Chapter 96: 96. The Late Demon General Azmireth

Owen was airborne now. Below, Leah set the pace, cutting the most direct line through Ashplain terrain. Odessa rode her Azure Sky Dragon alongside him, crystal wings built for sprint distance.

“The Formation is east-northeast,” Elder Moss had said.

Owen pushed his Mana Sense ahead at maximum range. The formation’s density registered immediately—significant and strengthening with every kilometer closed.

At thirty kilometers out, he found her.

Azmireth’s signature was the absence his Mana Sense had learned to read. She was at the formation boundary. Stationary. Working.

The boundary was fluctuating in a rhythm that wasn’t natural—pulses of void erosion pressing against the dungeon’s outer shell, then withdrawing, then pressing again. She was weakening the structure.

“She’s at the boundary,” he called down. “She’s forcing the manifestation.”

“How long?” Yuki called up.

He read the erosion rate. “I don’t know”

“How far?”

“Thirty kilometers.”

“Then stop talking and fly,” Leah said.

He flew.

—

He hit twenty kilometers and Azmireth’s suppression dropped.

She knew he was coming. Her senses were better than anything he had encountered and she had been stationary, focused, paying attention. The suppression dropping meant concealment was no longer the priority.

The void erosion pulses stopped.

She turned to face his approach.

Owen folded his wings and dropped—leveling at fifty meters, covering the remaining distance at full speed. The formation was visible now: a section of Ashplain where the air Trembled and space distorted, where grass had crystallized, where the sky was a wrong color of itself.

Azmireth stood at the boundary. Same black suit. Same small horns. Same void-black eyes tracking him with the patience of someone who had been waiting and was fine with having waited.

He landed hard thirty meters away. The impact cracked the crystallized ground.

“You stopped, huh” he said.

“I’ve run the numbers on your flight speed,” she said. “Nothing I could have done would force full manifestation before you arrived.” She tilted her head. “So I have decided to do this properly.”

“And what is that? Kill me and then force manifestation?.”

“Kill you and then take the fragment,” she said. “No time pressure. No complications.”

“Your last attempts haven’t been clean.”

“I’ve been collecting information, Dragon” she said. “I have enough now.”

She moved.

—

She came in fast and low. Demon Step fired on the first stride—afterimage blooming three meters left while her actual body materialized at his right, hands driving void erosion at his shoulder.

He rotated into her arrival, his forearm up between her hands and body. The erosion hit his scales instead of his joint. He accepted the pain and closed his other hand on her wrist.

She pulled but He held.

Devil’s Aura detonated at point-blank. The pressure wave drove him back four steps and broke his grip. He used the momentum—Momentum Shift activating, the backward push converting into a lateral pivot. He came around her flank and his tail swung horizontal, low and fast, at her legs.

She jumped it cleanly.

While she was in the air his Dragon’s Breath fired—not at her, at the ground directly beneath her landing point. The burst superheated two meters of crystallized grass into unstable slag.

She read it mid-air and Demon Stepped away, reappearing six meters left.

He was already turning.

“You’ve good, I’ll give you that” she said.

“So are you too” he said.

She came again—no Demon Step this time, straight approach. Close range was void erosion’s optimal condition.

He activated Dragon’s Aura instead.

The pressure wave hit her at five meters and her stride broke. He stepped inside her reach and drove his elbow into her sternum. The impact forced an exhale, a half-second of her attention on her own body’s response.

He used it. His free hand grabbed her collar and threw her—raw draconic strength through humanoid leverage, putting her into the crystallized ground.

She hit it hard.

Void erosion detonated from the impact point outward—a radial burst that cracked ground in every direction. His mana dropped eight percent. Ultra-Regeneration pulled it back.

Azmireth was already rising.

“That’s new,” she said. Her suit was torn at the shoulder. First damage he had seen on her. “You’re faster than in the hall.”

Owen activated the passive resonance.

Not the full Draconic Resonance. The undercurrent. The principle: assertion of coherence rather than demonstration of power. His scales didn’t blaze. The sound didn’t happen. But the quality of the air changed, the ambient mana aligning differently, and the void erosion burning through his mana began to slow.

Azmireth felt it immediately.

“What the hell are you doing,” she said. Flat. Recalibrating. “That’s not in my data. You developed something new since the hall.”

“Yeah, just four hours ago.” Owen said grinning.

Her tail snapped straight. “Vorthraxx was right that you grow too fast.”

She shifted approach entirely.

The hellfire came out—both hands, high output, sustained projection. Walls of violet-black fire on two sides formed a box. She was constraining the space, forcing him into a corridor where Demon Step could be used with geometric precision.

He didn’t dodge the box. He walked toward the nearest hellfire wall.

She hadn’t expected that. The Demon Step fired into empty space.

He was through the fire.

It burned. The passive resonance held back the void erosion component, but hellfire’s thermal damage found gaps between his scales. Ultra-Regeneration pulled mana to fight it. His reserves dropped to fifty-one percent.

He was behind her now.

She spun. He was already moving—Momentum Shift into her rotation, using her own angular momentum. His hands found her shoulders and drove her forward into the ground she had just stepped from. The impact was harder because he had her momentum added to his own.

Void erosion detonated. He had expected it and jumped, landing above the radial burst’s zone.

He landed on her back.

She tried to push up but He pinned both wrists to the ground, knees on her shoulder blades, and activated Dragon’s Aura downward—concentrated, not spread. Full weight aimed at a single point.

Demon physiology had a pain response. She went rigid.

“Yield!” he demanded.

“No!” she retorted.

She triggered Demon Step from a pinned position—constrained by contact and pinned wrists, she managed six inches of displacement. Enough to break his grip on her right wrist. Enough.

