"Captain… the barrier, it's gone," Raul's stammering voice echoed across the guild rooftop, a tremor running through his words.
Finn didn't reply immediately, his mind a storm of calculations.
The spear that shattered the barrier had been a sudden, brutal disruption.
It had rendered Noir's sacrifice, and the valiant efforts of the veteran adventurers still holding the line against the monster horde, tragically futile.
Finn was back where he started, staring at the same impossible dilemma that had plagued him before the veterans made their desperate stand.
'It has to be Mors' he thought, piecing together the identity of the attacker with a chilling certainty.
He had meticulously planned for the champions of evilus.
Alfia, he'd speculated, was deep within the dungeon.
But Mors… Mors had been an enigma, his movements utterly obscured by the ever shifting nature of the war.
With the addition of the monster horde, most of the scouts had been annihilated.
He was blind, and this was the consequence.
"Do we really have to abandon a stronghold?" Finn muttered, his voice a cold, clipped whisper, his hand clenching into a fist.
He couldn't let the monsters breach the ice walls and disrupt the critical clash between the Warlord and Conqueror at the city's heart.
Ottar's fight was the only reason the adventurers still held any ground.
Ottar, already at a severe disadvantage in terms of sheer power, would be overwhelmed if the horde broke through.
Abandoning one of the five strongholds to protect Ottar, or sacrificing Ottar to preserve the wider defense?
The choice was agonizing, a brutal conundrum he had mere seconds to resolve.
The monsters were already battering against the final bulwark, the ice walls, their demise a mere minute away.
"Wait a moment, Captain… there's something…" Raul's unexpected interruption jolted Finn from his grim contemplation.
.........
"Grr! What's taking so long?! Why is Babel still standing?!"
Valletta's fury was a palpable thing.
She'd dismissed the aged adventurers' suicidal charge as a minor annoyance, a fleeting impediment.
The barrier's fall had ignited a flicker of hope, the belief that the end was finally in sight.
Yet, despite every advantage, the monsters had failed to breach the central defenses, and Valletta's patience was wearing thin.
"It doesn't matter how many fools they send to their deaths! We have numbers on our side! Now break through already!" she roared.
Even if every last one of Orario's elder adventurers sacrificed themselves, they could only hope to carve out a minuscule fraction of the overwhelming monster population.
Valletta's own subordinates understood this grim reality.
Thus, he was extremely hesitant to deliver a report that would further irk his mistress.
"M-ma'am… we've spotted a strange ring of light surrounding Central Park. It's tearing apart any monster that tries to approach!"
"A ring of light? What the hell are you talking about?!" she snapped, her gaze snapping towards the city's center.
Her eyes widened in disbelief.
The scout's words were a horrifying truth she witnessed firsthand.
Encircling the Central Park, amidst the geysers of crimson monster ichor, pulsed a halo of silver and black.
"It's the Chariot!" a cultist wailed, his voice cracking with despair.
"Nothing can stop him!"
.........…
Around and around and around he raced, a blur of motion pulverizing every monster in his path. His legs were pistons, his blood a roaring inferno.
His vision narrowed to a singular, desperate point, trapping Allen in a world defined by absolute speed.
Faster. Faster. Faster, he screamed internally, his mind a relentless engine.
'Tear them to shreds when they step too close. Even if it hurts like hell when you strike.'
"Ah, my fingers are broken. My head is pounding. My heart won't stop racing. But who cares? I'm a chariot. Breaking rules is what I do."
The pain was a distant hum beneath the roar of his internal drive.
'Those old bastards are out there buying time. I got to make the most of every last second.'
He pushed harder, the world a smear of color and chaos.
'Maybe I am too worthless to save you all, but I'll make your sacrifices worth something.'
"So give your lives to me, you old dogs!!" Allen bellowed, the extreme velocity causing his eyeballs to bleed and his bones to groan in protest.
"Give them to me! Give them for him!"
He poured every ounce of his being into his cry, making his purpose known to the few elder veterans still clinging to life, still laying down their lives.
"You listening to me, Ottar?! You better beat that asshole!!"…
"Aaaaaaaaaagh"
.........
Back at the heart of the Ganesha familia home....
Perched on a rooftop, Mors surveyed the chaos unfolding, a cruel satisfaction twisting on his masked face.
"Whew, would you look at that. They are still holding out," he mused, his gaze falling upon the figure struggling to buy time.
"Who would have thought that whelp could move so fast," he muttered, a hint of grudging respect tinged with malice in his voice.
Below, Adi's scream tore through the fragile peace.
"Aaaaaaaaaah, you bastard!"
Her eyes burned with a furious intensity, her body a broken puppet crawling across the dusty ground.
If the sheer force of her hatred could have conjured teeth sharp enough to sever flesh, Mors would have already met a gruesome end.
Mors's voice dripped with a chilling nonchalance.
"Now, now, quite down little girl, lest I pluck out your entrails and stuff it down your throat."
Adi, stripped of fear by the sheer agony and injustice, met his gaze defiantly.
"Then do it, you bastard. I will rather die than let you continue having your way."
The thought of her friends, the innocents, of the precious knowledge that an evilus champion was among them, now outweighed any lingering desire for self-preservation.
She couldn't remain silent anymore, not even for Draco's sake.
'Draco, I am sorry. I am sure you will understand,' she thought, a silent apology sent into the void.
