Chapter 146: 146. The Reckoning

Vorthraxx Descended violently.

Owen tried short-range teleportation. Spatial magic coiled around him, ready to blink him past the swarm. The replications closed in. His teleportation fizzled as corrupted mana from Vorthraxx’s Sovereignty of the Demonic Dragon bleeded into the space around him, causing distortions and making reality itself unreliable. The magic slipped through his fingers like water.

’No! Please!’

Time slowed in Owen’s perception. The battlefield became a tableau of frozen motion: hunters mid-strike, demons mid-charge, the sky itself holding its breath. He saw Vorthraxx cutting through the air toward Yuki. He saw the distance between them. He saw that he wouldn’t make it.

’No no no—!’

—

Yuki felt the desperation and despair throwing the bond that connected her to Owen as it pulsed more violently that it had ever pissed before.

Her Battle Precognition fired.

The future unfolded in her mind in milliseconds. Vorthraxx’s attack path. His claws extended. The angle of his dive. The space between his scales where Owen’s earlier strikes had left the armor cracked. She saw it all and resolved herself.

She didn’t run.

Uru’s scales hardened around her, [Dragon Scale Armor] layering over her chest, her arms, her throat. The child who had been a slime was now armor, weapon, shield, all the things Yuki had needed her to be in this fight.

Yuki planted her feet as vorthraxx’s shadow fell over her. His claws reached for her throat.

Then [Phantom Step] activated. Yuki dissolved into shadow, reappeared not behind him, not away from him, but beneath him. Her katanas were already moving. Verida’s blade found the gap between Vorthraxx’s scales, an injury Owen had opened earlier, where the armor was weakest, where the wound was still healing.

And she struck. Hard.

The blade bit deep enough to draw blood. Purple light leaked from the wound, and for a single heartbeat, Vorthraxx’s momentum stalled.

His claws closed on empty air where Yuki had been a millisecond before before she phantom stepped away.

He looked down at the blood dripping from his chest. Then at the woman who had drawn it. His golden eyes held something that might have been recognition. Something that might have been memory.

’She’s just as brave’ he thought. ’Just as feisty.’

He almost said her name. Not Yuki’s. The other one. The one whose memory had followed him for a thousand years. Celeste. For a split second He saw Her image in Yuki.

Then at that moment, Owen crashed into him.

—

The impact drove them both across the battlefield. Owen’s claws found Vorthraxx’s throat, his shoulders, anywhere they could hold. His fire built in his chest, waiting to be unleashed. His Dragon’s Aura pressed down like a weight, trying to crush, to slow, to stop.

No more words. No more philosophy. Just raw unadulterated rage and violence now.

Vorthraxx parried. Blocked. Countered. But Owen’s ferocity pushed him back. Claw against claw. Scale against scale. The two dragons tore across the plain, their bodies carving trenches in the earth, their fire setting the grass ablaze.

They crashed through the demon army first.

Demons scattered, too slow, too close. The collision of two dragons moving faster than sound turned bodies to mist. Vorthraxx’s replications dissolved around them. The vanguard that had been pressing toward Nexus Prime broke, reformed, broke again.

Owen didn’t care. He couldn’t care. He pushed Vorthraxx through the ranks, through the chaos, through the screaming and the dying.

Then they hit the human lines.

Hunters dove aside. Shields rose and shattered. Solhart’s sword flashed, cutting a path for his people, but Owen was already past him, driving Vorthraxx toward the city walls, toward the rubble, toward anything that would stop them.

He saw what he was doing. Saw the bodies. Saw the terror in the faces of people who had come to fight demons and found themselves caught between dragons.

He saw Vorthraxx’s wicked smile.

The Desecrator’s laughter cut through the chaos. “Look at them, brother! Look at what you’re doing! You wanted to protect them. You’re killing them instead!”

Owen looked.

And in that split second of hesitation, Vorthraxx almost broke free.

Then Owen made a decision.

He grabbed Vorthraxx with everything he had left. His arms locked around the adult dragon’s throat. His wings beat once, twice, driving them upward.

“What are you doing?” Vorthraxx’s voice was almost curious.

Owen didn’t answer. He just flew higher.

They punched through the smoke, through the clouds, through the layers of air that grew thinner and colder the higher they climbed. The battlefield shrank below them. The cities became dots. The continents became shapes. The world became a curve of blue and green against the purple and red if the sounds and then the black of space.

Vorthraxx struggled. His claws found Owen’s sides, his back, his wings. But Owen held. His scales cracked. His blood sprayed across the sky. He still held.

“You can’t save them from.me!” Vorthraxx snarled. “There’s nowhere in this world they’ll be safe from me! No where I can be sealed again! I’ll find her! I’ll find all of them! You think flying higher will save anyone!?”

Owen’s ascent accelerated. Mach one. Mach two. Three. Six. The air screamed around them. The sky turned from blue to purple to black. The ozone layer cracked beneath them, the boundary between atmosphere and the void.

“There is one place…” Owen said.

He tore a rift in space.

The tear opened in front of them, raw and unstable, a wound in reality that had no destination. Owen had no coordinates in mind. No plan. No certainty of where they would emerge. He only knew that it had to be away from here. Away from her. Away from everyone Vorthraxx would use to break him.

But then he thought: one destination existed. A place that wasn’t anywhere anymore. A prison built by a father who loved his son too much to kill him. A dimension that had held Vorthraxx for a thousand years.

It was broken now, no more in existence, and Owen didn’t know or have enough power to create one of his own, but…he was damned if he wasn’t going to try.

So, He poured everything he had into the rift. His mana. His will. His bloodline. The fragments of Dominus’s power that had made him what he was.

The rift flickered and pulsed harder, as if in response to Owen’s determination.

The Owen flew into its void, Vorthraxx still locked in his grip. The world folded around them as the rift sucked them in. The sky, the battle, the screams, all of it had fallen away into nothingness.

And then there was only darkness, one that consumed them entirely.

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