CHAPTER 197: CHAPTER 198: HIS PUPIL

He laughed.

A dry, broken thing—Merlin’s throat had scorched itself from chanting, casting, forcing raw ether into impossible equations, again and again. His mana was drained. His lungs burned like old parchment kissed by fire. But he laughed anyway.

The sky around him trembled, fractured like stained glass beneath invisible weight. Mana storms flickered along the edge of his robes, casting shadows that danced like ghosts. Beneath his boots, the air itself warped, refusing to carry him cleanly now. Too much energy had been spent, drawn from forbidden reservoirs, from his bones, from the marrow of old regrets.

Still, he laughed.

"Just one more minute," he whispered, not to Loki, not to the world—but to himself. The spell was almost complete. The culmination of years. No—decades. The spell that would defy time, rewrite the weave of causality itself. A spell born not from ambition, but from obsession. The last child of a dying mind.

Fifty-two seconds.

He needed fifty-two more seconds.

His lips cracked into a snarl-smile hybrid. "Tell me... Son of the Sun God," Merlin rasped, letting his voice carry with theatrical venom. "What are you without your father’s gift? What are you... without the fire sun in your palm?"

A pause.

Loki didn’t snarl at first. He just looked up—face half-lit by the fractured sun above them. The heat shimmered around his frame. The usual chaos-fire that curled from his fingers faded... then snuffed itself out, like a candle ashamed of its own light.

He flexed his hands. Empty now.

"Okay, old man... you win," he said, voice calm, quiet, deadly. "Then why don’t you stop your spell?"

Merlin’s eyes narrowed. A cold wind curled around his spine.

"If you’re a fucking man... come down then.... Hand to hand."

There it was. The bait.

Merlin scoffed, a jagged, humorless edge to it. "Ha. You think that shit will work on me? Your useless attempt?"

But it did work, didn’t it?

Because the next words tore straight through him.

"...Now you know why Aurora left your teaching?"

The breath hitched in Merlin’s lungs before he could disguise it.

"You cunt!"

It struck harder than any god-fire. Aurora. The name alone shattered focus. He saw her—twelve years old, fingers ink-stained, eyes full of galaxies. Again—sixteen, demanding to be tested in front of the Elder Mages. And again—twenty-four, that day she stood before him and said she wanted to follow Loki into exile.

Aurora. His successor. His legacy. His daughter—not by blood, but by will.

His voice dropped an octave. "Motherfucker..."

The words vibrated with something old, something breaking. He floated lower in the sky without realizing.

"You knew," he hissed, voice barely restrained. "You knew what she meant to me. You knew she was mine. And still you poisoned her."

"She wasn’t yours," Loki growled back. "She was never yours. You don’t get to own people, you don’t get to smother them with your legacy and call it love."

"I gave her everything."

"You buried her under everything."

Merlin clenched his fists. The bones cracked audibly. The air around him turned hot and dry. Ash-smell kissed his robes. The mana reserves in his soul screamed to be still, to finish the spell. Thirty-nine seconds left.

"You piece of shit..." Merlin said, stepping forward on empty air. "You know it was your fault. You took her from me. You—you stole her from me."

He had never said those words out loud.

They sounded like rot.

"I prayed you would die in the Dark Continent," Merlin spat, eyes glowing dimly. "I prayed you’d be swallowed by the world serpent. But here you are. Still alive. Still breathing. Still... crawling."

"Cockroaches survive," Loki said with a grin. "We don’t drown in legacy like you do."

The wind howled louder now. Not natural. The storm listened. Thunder muttered along the edge of the battlefield, like gods whispering gossip.

Merlin’s lip curled. "You may be right."

Loki’s eyebrows rose, surprised.

"I influenced her," Loki admitted. "But you... you broke her. All that pressure. All that teaching. All those fucking expectations. She didn’t need a teacher. She needed a choice."

"I gave her purpose."

"You gave her chains!"

The words boomed across the horizon. Even the distant troops paused. Even the dragons in the east shifted their wings.

The spell ticked beneath Merlin’s skin. Thirty seconds. The core was rotating in layers now, rotating time backward in slices.

He needed just a little more time.

"Come down," Loki said, again. "Let me knock that shitty beard off your shitty face."

Merlin’s breath stilled.

"You want a fight?" he said, eyes gleaming. "You want this fight?"

Loki cracked his knuckles, grinning. "No more hiding behind spells, wizard. Come down and bleed."

Merlin exhaled.

Then dropped.

He touched ground in a shudder of magic. His boots carved small cracks in the earth. The mana field around him shattered, the great circle hovering above them destabilizing, flickering like dying starlight.

He would not stop the spell.

But he would stall.

He rolled his sleeves up.

"Alright, demi-god," he growled. "Let’s throw hands. I’ll teach you what your father never could."

"Yeah, yeah, old man," Loki replied, stretching his arms out wide. "Keep preaching."

The two titans closed the gap.

Knuckles clenched.

Feet bracing.

Eyes locked—not with the intent to win, but to hurt. To prove a wound deeper than battle.

.

.

.

Atop the jagged roof of Berkimhum’s ancient fortress, Aurora allowed herself a rare, fleeting smile. The spell she had woven—intricate and dangerous—had actually worked. The shimmering veil between the realm of dreaming and the waking world had thinned, more than anyone had dared hope. Her theory, once whispered in the quietest corners of her mind, now roared with undeniable proof: the dreaming was not merely a distant, unreachable plane but deeply entangled with reality itself.

Yet, this breakthrough came with a bitter cost. Dracula’s immutable laws forbade such reckless interference. The laws were there for a reason, ancient and cruel: to keep the horrors of the dreaming chained, to prevent them from spilling over into the mortal realm. But with this breach, those bindings weakened. And with weakened bindings, the darkness stirred.

Monsters far older than any kingdom, far more sinister than any beast known in history, now stirred in the shadows beyond. The Leviathans—beings of nightmare and primordial power—lurking just beyond the veil, waiting, hungry. They did not abide by mortal rules or kingdoms’ fragile borders.

Aurora’s mind sharpened with caution. She would think thrice before daring to tread such perilous paths again. She had no intention of reckless leaps like Loki, who always danced with danger as if it were a mere game.

But even as she fortified her resolve, her thoughts betrayed her. Movement in the corner of her vision pulled her attention—Devid, the military commander, his face taut with urgency, and Lara, her usually composed friend, now radiating a raw desperation that froze Aurora’s breath in her chest.

Lara’s eyes—wide, unblinking, pleading—met hers with silent urgency.

’Don’t tell me...’

Aurora’s heart clenched. She already feared the question that would come next.

She could see it before it was spoken—the weight of it pressing down like a storm on the horizon.

’Don’t tell me she’s going to ask me, too.’