Chapter 330: World Dragon
It came from simply releasing all of the stored time magic she had accumulated.
For the past two centuries, Audrey had continuously devoted a tremendous portion of her time magic toward preserving her youth.
Maintaining her appearance had never been a spell cast once and forgotten.
It was a constant expenditure.
Every year she continued living beyond the lifespan her body should naturally have reached demanded more mana than the year before to keep every part of herself fixed at that same point in time.
The burden accumulated.
And for two hundred years, an enormous portion of Audrey’s mana and magical power had remained bound solely to preventing herself from aging.
But now, she had released all of it.
Her hair had been the first thing to change, rapidly losing its color until it became a pale white.
It was simply the first visible sign that the spell preserving her youth had been abandoned.
But in exchange, the amount of magic now flooding through her body rose to an entirely different level, one that even the other Grand Class members on that battlefield could not truly compare to.
She had stepped into the realm of the Extraordinary.
Right as the barrage of attacks came to an end, time itself came to a halt.
Everyone and everything froze.
Only Ethan and his summons were different.
Rather than being completely halted, they were trapped in a constant state of overwhelming sluggishness, as though time itself had been stretched around them.
On the opposite side of the battlefield, even the floating dimensional orb had become affected.
The mass of darkness erupting from it slowed drastically as Bella’s emergence back into this world was forcefully suppressed by the overwhelming time stop.
In the very next instant, Audrey appeared directly before Ethan.
During the single second of future granted by Forward Skip, she had simply chosen that exact point as the place where she would emerge.
Her hand was already wrapped around his neck as she spoke in a more mature voice.
"All you’ve ever been is a thorn in my flesh... one I should have killed from the very beginning, before any of this."
Audrey herself looked older now, appearing as a middle-aged woman with faint wrinkles spread across her face.
But Ethan’s condition was changing at an even more horrifying rate.
In the split second she held him by the throat, his appearance had already gone from that of an eighteen-year-old to a man in his forties... continuously still aging.
Then, a sudden change occurred.
Purple miasma began oozing from his skin, causing Audrey’s expression to narrow into a frown.
The last thing she saw was the smile on his face.
Then the transformation began.
A violent backlash erupted from his body, releasing a shockwave powerful enough to force Audrey away as her eyes widened.
Black scales burst across his skin, while his physique expanded unnaturally, curving into a far more beastly form.
Gigantic wings erupted from his back, their inner membranes unlike anything ever seen before.
Within them stretched what looked like an endless night sky, filled with glowing stars and swirling purple cosmic clouds, as though a fragment of outer space had been woven into the wings themselves.
Right then, the clouds gave out a deafening roar of thunder.
Massive streaks of violet lightning descended from the heavens themselves, striking randomly across the battlefield as though the world were reacting to his birth.
The earth split apart, while entire sections of ground tore open beneath the pressure.
Boulders, shattered buildings, and fragments of the palace slowly rose into the air around him, drawn upward by the overwhelming force radiating from his existence alone.
Audrey stared in bewilderment at the sight before her.
What she hadn’t realized was that the accelerated aging she had forced upon Ethan had accelerated something else as well.
Dragons matured with age. Up until now, Ethan had only been a Skyreaver.
But the decades she had forced his body to race through had also driven his draconic growth forward.
And now, it was difficult to even classify what stage he had reached.
But one thing was certain.
That was a fully matured World Dragon.
Audrey instinctively drifted backward, apprehension filling her expression.
Dragons were the hardest creatures in the world to kill. In fact, the number of people who had successfully done so could be counted on one hand.
But there was another problem.
The mere presence of that dragon distorted the gravitational field of the entire area, which in turn disrupted space-time itself.
As a result, her Time Zone became unstable.
Her control over it wavered, preventing her from fully maintaining it or continuously holding others in temporal stasis.
So now, everyone else just stared in grandiose amazement at what had just appeared before them.
Right then, World Dragon Ethan opened its jaws and unleashed a massive torrent of energy carrying the effects of both heat and lightning.
Audrey’s eyes widened immediately as she thrust both hands toward the incoming blast.
Green mana erupted from her palms as she attempted to bring the attack to a halt with her time magic.
She couldn’t use Forward Skip to evade it; due to the disruption within her Time Zone which made that impossible.
However, the output of Ethan’s Dragon Breath dwarfed anything she had ever attempted to stop before.
Even Beilong’s.
Despite being barely one-third the size of that Fire Dragon.
Audrey found herself struggling to hold back a single attack. And the more she exerted herself, the faster the rebound of her aging process became.
The World Dragon answered with an even louder roar, pouring still more power into its breath.
Then the entire battlefield erupted into a blinding white light.
When it finally faded, Audrey was still floating in midair. But every trace of youth had left her body.
She was now nothing more than a frail mass of wrinkled flesh clinging to bone.
She had successfully stopped the Dragon Breath from advancing any farther. But in doing so, she had exhausted every last ounce of the time she had left.
Her body had finally reached its end.
Audrey looked toward Ethan one final time.
His dragon form had already reverted. He was clutching one arm and drawing deep, exhausted breaths as he looked back at her.
Lady Desdemona smiled.
It was a smile of acceptance...and perhaps even relief from the burden of a goal she had so mindlessly pursued for more than a century.
The green light surrounding her quietly faded, and her body rapidly began to fragment, pieces of skin breaking away and drifting into the air.
Then the wind carried away what remained of Audrey as ash.
And silence followed.
The impossible pressure that had blanketed the kingdom vanished almost instantly.
Ethan remained suspended in the air for another second, as though waiting to confirm that the woman before him was truly gone.
His vision blurred.
Then he, too...fell