The world had become a symphony of ruin, and I was its mad conductor. Standing amidst the fire and chaos, my body a blackened, smoking ruin held together by sheer will, I faced the descending gods. The nine true dragons, each an S-rank titan of elemental fury, were a breathtaking, terrifying sight. They were not a mindless horde; they were a royal court of executioners, and we were the condemned.
My desperate gambit had bought us a stalemate, but a stalemate was a slow death. The true battle was about to begin.
"Masha!" I roared, my voice a raw, shredded thing. "The Frost Drake is yours! Match its cold! Do not let it freeze this battlefield!"
"Erica, Kael! The Storm Drake! Its lightning is its weakness! Overload it before it can strike!"
"Eric, Jin! The Stone Drake! Break it! Lana, Talia! The Shadow Drake! Kill it before it kills you!"
My commands were the sparks that ignited the final, cataclysmic phase of the war. The battlefield, our small floating island, became a canvas for a battle of myths.
Masha, her S-rank core blazing with a fierce, competitive fire, met the Frost Drake's charge head-on. It was a duel of cryomancers, a battle of absolute zero. The Drake exhaled a blizzard, a storm of ice so cold it flash-froze the air itself. Masha, her grimoire floating before her, countered with a spell of her own, a shimmering wall of black ice that absorbed the cold, its surface cracking but not breaking. She was not just a student with a book anymore; she was a winter queen, her power a match for the beast's own. Their duel became a separate, isolated war, a vortex of swirling snow and shattering ice at the edge of our world.
High above, the Storm Drake gathered its power, the sky itself crackling as bolts of pure lightning converged on its form. But Erica and Kael were ready. They had become a single, devastating weapon. "Now!" Erica screamed, and they both unleashed their plasma lances. Their twin beams of searing, white-hot energy were not aimed at the Drake, but at the air just above it, at the focal point of the gathering storm. The lances struck the raw, untamed lightning, and the result was a deafening explosion that turned the sky white. The Storm Drake shrieked as its own power was turned against it, the feedback sending it tumbling from the sky, its scales blackened, its charge momentarily broken.
On the ground, it was a battle of pure, brutal attrition. The Stone Drake, a living mountain of granite and obsidian, met Eric and Jin's charge. Eric, shieldless but unyielding, became a battering ram, his greaves anchoring him as he slammed his body into the creature's legs, trying to unbalance it. Jin was a blur of motion, his Gauntlets of the Unbroken Fist allowing him to parry the creature's stone-shattering blows, his sword seeking the tiny fissures and cracks in its rocky hide.
Lana and Talia's fight was a deadly game of hide-and-seek. The Shadow Drake was a creature of darkness, melting into the long, skeletal shadows of the landscape, its attacks coming as silent, venomous strikes from the gloom. But it was facing two master assassins. Talia closed her eyes, her Kinetic Eye useless against a foe that cast no physical shadow. She relied on pure instinct, on the whisper of displaced air, her Viper's Kiss daggers a defensive shield of poisoned steel. Lana, however, was grinning, her amethyst eyes glowing with a manic light. She fired her kinetic bolts not at the shadows, but at the ground, at the walls, her ricochets turning the entire area into an unpredictable kill zone of invisible death. A lucky shot caught the Drake in the flank as it materialized, and its shriek of pain gave Talia the opening she needed.
While my living army fought their desperate duels, my spectral titans were engaged in a war of gods. Ouroboros and Hephaestus, my Abyssal Shadow and Infernal Juggernaut, were locked in a chaotic battle with the remaining five dragons. The Magma Drake was a fountain of fire, but Hephaestus, my obsidian slave, met its fire with its own, a battle of volcanoes that turned the stone around them to molten slag. Ouroboros was a nightmare of living darkness, its seven heads a vortex of unmaking, its ethereal form allowing it to shrug off the physical blows of a massive Iron Drake and the acidic spit of a Venom Drake.
But we were losing.
The sheer, overwhelming power of ten S-rank beings was too much. Masha was being forced back, her ice constructs shattering under the Frost Drake's relentless assault. Eric coughed up blood, a deep, spiderwebbing crack appearing on his chest plate from a blow from the Stone Drake. Talia cried out as the Shadow Drake's claws managed to rake across her back, the venom instantly eating through her armor.
And my own titans were beginning to fade. The drain on my mana was a physical agony, a soul-deep hemorrhaging that was pushing me to the brink of collapse. Ouroboros's shadowy form grew thin, Hephaestus's magma core began to dim.
Death was no longer a possibility; it was a mathematical certainty. We had fought with the courage of lions, but we were about to be devoured.
