Chapter 719: Armies Collide Part IV [Golden Ticket - Bonus]
Chapter 719: Armies Collide Part IV [Golden Ticket Chapter Bonus]
Saphira’s entire consciousness fractured.
She observed the capture and subsequent incineration of her dragons.
She had watched them become incinerated by a human woman who seemed to wield fire magic with the precision of a master engineer. She had observed the demise of even the most formidable creatures, dragons.
Her shoulders shuddered.
Her claws released their grip on the stone of the command platform, only to dig in once more with such force that the bedrock itself began to splinter. She attempted to formulate new orders, commands, and strategies.
But her consciousness kept fracturing. She kept processing the impossible, the way the web had been created, the way Mira had descended, the way the fire had consumed everything.
She started to transmit new orders.
"All units, establish new formations. Prepare for overhead..."
But before the transmission could complete, the sky detonated.
The dragons that had consumed the minotaurs had spread out. Simultaneously, their cores began to overheat.
The process wasn’t gradual. It was a violent, unstoppable surge of internal power that exceeded the creatures’ capacity to contain it.
They exploded from the inside out.
The detonations were catastrophic. The dragons’ bodies were completely vaporized, transformed from solid matter into nothing more than dispersing particles and superheated plasma.
The minotaurs that those creatures had swallowed experienced the full force of the internal detonation.
Their flesh shredded, their bones pulverized into dust so fine that it hung suspended in the air like smoke, their blood vaporized before it could even spill.
The blast radius expanded outward from each detonation point, incinerating everything in its path, creating shockwaves that made the air itself scream.
Saphira felt the pressure wave wash across her.
It was so intense that she was physically lifted from her position on the command platform, thrown backward by force that transcended her ability to resist.
Her claws raked across stone, leaving gouges several feet long as she attempted to anchor herself. Her entire frame convulsed from the force of the blast.
The formations positioned near the detonation sites were decimated.
Dragons that had been holding defensive positions suddenly found themselves engulfed in blasts that transcended their capacity to withstand them.
Scales melted from the intense heat. Wings were torn from bodies by the pressure differential. Eyes were incinerated in their sockets.
The dragons shrieked, their agony so profound and so intense that it bypassed the telepathic network entirely and became physical.
A weight that pressed down on every consciousness in the convergence.
The smoke from the detonations was still billowing across the battlefield when the portals began to tear open once more.
Directly inside the blast clouds, where visibility had been reduced to nothing, where the dragons’ sensory capabilities had been overwhelmed by fire and concussion and the sheer trauma of experiencing a detonation from the inside.
Reality itself seemed to crack, jagged fissures of dark lightning opening in the air like wounds in the fabric of existence.
The minotaurs materialized from the portals, as well as the ones guys who had rained from the sky.
They rematerialized, reformed from the ashes of the blast, their bodies reconstructed with supernatural precision.
Their muscles contracted as they materialized, testing the integrity of their newly reformed flesh.
Their weapons reformed in their hands, greatswords and greataxes still gripped in callused palms, still heavy with the weight of countless battles.
But they didn’t rematerialize in their original positions. They rematerialized on the backs of dragons, where some flesh and blood landed.
On the necks of creatures that were still reeling from the detonations.
On the spines of beasts that were trying desperately to process what had just happened and why their own forces had just detonated from within their own formations.
On the wings of dragons that were already struggling to maintain flight, their consciousness fragmenting as they attempted to reconcile the impossible.
The minotaurs opened their eyes.
Black lightning crackled from iris to iris, the telltale mark of Jack’s absolute dominion made manifest in their pupils.
The light emanating from those eyes was cold, unnatural, radiating a malevolence that transcended mere draconic power.
Their bodies tensed. Their muscles rippled beneath their bark-like skin as they registered their new positions and processed their immediate tactical objectives.
They didn’t hesitate. They didn’t pause to question or to understand the mechanics of their resurrection. They began the fight in the air.
A greatsword descended.
The minotaur that wielded it was positioned on the back of a Disaster-class dragon.
A creature that had been struggling to maintain altitude since the moment the minotaur had materialized on its spine.
The weapon was massive, a blade long enough to require both hands to wield, heavy enough that a normal human would have required significant effort to lift it.
But this was a minotaur, a creature engineered for combat, a being whose entire physiology was optimized for the application of destructive force.
It descended in a vertical arc that carried all the weight and all the momentum of a ten-foot creature dropping from the sky.
The dragon attempted to roll and dislodge the minotaur through violent aerial maneuvers.
It banked hard, its wings straining against the weight of both its own massive body and the creature now mounted on its back.
The air around it shimmered from the force of the maneuver. But the sword was already moving. The trajectory of its descent rendered conventional evasion or defense strategies ineffective.
The blade caught the dragon between the shoulder blades.
The impact point erupted in a spray of scales and blood. The sword sheared downward through the creature’s flesh, cutting through muscle and bone with the ease of a knife moving through softened butter.
The dragon’s spinal column, a critical structural component enabling flight, mobility, and the creature’s overall systemic coherence, sustained a fracture under the impact of the blow.
The dragon’s wings became useless.
Its ability to maneuver became nonexistent. It could do nothing but fall while the minotaur that rode its back continued to strike and drive its greatsword deeper into the wound, to inflict absolutely irreversible damage.
The creature’s consciousness registered the final understanding.
It was going to die. The entity’s demise was not a result of a confrontation with a peer or a conflict with a formidable adversary, but rather at the hands of a seemingly lesser entity that it had misjudged, an unforeseen element that had re-emerged directly within its immediate vicinity.
The dragon’s death scream erupted across the borderlands.
Across the upper formations, hundreds of dragons experienced the exact same sequence of events.
One dragon felt a minotaur’s greataxe being driven straight down into the junction between its neck and body. The weapon penetrated deep, severing the connective tissues that allowed the creature’s head to rotate.
The dragon’s consciousness registered that it could no longer turn or look to either side without moving its entire body. It was functionally blind in two directions, vulnerable to attacks it couldn’t even perceive.
Another dragon felt the minotaur mounted on its back beginning to tear open its wing joints methodically. The creature wielded its greatsword with surgical precision, pinpointing the exact points where the wing’s skeletal structure connected to the body and attacking those junctions with focused violence.
The dragon’s ability to maneuver degraded with each passing second. Its wing became increasingly useless. Flight became increasingly untenable.
But this wasn’t the scariest part of what happened. As it turned its whole body in an attempt to free itself and recover, it flew through the air and felt something touch it across its whole body.
Moments later, the dragon was cut into horizontal pieces as it fell to the ground.