Dragon-king
Dragon-king
Scattered fragments of scale. Given the enormous investment of corpses and resources each scale represented, the current situation was far from ordinary.
He had been so confident this body could withstand even the Sword of the War God's attacks several times over. And yet, those scales had been carved away without offering even token resistance.
The Dragon-king's gaze shifted to the blade.
A sword that seemed forged of platinum, and the aura flowing along its edge was unfathomably powerful.
The secret to that miraculous cutting power was the sword itself.
No matter how extraordinary Aslan's technique, skill alone could never shear through these scales.
His analysis complete, the Dragon-king adjusted his stance. He extended his uninjured hand and braced. All he had to do was avoid the sword's edge.
Clang!
The blade-storm descended. Vertical slashes, horizontal cuts, diagonal strikes flowed like water, but they could not escape the Dragon-king's eyes. He lashed out with his fists, swatting the sword aside.
He battered the flat of the blade to force it away, and when the redirected edge threatened to slice his knuckles, he unleashed a shockwave to halt it.
The cutting power was fearsome, but nothing to be truly terrified of.
He had faced countless foes who relied on such methods.
He counterattacked. Using the recoil from deflecting the blade, he spun violently and threw a punch. Aslan caught the blow on the flat of his sword and let it slide past. Between the grinding sparks, a pair of teal eyes blazed with vivid clarity.
It was uncanny.
The Dragon-king had not let his guard down.
He had not underestimated his opponent, nor had he held back.
A city cultivated for a thousand years was nothing compared to his own life. The Dragon-king had used it, burned it without hesitation. He had poured out every resource without a shred of restraint.
He had entered this battle fully prepared for it to be his last.
As he'd declared, it was a fight waged with everything he had.
And yet, the Dragon-king could not kill Aslan. Every attack missed its mark; every defense was dismantled. Each blow the Dragon-king launched carved through empty air.
It wasn't just the duel itself. The Dragon-king had made preparations to kill Aslan. Judging the arrival of his companions a threat, he'd dispatched priests to intercept them.
To ensure they couldn't reinforce him, to deny Aslan the chance to seize an opening.
But despite all those efforts, one had still reached this place. She had broken through the priestly blockade and arrived at the scene.
Though she hadn't been able to aid Aslan directly, that alone had shaken the Dragon-king.
That was why he had collapsed the ground with his breath. To isolate Aslan and himself, to eliminate the most dangerous threat first.
He'd sunk them both to a depth where no reinforcement could reach and pressed the fight.
It was his final gambit.
All he had to do was kill Aslan while they were cut off from support.
But he couldn't. Through that endless exchange of offense and defense, Aslan did not die.
Those eyes. He could tell just by looking. Aslan was still alive.
'Strange. This isn't normal.'
The Dragon-king brooded. It was unmistakably abnormal that he couldn't kill Aslan despite the blatant gap in power.
Worse, every time the Dragon-king believed he'd found an opening, Aslan slipped past the killing stroke by a hair's breadth and survived.
When only one final move remained, the desperate, decisive blow he'd unleashed had been blocked by an Ancient God.
The result: Aslan was still alive and still fighting.
He came at him with a far deadlier edge than before, sword howling.
A storm of steel. Just as the Dragon-king moved to deflect it, the arc of the slash bent sharply and tore open his wrist.
"Ngh...!"
A technique that uses the torque of the waist to bend the sword's trajectory. There was nothing esoteric or inherently difficult about it. But precious few could execute it with such precision, preserving lethal force without losing power.
Even dying, to wield this technique. This weapon. A single clean hit from any of those strikes would end the fight.
Knitting the split wrist back together with mechanized muscle, the Dragon-king snapped a short kick upward.
KA-BOOM!
A deafening blast. Aslan staggered, seemingly caught by the shockwave, then drew a dagger and hurled it.
A throwing knife that had already been foiled once. The moment the Dragon-king's consciousness, distracted by Purity, hesitated to block it, his advanced sensor array screamed a warning of its peril.
A black-stained dagger. The technique imbued in it was Knight Slayer.
The blade flew straight for the core nestled in his chest.
"Gah...!"
Clang!
