Chapter 173: Abandon Ship

The sulfur steam in the volcanic cavern tasted like bitter ash, but it was nothing compared to the sudden, agonizing snap inside Viona’s skull.

She gasped, stumbling back against the jagged basalt wall of the subterranean observatory. Her hands flew to her temples, her manicured nails digging into her pale skin.

A sharp, ringing migraine tore through her thoughts.

“Ah… ahh…!” Viona cried out, her knees buckling beneath her.

She collapsed onto the stone floor, her torn white robe pooling around her in the soot. Her chest heaved, her golden eyes wide and trembling as she stared blindly at the bubbling magma lake below.

The connection was gone.

The master resonance tethered to the imperial control spike—the thick, violent mana thread she had used to direct the colossal beast—had snapped clean in two. There was no slow fading of life, no gradual weakening of spirit. It had been severed in an instant, accompanied by the psychic feedback of a violent explosion and the sickening crack of crushed bone.

Ignisrax was dead.

“No…” Viona whispered, her voice cracking into a ragged wheeze. “No, no, no… that’s impossible. It can’t be.”

Heavy, rhythmic footsteps approached across the stone platform.

Leon stopped three paces away, leaning against his newly forged broadsword. He looked down at her crumpled form, his single amber eye narrowing as he read the raw horror painted across her face.

“What happened?” Leon asked, his voice low and raspy. “Did the beast reach the harbor?”

“He reached it,” Viona choked out, tears of pure despair and humiliation cutting pale tracks through the grime on her cheeks. She grabbed fistfuls of black gravel, her knuckles turning white. “He reached it, and… and they killed him!”

Leon didn’t flinch, but his jaw clenched tight. “How long did it take?”

“Minutes!” Viona screamed, slamming her palms against the stone. Her voice echoed off the volcanic ceiling, hysterical and broken. “Less than ten minutes! The tether didn’t even hold for a full quarter of an hour! I felt the iron shells… dozens of them, tearing through his skull! They ripped off his jaw! They shattered his spine! They blew apart an ancient dragon that took three archbishops and forty paladins to seal!”

She curled into a ball on the cold rock, trembling uncontrollably.

The false goddess, who had once looked down from the marble balconies of the capital as an untouchable deity, was completely shattered. Every grand ambition, every layer of divine pride, had been stripped away by an enemy that fought with soulless precision.

First, her coastal fleet was annihilated without seeing the opposing ships.

Then, her capital was taken in a single morning.

Her two hundred thousand provincial levies were blown to pieces by unseen birds before they could even form ranks on the roads.

And now, the living calamity she had hoarded as her ultimate triumph had been butchered like cattle on a butcher’s block.

“We can’t win,” Viona sobbed, burying her face in her bruised forearms. “We can’t defeat them, Leon. It’s over. John Smith… that powerless insect… he brought monsters from his world that defy reason. How can an army kill a dragon in ten minutes?! What kind of demons are they?!”

She looked up at him, her eyes bloodshot, her lips trembling with total defeat.

“If an ancient dragon cannot survive their thunder, what hope do eight thousand starving conscripts in the mud have? They will march into the Devil’s Throat with their metal wagons, and they will slaughter every last one of us. We are going to die here.”

Leon let out a long, slow breath through his nose. He reached up, scratched the rough stubble along his scarred jaw, and then kicked a loose stone into the bubbling lava below.

Sssss.

“You’re right,” Leon said flatly.

Viona blinked through her tears, looking at him in stunned silence. She had expected him to bark orders, to call her weak, or to demand they fight to the last man.

“What?” she muttered.

“I said you’re right,” Leon repeated, crossing his arms over the crossguard of his blade. “The war for the Solarian Empire is bleak. In fact, it’s completely dead. If those gray bastards can swat Ignisrax out of the air and turn him into scrap meat before lunchtime, any army we mobilize out of these mountains will just be walking into a giant meat grinder.”

He looked back toward the dark tunnel that led to the surface.

