Chapter 26: The Hound of Tears — Finale
The Hound was no longer a creature of flesh and elemental power. It was a conflagration. The death of its poison twin had unleashed a catastrophic, final transformation. Flames didn't just wreathe the fire-head; they erupted from its body. Its hide cracked like parched earth, revealing rivers of molten orange beneath. Its remaining eye was a sun-core of hatred. The steam that had heralded this change was gone, replaced by a blistering heatwave that warped the air and made the very stone of the chamber groan.
Elemental Control: Fire was now absolute. The Hound's combat style shifted from bestial cunning to apocalyptic, straightforward annihilation. It was aggression given form.
It didn't strategize. It erupted.
With a ground-shaking bellow, it initiated a Charging Headbutt, becoming a meteor of burning muscle aimed at Azazel. He dove, the heat searing his back as it passed. Before he could rise, the creature didn't turn—it executed a devastating Full Body Slam, leaping into the air and crashing down where he'd landed. Azazel rolled, the shockwave tossing him like a leaf, the stone where he'd been a half-second before now a crater of glowing, fractured rock.
Reginleif tried to distract it. "Piercing Feather: Barrage!" A fan of wind-needles shot at its flank. They hit the fiery hide and vaporized with faint puffs of steam, doing nothing but drawing its gaze.
The fire-head swung towards her, its maw opening. Not a fireball this time. A continuous, roaring Flamethrower of white-hot plasma. Reginleif threw up a desperate Wind Barrier, but this was not a projectile to be dispersed. It was a torrent. The barrier held for a second, the air superheating around her, before it began to collapse. She was forced to flee, a desperate sprint along the chamber's edge as the river of fire chased her, painting a line of molten stone in its wake.
Azazel used the opening. He closed in from behind, aiming for a hamstring. As his kukri descended, the Hound, without even looking, lashed out with a Claw Swipe. The attack wasn't just physical; the claws were sheathed in solid flame. Azazel parried, but the force was monstrous. He was knocked sideways, his arm numb, the smell of his own singed leather vambrace in his nostrils.
The fight became a brutal marathon of survival. They couldn't block. They could only dodge, deflect, and endure. Azazel would bait a Powerful Bite, dancing just outside the incinerating jaws, only to have to evade a follow-up slam or swiping tail. Reginleif used her speed and wind to stay airborne, to change direction mid-stride, creating afterimages to confuse its blazing eye. She landed glancing blows with her moonstone dagger, each strike hissing as it cut through flame to reach hide, but the wounds sealed instantly behind a crust of cauterized flesh.
They were whittling down a volcano with needles.
After what felt like an hour, a pattern of exhaustion emerged—in them, and in the beast. Its flames flickered slightly after a massive lunge. The molten rivers under its skin pulsed slower. They saw it. A flicker of hope, desperate and fragile.
"We're close!" Reginleif shouted, her voice raw from heat and smoke.
"Now! All in!" Azazel roared back.
They synchronized their assault. Reginleif launched herself high, drawing its attention upward with a spiraling vortex of wind. Azazel charged low and silent, a shadow in the hellish light. This was it. The killing push.
It was a trap.
The Hound's momentary lethargy vanished. Its blazing eye fixed not on Reginleif, but on the charging Azazel. It was a feint, a last spark of brutal intelligence.
It ignored the wind above. It took a single, earth-cracking step forward and unleashed a point-blank Flamethrower not at Azazel, but at the ground in front of him. The stone turned instantly into a lake of molten rock and superheated air.
Azazel skidded, blinded, the heat flash-boiling the sweat on his skin. He was off-balance, exposed.
The Hound's head swung sideways in a brutal, flaming backhand.
The impact connected with Azazel's chest.
There was no grace to it. It was pure, concussive violence. He was lifted off his feet and launched across the chamber like a ragdoll. He hit the wall back-first with a sound like a sack of gravel breaking. The air exploded from his lungs. He slid down, dazed, the world a ringing, pain-filled blur.
Before he could gasp, the Hound was there. It loomed over him, a tower of fire and fury. It raised a burning, colossal front paw.
STOMP.
Azazel twisted, the paw missing his head by inches, cratering the stone beside his temple. Shards of hot rock cut his face.
STOMP.
He rolled, the impact this time catching his leg. He felt, rather than heard, something crack in his shin. A white-hot spear of pain lanced up his nervous system.
STOMP.
He had nowhere to go. The wall was at his back. The burning paw rose again for the final, crushing blow.
A scream tore through the chamber. Not of fear, but of pure, unadulterated rage.
"LOOK AT ME!"
It was Reginleif.
The Hound's head, poised for the kill, froze. The fiery eye swiveled.
She stood twenty feet away, but she was not the agile dodge-artist of moments before. She was a statue of defiance. Her moonstone dagger was held low in one hand. The other was extended, palm out, towards the beast. And around her, the air was doing something impossible.
