Chapter 890: The Children Are Ours

Vergil watched the thousands of Niddrog’s descendants descending along the roots, caves, and fissures of the World Tree while black, red, and golden lightning thickened around Mjölnir.

The hammer seemed especially excited now that there was finally an appropriate number of targets.

The spawn were smaller than their mother, but "smaller" was a relative word in that place. Some were dozens of meters long, others hundreds, and the largest possessed bodies capable of destroying a city simply by landing on it.

They came from every direction, forming a draconic swarm that gradually covered the golden leaves above until Vergil had to tilt his head just to keep track of how many signatures were entering his perception.

Mjölnir trembled in his hand, almost impatient.

Vergil spun the hammer once.

"All right."

Another spin.

The air responded.

On the third, the entire sky seemed to bend.

Lightning appeared at thousands of points at once, first as thin lines running along Yggdrasil’s roots, then swelling into columns of black electricity surrounded by red and golden veins.

Vergil raised Mjölnir above his head and looked at the swarm.

"Let’s play God of Thunder."

Mjölnir vibrated violently.

Vergil smiled.

"No offense to the former owner."

The hammer practically jumped in his hand.

"Fine. With offense."

He brought Mjölnir down.

The thunder did not come from one direction.

It came from all of them.

A colossal network of lightning tore across Yggdrasil’s lower sky, jumping between dragons as though each body were merely an intermediate point in an electrical chain.

The first spawn was struck directly in the skull and exploded before it could even roar.

The discharge passed through the remains and reached another five.

Then twenty.

Then hundreds.

Dragons fell burning from the roots, some with their wings pierced through, others with their nervous systems destroyed so quickly that their bodies remained rigid during the fall.

Vergil moved Mjölnir to the left, and an entire line was struck by a horizontal wall of electricity.

One particularly large descendant pushed through the storm.

Vergil raised an eyebrow.

"You’re durable."

The creature opened its mouth.

Vergil pointed Mjölnir at it.

"Congratulations."

A bolt as thick as a tower entered directly through the dragon’s throat and came out through its back.

"You won the special prize."

The corpse fell.

Mjölnir vibrated in satisfaction.

While Vergil turned thousands of spawn into targets for his newly discovered career as an atmospheric deity, the situation several kilometers above was considerably less organized.

Crymsaria grabbed Niddrog by the neck.

Niddrog responded by biting one of her wings.

Nivara froze Niddrog’s hind leg.

Crymsaria was struck by the tail.

Nivara used the opening to slam the enemy’s snout with a claw covered in compressed ice.

Crymsaria came flying back, still spinning from the force of the previous blow, opened her mouth, and fired a blast of flame directly into Niddrog’s flank.

The problem was that Nivara was passing through that exact spot.

"CRYMSARIA!"

The white dragon had to dive sharply to avoid being hit.

Crymsaria turned her head.

"YOU GOT IN THE WAY!"

"I WAS ATTACKING!"

"THEN ATTACK SOMEWHERE ELSE!"

Niddrog hit both of them with a single wingbeat.

Nivara and Crymsaria were thrown in opposite directions.

Vergil looked up at the exact moment both tore through clouds of dust and wood.

"...Excellent teamwork."

Mjölnir vibrated as though laughing.

Crymsaria regained her balance first.

She beat her wings hard enough to create an airburst and flew back toward Niddrog, wrapping her own body in fire.

Nivara emerged from the opposite side with a layer of ice growing over her claws and chest.

The two accelerated.

Crymsaria shouted:

"I’LL TAKE THE HEAD!"

Nivara answered:

"YOU ALWAYS WANT THE HEAD!"

"BECAUSE IT’S THE BEST PART!"

"YOU HAVE NO STRATEGY!"

"I DO! THE STRATEGY IS TO HIT HER!"

Niddrog turned at the last second.

One paw struck Crymsaria in the face.

The other hit Nivara in the chest.

Both were smashed into different roots.

Vergil grimaced.

"Maybe she understood the strategy."

Mjölnir trembled.

"Yes. Her answer was to hit back."

A group of forty spawn dove toward him.

Vergil did not even look.

He raised Mjölnir toward the sky.

Forty bolts of lightning descended simultaneously.

Every one of them died before getting within two hundred meters.

"Next."

The swarm answered.

Hundreds came.

Vergil finally stood from the chair.

"Ah."

He held Mjölnir with both hands for a moment, drawing energy from the nonexistent clouds of that world as though the very concept of a storm were being artificially summoned.

