Chapter 436: Thor Vs Talira [II / Bonus - ]

Chapter 436: Thor Vs Talira [II / Bonus Chapter]

The boundless isolated sub-space of Aeliana’s dimensional dome shuddered violently down to its very conceptual seams.

High above the frictionless pristine white floor, the colossal fifty-foot silhouette of Talira hung suspended on massive, leathery crimson wings.

Her volcanic-red scales glowed with blinding molten heat, hissing and popping as they radiated waves of pressurized distortion that warped the surrounding void into watery mirages.

Below her, standing firmly on the invisible floor with her bare fists cocked and her wild blonde mane dancing in the gale, Thor grinned like a maniac.

KRA-BOOOOOOOOM!

The two titans collided in mid-air.

The initial impact did not simply push the air... it displaced thousands of cubic meters of atmosphere in an instantaneous omnidirectional shockwave that detonated across the dome like an artillery battery.

"Agh!"

Talira’s massive razor-sharp claws slammed directly against Thor’s bare unyielding forearms.

Neither combatant gave an inch.

The pure mass of a fifty-foot primordial dragon crashed relentlessly against the immovable god-tier power of the Asgardian Executioner.

Golden sparks of atmospheric thunder shrieked against roaring crimson fire, carving bright arcing scars across the infinite white expanse.

Using the monumental recoil of the clash, Talira snapped her colossal wings backward, launching herself fifty yards into the sky.

WHOOOOOSH!

’I need to attack another way!’

As she vaulted through the air, her thick spiked tail whipped through the void in a blinding horizontal cleave.

The tail moved with the supersonic velocity of a falling meteor, its razor-edged bone spikes tearing through the air with a deafening screech aimed straight at Thor’s skull but Thor didn’t even blink.

"Heh..."

Her storm-blue eyes flared with incandescent gold as she coated her right hand in a thick crackling sheath of thunder-mana.

Instead of dodging, the Daughter of Odin threw her palm outward, intercepting the massive multi-ton tail dead-center.

BANG!

The concussive collision sounded like a battering ram striking an adamantine fortress wall.

The physical momentum of Talira’s tail strike propelled Thor’s body violently to the left, sending her hurtling across the spatial void like a silver cannonball.

Yet, even as she flew sideways through the air, Thor’s wild grin never wavered.

With veteran battlefield-honed instinct, Thor dug her boots into the invisible spatial friction of the dome, arresting her lateral spin in less than a microsecond.

She twisted her muscular core, planting her feet against the empty air, and forcefully absorbed every ounce of the displacement.

VUUUUUUM... CRACK!

Transferring the diverted momentum into pure explosive forward thrust, Thor detonated the air beneath her boots, converting herself into a golden streak of blinding speed that shot straight back at the descending dragon.

"GWAHAHAHA! NICE WEIGHT BEHIND THAT TAIL, LIZARD!" Thor bellowed,her voice echoing over the roar of the gale as she closed the distance in the blink of an eye.

Thor reached the dragon’s chest in a fraction of a heartbeat.

Her right fist cocked back, loaded with concentrated mass and a crackling corona of golden lightning, and drove straight upward into the dense plate of scales covering Talira’s breastbone.

KRA-THUMP!

The blunt-force trauma was catastrophic.

A web of golden lightning surged through the volcanic scales, rippling violently across Talira’s entire fifty-foot frame.

"AGHHHH!"

The dragon let out a sharp choked roar of pain as the air was blasted from her colossal lungs.

But Talira was not a mindless beast... she was an ancient predator whose bloodline had ruled the skies before mortals built their first stone walls.

Tolerating the searing electrical shock coursing through her meridians, Talira unhinged her massive fanged jaw.

"RAHHHHHHHHH!"

At point-blank range, a concentrated beam of blinding white-hot Dragon’s Flame erupted from her gullet.

The torrent of primordial fire washed over Thor, enveloping the deity in a blinding inferno that reached thousands of degrees in seconds.

"GWAHAHAHAHAHA!"

Thor’s laughter cut straight through the roaring fire.

The God of Thunder threw both arms outward, delivering a double-handed,open-palm cleave that physically parted the dragon fire like curtains of red silk.

WHOOSH!

But as the flames split, Thor found nothing behind them.

...Talira was already gone.

Using the blinding light and the intense thermal updraft of her own breath attack as an evasive smokescreen, the Crimson Dragon had used her Wing-Strike Launch.

FWHUUUUUUM!

A hurricane-force gust of pressurized air detonated beneath her wings, propelling her multi-ton body straight up into the upper atmosphere of the sub-space.

Hovering at the ceiling of the white void, Talira’s glowing ruby eyes burned with fierce light.

’This situation is a bit good...’

She tapped into her awakened True Wind Magic, weaving razor-sharp gale currents around her wings and tail until her aerial velocity multiplied tenfold.

She folded her fifty-foot wings against her flanks, pointing her horned snout downward, and entered a vertical terminal-velocity dive.

