Chapter 430
STUMP! STUMP! STUMP!
The heavy, earth-shaking footsteps of Draco echoed relentlessly through the desolate expanse of the 49th floor.
He lazily closed the distance between himself and Alfia, his massive, twenty-meter frame casting a long, intimidating shadow over the dungeon’s cold ground.
There was no need to sprint.
A quiet, haughty arrogance underscored his deliberate, lumbering pace.
At this scale, protected by dense, overlapping scales and a layer of his magic skin skill, Draco felt practically untouchable.
He had little concern for where Alfia might strike…...with one glaring, catastrophic exception.
Internally, Draco winced whenever his mind brushed against the vulnerable reality of his anatomy.
A targeted strike to his groin would spell immediate, excruciating disaster.
Of course, Alfia was far too refined to entertain such a vulgar notion; lowering herself to that level was beneath her status.
Yet, she had no intention of simply standing by and watching him close in unchecked.
If her opponent were a typical dungeon monster, Alfia would have possessed a dozen ways to neutralize the threat instantly, their predictable instincts rendering them little more than moving targets.
But Draco was no mindless beast.
He was a dragon…...a creature of intellect, strategy, and unfathomable power.
She could not afford a single careless misstep until she fully understood the cards he held.
"Gospel," Alfia chanted softly.
With a sharp thrust of her hand, she launched her signature sound cannon directly toward Draco’s head.
This time, however, she poured a greater depth of mind into the incantation, inflating its potency to shattering levels.
Swish!
The attack tore through the air, leaving chaotic sonic shockwaves in its wake.
Despite the ridiculous velocity of the projectile, Draco’s sharp eyes tracked it effortlessly.
Yet, he made no move to dodge or intercept it.
He simply braced himself and let it strike.
In his true dragon form…...albeit one slightly modified……Draco’s stats manifested in an entirely different way.
It wasn’t that his numerical stats had been arbitrarily boosted; rather, every single point now carried exponentially more weight.
Size, physical reach, momentum, and durability had all been magnified to terrifying proportions.
It was this fundamental disparity that made even large type lesser-level dungeon monsters vastly superior to seasoned surface adventurers, at least physical-wise
If only those creatures possessed intellect instead of being mindless slaves to instinct, the surface world would have long since fallen to ruin.
Boom!
The amplified sonic blast slammed squarely into Draco’s chin.
The explosive force of the impact tilted his head slightly upward……. but that was the extent of the damage.
The remainder of the destructive sound waves failed to penetrate his scales, sliding uselessly across the surface of his magic skin before violently cracking and dissipating into the stale dungeon air.
"Ouch," Draco teased, his voice a rumbling bass that vibrated through the walls as he lazily continued his advance.
Ahead of him, Alfia frowned, though the deep hood of her cloak successfully obscured her expression.
While the current Draco was virtually impervious to her standard repertoire of attacks, he was far from invulnerable.
Beneath his arrogant facade, he was acutely aware of his two major flaws.
The first was his glaring vulnerability dangling from behind; the second, far more imminent danger, was energy consumption.
In his regular humanoid form, the metabolic and magical drain was negligible, allowing him to sustain himself indefinitely.
But at twenty meters tall, his energy expenditure had spiked to an astronomical degree.
Draco simply hadn’t consumed enough food prior to this confrontation to sustain such a massive form for long.
If he dragged this out, he risked perishing not from her magic, but from agonizing starvation.
The first gnawing pangs of hunger were already beginning to claw at his stomach.
Outwardly, however, Draco revealed none of this internal panic.
The last thing he needed was to give her a reason to prolong the engagement.
Coincidentally, Alfia found herself in a strikingly similar predicament.
The longer the battle dragged on, the more dangerous her position became due to the draining side effects of her own innate skills.
She needed to bring this confrontation to a definitive end, and quickly.
There was only one option left.
"Silentium Eden," Alfia whispered.
Instantly, the magic-negating armor encasing her body dissolved into nothingness.
The moment the restraint vanished, her suppressed magical power surged upward like a geyser, instantly enveloping the entire 49th floor in a suffocating, oppressive weight.
Her cloak billowed wildly around her, whipped into a frenzy by an invisible gale of pure magic.
As her magical pressure reached its absolute peak, she violently tore the garment away and discarded it to the side.
Now, Alfia stood revealed at her absolute maximum power, completely unfettered and ready for the crush him.
There was no longer any room for hesitation, and no need to play games.
Crack!
A sharp, explosive sound echoed through the cavern as Draco clenched his front talons, crushing the solid ground beneath his massive feet and bringing his advance to an abrupt halt.
