CHAPTER 164: 164. CALAMITIES!!

Rune blasted off the ground with a sharp boom, his feet detonating the earth beneath him. The surface cratered violently from the sheer force of his launch, and the very ground shattered into fragments as his figure vanished into a blur—faster than sound, faster than perception.

But even at such absurd speeds, his strike passed through thin air.

Lucian and the White Dragon of Grief were untouchable.

It wasn’t just reflex or speed. No, it was as if they existed in a different realm entirely. Like space bent around them.

His body didn’t connect—his fists, his attacks, even his presence was nullified in proximity. The moment he tried to interact with either of them, he phased through, as though they were intangible, unreachable.

He landed hard, fists clenched, teeth grinding. But retreat?

Not an option.

He snarled and shouted, voice tearing through the landscape. "[Repulsion: Field of Carnage]!"

The response was immediate and cataclysmic.

The land itself screamed. The entire region groaned beneath the pressure. As if the crust of the continent fractured at his will.

The ground detonated like volcanic fury, rupturing upwards in jagged, massive slabs—some the size of cities—hurtling through the air like meteors at terminal velocity.

It was no longer a battlefield. It was a natural disaster.

Each fragment of earth flew straight toward the titanic battle ahead—toward Lucian and the dragon.

But then... something peculiar happened.

Those terrifying, continent-tearing masses of land avoided Lucian completely. As if the world refused to acknowledge him as a target.

The projectiles shifted mid-flight, curved their trajectory unnaturally, and steered away. The Pale Monarch was untouchable. Untargetable.

On the other hand, the White Dragon retaliated.

Its eyes flared, and with a thunderous screech, it countered Rune’s devastation.

A beam—not just any beam, but a star-splitting, concentrated, supercharged breath of blue light—ripped out from its maw, cutting through the falling chunks of earth like a hot knife through butter. They vaporized instantly, becoming nothing but dust and void in its wake.

Rune clicked his tongue in frustration.

"Tsk. All my moves are a goddamn joke to these two," he muttered, wiping blood from the edge of his lip.

He was no fool. He couldn’t touch Lucian—not even approach him properly. So instead, he focused on the dragon. It was still a beast, still predictable in some ways.

He darted forward again, tearing through the air like a bullet forged in madness. This time, no hesitation. This time, his focus was singular: the dragon.

And then...

The nightmare began.

Two hundred meters away from the dragon—he froze.

Not because he was scared. Not because he hesitated.

Because he saw them.

Tens... hundreds... thousands... tens of thousands... No, hundreds of thousands of spherical orbs—each the size of a small house, glowing with piercing, cold-white-blue light.

They weren’t attacking yet.

They were charging.

Rune’s eyes widened. Even for someone like him—who thrived on chaos and danger—this was the first time he genuinely felt death looming.

BOOM.

Reality shattered.

The air cracked.

The atmosphere howled in agony.

A million spears of divine destruction—all fired at once—tore through space itself.

The light wasn’t blinding. It was absolute. The pressure wasn’t heavy. It was unbearable.

And Rune?

He could only whisper a single command under his breath. "[Repulsion: Force Field]..."

A spherical shield wrapped around him in that instant—but the beams traveled at the speed of light.

He wasn’t fast enough.

Nobody was.

The beams connected—not just with him, but with the entire expanse of Opalcrest.

Everything was annihilated.

The capital.

The cities.

The mountains.

The oceans.

The lush terrain turned to cracked, blackened rock. Molten magma bubbled from beneath the surface, glowing a dim crimson, painting the remains of the land in a funeral light.

Nothing remained of the once-great kingdom but ashes.

As for Rune...

He was barely breathing. His body was broken, limbs charred and mangled. His defensive barrier held—barely—but he was now a bleeding figure embedded in the ground, lungs struggling to take in air.

Blood poured from his mouth. His ribs cracked with each breath. His entire body was steaming from internal heat.

His consciousness was slipping, but he muttered out one last thought.

"...That...dragon is supposed to be weakened..."

Darkness began to swallow his vision.

"...I’m gonna kill Heinau when I get up..."

And then he passed out.

Unfortunately for him, not just Heinau, but the entirety of the Opalcrest Kingdom was wiped off the map.

Their grand cities, their history, their pride—gone.

What was once a thriving, arrogant empire had been reduced to a boiling ocean of magma. Rivers of molten earth flowed where palaces once stood. The skyline was no more.

Nobody could recognize the place now. Nothing remained. No borders. No kingdoms. No monuments.