“I’m a mercenary, Viona. I know when a contract is rotten. Dying in a ditch to defend a pile of shattered stone and burned wheat isn’t glory; it’s stupidity. Trying to take back the capital now is suicide.”

“Then… what do we do?” Viona asked, her voice small, stripped of all her usual divine arrogance. “Do we surrender to John Smith? He… he will put me on trial. He will execute me.”

“Surrender? Hell no,” Leon scoffed, spitting into the pit. “We walk away.”

Viona frowned, struggling to understand. “Walk away?”

“Think about it,” Leon said, leaning down so his lone eye locked directly onto hers. “Why did we summon those heroes in the first place? Why did you build the Grand Temple and gather celestial artifacts? It wasn’t to play king of the sandcastle in Port Solis. The true objective was always the Demon Lord Malakor in the north.”

He tapped the pommel of his sword.

“The Solarian Empire is worthless now anyway. The roads are cratered, the harbors are locked down, and the peasant lords are running scared. Let John Smith sit in the palace. Let him try to govern a starving continent that has no trade, no food, and no faith. Let him choke on the ashes.”

A faint, wicked smirk began to creep across Leon’s scarred lips.

“Besides,” Leon continued, his voice dropping into a conspiratorial purr, “John Smith thinks he only has to worry about us. But the world doesn’t end at the Dragonspine Mountains. The moment news reaches the northern border that the Solarian Empire has collapsed, what do you think the Wallachian Empire is going to do?”

Viona’s breath hitched. “The Wallachians…”

“Exactly,” Leon nodded. “Emperor Varos has been drooling over our southern grain fields for fifty years. The Wallachian Empire doesn’t fight with feudal conscripts and fancy paladins in shiny armor. They have powerful warriors. They have subterranean war beasts that burrow beneath the earth. They are a powerful country.”

Leon stood tall, gesturing toward the northern horizon.

“When Wallachia sees a strange foreign army occupying Port Solis, they won’t sit back. They will march south with everything they have. They’ll see the Americans as an existential threat—or an easy target once their flying machines run out of fuel and those metal darts. Wallachia has cards under their sleeves that John Smith’s little toy army has never dreamed of.”

Viona slowly pulled herself up from the floor, resting her weight against the stone balustrade.

Her mind, previously clouded with panic and grief, began to clear. The despair that had crushed her chest was replaced by the cold, calculating survival instinct that had kept her in power for decades.

“We let them bleed each other,” Viona whispered, the realization dawning on her face.

“Now you’re thinking,” Leon said, his grin widening. “We take the remaining summoned heroes. We pull our personal treasury, our best artifacts, and our elite vanguard out of the Ironwood Basin tonight. We leave the eight thousand conscripts behind as a distraction to keep John Smith’s eyes on the Devil’s Throat. While he’s busy hunting ghosts in the fog, we cross the northern border into Wallachia.”

He reached out, offering a rough, calloused hand to her.

“We go north. We offer our knowledge of John Smith’s weapons to Emperor Varos. We let the Wallachian war machine grind the Americans down in the mud. And while they tear each other apart, we gather our strength, march into the northern wastes, and finish the Demon Lord ourselves.”

Viona looked at Leon’s outstretched hand.

For days, she had clung desperately to the illusion of her throne, weeping over lost cities, dead dukes, and ruined palaces. But Leon was right. The Solarian Empire was already dead. Staying here to fight John Smith was a fool’s errand.

Her real power lay in her knowledge, her divine core, and the summoned heroes still bound by her command bands.

A cold, venomous smile slowly returned to Viona’s lips.

She reached out, placing her pale hand into Leon’s rough grip, and pulled herself upright.

“You’re right, Leon,” Viona said, dusting the volcanic soot from her ragged sleeves, her golden eyes burning with renewed malice. “Let John Smith have the throne of Solis. Let him celebrate his victory over a dead lizard. He has no idea what is waiting for him in the north.”