Chapter 573: Watching Two Dragons Tear Each Other Up Is Fun

As I crashed against the ceiling of the mountain above us, wrapping myself around Ilse, the air was knocked clean out of my lungs. And I blacked out for a moment.

I wasn’t sure if it was a moment or an entire lifetime.

But it was probably a moment, because my eyes flew open to my vision already rolling. I landed on the ground, no, on the thing’s surface, and bounced off it, still rolling with Ilse in my arms. Grit scraped along my cheek, and my shoulder took the second bounce.

Then, quickly, I used Feather Step again and vanished.

I appeared near Light. Three chains had already flown out of me in a blur. The first grabbed Light, who was quite close, the second glued Ilse to my side, and the third went looking for Bren.

I glanced around while I used my Enhanced Senses to search for her. Then I found it, an outcropping jutting from the rock up above.

’Let’s hope this is not just another sleeping dragon. I swear, I’m going to lose my shit. Why are we surrounded by dragons?!’

I vanished. By then the chains had wrapped around Bren. I appeared on the outcropping and fell to one knee. The stone was wet and cold under my palm, and feeling it brought more joy to my heart than anything I had experienced in a while.

’Solid ground. Beautiful. Doesn’t breathe, doesn’t have scales.’

From our position, the creatures were easier to see. Oddly, their size wasn’t as intimidating from up here. Frankly, the first dragon wasn’t even as big as the Mother Ship that belonged to the Naval Prefecture.

But it was the space that truly gave them their terror. The place was dark and cramped, with mountains bleeding into each other, so that the land had no pattern I could recognize.

Thus, every movement those things made crashed against the wall of mountains, and everything toppled and crumbled over everything else.

If I had to compare sizes, they were at least three times larger than Light’s wyvern.

The one that had woken first was the same color as the sky. Only the outline of its massive body could be made out, that and the flaming look in its eyes. Its horns twisted backward, and one of them seemed to stop abruptly halfway.

It rose further into the dark sky, and its outstretched wings looked like torn nets.

The second one was moving below, so I could only see its dark scales, rough as stone, and three intimidating horns that twisted in different directions, the smallest curving toward the front.

This one’s eyes were no different from the darkness. And it moved... slowly at first, but soon faster. With each movement, the entire Precipice, even the sky itself, seemed to shake alongside it.

’This thing, how big is it going to be?’

Although, we hadn’t gotten the chance to see the other one move, so there was no telling how immense that one could be.

The dragon lifted its entire mass from the ground and rose into the sky. It was like watching a mountain fly.

Its wings spread out like endless lengths of ancient branches, crashing against the mountainside and sending huge stones toppling down.

It scraped along the surface, flew at an impossible speed and crashed into the one in the sky, carrying the both of them upward.

However, the one in the sky clawed at it with its forelimb, again and again, tearing the tough skin apart.

’Holy goodness, it’s really coming apart.’

I stared up at it with a shocked look on my face. After lying on that skin, I never expected it to come apart so easily.

The skin was being torn loose, and debris that looked like rocks came raining down and shattering against the ground. They really seemed to be rocks.

They fell all over the plains without quite reaching us. I stepped back just in case, leading everyone closer to the mouth of the cave behind us. Dust rolled up the slope after us and settled in my teeth.

The two dragons battled with vehement and ruthless power, flying at each other and smashing each other against the walls of the mountain.

And then they rolled over and crashed into the side of the mountain we were on.

I grabbed my people and used Feather Step once again before anyone could see anything.

While the creatures battled and wrecked everything around them, all of us were busy trying to stay alive. At some point we passed a spot where a huge chunk of stone had turned the little boy into paste beneath it.

He most likely hadn’t survived the fall, but the stone had come down and flattened his body completely anyway.

Since the upper part of the Precipice was a disaster, we took the opportunity to descend further into it.

With my essence refilled, that was a bit easier. However, the essence being sucked out of me to Feather Step with three people was immense. Negligible at first, but soon it began to bother me, like a tap left running in another room.

Especially because I wanted to be stringent with my Spirit Essence this time around.

’I just got the well back. I’m not pouring it down a hole on day one.’

We went further down, until the catastrophe in the sky was nowhere to be seen. We could only hear it.

The entire mountain rumbled from time to time, shaking hard enough to send stones flying. Whatever was happening in that upper part, we were too far down to know anymore.

Here, in the lower depths of the Precipice, the sky was not visible. The peaks of the mountains were the new sky. Because of that, the air felt somewhat restricted, heavy in the chest with every breath, and it was a new environment for all of us.

We had to spread out in a line to continue walking downward along the edges of the cliff. Loose stone shifted under my boots every few steps, and I kept one chain slack around Ilse the whole way.

Beneath us was not really somewhere any of us could fall. It was an endless landscape cutting downward, and the only direction we could go was down.

It was almost as if the land itself was taking us somewhere.

’This is definitely not going to end well for us. Because of this, I need to be able to call upon Kassie. All of this would have come to an end if she and the others were just here.’

Even though that cowardly dragon from before had shown me dragons seemed to be stronger than Calamities, I still trusted that Kassie would discover a way to kill one.

Which was why my priority right now had to be searching for a way to break whatever was blocking my entry into my Soul Sanctum.