Free Web NovelThe blackness that filled the deep water had never been ripped so brutally.
Rings of dazzling light radiated outward, piercing layer after layer of water pressure, illuminating every inch of the underwater cavern walls, every dead coral skeleton, every grain of sediment suspended in the seawater with razor clarity.
The seawater boiled and churned under the intense heat.
Claudia only rolled over and closed his eyelids.
Chasing me to the seabed, condensing a sun and hurling it at me... what an absurd dream.
Could it be that deep down I fear him?
Impossible.
Absolutely impossible.
That red iron dragon was absurdly powerful, but I, Claudia, would not shrink back even in my dreams.
Bring it on, after all, it’s only a dream.
He thought.
But something felt off.
Half asleep and half awake, a string inside the remnant of Claudia’s consciousness trembled.
The light shining on him seemed too hot.
It stung his skin and burned his eyelids.
Dreams never feel hot.
In Claudia’s memory, cold was his constant companion.
His dreams had always been icy—painful and hungry, yes—but never scalding-hot like this.
His subconscious instinctively rejected the anomaly.
It was not like a dream.
It felt like a blade!
Alarms rang in his mind.
The chrome dragon’s crisis sense, forged through countless trials, lashed at his dulled nerves, forcing him to muster a sliver of alertness in his half-sleep.
His body reacted before his mind, muscles tensing.
At the same moment, the eyes he had just closed snapped open.
It was a sun.
A blazing white orb that vaporized surrounding seawater into nothingness, like a star near the end of its life preparing a final magnificent flare.
The light jumped without transition, from utter darkness to blinding brilliance.
Huge volumes of seawater contacting its surface vaporized instantly, unable even to let out a hiss, turning into vapor that, under high pressure, compressed into a supercritical fluid and formed a warped shock layer around the dragonqi bomb.
Light refracted, reflected, and bent in that medium.
The whole sun looked like an iron ball slowly melting in water.
Claudia’s heart spasmed violently.
Not a dream.
He was completely awake.
All drowsiness, confusion, and that half-dream haze were torn apart at once, replaced by perfect clarity.
“Is someone plotting against me?”
His mind whirred frantically.
That earlier daze was definitely not accidental; the dream overlaying reality had to have been deliberately constructed.
But there was no time to ponder.
During the moments he had been dazed, the blazing orb in the deep had fully ignited.
The red iron dragon held it aloft with massive arms, molten-light veins glowing between his dark scales. He adjusted his angle slightly, then hurled it at Claudia.
Damn!
Claudia’s body swelled in an instant, shifting from hatchling posture to towering great dragon. Muscles bulged like rolling waves beneath his skin, wings snapped open, tail vertebrae arched, and he prepared to catapult himself out of the cavern.
But it was too late.
The sun-sphere fell with deceptive slowness and terrifying speed.
In Claudia’s view its trajectory seemed static.
At first it simply hovered, trembling slightly, its shining surface slowly roiling with gold-red halos, like a giant gem fixed in the seawater.
Graceful, slow, motionless.
But once it began to fall, it could not be stopped.
In an instant it was upon him.
From stillness to eruption, there was no time to react.
Claudia’s vision was filled entirely by light, the sun expanding to occupy everything.
Winter Hunger!
In the rush, he only managed to use this area skill.
A temperature-denying cold surged from within, as if releasing millennia of stored hunger and frost in one go.
A ghostly blue chill exploded outward from him, instantly freezing the surrounding water; the liquid turned to solid ice and encased him in a thick frozen fortress.
Boom!
Endless light and heat burst forth.
The dragonqi bomb slammed into the ice; countless seawater molecules vaporized in an instant, shockwaves rippling outward and shattering the frozen sea into shards.
Crack!
The hastily cast Winter Hunger could not withstand such concentrated impact.
White cracks webbed the ice surface, golden-red light seeping through the fissures, and then the entire ice shell detonated from within. The ice fragments vaporized almost before they flew far.
The ice armor melted away.
