Chương 50: Chapter 22 Part 3

Miles below, standing on the high observation balcony of the Royal Palace, Crown Prince Theron gripped the cold stone railing, his knuckles turning entirely white. Beside him, his surviving generals stood in stunned silence. The howling winds of the storm had died down, replaced by the deafening, rhythmic booms echoing from the stratosphere. Minutes ago, Theron had closed his eyes and prayed to the gods for a swift death. The arrival of the Ancient Dragon had signaled the indisputable end of the Zareth Kingdom.

The sheer size, the pressure, the blistering heat - it was an unwinnable war. But as Theron looked up through the flickering, pale-blue hexes of the Aegis Array, he saw something that completely broke his understanding of reality. The golden mountain in the sky was flinching. The colossal, mythic beast was violently twisting and thrashing in the open air, its telepathic roars shifting from absolute dominance to unmistakable, panicked agony.

Every few seconds, a localized explosion of blinding azure light would detonate against the dragon's shimmering hide, violently knocking the galleon-sized monster off balance.

"She is pushing it back," General Balkan whispered, his voice trembling as he leaned over the railing, his scarred face completely pale.

"By the Gods... she isn't just surviving. She is actively pushing the calamity back." Theron couldn't look away. He didn't understand the profound martial arts at play. He didn't understand how a woman with no wand and no magical grimoire could fly, let alone physically batter a creature of myth into submission. But as he watched a massive cluster of shattered golden scales plummet from the sky and bounce harmlessly off the kingdom's shield, a dizzying, terrifying wave of hope swelled in the Crown Prince's chest.

It was a deeply sobering hope. The woman he had desperately locked out of his city, the anomaly his Spymaster had deemed a 'walking siege weapon', was currently proving that title vastly inadequate. She wasn't a siege weapon. She was a world-breaker. Pushed to the brink of panic, the Ancient Gold Dragon abandoned all physical combat. She beat her battered wings, creating a localized hurricane to forcefully push the terrifying human back, and threw her massive head toward the heavens.

She drew upon the deepest, most primordial core of her solar furnace, condensing every ounce of her remaining mana into a single, apocalyptic strike. She wasn't trying to aim. She was going to erase the entire airspace, the human, and the magical blue dome below them. The atmospheric shift was instantaneous and horrifying. The ambient oxygen in the sky above Elyndria was violently sucked into the dragon's expanding lungs, creating a suffocating vacuum. Down in the capital, the air pressure plummeted.

Citizens collapsed in the streets, gasping for breath as the temperature aggressively skyrocketed, the residual heat baking the cobblestones despite the protective dome. Inside the Ivory Tower, the massive runic pillars began to violently crack. Archmage Kirnof fell to his knees, blood pouring freely from his nose and ears.

The magical scrying pool in the center of the chamber flared blindingly white, the enchanted water instantly boiling away as the instruments failed to comprehend the thermal density gathering in the sky.

"Brace!" Kirnof screamed to his bleeding mages, his voice completely raw.

"The sky is falling!" High above, Ming Xuan Ji hovered directly in the path of the cataclysm. She didn't use [Cloud-Stepping Dragon] to evade. She knew that even if she dodged, the sheer radius of the Ultimate Breath would completely annihilate the Aegis Array and the millions of people below it. She had to intercept it. She unsealed her Dantian to its maximum capacity. Xuan Ji extended her left arm, her palm glowing with the absolute-zero, freezing azure light of Ultimate Yin.

Simultaneously, she extended her right arm, igniting with the searing, golden fire of Ultimate Yang. She brought her hands together, perfectly overlapping her palms. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. The physical toll on her own body was immediate. To force two diametrically opposed energies of mythical proportion to fuse without detonating required torturous control.

Her meridians burned as if she had swallowed molten iron, her skin flushed, and her veins visibly bulged, glowing faintly beneath her pale skin. She didn't throw the energy as a projectile. She wrapped the highly unstable, swirling black-and-white singularity entirely around her own body, creating a compressed, hyper-dense armor of gravitational distortion. [Heavenly Demon Secret Art: Sun-Moon Subjugation Echo] High above, the night ceased to exist.

A blinding, churning pillar of super-heated solar fire erupted from the dragon's massive jaws. It was a beam of pure, unadulterated annihilation, fifty feet wide and carrying the heat of a dying star. As it shot downward, the atmosphere itself ignited. To the millions of terrified citizens cowering in the lower rings of Elyndria, it looked as though the sun had just crashed into the earth.