Hyper-sensitive to shift, Draco couldn't possibly miss the tidal wave of magic radiating from Alfia.
If the power she had exhibited moments before resembled a flickering campfire, the current Alfia was an all-consuming forest fire.
Gazing into her cold, indifferent heterochromatic eyes, Draco knew with absolute certainty that she intended to beat him quickly.
Even with his monstrous transformation, surviving whatever lethal spells, she was about to unleash was no guarantee.
If he didn't want to die here, he had no choice left.
He, too, needed to go all out.
So, without hesitation, Draco activated his wind dragon spirit transformation.
It was his first time using the skill in his dragon form, so he didn’t know how much mind it would cost or how long it would last, but was there any choice in the matter?
The alternative was being beaten half to death, captured by the woman standing across the cavern, who would then feed him alive to some monster on the 60th floor.
Whump.
Immediately upon activation, Draco felt a massive, alarming drop in his mind reserve, a sudden drainage that made his vision swim.
But he couldn’t afford to care.
His reptilian eyes, now glowing emerald, were locked entirely on Alfia.
Fwoosh.
His obsidian scales shifted, shedding their light-absorbing black and turning into a vibrant green. A gale-force wind barrier swirled gently around his massive body, hissing as it sheared against the dungeon walls.
Draco had chosen wind because it drastically boosted his speed and agility.
His dragon form had taken away a decent portion of his natural nimbleness, and he couldn’t confidently say he could simply tank Alfia’s spells at her current, unfettered power.
Additionally, Alfia was now vulnerable to his magic, as she had discarded and deactivated her magic-negating armor.
‘So, the situation isn’t entirely disadvantag….’
Draco’s thoughts trailed off into the void as Alfia moved.
No, she didn’t just move.
She disappeared.
Widening his range of vision, snapping his neck around, Draco immediately found her, but she was already dangerously close.
Too close.
Within the five-meter range, Alfia could launch her devastating magic from any direction without a fraction of a second's delay.
Draco knew precisely what was coming.
“Gospel,” Draco saw her lips move, the auditory arrival of the sound lagging behind her lethal execution.
He reacted on pure instinct.
Enlarging the emerald wind barrier encasing his body, Draco braced himself.
A fraction of a second later, he felt the apocalyptic impact of something descending from above.
BOOM!
Alfia’s empowered sound attack struck the wind barrier head-on, creating a loud, grating, shrieking sound…...like the collective agony of a thousand banshees…...that tore through the cavern.
The concussive force made Draco’s teeth ache in his jaws.
Struggling against the downward force of the sound, Draco poured more of his rapidly depleting mind reserve into the wind barrier to keep it from shattering.
Simultaneously, he whipped his tail, weaving wind arrows embedded with homing and slash-detonation spell keys and launched them directly into Alfia’s space.
Swish! Swish! Swish!
The wind arrows cut through the air, their razor tips whining so fiercely that the sound barely registered over the chaotic roar of the barrier.
“Lugio,” Alfia chanted calmly.
She conjured a secondary spell to meet the oncoming projectile swarm.
Her magic shredded the wind arrows instantly, their collective momentum carrying the explosive backdraft forward to hammer against Draco’s wind barrier for a second time.
CRACK-BOOM!
The wind barrier groaned, shimmering violently under the secondary attack.
But Draco had anticipated this stubborn resistance.
Even as his barrier flickered, he had already woven dozens of new wind arrows, launching them from multiple blind spots at randomized intervals.
Unless Alfia possessed a wide-area-of-effect spell capable of wiping out matter in a three-hundred-degree radius, at least one of his wind arrows was going to find its mark.
Despite their deceptively small size, Draco had condensed an immense amount of magic into each projectile.
It would surely hurt if she took a direct hit.
In his current transformed state, wind spirit magic felt weightless, almost instinctive, and delightfully instantaneous in its cast.
Swish! Swish! Swish! Swish!
The wind arrows converged on Alfia from all angles.
She didn’t even bother to bat an eye at them; she simply dodged.
But due to the enchanted homing effect, the wind arrows looped in mid-air, curving sharply to chase after her unyielding form.
Though they couldn’t quite match her blinding baseline movement speed, their overwhelming numbers prevented her from lingering in one place long enough to complete a stationary chant.
“How annoying. Just shut up and let me fight,” Alfia muttered, lightly smacking the side of her head in sudden annoyance.
The corrupted spirit lingering in her psyche was actively trying to interfere with her focus again.
Clasping her hands together in a mimicry of prayer, she whispered a low, rapid sequence of syllables.
Draco couldn’t catch the incantation over the screeching ambient noise of his own magic, and his concentration was heavily occupied with charging his next, far more ambitious spell.