"DIEEEEEEEEEE!"

Talira plummeted toward the floor like a falling star, shrouded in a violently spinning drill of emerald wind and molten fire.

Down below, Thor looked up, her broad shoulders coiling like iron springs as golden lightning arced across her teeth.

"NOW WE’RE TALKING! BRING IT DOWN, DRAGON!"

Thor planted her boots, threw her hands up, and prepared to catch the falling calamity with her bare strength.

KRA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The impact between the diving dragon and the God of Thunder was so immense that the white sub-space momentarily inverted its colors, flashing pure negative black before returning to blinding white.

Thor caught Talira’s descending snout with both hands, her boots sliding backward across the invisible floor as she ground her teeth against the staggering force.

But even as Thor held her ground, she did not notice the subtle microscopic shift occurring within the dragon’s biology.

Throughout their entire brutal exchange... from the first fist collision to the point-blank body blows, Thor’s golden lightning had been continuously discharging into Talira’s thick hide.

Normally, foreign elemental mana would tear an opponent’s meridians to shreds.

But Talira’s primordial draconic core was an ancient evolutionary furnace designed to process, adapt, and withstand cataclysms... As dragons did...

Deep within the dragon’s volcanic blood vessels, the residual electrical charges that Thor had poured into her flesh were not dissipating.

They were being absorbed, compressed, and metabolized by her bone marrow.

Thor grinned fiercely, her biceps bulging as she prepared to hoist the fifty-foot dragon by her snout and slam her into the floor.

"TIME’S UP, GIRL! THIS ONE’S GOING TO LEAVE A BRUISE!" Thor roared, drawing back her left fist, enveloped in an apocalyptic sphere of golden thunder to deliver the finishing blow.

In that exact second... Just as Thor’s fist began its forward trajectory, Talira’s glowing ruby eyes violently changed.

The deep crimson of her irises turned into a blinding blue-white.

ZZZZZZZZZT... KRA-KRA-KRA-KRA!

Thor’s eyes widened in sudden astonishment.

"What the—?!"

Talira’s entire fifty-foot body erupted into a violent tempest of True Lightning.

Having accumulated and metabolized Thor’s divine electrical output throughout the entire battle, the primordial bloodline within Talira had forcefully unlocked a brand-new elemental affinity under the crushing pressure of combat.

’Plot armor, huh?’ Aeli thought as she looked at it, was Talira perhaps a chosen daughter of Heaven?

Violent bolts of blue-white lightning tore through Talira’s scales, coiling down her elongated neck and gathering directly inside her unhinged maw, supercharging her breath with terrifying dual-elemental destruction.

"DIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"

It was point-blank as there was zero distance between them...

A colossal beam of fused Primordial Dragon-Fire and True Lightning erupted directly into Thor’s face.

KRA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The blinding explosion engulfed the entire central sector of the sub-space in a swirling, deafening vortex of blue lightning and red fire.

The shockwave ripped across the floor, tearing at Aeliana’s robes and forcing the elven Archon to channel fresh mana into the air to keep the dome stabilized.

For two breathless seconds, the roaring elemental tempest obscured everything then, from the center of the incinerating blast...

STEP!

A heavy silver-plated boot stomped down onto the floor.

Emerging from the smoke and flames, her skin smoking and her silver breastplate slightly scorched, was Thor.

The God of Thunder had borne the full concentrated brunt of the point-blank lightning-fire breath.

Her wild blonde hair was wilder than ever with small static arcs dancing across her eyelashes, and a thin trickle of blood dripped from the corner of her lip yet her stance remained completely unbroken.

"GWAHAHAHA!" Thor laughed, spitting a bead of blood onto the floor with a terrifying ecstatic grin. "AWAKENING LIGHTNING MID-FIGHT JUST TO HIT ME WITH MY OWN MEDICINE?! YOU MAGNIFICENT BASTARD OF A REPTILE!"

She was only hurt like this because she allowed herself to be... Thor thought of it like a reward for the woman to feel more motivated.

Before Talira could even recover from the massive mana drain of her ultimate breath attack, Thor stepped into the pocket.

Her bare fist drove forward with the speed of an inescapable comet.

BANG!

The blow struck Talira squarely beneath the lower jaw, right at the focal point of her draconic equilibrium.

The concussive force scrambled the dragon’s nervous system instantly as Talira’s glowing blue-white eyes rolled back into her head, the blinding lightning fading from her scales and her massive fifty-foot frame collapsed forward into the floor.

FWHUUUUUUSH!

As her consciousness slipped into darkness, the extreme magical exhaustion and blunt-force trauma forcefully collapsed her draconic form.

The massive wings, the thick scales, the sweeping tail, and the horned snout rapidly shrunk, dissolving into wisps of red vapor until only the small humanoid body of Talira lay resting on the white floor, her chest rising and falling in shallow unconscious breaths.

Sitting near the boundary, Morwenna’s stormy gray eyes narrowed in disgust.