With a concussive boom that physically tore the stratosphere to shreds, Xuan Ji launched herself straight up, diving headfirst directly into the descending pillar of solar fire. The physical and spiritual collision was cataclysmic. The dragon's ultimate breath did not incinerate her. Instead, the hyper-dense, gravitational anomaly of Xuan Ji's Yin-Yang aura acted as an indestructible, supreme wedge. The fifty-foot pillar of solar fire violently, cleanly split perfectly down the middle around her.

Like a river breaking against an immovable boulder, the twin streams of super-heated dragon breath roared past Xuan Ji on either side. The divided flames crashed into the resilient upper hexagonal panels of the Aegis Array far below, washing over the city's magical dome and raining a terrifying, harmless shower of golden sparks over the trembling capital. The Ancient Gold Dragon's eyes widened in sheer, primal horror.

Riding the center of the split beam, entirely untouched by the solar fire, the tiny human rocketed upward. Xuan Ji broke through the origin point of the breath attack, appearing directly between the dragon's massive, sweeping horns.

"Checkmate," Xuan Ji whispered. She slammed her glowing, singularity-wrapped palm directly into the center of the Gold Dragon's forehead. The impact did not break a single golden scale. It didn't draw a single drop of blood. Instead, the supreme force of the Yin-Yang singularity bypassed the dragon's mythic physical armor entirely. The shockwave vibrated perfectly through the beast's thick skull and aggressively rattled its massive brain. The sky went completely dead.

A massive, perfectly circular ring of displaced air exploded outward from the point of impact, expanding for miles across the dark horizon and instantly silencing the howling winds. The Gold Dragon's eyes rolled back into its head. The blinding solar heat radiating from its massive body instantly flickered and died out. Its colossal wings went entirely limp. The telepathic presence that had been suffocating the minds of the capital's citizens was abruptly severed, replaced by a heavy, terrifying quiet.

The mythic beast had been knocked completely unconscious mid-air. And then, gravity took over. Without the dragon's innate magical levitation keeping it aloft, the sheer, unimaginable weight of the galleon-sized beast plummeted from the sky. Down below, Crown Prince Theron, General Balkan, and the Vanguard watched in paralyzed awe as the golden mountain fell.

It missed the pale-blue dome of the Aegis Array by mere hundreds of feet, plunging past the towering walls of the capital and hurtling toward the empty, rain-swept plains of the foothills just outside the city. KRRAAACK-THOOOOOM. When the Gold Dragon struck the earth, the impact was worse than a natural earthquake. The bedrock of the continent violently groaned. Millions of tons of dirt, stone, and pulverized grass were thrown hundreds of feet into the air in a massive, expanding dust cloud.

The shockwave rolled across the plains, slamming into the magical walls of the Aegis Array. The pale-blue hexagonal shields violently flared, absorbing the impact to protect the capital, but the physical tremor still knocked half the City Guard off their feet and rattled the stained glass in the Royal Palace. For a long, agonizing minute, the only sound was the heavy, freezing rain slowly beginning to fall again, washing away the massive dust cloud that had swallowed the plains.

As the air finally cleared, the true scale of the devastation was revealed. The Gold Dragon lay in the center of a crater the size of a small lake. Its massive, golden body was half-buried in the displaced earth. Its chest was rising and falling in deep, slow, ragged breaths. It was alive, but completely, utterly subdued. Standing perfectly still on the very tip of the dragon's massive snout was Ming Xuan Ji. Her black-and-crimson silk hanfu was completely immaculate, untorn and unbothered by the catastrophic fall.

The glowing, terrifying gold of her [Divine Eye of Veritas] slowly faded back into deep, calm obsidian. The Gold Dragon let out a low, rumbling groan, the sound vibrating the earth. The beast's massive eyelids fluttered, struggling to open as consciousness slowly, painfully returned to its rattled brain. When the dragon finally managed to open its eyes, the first thing it saw was the tiny, terrifying human standing casually on its nose.

Xuan Ji crossed her arms, looking down at the mythic beast with the calm authority of a raid leader who had just finished carrying the entire server.

"Now then," Xuan Ji said, her voice echoing clearly across the silent crater.

"Are you ready to sit down and talk about your egg?"