He reached to block the incoming blade, but it ricocheted off his hand and slammed into his chest, shattering. Had he failed to block it, the battle would have ended then and there. Not the kind of gambit one expected from a man on the brink of death.
'No room for complacency. So this is the Master of Combat!'
It didn't end there.
Aslan's swordplay sharpened and intensified with every passing second. Within the swirling, howling White Light, only his eyes burned with terrible clarity.
Whenever the Dragon-king moved to block, Aslan would twist his edge and scrape away scales. When caught in a shockwave, he'd spin with it and drive the assault from the opposite direction. The recoil-driven strikes arrived so fast they could split the next shockwave apart.
Blood sprayed from his wrists and arms with the backlash, but Aslan did not stop.
A sliver of a miracle.
A fleeting moment of awakening.
With only that, Aslan was evading death and racing toward life.
He was holding his ground.
The Dragon-king could not comprehend it.
This battle should have been a replay of the Predator versus the God of Fire and Smithing—a clash between an Ancient God and a god.
A fight the Dragon-king should have won by an overwhelming margin.
The gap in raw power was glaring. The difference in experience was immense. And while there might be a disparity in skill, it was irrelevant—the sheer weight class could overwhelm any technique.
He had not grown careless. He had not husbanded his strength.
Crunch, screech!
Even while giving everything, the Dragon-king was losing ground. Inch by inch, as Aslan scraped death aside and pressed forward, the Dragon-king crept closer to defeat.
'How can the outcome be this different?!'
He swung the back of his hand, and the flat of the sword met it. At the moment of impact, Aslan's body rode the force of the deflection into a brutal spin.
The rotation carried a slash, and the slash carved through a wing.
CRRRRACK!
The severed wing. Against his will, the Dragon-king's gaze was pulled to it.
A bare wing, unarmored by thick body-scales and devoid of any hidden function.
His eyes traced the blood weeping from the torn wing, trembling in disarray.
And so, he failed to block the next strike. Aslan released the sword with the momentum of his swing, caught it in his other hand, and launched a rising diagonal slash from a low stance.
Cr-r-r-rack!
Purity split his shoulder through the scales and ripped the wing away. The blade of white light screamed as it tore through dark scales.
Staring at that platinum blade, the Dragon-king thought:
Had his father, the God of Fire and Smithing, truly abandoned his own son for this moment—for Aslan?
KA-BOOM!
He punched as the thought flared. The blow struck the tip of the sword and warped, and he flowed into a spinning kick. Aslan barely ducked the kick and raked his blade across the Dragon-king's leg. Scales scattered as the ankle was shredded to tatters.
The Dragon-king felt an inescapable death closing in.
Confronting that death, he watched a long, final montage. His body still moved, still fought, but the visions overlaid his sight, shimmering.
The Dragon-king was the first Dragon-king.
A king fashioned from the lingering divinity of the Giant Dragon a thousand years ago.
Even if he was born from remnants of divinity, he was a Dragon-king acknowledged by all—a son of a god.
A true heart of the dragon.
That was the problem.
The Ancient Gods had been defeated long ago.
He was the son of a loser, and his father, the Giant Dragon, had died powerless.
That was the problem.
When he was born and naturally ascended to rule, the Dragon-king looked upon Geladrion and decided:
His father was nothing but a loser.
And he himself was merely king of those who served a loser.
His service to the Predator was no accident.
It was the overwhelming strength.
The absolute power that had silenced his father, the Giant Dragon, with a single move had captivated him.
And the rational aspect—the fact that it could communicate.
The way power scaled with the efforts of the worshipper; how much one could devour and modify.
The Dragon-king, who by birth could only ever be a loser, was drawn to it, and soon reached a conclusion.
Rather than lead the defeated in a battle already lost, it was better to start the fight anew on the victor's side.
Thus, he became a priest and the Dragon-king.
He devoured the next Dragon-king candidate who came for the succession and disguised himself in that form.
For over a thousand years, he lived on, endlessly modifying his body.
At first, he had worried and half-hoped that his father might punish him for such blasphemy, but it never happened.
Until now.
Clang! Screech!
With his hand half-severed, he smacked the flat of the sword away. Every time he deflected it, he blocked the follow-up with his legs, his tail, or fired his breath to gain distance.
Flailing desperately, he swung his arm to survive the onslaught that re-engaged the instant he tried to retreat.