Electricity began accumulating around his body at such density that the gray dust on the ground rose into the air.

The nearby roots began to glow.

Golden particles from Yggdrasil entered the discharges and gave the lightning an even stranger color.

Vergil jumped.

The first dragon took Mjölnir to the jaw.

The impact destroyed half its skull and launched the body into three others.

Vergil released the hammer.

Mjölnir pierced the chest of the second, turned on its own in midair, struck the third from behind, and kept flying between dozens of creatures while lightning exploded from every impact.

Vergil simply walked through the air using platforms of demonic energy, extending a hand whenever he needed to correct the trajectory.

Mjölnir returned.

He caught it by the handle.

"Having fun?"

The hammer vibrated frantically.

"Me too."

At that exact moment, a colossal roar tore through the environment.

Vergil looked up.

Crymsaria was literally mounted on Niddrog’s neck, biting the base of one horn while driving all four claws into the black scales.

Nivara had frozen half of Niddrog’s tail and was pulling in the opposite direction, trying to stop the creature from turning.

Niddrog was, understandably, extremely irritated.

She slammed her own body into Yggdrasil.

Crymsaria was crushed between Niddrog and a root.

"HAHA!"

Vergil frowned.

She was laughing.

Niddrog repeated the motion.

Crymsaria released the horn and dove away.

Nivara used the position to freeze the region Crymsaria had bitten.

"NOW!"

Crymsaria turned in midair.

"I KNOW!"

"THEN DON’T TAKE SO LONG!"

"STOP GIVING ORDERS!"

She struck the frozen point with her forehead.

Niddrog’s horn broke.

The fragment, as large as a mountain, rotated slowly as it fell.

Nivara looked at Crymsaria.

"It worked."

Crymsaria smiled.

"My idea."

"I froze it."

"But I hit it."

"Because I told you to."

"Do you want to fight me or her?"

Niddrog struck both of them with her head.

The two disappeared over the horizon.

Vergil followed them with his eyes.

"Maybe both options are possible."

Mjölnir vibrated.

"No. I’m not betting."

Another swarm appeared.

Vergil sighed.

This time there were too many dragons for him to consider fighting them individually entertaining.

The spawn filled practically all the space between several roots, and more kept emerging from the nests below.

Some bodies were small.

Others enormous.

Some had two wings.

Others four.

There were even elongated variants that moved like serpents through the branches, firing jets of blue energy.

Vergil dodged one beam by tilting his body.

Another passed beneath his feet.

A third struck his barrier.

He looked around.

"This is getting repetitive."

Mjölnir vibrated as though disagreeing.

"You can keep going later."

Vergil hooked the hammer at his waist.

Mjölnir trembled indignantly.

"Don’t be dramatic."

His hand went to Yamato.

The swarm continued advancing.

Vergil took a deep breath.

Then drew.

There was no sequence of attacks.

Only one.

Yamato followed a perfect horizontal path in front of him, and the cut did not directly strike a single dragon.

It struck the space occupied by the swarm.

For an instant, nothing happened.

Then the world split.

A violet line appeared across dozens of kilometers.

The space above it slid a few centimeters to one side.

The space below slid in the other direction.

Thousands of Niddrog’s spawn were cut simultaneously.

Bodies separated.

Wings fell.

Heads came loose.

Some dragons were split in half before they even realized what had happened.

Others continued flying for several seconds until reality caught up with the cut and their forms simply came apart.

The sky became empty.

Vergil spun Yamato and sheathed it.

Silence.

Mjölnir vibrated irritably.

"I told you it was getting repetitive."

Another tremor.

"You can kill something else later."

Mjölnir seemed to accept that.

Vergil left the crater and walked to a raised root where he could better observe the fight between the three dragons.

Niddrog was still battling Nivara and Crymsaria at an absurd distance.

The three looked small from that point, which by itself showed the scale of Yggdrasil.

Red explosions illuminated sections of the roots.

Entire regions froze pale blue.

Niddrog answered by tearing through both elements with physical blows that produced shockwaves visible from kilometers away.

Vergil was about to resume watching when he noticed the corpses.

Thousands of them.

The dead spawn covered the dunes, roots, and lower craters.

Some still released blue energy.

Others had already begun slowly decomposing in that environment.

He thought for several seconds.

"Qliphoth."

Her presence responded immediately inside his mind.

"Yes?"

Vergil looked at one of the bodies.

"Can you absorb this?"

There was a pause.

"The dragons?"

"Yes."

Qliphoth seemed confused.

Vergil explained.

