Velariss's shriek finally made the two great dragons turn their eyes to her.
The dragon presence bearing down on her, and those two pairs of cold golden pupils, only stirred her excitement. "Yes, just like that. Look at me. And then..."
Kra-KOOM.
Lightning flickered once across the blue dragon's body, so casually it hardly looked like an attack at all. The Abyss Beast's left wing exploded off at the root, the charred stump smoking blue, and the enormous body staggered down onto one knee.
Azla looked down at her, a trace of plain disgust in his eyes. "Stitched-together vermin. Out of the way."
Then he simply turned back to Da Long, who was waiting for him.
Velariss did not understand Draconic. She didn't need to. The contempt of two dragons needed no translation!
She hugged herself, shaking from head to toe. "I am complete now... I no longer need to endure... You do not get to ignore me!"
The core in the Abyss Beast's chest bloomed with black light. The dragon head yawned wide, and a pillar of pitch-dark energy roared toward the blue dragon!
The blue dragon snapped his head around, lightning crackling in his throat, and met the abyss cannon head-on with a pale bolt of lightning breath.
The two forces collided in midair. There was no contest at all. The lightning breath punched through the darkness in a single instant.
Scattered black light sprayed like torn wadding, and the arcs leapt on past the blast-wash, like countless twisting silver snakes, engulfing the Abyss Beast and the Velariss perched on its head.
A thousand arcs crawled over the Abyss Beast's body. Its remaining right wing snapped. The bear-bulk of its torso was scorched open in a hundred places. Half the scorpion tail was gone. Flesh sprayed in every direction, and even the black light of the Abyss core in its chest guttered dim.
"AAAH!" Velariss let out an ear-splitting scream, and for the first time, fear surfaced in those fever-bright mad eyes.
The Abyss Beast sank steadily through her screaming, down into the pool of shadow beneath it.
Far off, the First Legion had long since pulled clear of the battlefield, but high overhead a single scout Puchi remained, watching the three-way battle of giants below.
That the blue dragon utterly overpowered the Abyss Beast came as no surprise to Lin Jun. Their bodies might be of a size, but the gap between their panels was anything but small.
The blue dragon Azla had walked the [Ancient Dragon Path] to its very end. One last step remained before he could cross the threshold.
And if Lin Jun guessed right, that final step was simply this: eliminate every remaining competitor.
Going by panel alone, the great dragons of the early days could no longer even be mentioned in the same breath as him.
The Abyss Beast, in the end, was only somewhat stronger than an ordinary great dragon. Without [Shadow Melt], the First Legion could have brought it down themselves.
But the match wasn't truly decided yet. If shadow bugs excelled at anything, it was beating the strong from a position of weakness, and there was no reason to think Velariss, this king-sized bug, would be any exception.
Sure enough, once the Abyss Beast had sunk into the shadow, the remaining arcs burst against the darkness without piercing it, and Velariss was spared the finishing blow.
Then the whole shadow lunged, racing toward the two dragons!
Da Long, standing farther off, beat his wings and rose. Azla, much closer, erupted instead, arcs pouring off him stronger and denser than before.
The shadow drank the ground from under the blue dragon. Azla felt everything beneath him go soft, and he began, slowly, to sink.
He tried to fly, tried to tear loose, and could not. Even his breath did nothing against the shadow. He could only watch himself be dragged down, inch by inch, into that darkness.
When he understood that there was no breaking free, what rose in Azla was not fear. It was fury.
"You clinging, meddling worm, interfering in the Dragon Strife. You are asking to die!"
He did not tip his head back and grasp for air like a drowning creature. He gathered thunder in his throat one more time, and then dove headfirst into the shadow.
Deep in the blackness, threads of lightning began to bloom. Countless arcs went shuttling through the inside of the shadow, flash after flash after flash.
At some point, Velariss's scream came up out of the depths, shrill and terrible, and lasted only a few breaths before it cut off dead.
Then the shadow blanketing the entire city began to shrink and dissolve, uncovering the scorched earth and shattered tile it had swallowed.
