Chapter 74: The Day the Skies Bled
The world was fire.
Sky—once divided between sun and storm—was now drenched in blood-red light, as if the heavens themselves wept for what was to come. Ash replaced snow. Thunder replaced silence. And time lost its meaning in the face of Antares, the Burning End.
Vaelros the Hollow had unleashed his true form—an abomination forged of shadow and madness. He struck Antares with a blow that cracked valleys open, but even the amplified power of the Broken Black Egg couldn't bring the Dragon Lord to his knees. It only earned him Antares' attention.
> "Foolish shade," Antares snarled, voice rippling through space itself. "You trade your soul for embers."
Antares devoured him.
Not with fire. Not with teeth.
With presence.
The Hollow was erased—not destroyed, but unwritten, as if his very existence had never been carved into the world. The shadows fell silent. The relic shattered.
A world's hope dwindled.
Jean stood beside Whitney, both bloodstained and half-broken. Around them, the coalition teetered. Envoy Knights, seasoned and unrelenting, fell one by one. Magistery Sages screamed incantations that shattered the laws of the world—and still it wasn't enough.
Karen and Raigen soared through the storms above, desperately driving lightning into Antares' wings to ground him. Illyana Veyr had encased the northern flank in a prison of ancient glacial steel, but Antares melted it simply by standing near.
Seraphine, the Emissary of Flame, dove into combat with tears in her eyes. Her fire could not harm him—only delay him. Even her divine phoenix form wavered under the might of the dragon who had once battled Martin Luther to a standstill.
Ryan Magus stood at the center of a crumbling reality, holding onto the False Codex like a dying man clinging to a blade.
> "I can rewrite it," he whispered, bleeding from the nose, eyes rimmed with madness. "If I just—if I—"
> "Ryan!" Jean called out, her voice cutting through the ruin. "Stop!"
He didn't listen.
The Word of Unmaking surged. The battlefield twisted. In a single moment, half a thousand soldiers blinked from existence, rewritten into nothing by the unstable Codex.
> "I'm sorry…" Ryan muttered. "I didn't mean to—"
Antares moved.
He landed with a force that crushed mountains. Roared. The sound alone ruptured eardrums, shattered wards, broke bones.
And then he spoke—not words, but the ancient will of dragons.
> "You were warned."
He spread his wings—and the sky split.
A hole in the atmosphere tore open to the void beyond stars, a rift where flame met the absence of time. From it, dragons poured. Not mere beasts—elders, timeless and seething. The Dragon Armies had come.
The Dragon War was no longer an invasion.
It was the end.
Jean knelt, surrounded by death and ash and silence, her hand wrapped around Eclipsion, the sword of Martin.
> "I won't let it end here."
Light flickered at her fingertips. Solstice blazed in her other hand.
Her eyes glowed gold.
Whitney howled to the sky, divine light erupting from his form.
Jean Luther, Emissary of Light, rose once more.
> "Gather the Emissaries," she whispered. "All of them. Every last one."
Because if Antares could not be defeated by strength—
Then she would summon every shard of divinity left in the world.
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