Chapter 190: Despair
Chapter 190: Despair
’The shadow does not belong to a cloud.’
That was the first thought that entered Raiden’s head as he looked up, his whole body turning cold despite the fires still burning all across the battlefield.
Because as soon as the shadow fell over the battlefield, it felt like the night had arrived. A complete sense of darkness covered the battlefield, making everyone blind for a minute.
But the moment his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Raiden felt his breath get caught in his throat.
That thing was no giant cloud, but a Dragon.
Well, calling it a dragon wouldn’t be too accurate, as that word was far too small and too ordinary for the thing hanging above them.
This was a continent of black scales and moving flesh, a monstrous shape so large that Raiden’s mind couldn’t even begin to measure it at first.
Its body stretched across the heavens over the horizon, with almost no end in sight. If he had to guess, it was almost fifty kilometres long, feeling so massive that the battlefield beneath it looked like nothing more than a speck of dirt on Earth.
It had pitch-black scales, not normal ones, but special ones that had a depth to them, a kind of devouring quality, as if each scale devoured the surrounding light and brought along the profound darkness everywhere with it.
Thousands upon thousands of those scales covered its body like layers of ancient armour, every single one the size of a building, overlapping in a pattern that looked like an ancient script and language of some kind.
The more he looked at it, the more it felt like a moving mountain range forged from night itself.
Here and there, streaks of dull crimson glimmered between the scales like old wounds that had never truly healed, pulsing faintly beneath the dark surface as though molten blood flowed under its hide. But that was not even the most horrifying part about it.
That was the wings.
They spread slowly through the sky like vast membranes of darkness stretching so far outward that they blotted out whole sections of the horizon. Every beat of those wings came with a pressure that pushed the storm clouds away and sent hurricanes rolling across the battlefield below.
The sound they made was not loud in the normal sense. It felt deeper than that, much deeper. It hit directly into his soul.
Then Raiden saw its head clearly, and the last warmth left his body.
Its skull was long and crowned with jagged horns that curved backwards like shattered mountain peaks, each one larger than city walls.
Its eyes burned in the darkness like twin crimson suns staring down at the world with a coldness that did not belong to any living creature. Even from that impossible height, their pressure crashed into the battlefield like an invisible sea, crushing hearts and freezing souls where they stood.
Dark mist poured from its jaws in long, slow streams, spreading through the heavens like poison. The very clouds around its mouth began to blacken and rot, and distant flashes of red lightning crawled through them like veins opening inside a corpse.
Nothing about it felt natural. Nothing about it felt like a beast that should exist in the same world as everything else.
It was the true walking calamity.
And as that fifty-kilometre Black Dragon lowered its gaze toward the battlefield below, toward the corpse of the smaller dragon and the terrified creatures mourning him, Raiden finally understood why even Diamond-Tier Terra Beasts had despaired.
Their young master had not simply died.
He had killed the child of this thing.
Seeing its child dead, with seemingly a small sheep standing on top of it, it roared loudly in anger. The sound of that roar shattered Raiden’s eardrums. He could feel his bones rattle as everyone on the battlefield fell to the ground, bleeding on their faces, some still fighting while others fell unconscious.
They couldn’t fight this thing. They couldn’t win at all. Raiden felt nothing but despair settle in his heart as he looked at the dragon.
This despair was soon amplified as this dragon moved its wing, slapping the five gigantic figures in the air, pummelling them towards the ground.
Those five Terra Beasts shot out like a blur, impacting the ground in different places.
Boom!!
A gigantic shadow fell in front of Raiden, dragging on for several hundred metres before coming to a stop.
He looked at the fallen Terra Beast in front of him and didn’t know what to say. The same Dark Phoenix that seemed like an untouchable figure to him, one that was the largest Terra Beast he had seen before today, was taken out in an instant.
Raiden looked closely at its body and found its wing was torn off completely, with crimson blood constantly flowing down its mouth, as it kept struggling to pick itself up.
On top of this one-kilometre phoenix was an old man who was unconscious. His life and death were unknown.
"Old Man Sol!!" Raiden broke into a run, driving his seven-star steps to the limit as he appeared next to the old man, only to see him breathing shallowly.
He took a breath of relief as soon as he saw it. At least the old man was alive.
He turned his head towards the other side to find the Golden Garuda was similarly in a dire state, one of its claws completely missing as it too struggled to pick itself up.
Old Man Tobias was in a better state than Old Man Sol was, as he struggled to stand up tall on the back of the fallen Terra Beast.
Seeing these two, Raiden had finally figured out what kind of Terra Beast they were facing.
A Mythical Terra Beast.
His Aunt Ruby told him that the difference between a Mythical Terra Beast and the ones below it was greater than the difference between Heaven and Earth.
He never figured out what it meant until now.
And as soon as he did, he fell into despair.