"Bullshit," Morwenna spat, crossing her arms with a loud click of her tongue. "Taking a point-blank dragon breath infused with her own awakened lightning and she doesn’t even drop to a knee? Total divine plot armor bullshit..."

Thor wiped the blood from her lip with the back of her forearm, looking down at the unconscious crimson-haired girl with deep unreserved respect.

"GWAHAHAHA! She’s got incredible guts," Thor rumbled warmly. "Awakening Lightning in the middle of a brawl... Odin’s ravens would have sung of that strike for a month. We are definitely fighting again once she wakes up."

Thor bent down, casually scooping the unconscious dragon girl up by the back of her shirt with one hand, and tossed her gently through the air toward the sideline.

"Catch, elf!"

Aeliana raised her slender hands, catching Talira’s limp body with a gentle cushion of mana, cradling the sleeping dragon against her lap as she stroked her fiery hair.

Thor turned slowly on her heel, her storm-blue eyes locking dead-center onto Morwenna.

"Now then, sailor..." Thor grinned ferociously, pointing a thick thumb over her shoulder. "You’ve been talking all that hot shit about divine grudges. Are you stepping up, or are you going to keep scowling from the peanut gallery?"

Morwenna’s lips slowly parted into a sharp smile.

"I thought you’d never ask, muscle-brain," Morwenna drawled, her raspy voice dripping with cold delight.

She rose from the spatial floor, stepping forward into the center of the void.

Her black leather coat swayed around her shins and her bare feet tapping softly against the invisible surface as her right hand rested comfortably on the hilt of Tidebringer.

Thor’s eyes narrowed slightly as she observed the Dread Queen’s posture.

Despite Morwenna currently operating under the restricted levels of the Sovereign Realm, Thor’s god-tier instincts could perceive the dormant world-crushing abyss resting beneath the mortal seal.

This was not a standard warrior... this was a being who had once commanded the terrors of the deepest sunless ocean trenches.

"You’re a dangerous one," Thor noted, her boisterous voice adopting a rare serious edge. "You’ve lost an immense amount of your original power... but the steel in your soul is ancient. It is only basic battlefield courtesy to face a true weapon-master with proper steel."

Thor extended her right hand into the open air.

SHING!

Hovering twenty feet away in mid-space, the short-handled ancient war hammer Mjölnir flared with blinding cosmic starlight.

The hammer crossed the distance in a fraction of a millisecond, snapping cleanly into Thor’s open palm with an ear-splitting sound that sent a ripple of absolute divine authority through the entire dome.

VUUUUUUUUUM!

The moment Thor gripped the hammer, the atmosphere shifted once more.

The air around Morwenna grew impossibly heavy as a phantom ocean manifested around the Dread Queen’s silhouette... dark abyssal waters that swallowed the white light of the sub-space, creating an eerie sunless pressure that made the void tremble.

Morwenna drew Tidebringer.

The curved abyssal saber slid from its scabbard with a crisp singing hiss.

The runic engravings along the dark blade ignited with a deep pulsing blue luminescence, resembling the terrifying heartbeat of a slumbering Leviathan.

Thor took to the air, hovering thirty feet above the ground as she began spinning Mjölnir in a rapid mesmerizing circle.

The hammer blurred into a golden disc of pure energy, generating a high-pitched hum that ionized the air into ozone.

Even suspended in mid-air, the crushing pressure of Morwenna’s phantom ocean did not cause the God of Thunder to waver in the slightest.

Morwenna tilted her head back, looking up at the flying deity with cold half-lidded eyes.

"Tell me, God of Thunder..." Morwenna whispered, her voice cutting through the hum of the spinning hammer with chilling clarity. "...Do you know what it’s like to fall?"

Thor chuckled, continuing to spin Mjölnir with casual ease.

"GWAHAHAHA! To fall?! Little sailor, I’ve fallen through burning stars and plummeted into the frozen pits of Niflheim! Falling is just another way of traveling fast!"

Morwenna’s stormy gray eyes flashed with a sudden blinding burst of pure crimson light.

"That’s not falling," Morwenna murmured softly. "This is."

VUUUUUUM... SNAP!

In less than a second, the entire fifty-yard patch of space surrounding Thor turned into an ominous suffocating shade of deep blood-red mana.

The gravity within that red pocket did not merely increase... it multiplied by ten thousand times.

’Thankfully I have replicas of my skills saved in Tidebringer that only I can use and a lot of my mana is here too.’ Morwenna thought with a smile, Tidebringer was simply another half of her that made her complete.

As for this attack, it was not standard gravity everyone was aware of... It was the crushing hydrostatic pressure of the Mariana Trench, the weight of an entire conceptual ocean collapsing inward upon a single point in space.

Thor’s flying stance was violently arrested.

Her spinning hammer seized mid-rotation, and despite her immense godly physical strength straining to resist, the crushing mass of the red abyss dragged her out of the sky.

KRA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!