Then Claudia felt the light and heat.
The brightness was blinding.
He shut his eyes, but the lids could not block it; through his eyelids he could see the shadows of his claw bones.
The heat was fierce.
His scales softened, curled, and melted... then muscle fibers contracted, ruptured, and carbonized under the blaze.
Then came the shockwaves.
The chrome dragon felt his body gripped by a giant hand and tossed into a blender, tumbling through water, spinning, unable to tell up from down, only the endless burning and impacts remained.
However.
Compared with the helplessness he had felt when struck by a dragon’s breath before, this time he could still move, barely.
The blast stirred chaotic turbulence that wrapped his body and flung him further away.
Claudia seized the chance.
He gritted his teeth, flapped his wings with every last ounce of strength, rode the current and shock, and finally escaped the most dangerous center.
Looking back.
The heat and light were dissipating, but the sea had been utterly transformed.
A gigantic vacuum sphere had formed in the deep; all water had vaporized, leaving a shell of high-pressure steam and plasma.
Seawater surged in from all sides to refill the void.
A majestic curtain of returning flow formed around the shell, striking, merging, and roaring thunderously.
It was a rare, spectacular sight.
But Claudia had no mood to admire it.
Pain!
The chrome dragon gritted his teeth; the twitching facial muscles pulled at burned flesh on the left, a fresh jolt of agony.
He bowed his head and inspected his body: his dark-silver scales were now entirely blackened—
Charred black, carbonized black, scarcely a single intact scale remained.
His left side was almost unbearable to behold.
Nearly one third of the left wing membrane had been burned away; the remaining portion was curled and brittle like a scorched leaf, riddled with holes and cracks; the left ribs were exposed, scale plates peeled off in chunks, revealing charred red-black muscle and bone; his left face was burned from snout to behind the ear, that eye shut tight, the eyelid seared and fused.
The right side was somewhat better.
But only somewhat.
Still, such wounds did not make Claudia tremble.
He extended his right claw and made a grasping motion in the water.
Cold surged from his body, crystallizing into ice plate armor that covered the horrific wounds, temporarily staunching blood and numbing pain.
He raised his burned, ice-covered head and stared upward.
In his sight, the Scarlet Emperor Cangxing loomed above, his body cloaked in dark scales, hovering over the churning water, revealing only a massive, blurred silhouette.
Claudia could barely make out a pair of profound eyes.
A wild laugh welled up from his throat.
“Ha!”
The chrome dragon opened his jaws and unleashed a hoarse, tearing laugh.
“Damn you, red iron dragon!”
He exhaled a spray of sputtering breath with sparks, spread his wings to the maximum, and displayed his mangled body in full view of the red iron dragon.
“You wouldn’t even let me sleep? You came all the way here to disturb my rest?!”
“Good! Very good!”
“You think you’ve won?”
The corners of his mouth split, revealing a row of broken fangs, gums streaked with blood. “Let me tell you, Garoth Ignas!”
“I, Claudia, have lived nearly two thousand years! I have been hunted by dragons ten times my strength and besieged by armies a hundred times my size! I have approached death countless times and crawled back from hell over and over!”
“You think you can kill me?!”
His body pitched forward, wings taut, assuming a fiercely offensive charge posture like a lone wolf that would bite even with broken legs.
“Come, I will show you my limits!”
“Even if I die in the end, I will tear your flesh and bones apart, make you remember the name Claudia! Every time your wound itches for the rest of your life, you will think of me! You will lie awake at night, doomed to remember!”
His wings unfurled, dragging water and surges behind him as he charged straight at the red iron dragon.
Terrifying momentum.
Killing intent bristling.
Then...
Both wings suddenly folded.
The chrome dragon who had just thrown out fierce words and a suicidal stance carved an arc through the water, abruptly changing course from a straight charge to a steep dive toward deeper ocean away from the red iron dragon.
He fled.
Countless intelligent creatures called Claudia mad.
But none called him foolish.