WHOOSH.
Upon activation, a devastating wave of concussive sound rippled outward with Alfia at the center, instantly vaporizing every single wind arrow chasing her.
But they had served their exact purpose.
Using the sliver of time he had successfully bought, Draco had forced his magic to coalesce.
He had charged a massive, dual-natured spell…...one that married the volatile volatility of wind and fire spirit magic, supercharged by his own dragon breath attack.
It was a terrifyingly similar technique to the one that had nearly obliterated Mors five years ago.
He had reverse-engineered the chaotic formula through the trauma of battle, even if his mind hadn’t been entirely sane at the time.
Bubble! Bubble!
Pop!
The atmosphere around Draco’s maw began to warp, the extreme heat melting the stone floor beneath his talons into glowing, orange-hot slag.
A sun-like ball of absolute death hovered menacingly within his wide-open, scaled jaws, casting hellish shadows across the cavern walls.
Draco’s green reptilian eyes crinkled in desperate focus as he locked the trajectory of the attack onto Alfia’s exact coordinates.
He generated a massive wind tunnel inside his throat to further accelerate the spell’s launch speed.
He couldn’t afford to miss, couldn’t afford to lose concentration, and absolutely could not let the orb detonate anywhere near his own face.
If the containment failed, the blowback would be catastrophic.
The spell was dangerously volatile…...a high-risk gamble to end the stalemate here and now.
With everything set up precisely, Draco thrust his neck forward to launch the ultimate attack.
However, Draco had failed to account for a critical variable.
With her magic-negating armor completely unequipped and no longer restricting her output, Alfia’s operational range wasn't just freed…...it had exponentially multiplied.
The suppression had hidden her true parameters.
Alfia could launch her spells not just within a modest five-meter radius anymore……but a staggering thirty meters.
That was the terrifying magnitude of the power her armor had been holding back.
She had merely pretended that her range was still five meters, expertly fooling his senses into a false sense of security.
And Draco, unfortunately for him, was standing right at the very edge of that newly revealed thirty-meter death zone.
Realizing she was too far to completely overpower or match the raw trajectory of Draco’s impending dragon breath, Alfia opted for the next best thing to disrupt his aim.
“Gospel,” Alfia chanted.
She manifested a sound wave directly beneath Draco’s heavy chin the exact microsecond he widened his maw to release the attack.
KABOOM!
The impact to his lower jaw was so sudden, so unexpected, that it violently forced his heavy dragon head to tilt upward at a sickening angle.
Panicking as he felt the tightly woven spell lose its structural integrity, threatened by the concussive shockwave vibrating through his skull, Draco was forced to fire prematurely.
If he held it for even a millisecond longer, he risked an Ignis Fatuus…. a catastrophic internal detonation right inside his own throat.
‘You crazy bitch!’ Draco cursed internally as he watched the glowing sphere of condensed death warp grotesquely upon launch.
SHING……WHOOSH!
The jagged spell cut through the air with unimaginable, earth-shattering force.
It created a deafening sonic boom that directly impacted the side of Draco’s head, causing his thick neck to snap backward with a sickening crack.
Draco winced, a sharp spike of white-hot pain lancing through his central nervous system.
The attack rocketed upward, slamming into the ceiling of the 49th floor.
But it didn’t detonate against the barrier…...far from it.
The concentrated thermal energy of the spell effortlessly melted through the bedrock before its physical mass even made contact.
Screech
BOOM!
A jagged, miles-deep hole was instantly bored through the stone, and the attack kept surging upward.
It bypassed the 48th, the 47th, and the 46th floors in a fraction of a heartbeat, its expanding circumference hollowing out the stone like a drill through butter.
Higher, and higher the energy pillar climbed, carving a massive vertical chimney through layers of the dungeon, until finally, on the 32nd floor, it broke containment and erupted in a blinding, apocalyptic flare that shook the entire dungeon.
The shockwave was so immense, so violently disproportionate, that it propagated all the way up to the surface.
By the time it breached the surface, much of its kinetic force had dissipated, resulting in only minor tremors and rattled windows for the city above.
However, the exact opposite could be said for the interior.
Anything and everything caught within the direct path of the vertical beam between the 49th and the 32nd floors had been, mercilessly decimated, reduced to glowing dust and vaporized mineral sludge.
And the dungeon, was not happy about this in the slightest.
Deep within the stone walls, a low, ominous groaning began to echo.
A/N: Ok readers, I know, that I promised to end the battle this chapter, but I kind of got carried away with my imagination and ended up reaching my word count per chapter much sooner.
But don’t worry…...will end it in the next chapter surely.......right?
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