It was the sight of Masha that broke me. The Frost Drake finally shattered her last defense and slammed its massive head into her, sending her flying. She landed in a crumpled heap, her grimoire sliding from her grasp. The Drake loomed over her, its jaws opening to deliver the final, freezing blow.
In that moment, something inside me snapped. The cold, calculating tyrant was consumed by a raw, primal, and utterly furious rage. The will to survive, the will to claim my happy end, became a supernova of pure, defiant power.
"GET AWAY FROM HER!" I screamed, the sound not human, but the roar of a cornered god.
I held Soul-Drinker aloft. The black sword, my parasitic blade, became the focus of my will. I didn't just absorb the ambient energy anymore. I ripped it from the world. The fire from the Magma Drake, the cold from the Frost Drake, the lightning from the Storm Drake—I pulled it all, a vortex of stolen, elemental fury, into the sword.
The blade screamed, a high-pitched, keening sound of a mortal object trying to contain the power of creation. My own body became the conduit. Fire and ice and lightning warred within me, a cataclysm of agony that threatened to tear me apart atom by atom. But I held on, my will the only thing keeping the storm from consuming me.
I poured that stolen, chaotic power into my summons.
Ouroboros, my Abyssal Shadow, swelled with the raw, elemental energy. The pure darkness of its form became shot through with veins of fire, tendrils of ice, and arcs of lightning. It was no longer just a creature of the void; it was a living embodiment of the apocalypse. It let out a silent, seven-headed roar and descended upon the dragons. It was not a battle anymore. It was a feeding. It unmade them, its elemental-charged shadows tearing through scale and bone, devouring their power, adding it to its own.
Hephaestus, my Infernal Juggernaut, roared as the stolen magma energy flowed into it. Its obsidian carapace glowed white-hot, and the magma core in its chest became a blinding star. It unleashed a single, final attack—not a jet, but a full-body detonation of pure, volcanic fury. The wave of fire and molten rock washed over the battlefield, incinerating the last of the Wyvern horde and engulfing the nearest three dragons in a tidal wave of annihilation.
The battle ended as quickly as it had begun. The dragons, faced with a power that defied all logic, were systematically, brutally, and utterly erased from existence.
When the fires died down and the shadows receded, silence fell upon the Graveyard of Gods. The floating island was a ruin, a cratered, melted, and frozen testament to the war we had just survived.
We were all that was left.
I collapsed to my knees, Soul-Drinker clattering to the stone. Every inch of my body was a universe of pain. I was bleeding from my eyes, my ears, my nose. I coughed, and a spray of black, steaming blood spattered the ground.
The rest of my team was in no better state. Jin was leaning on his sword, his left arm hanging at an unnatural angle. Talia was unconscious, Lana shielding her body, both of them covered in deep, venomous gashes. Kael and Erica were on the ground, their bodies smoking with the after-effects of the Storm Drake's lightning. Masha was a crumpled heap, her breathing shallow. Rina, the only one without a physical wound, was on her knees in the center of them all, her hands glowing with a faint, pathetic flicker of green light. She was trying to heal them, but she was utterly, completely drained, tears of helpless exhaustion streaming down her face.
We had won. We had survived the impossible. We had slain gods. But we were broken, shattered remnants of the army we had once been, clinging to life by a single, frayed thread.
It was in that moment of absolute, profound vulnerability, as we knelt broken amidst the corpses of gods, that a new sound reached us. It was not the roar of a beast or the crackle of magic. It was the soft, almost gentle sound of a sword being drawn from its scabbard.
We all looked up. Eric, our unbreakable wall, our mountain of iron and resolve, was trying to push himself to his feet, his eyes wide with a sudden, final terror. He let out a choked cry, a sound of pain and utter disbelief. A sword, impossibly sharp and forged of a strange, pale metal, had been driven clean through his back, its tip emerging from the center of his chest plate.
He looked down at the bleeding blade, then back at us. Before he could speak, the sword was wrenched free, and a spray of crimson painted the white stone. A second figure, a blur of motion, appeared at his side. There was a flash of pale steel. Eric's remaining arm, the one that had held the line against gods, was severed at the shoulder.
He staggered, his eyes wide with shock, a final, desperate plea forming on his lips. The second figure moved again. Another flash of steel.
And Eric's head, our brave, loyal Eric's head, tumbled from his shoulders and rolled to a stop at my feet, his eyes still open, forever locked in a look of stunned, final betrayal.
I looked up from his lifeless face. They stood over his body, six of them, their forms silhouetted against the dying fires of the battlefield. They were students, like us. But their eyes… their eyes held a light that was utterly devoid of sanity, of mercy, of anything remotely human. And on each of their faces was the same, terrible, beautiful smile. The smile of a maniac who had just found a new set of toys to break.