"They were created from Niddrog’s bloodline. Niddrog spends ages eating Yggdrasil’s roots. These spawn, directly or indirectly, were formed from the energy she absorbed. Technically, these bodies should be full of energy from the primordial trees."

Qliphoth went silent.

Vergil knew that silence.

She was calculating.

"Wait."

He waited.

"Maybe."

"Maybe?"

"I don’t know how the energy will react while passing through you. I can consume tree energy directly because I am a tree. You are not."

Vergil looked at his own hands.

"So?"

"Swallow one with demonic energy."

Vergil raised an eyebrow.

"You want me to test it."

"Yes."

"On myself."

"Exactly."

"How responsible."

"You regenerate."

Vergil did not answer.

He opened one hand.

The Authority of Gluttony mixed with demonic energy and wrapped around the body of one of the spawn.

The entire corpse began dissolving into dark particles, compressed, refined, and absorbed through the connection between Vergil and his internal entities.

The amount of energy was considerable, but almost immediately he noticed something strange inside it.

It was not demonic energy.

Nor divine.

Nor ordinary draconic energy.

There was an extremely dense primordial vitality mixed into the creature’s core, a signature reminiscent of Yggdrasil, but distorted through generations of draconic consumption and reproduction.

Qliphoth began analyzing it.

"Interesting."

"That is never a good word coming from you."

"It works."

Vergil waited.

"But?"

"But you are not compatible with all of this energy. One part enters your system, another tries to convert into demonic energy, and a third simply rejects your structure."

"Can you use it?"

"I can."

"How much?"

"A good portion. Maybe most of it, depending on how much time I have to refine it. But it will need to pass through you first because our bond is structured that way."

Vergil looked at the thousands of corpses.

"So you get stronger."

"Yes."

"And me?"

Qliphoth hesitated.

"You too."

Vergil raised an eyebrow.

"Explain."

"I can’t retain all of it. The energy I convert will partially return to you through the bond. You’ll gain a new layer of energy mixed into your demonic power. I don’t know exactly how it will behave yet."

"Dangerous?"

"Probably."

Vergil looked at the corpses again.

"Do it."

Qliphoth took half a second.

"All of them?"

"All of them."

Black pressure exploded from Vergil’s body.

The Authority of Gluttony spread across the lower territory of Yggdrasil like an ocean of shadows.

First it enveloped dozens of bodies.

Then hundreds.

Then thousands.

The remains of the spawn began disappearing simultaneously, dismantled into energy and pulled toward Vergil in black, blue, and golden currents.

The amount was absurd.

Vergil felt the first impact inside his body.

Then the second.

Then came a true flood.

The energy of the spawn carried accumulated particles from Yggdrasil, traces of countless roots consumed by Niddrog’s bloodline, and a draconic characteristic adapted over generations.

Qliphoth received most of it through their connection and immediately began devouring it, dismantling incompatible components and incorporating what she recognized as primordial plant energy.

Her inner body reacted.

Roots grew.

Branches expanded.

Her connection to Yggdrasil became clearer.

Vergil, on the other hand, received the return.

Completely new energy mixed into his demonic power.

He felt it first in his chest.

Then in his spine.

Then in his hands.

It was not ordinary mana.

It did not possess traditional demonic aggression, divine purity, or Death’s silent weight.

It was alive in an almost uncomfortable way.

Ancient.

Persistent.

A force carrying within it the principle of growth, connection, and continuity, but one that had passed through a bloodline of predatory dragons before reaching him.

Vergil closed his hand.

Golden lines appeared beneath his skin.

Then turned black.

Then disappeared.

"Interesting."

Qliphoth answered quickly.

"I said it first."

"Keep refining."

"With pleasure."

Vergil absorbed the final corpse.

The territory became strangely clean.

He took a deep breath and felt that new energy slowly settling into his system, still without a defined function, but clearly present.

Then he heard something.

A growl.

It did not come from the sky.

Nor the roots.

Nor the ground.

Inside his head.

Vergil slowly raised his eyes.

Nivara and Crymsaria had also stopped for a moment.

Niddrog stood between them, one wing covered in ice, several scales destroyed, part of her snout burned, and dark blood running from different parts of her body.

Crymsaria had half her chest marked by deep claw wounds.

Nivara had lost several ice plates around her neck and blue blood ran down one of her legs.

All three were irritated.

But the growl invading Vergil’s mind came from Niddrog.

The voice was feminine.

Deep.

Ancient.

And absolutely furious.

"YOU SHITTY DRAGONS, GET OUT!"