The void erosion from that freed hand was the strongest output he had seen from her—concentrated, precise, aimed not at his body but at the passive resonance field, specifically at the layer where it interfaced with his Sovereignty.

She had found the seam of mana.

The resonance cracked. The void erosion started damaging the underlying structure beneath it. His mana dropped fifteen percent in just two seconds. Then twenty.

He had seconds remaining.

He pulled everything remaining and fired Draconic Resonance at full output.

One second of complete assertion—every scale blazing, the sound hitting frequencies that cracked crystallized grass in a ring around him. The passive resonance fracture sealed instantly.

The void erosion didn’t stop. It reversed.

Every tendril of Hollow Tide Azmireth had embedded over the last three fights—the accumulated erosion from the dungeon field, the hall, this engagement—caught the reversal wave and was expelled through her hand that was still generating it.

Azmireth screamed.

The first uncontrolled sound he had heard from her. Short. Sharp. Then cut off with the speed of something that refused to give it more space.

She released his body and drove backward across crystallized ground, putting ten meters between them in one movement. She was on her feet. But her right hand—the one running the Hollow Tide when the reversal hit—was held against her body, the purple skin now greying, the mana structure visibly damaged.

She looked at it. Then at Owen.

Owen’s mana read nineteen percent.

He stood up.

Azmireth’s void-black eyes moved across him in rapid a calculation. The calculation produced an answer she didn’t like.

“You can’t run another Draconic Resonance, can you” she said.

“No, i can’t ” he agreed.

“And I have void erosion. And you have Indestructible Scales and Ultra-Regeneration and almost nothing left.” She looked at her damaged hand. “And I have this.”

“So it comes down to one exchange,” Owen said.

“Yes.”

“Come then,” he said.

She came with everything—Demon Step firing three times, afterimages stacking, the real position buried in blur. Void erosion in both hands despite the damage, output halved but significant. Devil’s Aura primed.

Owen did not move.

He stood with feet planted and eyes closed and reached for the nineteen percent remaining. He pushed it all into passive resonance—not a burst, not output. Just the principle at maximum sustainable intensity: himself, completely and entirely, asserted into the ground beneath him and the air around him and the scales on his body and the Dragon King bloodline Dominus had put into an egg and trusted.

Azmireth’s Demon Step resolved. The real position came out of the blur two meters in front of him, void erosion already firing.

It hit the resonance field.

The field held.

Not because it was stronger than her void erosion. It wasn’t. But the passive resonance running at full intensity on nineteen percent wasn’t a defensive layer—it was Owen’s existence asserting itself so completely that void erosion’s fundamental principle, the undermining of matter’s will to cohere, had nothing to undermine.

He was too certain of himself to doubt.

The void erosion dispersed like water against glass.

Azmireth’s eyes went wide.

He opened his eyes and his right hand closed around her throat.

The void erosion she triggered fired and scattered. The Devil’s Aura detonated and he absorbed it. The Demon Step fired and he held because his grip had every remaining resource behind it and nineteen percent of Owen was enough for this.

She stopped moving.

“The fragment,” she said, voice compressed. “Vorthraxx will send others. I am one of seven generals. Killing me solves nothing.”

“It will solve today

” Owen said.

Something moved in her void-black eyes. Closer to recognition.

“You really are going to do it…” she said. “Build it back? The dragon kingdom.”

“Yes.”

“Then you’d better be faster than he is…” she said. “…Because Vorthraxx has been building his own kingdom for a thousand years and he is nearly done.”

Owen looked at her.

Then he fired Dragon’s Breath at point-blank range.

Not the controlled, directional bursts. The full output. The ancient thing at the bottom of his reserves—the draconic fire of the Dragon King bloodline, the temperature of something that had been burning since before the current world was arranged the way it was. The Prometheus fire.

Azmireth did not scream this time.

When it was done, Owen stood in the clearing where she had occupied and his mana read zero and the ground around him was black and the formation behind him continued building, indifferent.

He dropped to one knee.

Azmireth was dead.

But she was just one of sev.

Six more to go.

Footsteps sounded behind him—Leah arriving first, then Yuki, Odessa, Alfred, Elder Moss. All of them stopping at the clearing’s edge and taking in what was left of it.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Yuki crouched beside him. “you okay?”

“I’m at Zero capacity, baby~” he said in a joking manner.

“Can you stand?”

“Give me a minute.”

“You have more than a minute,” she said. Her voice was steady. “The formation is still building.”

She put her hand on his back.

Behind them the Story Dungeon’s formation continued its slow, enormous work.

“Apparently, there are six other Demons we need to Look out for” Owen managed to say.

“Six more!?” Leah exclaimed. “There are six more of her out there?!”

“Yes…” Owen said.

She crouched beside him. Her amber eyes were on the formation. “Fuck… How long until this opens?”

Owen looked at the shimmer. Read the formation’s pulse. The erratic fluctuation Azmireth’s void erosion had introduced was settling—the dungeon’s mana finding its natural pattern again without the external pressure.

“Without her forcing it?” He exhaled slowly. “Days. Maybe a week.”

“Good” Leah said.

“Good?”

She looked at him. “Because you need to recover before you walk through that gate. And there are things that need to be resolved on this continent before you disappear into a dungeon for however long it takes. Marak. The three clans. My mother. The shamans. The contamination. All of it needs closure before you go.”

Owen looked at her.

“Alright then” he said, looking at Leah pout.

He almost laughed. The mana depletion made it come out wrong—more like an exhale than a laugh—but the shape was there.

“Alright, Alright, don’t bite me” he said. “A week. We close this beastfolk inter tribe war arc. Then the dungeon.”

“It’s not a war, But….Good” Leah said again, and stood.

The formation continued behind them.

Building toward something that would still be there when Owen was ready for it.

And six more demons somewhere, still working. Still preparing.

Still coming.

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