The red iron dragon opposite him was disturbingly abnormal—beneath serenity lay an even deeper madness. Its dragon breath was outrageously powerful and unreasonable, and in close combat it was not at a disadvantage.
These conclusions had been proven in earlier clashes.
Claudia had no clear plan on how to handle such an enemy.
So he ran.
Or rather, he temporarily avoided the blade and made a strategic retreat.
No shame in that.
In two thousand years, he had fled more times than most dragons had fought. To him, living meant eating, eating meant growing stronger, and growing stronger meant taking even more.
With a Flesh Tier growth trait, Claudia knew his ceiling might not end at Mandate of Heaven.
He could grow stronger and wash away this humiliation later with interest.
The chrome dragon fled through the deep.
Each beat of his wings trailed an endless cold, frostflowers blooming behind him, freezing the surrounding seawater into white ice paths inch by inch to slow and impede the Scarlet Emperor Cangxing’s potential pursuit.
Behind him, the red iron dragon simply hovered, head tilted slightly, the Eye of Truth piercing darkness and ice barriers, locking onto the ancient chrome dragon streaking away.
“Not chasing?”
The green dragon’s whisper echoed in the red iron dragon’s mind.
Garoth smiled faintly and replied by thought, “No rush. Let him run a little.” Then he praised, “Cerora, I didn’t expect even a Mandate great dragon to be tricked like that by you.”
“If he were already Mandate, he wouldn’t have had any chance to wake.”
Even sleeping, dragons possess subconscious vigilance. In such a state, their perception of ordinary danger is dulled, but their sense for genuine crisis becomes extremely sharp.
Yet under Cerora’s dream confusions, Claudia was hazy and uncertain, unable to tell dream from reality until the last moment.
That gave Garoth time to gather a dragonqi bomb and silently close to optimal throwing distance.
After all, he did not want to kill Claudia outright.
He aimed to wound and weaken his resistance without delivering a fatal blow—a control requirement more delicate than unleashing a reckless dragonqi bomb.
If one strike killed him, the capture would lose its point.
The green dragon replied modestly, “It’s nothing noteworthy.”
Meanwhile, Claudia descended.
He had no idea how far he swam, only that the surrounding water was getting heavier.
Light was crushed by pressure; only boundless black remained, and each flap of his wing sent tearing pain through him. The burned left wing was nearly numb; the right side was growing numb too.
At last a massive fissure appeared ahead.
A trench.
Bottomless, its rock walls thick with deposits.
He didn’t hesitate and dove in, stopping only when he reached a protruding rock ledge at the trench’s deepest point.
It was very quiet here.
Apart from his heartbeat, nothing could be heard.
Claudia turned and lifted his head, peering up through layers of dark toward the trench opening.
There was nothing.
No dark shape more alarming than the pitch black above—only the crushing weight of deep water.
He exhaled in relief.
Muscles that had been taut slackened; he nearly slipped from the ledge.
After steadying himself, Claudia grinned and lowered his head to eye his charred torso. Blood seeped from gaps in his blackened scales, then froze in the extreme cold, sealing the wound cracks.
“Garoth Ignas...”
He murmured the name.
“Damn you, red iron dragon.”
“Because of you, I’ve been hungry so rarely.”
He ground his teeth in the dark and muttered to himself, “But don’t think it ends here. When I recover, I’ll find your flaws and weaknesses.”
“Then I’ll tear your flesh piece by piece and crunch your bones...”
Claudia snapped off a chunk of trench rock, tossed it into his mouth, and chewed with a clack-clack, grinding the stone across his teeth to simulate the pleasure of tearing meat from bone.
He wore a fierce expression, imagining it was the red iron dragon’s flesh and bone.
He chewed with relish.
But.
Before he could swallow, he seemed to sense something and his expression froze.
Ripples formed on the seawater before him.
The water parted as if an invisible hand tore through it, rolling aside to reveal a straight black fissure with jagged edges.
A spatial rift.
A dark, enormous claw reached from the tear.
Dragon scales heavy, seams glowing with dark-red energy veins, claws sharp enough to cut space itself.