Only charred regret.

The ones lucky—or smart—enough to flee before Lucian and the dragon clashed? They were now huddled in distant lands, thanking every god and ancestor that they ran. And even then, the aftershocks might still catch them.

But even after all that annihilation...

The dragon. Wasn’t. Done.

It roared again. A cry that wasn’t just sound—but pressure, devastation, emotion, and power wrapped into one.

The air warped.

The clouds were blown away.

The winds became blades, slicing through the ruined terrain. Entire fragments of land, those not already submerged, shattered under the weight of that singular scream.

Kingdoms that were nowhere near Opalcrest felt that roar. Mountains crumbled. Oceans convulsed.

The Grieving Dragon was learning.

It was awakening.

Slowly but surely... it was beginning to understand its own strength.

Lucian stood silently, staring up at the monster. His expression unreadable, his golden-amber eyes narrowed.

Then...

His lips curled into a smile. A sinister, death-predicting smile.

And then, he vanished.

Just like that. No sound. No ripple. No trace.

The dragon froze.

Its massive eyes darted around.

It couldn’t sense him.

That shouldn’t be possible.

It could detect mana signatures within 1.53 million kilometers with perfect clarity. It could sense everything and everyone.

But Lucian Lancaster had disappeared from the concept of detection.

Then it happened.

The sky—was torn apart.

Not split. Not cracked. No. It was torn into tens... hundreds... thousands... tens of thousands...

Hundreds of thousands of individual pieces.

It wasn’t a sky anymore—it was a mosaic of horror.

And from each floating shard of the shattered heaven, a single sword emerged.

Each sword was small. Nothing grand. No gold. No aura of kingly majesty.

Just blades made of hazy fog.

Swords that flickered like faulty illusions, existing and not.

Their presence was so vague, the dragon physically turned its gaze away—it couldn’t focus on them. Couldn’t even feel them.

Then Lucian’s voice echoed everywhere.

"[Oblivion: Severance]!"

And the swords descended.

Each one fell at the speed of light.

Each one struck with the force of a profane erasure.

And the moment they landed, they didn’t explode.

They collapsed reality.

Where they struck, black holes formed—dozens of them. Real ones. Not metaphors.

Complete with spinning accretion disks, spiraling debris, matter, even time itself being consumed.

The landscape was consumed.

The magma oceans? Gone.

The mountains of ash? Gone.

The echoes of existence that once claimed to be Opalcrest?

Forgotten.

Because even space forgot. It trembled and—worse—it lost memory of itself. It became nothing. Blank.

Reality bled. Timelines overlapped. Shattered moments of past, present, and future danced across the ground like flickers of a broken projector.

Different realities clashed beneath the dragon’s massive form.

And yet...

Even after all that...

The dragon still wasn’t dead.

Its scales were cracked. Its body bleeding. But its eyes—

—those deep blue, glinting voids—

—had adapted.

Adapted to Lucian’s element. To Oblivion.

It stared directly at where Lucian used to be... and grinned.

Its jagged teeth were visible even from kilometers away. It breathed out—not ice, not wind—but fire for the first time.

A fire of white and blue, so dense it looked like liquid energy.

It exhaled with wrath, the beam spreading in a tsunami of heat and chaos that swallowed the 200 kilometers of space infront.

Everything—everything—was reduced to void.

Buildings. Terrain. Laws of physics.

Only the void remained.

But that...

was its biggest mistake.

Because from the void itself—

—something emerged.

A single finger.

Just a finger—that barely fit inside the 200km-wide void.

But even that fragment... was too much.

Even the dragon, in its new apex form, shuddered. Its scales stood on edge. Its wings curled. Its expression shifted to pure dread.

And then—Lucian reappeared.

Not by choice.

He was dragged out. Forcefully summoned by whatever existed beyond the veil.

He stood exposed, face pale. No longer smiling. No longer confident.

For the first time in his life—

Lucian Lancaster feared death.

The finger softly tapped the shattered surface beneath it.

And in response...

Millions of spatial rifts opened across the broken kingdom. No, not just that but across... The world... across Cronica.

Each portal birthed a new monstrosity—some insectoid, some crawling masses of eyes and bone, some shifting clouds of teeth and flame.

Each one twisting, malformed, grotesque.

All of them... abominations.

Amalgamations. Aberrations. Nightmares.

And yet all of them shared a name.

In the system.

In the air.

In every mind still capable of processing information.

« Spawn of Vorr’Kael »

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End of Volume 2: Rift’s Descent