Chapter 182. The Golden Dragon
Despair, like the bitter cold of the Northern Territory, instantly seeped into his bones.
Run…
That was the only thought left in Alectos’s mind. But where could he run? At this distance, what difference was there between fleeing and standing still to die in front of this monster?
He drew in a deep breath. The icy air stabbed painfully into his lungs, yet it also cooled the terror boiling inside him.
Carefully, he lowered Alice from his back and let her lean against a rock that could barely shield her from the wind.
Then he turned around and faced Ifreles head-on.
No matter what, there was no way he was going to let the man who had nearly killed his own daughter take Alice away!
The golden eyes that always carried a sunlit warmth now held not the slightest trace of fear. All that remained was the resolve of soone marching toward death.
If he used ordinary thods, he would die without question.
But this was the Dragon Mountain Range.
It was his final hope, and his only one.
A few months earlier, in that frozen Dragon Ruins, when he had been drawn into that black stone wall and undergone baptism within that bizarre inheritance space, he had gained more than a surge in strength and the purification of his bloodline.
He had also received a far heavier, far more forbidden gift.
Through the soul-rending agony, that ancient and majestic will had once whispered to him:
“Descendant, your bloodline is both glory and key.”
“If one day you face an enemy you cannot resist, if you are ever driven into a dead end with no path left to retreat… then offer your body as sacrifice and your heart as the dium.”
“At the place where your ancestors sleep, awaken that slumbering wrath.”
When Ifreles saw that Alectos was no longer trying to flee and had instead taken a stance of confrontation, the smile on his face deepened.
“Oh? Have you given up? Or do you actually think that a pitiful bit of dragon blood in your veins can create a miracle here?” He looked at Alectos with amused interest, like a cat toying with the mouse beneath its paw.
Alectos did not draw his sword.
Under Ifreles’s intrigued gaze, he made a move so shocking that even a demon was caught off guard.
He raised his right hand, brought his five fingers together, and without the slightest hesitation, drove them straight into the left side of his chest!
Splurt.
His claws tore easily through the thick leather armor and flesh, plunging deep into his chest cavity.
Blood burst out like a fountain, instantly staining the snow beneath his feet red.
The smile on Ifreles’s face froze at once, and one brow lifted slightly.
Suicide? Were young people these days really so spineless?
“Urgh…”
Alectos let out an extrely suppressed groan from deep in his throat.
Pain.
Pain beyond description.
Yet he did not even dare tremble. He clenched his teeth so hard his jaw nearly cracked, the veins on his forehead bulging and twisting like worms, his face pale as a corpse.
His right hand groped through the warm, slick cavity of his chest until his fingertips touched that violently beating core.
Got it.
A savage glint flashed through Alectos’s eyes. The muscles in his arm swelled, and he yanked outward with all his might!
Riiip—
Blood vessels snapped. Fibers tore apart.
A still-throbbing heart, wrapped in pale golden flas, was ripped alive out of his own body!
The instant the heart left his body, not only did it not stop beating, it began pounding with the deep force of war drums.
Thump! Thump! Thump!
With every beat, the surrounding space trembled.
“A madman.”
Ifreles put away his smile and, for the first ti, looked at this Dragon Demi-Human with genuine seriousness.
That kind of ferocity was… interesting.
Alectos held his own heart high, letting the burning blood infused with draconic power spill onto the snow beneath his feet.
Then sothing bizarre happened.
Instead of freezing, the blood moved as though it were alive, spreading and slithering across the snow at astonishing speed. In an instant, it sketched out an ancient and incomparably complex dragon rune formation filled with a primordial aura.
Bzzz—
At last, Ifreles realized sothing was wrong. He stopped watching the spectacle and flashed forward, intending to stop him.
But he was too late.
Looking at the demon charging toward him, Alectos revealed a ghastly smile. Using the very last of his strength, he slamd that still-beating heart into the absolute center of the formation on the ground!
“With my bloodline as the guide—”
“I welco the soul of my ancestor!!”
The instant the heart touched the formation, it erupted with a golden radiance as brilliant as the sun.
That sun-like golden brilliance instantly swallowed everything.
Ifreles’s forward charge ca to a violent halt, and he had no choice but to raise a hand to shield himself from the blinding light.
“ROAR—!!!”
In the next second, a dragon’s roar burst from the heart of the light, as if it had co from the ancient primordial ages themselves, powerful enough to shatter the soul.
The mountains trembled. Even the blizzard sweeping across the sky seed to have its pause forced upon it, every flake suspended in midair.
Within the light, a colossal shadow rose from the earth.
Its body expanded and reford at terrifying speed inside the flas.
Flesh beca scales harder than anything could destroy. Bones beca towering mountains. Breaths beca howling storms.
In only a few breaths’ ti,
a giant dragon more than three hundred ters long, with a wingspan that blotted out the sky and a body covered in dazzling scales as though cast from pure gold, appeared at the storm-wreathed entrance to the mountain range!
It rely stood there, yet the pressure radiating from the pinnacle of life itself made the surrounding space cry out in strain.
Ifreles was driven back dozens of ters by that terrifying shockwave alone.
He lifted his head and gazed up at this creature that existed only in legend. The casual composure on his face finally vanished, replaced by a trace of gravity.
“A Golden Dragon…”
he murmured softly, a hint of wariness flashing through his eyes.
The Golden Dragon slowly lowered its head.
Within those enormous molten-gold vertical pupils, there was not the slightest trace of emotion that belonged to Alectos. There was only pure, indifferent, lofty majesty and wrath.
Then a vast and ancient will, as though ford by countless overlapping voices, echoed directly between heaven and earth.
【Demon.】
【This is not your domain.】
【Leave! Or… face destruction!】
Ifreles looked at the colossal being before him and felt the utterly pure elental laws surging from its body. Instead of anger, he laughed.
“It is nothing more than a remnant soul, yet it dares bark before ?”
The nobleman’s coat on his body stirred without wind, and dark red hellfire rose from beneath his feet, turning into a pillar of fla that shot into the sky.
“Then let see just how much backbone relics of the old age still have left!”
The battle erupted in an instant.
The Golden Dragon opened its enormous jaws, and a stream of golden dragon breath that could vaporize mountains poured forth like divine judgnt.
Ifreles did not dodge. He rely raised his right hand, and in his palm, a dark red fireball compressed to the absolute limit and reeking of sulfur t it head-on.
Rumble—!!!
Dragon breath and hellfire collided violently in midair.
The mont those two extre forms of energy made contact, they triggered a localized spatial annihilation. A twisting black void appeared out of nowhere, madly devouring the surrounding light and matter.
A terrifying shockwave swept outward, and all the snow within a thousand-ter radius sublimated instantly, revealing the dark brown frozen earth below.
Every clash made the entire Dragon Mountain Range shudder violently, as though it might collapse at any mont.
The snow atop the peaks broke loose and plunged downward in a terrifying avalanche, only to be blasted into powder by the aftershocks of battle halfway down the mountain.
And yet, within the Golden Dragon’s eyes, there flashed a trace of anxiety so faint it was nearly impossible to detect.
Alectos’s original body was, in the end, only at the Fourth Tier. He was incapable of fully bearing the might of his ancestor.
The battle had lasted only a few minutes, yet the indestructible golden dragon scales had already begun showing charred black marks from the hellfire’s scorching, and the golden radiance around it had started to flicker unstably.
Its movents, too, had begun to slow.
“It seems this is as far as your limit goes.”
Ifreles caught that weakness with sharp precision. A longsword condensed in his hand, and he prepared to deliver the final strike to the dragon.
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