That single casual rip widened the rift, and then a massive head pushed through—
The red iron dragon emerged entirely from the fissure.
Because the Spell-Extinguishing Claws’ effect was somewhat weakened in the Ember-Annihilating Form, the motion of tearing space was a bit crude, not as graceful as in his Rift Form, but still skilled.
The red iron dragon stared at the battered Claudia and did not attack immediately.
“Continue.”
“You may run all you like.”
He spoke, his voice passing through the water to Claudia’s ears.
“But no matter where you run... deep sea, underground, the edge of the sky, the world’s boundary.”
The giant tilted his head slightly; the light veins at scale seams flickered. “You cannot escape my claws. Your life belongs to me; you have nowhere to hide.”
From earlier combat, Garoth had already discovered something.
Claudia’s Law-Eating fangs were similar to his Spell-Extinguishing Claws.
But fundamentally different.
Garoth’s claws were versatile and multi-purpose; Claudia’s fangs served only predation, concentrating space-warping ability into the single act of biting.
He could warp and bite space.
But he lacked the skill to use that to teleport through space.
That required delicate operation; Garoth had taken nearly a hundred years to become proficient—and still would not claim mastery.
Claudia clearly lacked that patience; he poured his points into eating.
The ancient chrome dragon twitched slightly.
Then, looking at the composed red iron dragon, muscles under Claudia’s faceplate began to twitch uncontrollably. The corner of his eye, then his mouth, and finally his entire face contorted.
A few seconds later, the spasms stopped suddenly.
Claudia’s mouth peeled into a grin bit by bit, baring fangs.
“Nowhere to run?”
“You’re right, it seems.”
His expression calmed fully. He arched his broken body, tensing limb muscles; blood squeezed from wounds then froze into ice plates, covering the charred scales.
He had no space left to retreat.
“I can give you a choice, Claudia.”
Garoth raised a foreclaw and pointed at him. “Submit to me, crawl beneath my wings, and I will grant you rebirth. You will no longer be a stray dog fleeing in corners, but a hunting hound under the Cataclysm.”
At this, Claudia burst into laughter.
“Submit to you?”
“Garoth Ignas... you expect me to wag my tail like a dog for you?”
His laughter cut off, voice hardening. He said in a deep tone:
“I, Claudia, am the great Deep Freeze Tyrant! I will forge my ascension to Immortal with countless flesh and blood! And you?”
“You are not even Mandate—you are crown-level.”
“A crown-level, daring to make Mandate submit? Daring to beg the great Deep Freeze Tyrant for mercy?”
Oh, so I’m only crown-level?
Garoth almost forgot that fact.
After consecutive battles, he had grown used to facing Mandate-tier beings, to the point his own rank blurred.
“Thank you for the reminder; it makes me appreciate how excellent I am.”
Garoth’s eyes narrowed as he stared down at Claudia. “You may pride yourself on being Mandate, but to me that’s insignificant. Rank is just the size of a container, and I have filled mine with far more than the container.”
“I am the Cataclysm, the dusk of the end, the scorched earth of the world.”
“To receive my favor and crawl beneath my wings—what a blessing for you.”
He leaned his head forward and said calmly, “This is your honor; you should not refuse.”
Claudia sneered and laughed with fury.
“Honor? I, Claudia, would never bow to a presumptuous, arrogant dragon like you, even if it kills me!”
He bared his teeth. “Come! Kill me! Or be bitten to death!”
“As expected.”
Garoth shook his head slightly. “I never expected a mad dog to obey.”
His eyes slit to narrow lines; the dark-red light veins along his scales flared into golden flames.
Scalding heat gushed from scale seams, vaporizing the seawater around him and forming a temporary bubble cavity. At the same time, two extra pairs of massive forelimbs condensed from his shoulder bulges and rib sides.
Six-armed form, manifested again.
“To deal with a mad dog like you...”
“Violence is the clearest language.”
