CHAPTER 171: DRAGON BREATH AND SHADOW ESSENCE

The word scraped from his throat, raw and ragged. He forced it out through clenched teeth, even as the pressure threatened to shatter him

"I’m not yours."

Heat flared.

It burst from within, erupting like a sun breaking through storm clouds. The darkness cracked, the void splintering under the blaze of his will.

Flames erupted from his core, a torrent that shredded the suffocating shadows. The whispers faltered, then burned away into silence.

In the real world, the Shadow General reeled. The tendril buried in Jae’s mind snapped back, severed by the backlash.

Jae staggered. His knees buckled, his chest heaving, breath ragged and uneven. The effort had nearly broken him, but his will held. The flames still burned.

The General shrieked, a sound that rattled the stones of the courtyard. Its form unraveled where Jae’s fire had touched it, shadow peeling away in flailing strips.

For a moment, its body seemed to collapse into a formless heap.

But still, it endured. The tendrils coiled back together, dragging loose fragments inward. Slowly, mockingly, it reformed, its jagged limbs snapping back into place.

Its burning eyes glared at Jae, a weight of malice pressing down harder than before.

Jae wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, forcing his stance firm again. He refused to give it ground. He would not let it see weakness.

He stepped forward, his blade blazing brighter. With a roar, he drove the Dragonfire straight into the center of its body.

The courtyard erupted. Flames tore across the ground, sweeping through the ruined stone and scorching it black.

The strike split the General in half, tearing its body wide open in a blaze of searing light.

For the first time, its form faltered. Its body did not immediately knit back together. The writhing shadows lingered, sluggish, as if burned too deeply to reform cleanly.

And yet, even then, the darkness did not die. The halves dragged themselves back together, wriggling tendrils clutching for purchase.

Piece by piece, the shadow knitted into shape once more, though slower, trembling, relentless still.

Jae’s chest burned, not just from the strain of battle, but from something deeper. His veins pulsed with molten heat, his throat ached with every breath, his lungs seared as though filled with cinders. And through it all, pressure built inside him.

A pull, instinctive, primal.

It urged him to go further. Past what he had already done. Past the limits of his body. Past the edge of control.

His vision blurred at the corners, his heartbeat thundered in his ears, and the fire coiled tighter within him, straining to break free.

The pressure grew, unbearable, until it could no longer be contained.

He let it out.

The pressure that had been building in his chest tore free, no longer something he could contain. Fire surged, not from his hands, not from the blade clutched tight in his grip, but from deep within, a raw power that had slept inside him until this moment. His mouth opened, and what came out was no ordinary flame.

Golden fire roared forth in a torrent, the sound of it like the earth itself exhaling. The blaze wasn’t shaped by technique, not guided by conscious intent.

It was wild, unrefined, pure. A flood of radiance that poured across the courtyard and swallowed the ruins in a tide of dawn-colored light.

The air itself split under the heat. Stone cracked and curled, the shattered floor glowing red beneath the torrent.

The blast filled every corner of the broken courtyard, leaving nothing untouched, searing away shadow and turning the darkness into smoke and ash.

The Shadow General’s towering frame was engulfed. Its limbs, those jagged weapons of living night, burned away in great chunks, torn apart as the fire scoured its form.

The shrieks it loosed were no longer those of a commander holding dominion, they were ragged, desperate, pierced with disbelief. The golden flames didn’t just push it back.

They consumed, stripping it down and scattering fragments of writhing black essence that clawed at the ground, unable to withstand the light.

For long moments there was only fire, and the sound of the Shadow General screaming as it was torn apart.

Then the torrent slowed down.

Jae dropped to one knee, the last of the dragon’s breath fading into embers as his chest heaved. His throat burned as though it had been raked with hot iron.

Each breath came jagged and shallow, the raw force of what he had unleashed tearing at his body from within.

His lungs felt scorched, his chest hollowed, as if he had poured not just fire but pieces of himself into the world.

Still, he forced his eyes up, locking onto the enemy. He could barely see through the haze of heat shimmer and smoke, but he refused to let his gaze slip.

The Shadow General was broken. Scattered across the courtyard in fragments, its massive frame no longer held together. Limbs flickered, collapsing into pools of writhing smoke that struggled to reform.

Pieces of its torso lay strewn across stone, twitching, slithering, desperate to pull back into a whole. Its shape was ruined. Its power was wounded. Yet still it clung to existence.

Even shattered, it lived.

Jae’s gut clenched. His fire could tear it apart, but it was clear now that destruction wasn’t enough. Every spark of darkness that remained sought to rejoin, to knit itself together.

As long as its essence survived, the General would endure. His greatest strike had broken it, but not ended it.

That realization fell on him with the weight of iron.

Which meant he had only one choice.

It was reckless. Suicidal, even. The kind of decision no sane warrior would make. But sanity had no place here. Not when the enemy refused to die.

Jae pushed himself forward on unsteady legs. His body trembled with exhaustion, yet he forced his hand out, fingers curling. His flames sparked again, not to destroy, but to draw.

The fragments of shadow resisted. They writhed, retreating, clawing at the edges of the courtyard as if to escape.

But his fire was not asking, it was pulling. The golden heat wrapped around the broken essence, dragging it in with a force neither of them could defy.

Piece by piece, the remnants of the General were pulled toward him. Smoke slithered across the shattered ground, tendrils twisting as they fought in vain. Then they reached him. They touched his skin.

And the world exploded in agony