper.

When Marcus’s Progenitor Soul finally understood what Phei intended to do, whatever erupted from that ancient existence would not be allowed to carry beyond the dome through Soul Energy, spirit, Essence or death itself. Eira had witnessed once already what happened when the rage of an Original Progenitor struck against the borders of its own existence, and this time every road outward would be waiting for it.

Eira and Dragon Lady would bury whatever force struck the physical world beneath Void-Ice and the Void could then wobble and drink at the impact or energy and essences.

The Undead Queen would swallow the Soul Energy travelled deeper.

Nothing Marcus unleashed would reach beyond the dome!

Cassiopeia stood farther back between two ancient trees and stared upward.

Calling what covered the Endless Forest a barrier no longer felt sufficient.

Twenty kilometres of wilderness had been enclosed beneath the combined power of three monstrous beings.

Eira’s black-white Void-Ice formed the great imprisonment itself, its currents moving ceaselessly across the outer shell while space around the boundary remained locked beneath her power. Dragon Lady’s reinforcement spread through its inner face in immense silver-white veins, blue-white Void-Ice pulsing through crystalline branches each time her Dragon Core beat. Between them flowed the Undead Queen’s black-violet Death Essence, filling the hidden paths through which a spiritual disturbance might otherwise escape.

The sky was gone.

The outside forest was gone.

Even the distant presence of Hell’s Paradise Island seemed to have receded behind the enormous prison they had built.

Beyond the dome, the Endless Forest remained quiet.

No one would see the storm gathering beneath the artificial sky.

No one would hear what happened to Marcus’s body while his Soul remained elsewhere.

No one would feel the Original Progenitor inside him awaken, rage or scream against whatever Phei intended to do inside the Soul Realm his consciousness had entered.

Eira slowly lowered her gaze from the completed enclosure.

Phei remained unconscious in her arms, his face strangely peaceful considering where his mind had gone. Marcus lay motionless beneath the tree, blood still staining his mouth while broken teeth remained scattered across the frost around him.

What Cassiopeia could not envision was her own change after what was about to unfold!