At those words, Garoth flapped his wings and lunged, his hulking body surging directly toward Claudia.
“I will bite your bones apart!”
Claudia roared; his charred body blurred into a streak as his maw opened to the limit, fangs locking onto the red iron dragon’s throat and lunging straight in.
He had no retreat—only forward, only teeth to speak.
Garoth did not dodge; he met the assault head-on.
His six arms spread like a blossoming snap-trap and then snapped shut.
The topmost two arms reached out like iron pincers. The left claw latched onto Claudia’s approaching neck side, talon tips piercing the charred scales and embedding deep in the neck muscles; the right claw gripped the base of the damaged left wing, pinching at the fragile joint connecting wing bone and shoulder bulge, talons slicing through the carbonized membrane and halting his forward momentum mid-lunge.
“Mouth!”
Claudia’s massive maw slammed to a stop right before Garoth’s throat.
He could feel the high-temperature radiation from the dragon’s chest drying his oral cavity; he struggled wildly, claws scraping at Garoth’s chest and belly to tear open armor.
Garoth’s middle pair of arms were ready.
Between the claws, two dragonqi bombs condensed like solid matter, their golden light in the deep water blindingly like two mini suns, spinning at high speed.
He didn’t throw them; he held them and pressed them close to Claudia.
The right middle arm’s sun landed first.
It struck the center of Claudia’s sternum.
Crack!
The ice armor at the contact point melted first, then the underlying scales and flesh caved and shattered instantly.
The breastbone snapped with a crisp fracture and collapsed inward; blood spurted then vaporized instantly from the heat. Claudia’s torso arched backward, his throat emitting a warped, agonized roar.
The left middle arm’s sun followed.
It slammed into his right shoulder.
Crack!
Bones shattered, remaining scales flapped open exposing charred muscle fibers which instantaneously carbonized in the golden flame.
Meanwhile, the light veins between Garoth’s scales glowed and dimmed rhythmically.
Like breathing, they absorbed the shockwaves and heat generated by the near explosions, reincorporating the damage and replenishing what was spent—feeding on destruction.
This tactic Garoth had learned in his previous confrontation with Claudia.
Combat is the best teacher.
Thanks to that earlier entanglement, Garoth realized that in Ember-Annihilating Form he could still display melee prowess comparable to normal form, albeit in a special way and limited to a stage of explosive qi, not sustained.
In this state, his dragonqi was highly excited and active, yet because of the form’s control over energy he could wield it precisely, even absorbing damage from close-range detonations to feed himself.
Thus Garoth could enhance melee by hand-molding dragonqi bombs.
Claudia reeled from the blasts.
His vision filled with golden spots; his ears rang, balance destroyed.
He roared and drove his fangs to tear at space, using Law-Eating fang power to shorten the distance to Garoth’s neck for a counter-bite.
But then Garoth’s lowest pair of arms moved.
They closed like iron bands from the sides, claws locking around Claudia’s ribs and waist, pinning him tighter. The upper-left arm sank slightly; its elbow pushed under Claudia’s lower jaw and heaved upward, a brutal force wrenching his head back.
Bang.
Top and bottom jaws slammed empty as Claudia’s fangs struck together hard.
The two dragons writhed locked in close quarters.
Claudia was almost entirely suppressed.
He writhed against Garoth’s claws, roaring and thrashing.
Garoth paid him no heed.
The right middle arm rose again. Another dragonqi bomb condensed in an instant; he pressed it against Claudia’s already-collapsed chest for another close-range smash.
Boom!
This time the energy detonated directly within the caved-in chest cavity.
Claudia’s thorax became like an ignited furnace; light spilled from gaps in his ribs.
His body emitted a series of unbearable groans as his back scales were forced outward and burst from inside; scale fragments and blood sprayed backward.
Crimson stained Garoth’s claws then evaporated in the golden flames.
The battle was essentially one-sided.
Claudia was far from peak.
If Garoth hadn’t been experimenting with a new fighting method, the defeat would have been faster.
Even so, Claudia was in dire straits.