It was still. Not calm, but compressed. So densely compressed it was visible, a shimmering, diamond-hard sphere of solidified atmosphere wrapping her like a cocoon. The raging heatwaves from the Hound parted around it. Dust on the floor skittered away from her. She had pulled every molecule of air from the immediate vicinity and forged it into a single, immovable point of absolute pressure.
She had its complete, utter attention.
The Hound forgot the broken man at its feet. Here was defiance. Here was a threat that dared to stand still. With a world-ending roar, it turned its entire, burning mass towards her, leaving Azazel crumpled and forgotten against the wall.
___
Azazel's thoughts were a broken film reel against the pain. Oh shit. This hurts. What the fuck was I thinking? Got cocky. The info made it seem like a simple straight path. But thing changes… it's a different fight. Am I going to die here? Sorry, Reginleif. Guess I'm just another fool who confused reading a manga with living it. Another corpse for the dungeon's.
Then, a voice. Clear, bright, and impossibly out of place. Ruyi Ironveil. Azazel, maybe one day we can meet again. Like we can do this all over again.
What are you talking about? his mind screamed into the void of pain. Ruyi? You know Find a way to be with me again you're still in love with me right.
His final, coherent thought was a burst of hysterical, internal laughter. Hahaha. What the fuck is she talking about? 'Find her?' I'm about to be a stain on a dungeon floor and she's giving me a fetch quest. Fuck this. All my living… seen so much violence. So much death. Warzones. Helping people Killing others. Killing for myself. Out of anger. I was only ever afraid of one thing… seeing his face of the person I killed again. But Never did. So in reality, I only ever had one thought, one purpose…
Avoiding violence.
But avoidance was no longer an option.
*I AM ABSOLUTE VIOLENCE*
In the background of his failing consciousness, his body moved. It pushed up from the shattered stone. A halo of inverted light, bruised and sickly, ignited behind his head. And from his shoulders, shadows bled into the air, coalescing not into tendrils, but into one vast, tattered, dying wings of pure blackness—the ultimate, catastrophic sign of Qliphothic Overload.
"NO, AZAZEL!" Reginleif's scream was pure terror. "You overload again! You'll die!"
Her own mind raced, guilt a sharp blade. Why did I follow him? Trust him this much? He's about to burn out his soul! I should have… I should have used the Starlight Rapier from the start! But I can't… I just can't, because…
Her thought was severed as Azazel spoke. His voice was not a shout. It was two voice
"Your fucking dog."
He didn't throw a weapon. He threw hatred. A spear of condensed shadow and cold fury materialized and shot across the chamber. It didn't damage the Hound, but it insulted it. The blazing head turned, its sun-core eye locking onto the upstart insect that refused to die.
Azazel rushed. Not away. Under. He passed beneath the colossal, burning body, slamming a hand against its belly. "Black Ice: Piercer!" A jagged pillar of dark ice erupted upwards, stabbing into its underside. It lasted for a second before the immense heat vaporized it into a plume of superheated steam, but it made the beast flinch.
Reginleif tried to move, to help, but the radiant heat was a physical wall, driving her back. How is he even standing in that? Those wings… the overload is consuming him, but it's also shielding him? Why? Why is he doing this? And why am I just standing here useless?
The battle was no longer tactical. It was primal, elemental. Fire against Void.
Azazel, illuminated by his own dying dark halo, wielded You Shadow again. But it was different. The shadows that erupted from the Hound's own form were not tendrils. They were jaws. Serrated, bestial maws of darkness that clamped onto its flaming legs, its neck, biting deep with a hunger that cooled the flames where they touched. The Hound roared, truly immobilized for the first time, struggling against bonds of biting nothingness.
Azazel leaped. A superhuman jump propelled by the last of his strength and the failing dark wings. He landed on its head, directly between its flaming ears. He raised his kukri and brought it down with all his might on its skull.
CRACK.
The blade, already stressed, shattered on the diamond-hard, superheated bone.
Undeterred, Azazel roared, "Black Ice Fang!" The remnants of his weapon glazed over with a shell of jagged black ice. He struck again.
The enchanted ice shattered.
"ABSOLUTE VOID ZERO FANG!"
This time, he didn't enchant metal. He forged a weapon from the void itself. A shard of absolute negation, of the cold at the end of time, formed in his grip. He drove it down.
This time, it bit. The Hound's skull screamed—a sound of breaking physics, not biology. A web of cracks spread from the impact point. But the cost was instant. In response, the Hound's entire body detonated in a last-ditch cataclysm of hellfire, a suicide blast meant to take everything with it.
Azazel was flung clear, his dark wings disintegrating. As he flew, he managed one final, monumental act of will. He didn't summon a vortex. He summoned the concept of drowning.
"CATARACT."