"Somebody heeeeeeee…."
Her desperate cry was abruptly cut short.
In a blur of motion, Mors, who had been on the rooftop, was now hovering over her, Adi's limp body dangling precariously from his grip, her throat clamped in his hand.
"You know, I rarely let anyone who annoys me live for long," Mors's voice was low, menacing, his bandaged eyes, bloodshot and chilling, fixed on her struggling form.
"You were one of the few exceptions, and yet you waste my mercy."
Adi could offer no retort, her windpipe constricted, the desperate need for air a burning agony.
"There are many ways to make your death miserable and painful, but for now, I will refrain. I still require your existence for…" Mors's words trailed off, shattered by a voice that sliced through the tension like a honed blade.
"How noisy!"
The voice echoed from the room beyond the patio.
Adi, with a desperate twist of her head, her eyes wide with a sudden, overwhelming hope, saw the figure emerging.
Tears streamed down her bruised face.
"Draco!" she choked out, the single word a lifeline, a desperate plea carried on the ragged edge of her breath.
.........
"Ugh, my head hurts like hell and my body feels as though it weighs a ton," was Draco's first coherent thought as consciousness slowly returned.
He sat up on the bed, the stiff cotton sheets a welcome sensation against his aching skin.
His muscles protested, and a dull throb emanated from his usually expressive, scaly tail, which had been carelessly tucked at an awkward angle during his prolonged unconsciousness.
Before he could even attempt to get his bearings, his sensitive ears were assaulted by the sudden cacophony of the yard.
"So noisy," Draco grumbled, his eyes snapping open and immediately locking onto the source of the disturbance.
There, he saw Adi, her small frame held cruelly in the grip of a man he couldn't immediately identify, hidden beneath layers of bandages.
"You, dragon boy… so you have finally awoken," the strange man said.
Draco's mind, slowly clearing, immediately recognized the voice.
Mors.
One of the last figures he remembered before darkness had claimed him.
"So you survived, huh?" Draco replied, his voice devoid of emotion, his expression blank.
He recalled a chaotic confrontation, an attempt to end Mors's life, an interruption…the memories after that remained frustratingly fuzzy.
"Yes, I did, and I have come for…" Mors began, a triumphant edge creeping into his tone.
"Sigh, I don't need to hear your nonsense," Draco interrupted, his voice calm, almost dismissive.
He pushed himself off the bed, stretching his limbs, the stiffness gradually receding.
As he stretched, his limbs felt surprisingly fluid despite the lingering ache, before walking towards the patio.
A weak ray of sunlight filtered through the dense grey clouds, illuminating the yard and allowing him to inspect himself.
'Shirtless, huh,' he thought, flexing his chest and the appendages of his tail.
Outwardly, there were no visible injuries, though a deep-seated internal feeling of discomfort lingered.
But It mattered little.
Mors sought revenge, and Draco's own desire to see Mors dead burned with an equal, if not fiercer, intensity.
"You have grown awfully bold since our last meeting," Mors observed, his grip tightening on Adi's throat, a subtle increase in pressure that made Adi flinch.
"I recall you being more timid, hesitant, and fearful in my presence."
"Well, the answer is simple. I have lost every reason to fear you anymore," Draco retorted, his gaze drifting to a small perch where his firebirds sat.
He reached out, gently ruffling their vibrant feathers.
"I missed you guys," he whispered, the birds chirping happily in response.
Mors frowned, clearly unsettled by Draco's nonchalant demeanor.
"Do you not care about this girl?" he inquired, his voice laced with a predatory challenge.
He increased the pressure further, as Adi's skin began to bruise, turning a sickly purple, and her broken limbs flailed like a poorly handled puppet.
"I do," Draco paused, gently placing the firebirds back on their perch.
"But why worry, when I can just get her back?"
He extended an arm, not in a gesture of aggression, but of intent.
His arm began to twist and turn, scales rippling and shifting as he activated his partial dragon transformation.
"Interesting," Mors mused, his voice laced with curiosity.
"It would seem that you have acquired some kind of power that would grant you this confidence." Mors deduced, a predatory glint in his eyes.
He tensed, readying himself.
"Very well, then. Show it to me. I would very much like to see if you can save this girl before I…"
Swish!
Mors's sentence was, once again, left unfinished.
In the blink of an eye, Adi was no longer in his grasp.
All he registered was a fleeting flash of emerald green.
Following the impossible trajectory of the flash, Mors's eyes widened in disbelief.
Draco stood behind him, Adi cradled in his arms in a perfect princess carry.
But Draco was different.
His obsidian scales, horns, and silver hair had somehow shifted, now a vibrant, luminous green.
"See, that was easy…" Draco's voice was a low drawl, his head slowly turning back towards Mors.
His reptilian eyes, now the color of deep jade, flashed with an ominous, predatory glint.
"How?!" Mors's question was a stammered incredulity.
He, a peak level seven, had faced Draco, who, to his knowledge, was a mere peak level four.
Even with a significant power-up, Draco should have been, at most, a new level five.
Additionally Draco didn't seem to be using the extreme transformation from their last battle.
Draco's lips curved into a smirk, a chilling expression on his face.
"Let's just say," he began, his voice echoing with a newfound power, "I learned how to shed my other colors."
The unspoken threat hung heavy in the air, a promise of a battle far too different from anything Mors had anticipated.