His body trembled violently under the repeated explosions; ice armor shattered and reformed faster than it could hold; scales cracked, muscle carbonized, bones broken, blood vaporized.
But he did not stop fighting.
Even locked by six arms, his fangs still sought opportunity.
He tilted his head despite the agony and injuries, thrust forward, and drove his fangs toward Garoth’s skull.
Crunch.
He missed.
Garoth’s head tilted slightly, letting Claudia’s fangs slide across the neck side, shaving off a few scales only.
“If this continues, I have no chance to turn the tide.”
In the raging fight, Claudia realized this clearly. He drew his head back with effort, evaded Garoth’s small-sun claw strikes, and let out a silent roar.
All his strength was siphoned up in a single breath.
His jaws opened again.
This time the gape exceeded anything before.
One hundred eighty degrees, two hundred degrees, two hundred twenty degrees...
His skull hadn’t enlarged, but the vortex in his mouth visibly inflated at a speed the eye could follow. Space warped, folded, and stretched between his fangs into an abyssal blackness.
Like a bottomless pit.
It swallowed everything around it.
Seawater, light, heat, even the golden flame leaking from Garoth—all were devoured by the void, disappearing.
Visually, Claudia’s head seemed to grow huge.
The spatial distortion formed a cavernous void between his fangs, making it look as if he had grown a maw larger than his body.
Bite!
Claudia silently hissed as he lunged that mouth at Garoth.
Like a last flash of brilliance, the bite’s speed rivaled his prime. Space in front of his maw twisted wildly.
Any other creature would find it impossible to resist now.
However...
Garoth’s claws sliced through the warped space, tearing the distortion like fragile cloth. Then his talons plunged through the tear and came to either side of Claudia’s skull.
The left claw gripped Claudia’s upper jaw.
The right claw clamped the lower jaw.
Talons sank deep into muscle and bone on both sides of his skull, holding him fast, then pried up and down and apart.
“Gnaw gnaw gnaw gnaw...”
A muffled throat sound escaped Claudia.
His jaws were forced further apart by irresistible strength; an already maximized gape was stretched until the angle between his jaws nearly became a straight line.
At the same time, the vortex in his mouth spiraled toward loss of control.
The spatial warping grew more violent.
As if an invisible leviathan were ravenously devouring all around it.
Garoth’s gaze narrowed as he watched the huge maw and sensed danger.
Then he inhaled deeply and opened his dragon kiss.
You want to eat?
Let me see your limits!
Dragon breath surged forth; nearly mouth-to-mouth, he blasted directly into the wide-open maw of Claudia.
Claudia’s body tensed instantly. His pupils contracted to pinpricks and then violently dilated.
The Throat of Devouring World trait was operating at peak effect.
Even so, he felt an indescribable searing rush slam down his esophagus; tissues vaporized where it passed, the gullet melted through, dragon breath inundated his chest and stomach.
Light beamed through openings between his scales.
Every blood vessel and organ outline shimmered in the pyre-light.
He tried to roar, but his throat was filled with dragon breath.
Rumble...
Energy battered and rebounded inside his abdomen.
His stomach expanded to the limit, then was forcibly filled with more. He could not digest; burning, tearing, and distension pains reached the apex.
But beyond the apex, an unprecedented sensation arose—
Satiety.
A fullness never before known, as if his body would burst from being filled.
Claudia had never eaten his fill in his life.
No matter how much he swallowed, his belly always contracted, pained, screaming for more—an endless bottomless maw.
But now.
The destructive fire energy filled every empty space in him; his stomach was stretched to agonizing extremes yet felt full—
Like a hungry spirit a thousand years starving suddenly stuffed with a mountain of flesh.
“Ah-mng...”
Tears welled in Claudia’s eye sockets.
Satisfaction.
Happiness.
His eyes rolled back as the last sliver of awareness fixed on this absurd sensation. His huge body convulsed once in Garoth’s claws, then went limp and collapsed into unconsciousness, life and death unknown.