A geyser of black water, wide as the chamber itself, erupted beneath the Hound, swallowing the hellfire in a titanic hiss of steam, engulfing the beast in a crushing, swirling tomb. And through the heart of that churning darkness, Azazel's final Absolute Void Zero Fang lanced, guided by his will, piercing through steam and water to find the crack he'd made in its skull and pry it open.
He landed hard, skidding to a stop on his knees twenty feet away, breathing in ragged, torn gasps. He tried to reach for his inventory cube. To get a potion, anything. His mind sent the command.
Nothing.
The violet space was closed. His Mythic was gone. Not sleeping. Obliterated. He couldn't feel the seed. He couldn't feel his legs. A profound, magnetic weight was pulling him down into the stone. What the hell… I can't… open it. I can't feel my body anymore. This is it. This is the drop.
Through the clearing steam, the Hound emerged.
It was a charred, walking ruin. Its flames were guttering candles. Its hide was blackened, cracked charcoal. One side of its skull was caved in, oozing molten slag instead of blood. But it was standing. It was moving. With a terrible, slow, proud finality, it turned its one remaining, dimming eye towards the kneeling Azazel. It took a step. Then another. The conqueror, coming to claim its prize.
Azazel tried to stand. His body refused. The inverted halo behind him flickered weakly. He looked up at the approaching death and managed a bloody, broken grin.
"Well… shit. For a dog… you're so fucking proud… aren't you?"
He couldn't rise. The halo pulsed—the Qliphothic Overload entering its terminal phase. His body was eating itself from the inside out.
"S'okay…" he slurred, vision tunneling. "I think… I'm dead anyway."
A hand clamped onto his shoulder. Not gentle. A grip of iron.
"You're not dying here, you asshole."
Reginleif stood beside him, her face smudged with soot and set in lines of furious determination. She hauled him back, putting herself slightly in front. "You got me into this mess. We are both leaving this hellhole. And then you and I are going to have a very serious talk about this shit."
Finally, she thought, her senses stretching. The ambient heat… it's gone. The overload isn't generating it anymore. The fire's almost out. Which means… I can do it. I have to. I hate it. I hate the overload. But I hate watching him die more.
She took a deep, centering breath, then raised her right hand high into the air, fingers spread as if grasping the ceiling itself. Her voice, when it came, was not a shout, but a resonant, chanting call that vibrated in the very air of the dungeon, a stark contrast to the guttural roars and crashes of moments before.
"By the emerald threads of dawn's first light,
I call the loom that binds the sky so bright.
Winds of jade and whispers green,
Spin the fabric of the unseen.
Veil of leaves and tendrils high,
Weave the clouds where spirits fly.
Roots of earth and breath of air,
Entwine in ■■■■■, pure and rare.
Sky's green loom, awaken now,
Grant me strength, I humbly vow.
Threads of life and nature's grace,
Guide my hand, empower this place.
With every stitch, the world shall bloom,
By sky and earth, I cast this loom.
Verdant power, wild and true,
Sky's green loom, I call on you!"
The space around her hand warped. Not with darkness, but with a concentrated, terrifying verdancy. The air hummed with a power that felt ancient, vast, and alive. It was the power to unravel seams in the world.
"Emblem Loom: Sky Eater."
She didn't swing a blade. She drew a line. From her raised hand, a beam of pure, concentrated atmospheric pressure—green as a storm-cut sky and thin as a monofilament wire—lanced out. It didn't travel. It existed, instantly connecting her will to the Hound.
It passed through the charred beast with a sound like a razor slicing the canvas of reality.
There was no explosion. No dramatic collapse.
The Hound of Tears simply… parted. A clean, impossible fissure appeared from its crown to its chest, down through its torso. The two halves slid apart with a gentle, final sigh, crumbling into mounds of inert, grey ash as they fell. The beam continued, striking the far wall of the dungeon chamber. The ancient, magically reinforced stone didn't crack. A vertical line, perfectly smooth and half an inch wide, simply appeared in it, deeper than sight could follow. Anything that had been in that line ceased to exist.
Silence.
Reginleif lowered her arm. She stood tall, breathing heavily, the echo of colossal power still ringing in the stagnant air. But the victory bore an immediate, visible cost. Flickering at her temples, barely visible, was the faint, ghostly outline of green, spectral wings. A Corruption Sign. Her expression, usually so animated, was locked in a mask of forced calm. When she breathed, it was utterly silent, as if she was holding the very air inside her prisoner.
The boss was dead. The twentieth floor was cleared.
They had won.
Azazel lay at her feet, broken and empty. Reginleif stood above him, victorious and newly burdened, a faint, eerie green light playing at the edges of her silhouette.
The dungeon's greatest barrier was broken. All that remained in the chamber was ash, silence, and the heavy price of their triumph.
End of Chapter 26