Since becoming a priest and living this long, the Dragon-king had seen countless challengers. Some saw through his schemes; others colluded with different gods, became priests, and opposed him.
Silencing them all, he had grown certain.
That to survive and achieve Victory, this path was the right one.
And so, the Dragon-king had never tempered himself.
He had relied solely on shortcuts.
Not once in his life had he truly faced death or adversity.
He had never forged himself.
Unworthy of being a son, having long since discarded his qualifications as Dragon-king, he still could not relinquish the wings—the symbol of the Dragon-king, the proof he was the Giant Dragon's son.
He could not cut away his lingering attachment.
The Dragon-king knew this well.
He had abandoned things half-heartedly, and taken them up half-heartedly.
CLAAANG!
Only two fingers remained. As Purity was knocked wide by a sweeping backhand, the Dragon-king—his body no longer requiring breath—roared and thrust his talons forward.
He aimed for the nape of the neck. This was his chance, while the weapon was out of position to block. But Aslan, gasping for breath, intercepted the killing thrust with his barely functional left arm.
CRRNCH!
The left arm and talons collided. The entire limb was ripped away, but it bled off the talons' speed drastically. From invisible, slowed to something visible. Through the Sword Path gifted by countless Precognitions, Aslan moved.
With his left arm destroyed, he pivoted aside. He turned, riding the force that filled the void of his shattered limb, pushed along by the momentum. In that turn, he reversed his grip on the sword.
The moment that sword-point aligned with the Dragon-king's chest, the Dragon-king held his breath without realizing it. Purity was dyed an unimaginably pure white.
"Heart Piercing...!"
The sound of metal scales and muscle splitting. A blade driving precisely toward the core within his heart. That strike pierced the core and stopped.
The sensation of the core cracking. The Dragon-king froze at that feeling, and Aslan, still clutching Purity, heaved for air like a man on the edge of death.
Aslan—the one who had hammered himself relentlessly until he finally reached mastery. Dying at the hands of such a man was perhaps an inevitability.
When the core fractured, the energy animating his entire body faded away. The Dragon-king let his arms hang limp and gave a bitter smile.
"...I won't offer an apology."
There was no blood. He was a priest of the Predator, after all. Instead, escaping light filled the void. Energy leaking from the seat of his core.
"I... believed I was right."
The Dragon-king raised his head. A dizzying height. So deep that it would take several lengths of rope braided together to barely reach the surface.
Through the gaping hole above, he could see the sky beginning to darken.
Silhouetted against that sky stood his father's spine.
Embedded in its back was the molten tungsten the Predator had fired to shatter it.
"It's just..."
Leaning back against that cold metal, the Dragon-king closed his eyes.
"...I was afraid."
Eyes closed, he spoke.
"I didn't trust myself. I was terrified that it would all prove worthless in the end. I was afraid that while I was hammering away at myself, I would simply break."
With a wet cough, Aslan stared at the Dragon-king. Only a dim light wandered in those eyes.
"And yet, I called myself the Dragon-king... In hindsight, this was the obvious result."
The Dragon-king opened his eyes and looked at Aslan. The emotions in their meeting gazes were not the same.
"How could one who flees at the fear of death ever defeat one who has transcended it?"
A bitter smile spread, and the Dragon-king chuckled faintly before closing his eyes again. He would not open them again.
"That... is the reason for my defeat."
Purity vanished, leaving only a gaping hole, and the Dragon-king's head dropped.
"I've lost. Take... everything. It will be useful."
Having admitted defeat, the Dragon-king's body slowly collapsed. He knelt, then laid his body upon the ground.
As his flesh, completely drained of energy, began losing function and his vision slowly dimmed, the Dragon-king looked at Aslan one last time.
Still standing, that figure looking down at him.
Those teal eyes, blurred by his failing sight but still sharp.
The Dragon-king smiled one final time.
'At least I was right about one thing.'
He shut his eyes.
'Anyone could see it—you are a grand hero.'
The Dragon-king died, and Aslan, gripping the hilt of the Blood Sword that had materialized where Purity had vanished, gasped for air.
Soon, Aslan's body crumpled to the floor as well. Above the sunken earth, only lava continued to roar in the darkness.