By then most of the blue dragon's body had gone under. Only a stretch of his spine still showed above the black, and it was still sinking.
A pair of black-scaled dragon claws clamped onto that spine, claw-tips punching through scale into flesh.
Da Long beat his wings, wide enough to shade half the sky, and hauled. Inch by inch, the blue dragon's body was dragged up out of the dark. When the shadow finally guttered out entirely, Da Long let go, and the mauled blue dragon crashed heavily into the ruins of the city.
Only one of Azla's golden eyes was still bright; the other mirrored the ash-gray sky, most of its light gone. He was bloody from head to tail, and his scales wore a layer of gray-white corrosion: the marks of the elements of the shadow space, etched into him during his time inside.
Azla pushed himself back up. Blood squeezed out from between the scales of all four limbs; he paid it no attention whatsoever. His one bright eye found Da Long.
Da Long's gaze passed over him, and he said, flatly: "Recover first. Then we settle the score."
"Hahahahaha!" Azla suddenly roared with laughter at the sky. He laughed for a long time. Then his head came down, and every trace of humor drained from that final golden eye. "You would release me again? And then, like tossing alms to a beggar, allow me to defeat you and become the Ancient Dragon?"
He took a step forward, and the charred ground shattered under his claw.
"Stop making that sickening face of the responsible elder brother at me!"
His last golden eye held nothing now but fire.
"Come and finish our battle. Let us decide who is strongest!"
Da Long was silent for a moment. Then: "Is that so. Then have it your way."
Thunder kindled again in Azla's throat, lightning dancing and snapping in his blood-slicked jaws.
Da Long's wings snapped once, and he speared straight up into the night sky, higher and higher, until he was a black speck framed in the middle of the three bright moons.
Then the speck became a black meteor, falling arrow-straight out of the moons' heart.
Azla threw back his head, that last golden eye reflecting the black point as it swelled, and breathed out his pillar of thunder to meet the diving shadow head-on.
The two met. Lightning detonated across the sky, and in a heartbeat the blue-white arcs had crawled over every inch of it.
Da Long's scales were ripped away in sheets. His flesh charred black in the glare and sloughed.
He did not slow. He came down through the very center of the thunder pillar and struck Azla square across the body.
The earth convulsed.
Dust vaulted into the sky on the shockwave, rising in the shape of a growing mushroom.
Azla's body was hammered deep into the ground. Ribs jutted from his flank, their broken ends ragged, and blood ran from every wound to pool dark red beneath him.
His limbs still twitched faintly, but they could no longer lift that ruined hull.
In midair, a many-faced polyhedron tumbled down among the sprays of shattered black scale, its facets catching the moonlight, like a star someone had dropped and forgotten.
The dying Azla's remaining eye flew wide. He knew that object.
"Mother... she gave even that to you..." His voice was sand and thread, but it shook with pure disbelief. "And you... did not use it?"
Da Long walked out of the wreckage, flicked the rubble aside with a claw-tip, picked up the polyhedron, and tucked it inside an intact scale at his neck. In passing, he also splattered, with one crisp smack of his claw, a certain scout Puchi that had been inching toward the artifact on its sneakiest tentacles.
"Had I used it, you would never have accepted the loss." Da Long lowered his eyes to the dying Azla. "Besides. Weren't you the one who refused to acknowledge her as Mother?"
Azla was silent for a long, long time. So long that Da Long began to think he had already died.
Then the ruined hull shuddered once, and gave up its last laughter.
"Haha... ha..."
"When we hatched... which of us didn't believe she was our mother?"
"It was only that Silvia... never needed children like us..."
As the last words left him, the light in Azla's pupil scattered and went out, and a vast tide of power flowed out of his body and into Da Long.
There was no joy at all in Da Long's eyes.
"You were the same, you know."
One soft sigh, and Da Long rose into the air, flying hard toward the north.
The Ancient Dragon Path's final competitor was that way!
(End of Chapter)
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