Chapter 74: 74. Hellfire

She moved first.

Owen had expected it, had been reading her weight distribution, the coil in her tail, the almost imperceptible shift in her stance that preceded motion. He had fought enough opponents by now to recognize the moment before inaction collapsed into action.

What he had not expected was how fast.

Azmireth crossed fifteen meters in a blur that his eyes tracked as motion and his Mana Sense tracked as nothing. No displacement of mana. No readable signature cutting through air. Just the afterimage she left behind, a fading purple silhouette standing where she had been, and then her fist connecting with his chest.

The impact drove him back three steps. His Indestructible Scales absorbed the physical force, redistributing the kinetic energy across his body the way they always did. He felt it, but it didn’t break anything.

Then her other hand came up, and her palm filled with fire.

Not orange. Not the red-gold of his own Dragon’s Breath or the green-tinged heat of magical combustion. This fire was deep violet at its core and bleeding into absolute black at the edges, and it hit him in the shoulder before he could fully rotate away.

Owen had been burned before. inside the tower of royals, when he fought himself. He had believed, with reasonable confidence, that fire was one of the things he did not need to worry about.

He revised that belief immediately.

The hellfire did not behave like fire. It did not spread across the surface of his scales and dissipate. It sank, pressing through the Indestructible Scales’ defence as though they were cloth, reaching the flesh beneath, and then burning with a cold, consuming intensity that felt less like heat and more like something fundamental being eaten away.

He roared and spun away, putting distance between them.

[Status Ailment: soul burn]

[Indestructible Scales: INEFFECTIVE against this damage type]

[Ultra-Regeneration activating…]

His regeneration kicked in immediately, new tissue forming under the burn site, pushing the hellfire’s consumption backward. But it was expensive, he could feel his mana reserves dropping faster than any physical wound had ever cost him.

Aaron and Paul came from his flanks.

They were straightforward, no tricks, no abilities beyond the brute amplification of demon physiology. Aaron hit like a battering ram from the left, both fists driving at Owen’s ribs. Paul came lower, going for his legs, trying to bring him down through weight and leverage.

Owen activated Dragon’s Aura.

The pressure wave rolled outward from his body in a ring, not targeted but omnidirectional, catching both demons mid-charge and staggering them. It didn’t stop them, their demonic constitution resisted the psychological component that made Dragon’s Aura effective against humans and lower ranks beasts, but it bought a half-second.

which He used it.

Momentum Shift activated, and he drove into Aaron rather than away from him, the acceleration skill inverting the expected geometry of the exchange. He caught the demon’s outstretched arm, used the borrowed momentum, and threw Aaron across fifteen feet of dungeon grass into Paul’s incoming charge. The two demons collided with enough force to crater the ground beneath them.

Then Azmireth blinked.

Demon Step, he catalogued it in the moment of its use, the afterimage appearing six feet to his left while her actual body materialized directly above him. Another burst of hellfire came down at close range, and this time there was nowhere to drift.

It caught him across the back and upper wings.

The pain was extraordinary. Not debilitating, his draconic body’s pain tolerance was far beyond human limits, but vivid and consuming in a way that demanded his attention. More critically, the hellfire was burning through his mana at a rate that was going to become a problem. Ultra-Regeneration was fighting it continuously, and Regeneration required mana, and Azmireth kept adding to the burn with every exchange.

He needed to understand this fire.

His Magic Affinity had copied skills before through observation, But hellfire was different from anything in his existing reference points. He needed to be inside it longer. Needed to let it burn and read it while it burned.

The idea was unpleasant but He did it anyway.

He stopped trying to avoid the next hellfire burst and took it full in the chest.

It was worse than the previous hits. His mana dropped sharply as regeneration fought for ground. But inside the pain, his Magic Affinity was working, decomposing the hellfire’s structure, reading the mana-pattern underneath, identifying what made it different from normal combustion. The mechanism that let it bypass physical defences. The specific frequency at which it consumed rather than burned.

[Magic Affinity, analysing Hellfire…]

[Fire Affinity cross-referencing…]

[New Skill Acquired: Hellfire, C-Grade]

C-Grade. Barely a spark compared to what Azmireth was throwing. But it was his now, and it would grow.

Aaron and Paul had recovered and were coming again, this time together, their approach coordinated in a way that suggested Azmireth was directing them even while she fought. Owen read it through his Mana Sense, the faint thread of demonic authority connecting her to them, the micro-adjustments in their positioning that served her overall strategy rather than their own instincts.

She was using them as pressure. Keeping him reactive, keeping the hellfire burning, letting the mana drain do the work she couldn’t do through direct force.

Smart.

He decided to remove the variables.

Owen activated Sovereignty of Space-Time.

Time slowed.

The world went thick and movement became heavy, sound dropping in pitch. He felt it immediately, the hellfire still burning across his back and chest didn’t pause with time. It continued consuming, and the net drain on his mana spiked sharply. The Sovereignty was expensive under normal conditions. Running it while hellfire actively ate his mana reserves was like trying to fill a bucket that someone was drilling holes in.

He had seconds. Maybe less.

He used them.

Aaron first, close enough that two bounds inside slowed time covered the distance. Owen’s claws found the demon’s throat before his slowed body could respond, and he tore. The movement was clinical. Efficient. Aaron’s demonic constitution fought to regenerate and failed; whatever kept demons alive, it had limits, and Owen pushed past them in the fraction of a real-time second the Sovereignty bought him.

Paul read what was happening, even in slowed time, his demon instincts fired, and tried to run. He made it four slow-motion steps before Owen’s tail caught him across the back of the skull with everything Owen had left to spend.

The Sovereignty collapsed.

[Sovereignty of Space-Time, Deactivated: Insufficient Mana]

Time snapped back to normal. Owen stood between two dead demons, the hellfire on his back still burning, his mana reserves at a level that made him acutely aware of every further expenditure.

Azmireth stood ten meters away.

She was looking at Aaron and Paul. Something crossed her face, not grief exactly, but the recognition of a calculation that had gone wrong. She had expected the two of them to keep the pressure up long enough for the mana drain to finish the job.

Owen raised his hand and released a burst of Dragon’s Breath, not at her, but at himself, specifically at the hellfire still burning across his back and wings. Flame against flame, his own fire familiar enough that he could use it to disrupt the hellfire’s hold, buying his regeneration the room it needed.

It worked. Partially. The hellfire receded but didn’t fully extinguish.

He looked at Azmireth.

She looked at him.

The easy amusement was completely gone. In its place was something more honest, the expression of someone who had made a precise assessment and was recalculating.

“You suppressed the hellfire,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“yeah” Owen admitted. “But give me time, and ill be done with it completely.”

Her tail twitched once.

Then she reached into her suit and pressed something, and the teleportation light bloomed around her, not the crystal-shattering flare of Rogers’s emergency escape but something smooth and prepared, a predefined exit she had arranged before the fight began.

“Vorthraxx’s timeline is not served by my death today,” she said. The purple light was already obscuring her outline. “This isn’t over, little dragon.”

The light took her.

Owen stood in the ruined dungeon field, two dead demons at his feet, hellfire still smouldering in the gaps of his scales, mana reserves critically low.

He reached through the bond to Yuki.

She was close. Close enough that the telepathic connection carried clearly, and what came back through it was not calm.

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