CHAPTER 68: THE DRAGON’S ROAR

The line went dead.

Chloe looked up from her datapad.

The decision was made.

The alliance was forged.

She looked at her own team.

Her broken, mismatched, glorious team of misfits.

Jax was already pulling the components for his masterpiece bomb from his pack, a look of pure, focused joy on his pained face.

Jinx was methodically checking her rifle, her movements sharp and economical, her face a mask of grim, professional resolve.

Michael just stood there, the weight of the entire world, of his mother’s legacy, of their one, single, impossible chance, settling on his shoulders.

He gave a single, slow nod.

The plan was insane. The chances of survival were slim to non-existent.

He was terrified.

And he had never felt more ready.

Jax, having finished the preliminary wiring on his bomb, looked up at them, his face shining with a manic, beautiful, and utterly terrifying glee.

He gave a pained, but triumphant, grin.

"So," he asked, his voice full of a terrible, wonderful joy.

"Who’s ready to go kill a dragon?"

The walk back to the edge of the Great Lawn was a funeral march.

The air grew hotter, thicker, heavy with the smell of burnt earth and ozone.

The distant, chaotic symphony of battle grew into a deafening, all-consuming roar.

They took up their new positions, a scattered, desperate line of ghosts preparing to haunt a god.

Jinx found her perch high in the skeletal branches of a massive, blackened oak tree, a perfect, hidden sniper’s nest overlooking the battlefield.

Jax, supported by two grim-faced Ironheart veterans, was carefully, lovingly, placing his masterpiece of a bomb at the base of a jagged, unstable rock formation.

And Michael... Michael just watched.

From the relative cover of a deep, smoking crater, he looked out at the end of the world.

The Umbraxis was no longer just a monster.

It was a force of nature.

It was a living, breathing apocalypse.

A behemoth of shimmering, obsidian scales and veins of molten, crimson fire that pulsed with the rhythm of a dark, angry heart.

Its sheer size was a violation of physics. It blotted out the angry red sky, its massive, leathery wings casting a shadow that seemed to swallow the very light.

Okay, his inner monologue drawled, his mind a numb, static-filled buzz. So that’s what a raid boss looks like in 4K.

The graphics are amazing.

The gameplay, however, is about to suck.

The other Guilds were breaking.

The polished, perfect phalanx of The Vanguard was a shattered, smoking ruin. Their gleaming silver armor was blackened and torn, their energy shields flickering and dying.

Sterling, their arrogant prince, was on one knee, his energy blade shattered, his handsome face a mask of shocked, bloody disbelief.

He was staring at the Umbraxis, not as a Hunter facing a target, but as a believer who had just seen his god torn apart.

The beast opened its mouth, and it was not a roar that came out.

It was a river.

A torrent of liquid, white-hot fire that poured across the battlefield, turning the very earth to glass.

A squad of Hunters, their shields flaring brightly for a single, glorious, and ultimately futile second, were simply... erased.

They didn’t scream. They didn’t burn.

They just vanished, their very atoms incinerated, leaving behind nothing but the faint, shimmering ghosts of their last stand.

Michael’s [Void Sense] was a raw, screaming nerve.

He could feel the terror of the dying Hunters, their final, panicked thoughts a wave of pure, undiluted agony that crashed against the fragile walls of his mind.

He could feel the raw, ancient, and utterly alien power of the Umbraxis.

It wasn’t just rage. It wasn’t just hunger.

It was... old.

It was a power that had existed before cities, before humanity, before the very concept of rules.

It was the quiet, patient, and all-consuming power of the Void itself, given flesh and fire and teeth.

"It’s a living Gate," he whispered, the words a dawning, horrified revelation.

Chloe’s voice was a quiet, steady presence in his ear, a thin thread of logic in the face of primordial chaos.

"My analysis confirms it," she said, her own voice strained, the usual clinical detachment gone. "It is not just a monster that came through the Gate."

"It is the Gate."

Jax, from his position by the bomb, was uncharacteristically quiet.

His usual manic glee was gone, replaced by a profound, almost religious awe.

"It’s... beautiful," he breathed into the comms, his voice a hushed, reverent whisper.

"It’s the most beautiful explosion I have ever seen."

Jinx, from her perch, was a coiled spring of pure, deadly focus.

Her world had shrunk to the circle of her scope, the crosshairs, and the four, shimmering, spectral guards that danced around their burning god.

"I have a shot," she said, her voice a low, cold growl. "But it’s not clean. The atmospheric distortion from the heat is warping the light."

"You will have to account for it," Chloe stated, her voice returning to its familiar, commanding tone.

She was processing the new data. She was adapting.

She was the anchor.

"Forge’s diversion will begin in thirty seconds," she announced to the team. "That will be your window, Jinx."

"Jax, on my mark, you will arm the charge. Not before."

She paused.

"Michael."

"Yes?" he managed to croak.

"Build your walls," she said, her voice a quiet, final instruction. "Center yourself. When the time comes, you will not have the luxury of hesitation."

He closed his eyes.

He focused on the feeling of the cold, hard ground beneath him.

He focused on the steady, reassuring weight of the Reaper’s Fang in his hand.

He focused on the sound of his own breathing.

In. Hold. Out.

He built his box.

He put the screams of the dying Hunters outside.

He put the overwhelming, ancient power of the Umbraxis outside.

He put his own fear, his own doubt, his own terror, outside.

Inside the box, there was only the mission.

There was only the target.

There was only the quiet, cold, and terrible purpose of a Reaper waiting to do his work.

He opened his eyes.

The world was still a burning, screaming hell.

But his mind was quiet.

Cold.

Ready.

Forge’s grizzled, determined voice crackled to life in their shared comms channel, a roar of pure, defiant, and glorious courage.

"Alright, you beautiful, broken bastards."

"The Ironhearts are in position."

"On your mark, Thanatos."

The silence stretched, a single, held breath before the plunge.

It was time.