Chapter 100: The Death Instinct and the Ashes of the Past
Alexander's gravitational fist was chambered, ready to warp the continuum and reduce the Ancient Dragon to stardust. But Abraham did not occupy the apex of the dragon hierarchy by a mere whim of fate or the complacency of the ages. He was an entity of pure will, forged in the alchemy of the world's primordial dawns.
In a surge of pride, the golden colossus refused to suffer the fate the S-Class had in store for him. Ignoring the gravitational distortion that began to shear his flanks and tear away shards of his skin despite his existence as a living concept Abraham lunged forward. He used neither his fists nor his feet, but the sacred armor of his own skull, delivering a headbutt of unspeakable brutality straight into the forehead of the Rank 1.
**CRASH!**
The impact, devoid of sound in the vacuum of the exosphere but burning as bright as a gestating supernova, clean shattered Alexander's momentum. The laws of inertia were swept away. Without leaving him a single millisecond to recover his footing or manipulate the surrounding mass, Abraham locked his two golden hands around the young man's neck. His fingers of gold clamped down like steel jaws. The thrusters etched beneath his heels ignited with the fury of a cataclysm.
In a straight, vertical, and purely destructive trajectory, he hurled Alexander downward. They tore through the thermosphere at a breakneck speed, then the stratosphere, before piercing the cloud cover of the Earth in a scream of thermal friction that set the sky ablaze from end to end. To the rare survivors on the ground, it looked as though a second meteor, red and golden, had just fallen.
The two titans slammed into the metallic plain with the force of a planet-killing meteorite.
The shockwave instantly pulverized the labyrinth of slabs they had erected just minutes prior. A crater several kilometers wide expanded in a fraction of a second, liquefying bronze, iron, and rock under a frictional heat rising to several thousand degrees. Waves of molten metal geysered toward the sky before raining back down in a torrent of incandescent tears. The dust of silica and steel settled slowly, revealing the sheer scale of the disaster. At the center of this abyssal hollow, the two beings stood back up. No sobbing. No gasping. Just the heavy, choking, oppressive silence of the aftermath.
Alexander cracked his neck with a sharp snap, mechanically dusting off his torn jacket. Opposite him, Abraham stood tall. His body was marred by deep black streaks and the scratches of combat, but he regenerated instantly, his posture remaining royal, imperial, and unshakeable. The Ancient Dragon finally broke the stagnant air, his voice heavy, metallic, and vibrating with an incomprehension laced with visceral disgust:
"Why, Alexander? Why ally yourself with these ephemeral parasites? Why do you refuse to let me simply purge them from this planet they never cease to desecrate? Your behavior is a disgrace to the sacred lineage of Dragons. You, Obliranca, Flora... You have all become soft, cowards of the worst kind, crawling among the vermine and feigning weakness just so you do not frighten those who should be your slaves."
Alexander calmly crossed his arms over his chest. His dark, impenetrable gaze remained locked on the forge-like eyes of the colossus.
"You speak of a bygone era, Abraham. Blood has spilled enough on this planet, for far too long..."
"A bygone era, you say?! Don't make me laugh," the tyrant spat, taking a step forward, his mass amplified by a wrath that caused the rocky walls of the crater to collapse. "These are the same humans who waged war against us in the old days, have you forgotten?! They are the ones who sought to cage us, to dominate us, to rewrite the natural order for their own individualistic profit! They haven't changed an iota the proof is that they came all the way here just to try and steal the Draconic Power Stone. They are still the exact same, Alexander..."
Suddenly, Abraham's voice cracked. The thunder of his fury gave way to a lower, more muted vibration, heavy with an agony that centuries had failed to smooth away. His golden eyes stared into the void as a distant memory consumed his pride.
A child with silver hair, running through a field of lilies, long before the earth was clad in gold. She had no malice in her heart. She loved the song of birds, the morning dew, and looked upon the first men with a naive curiosity. Orphe was not wicked. She only wanted to live.
Then came the torches. The iron spears. The panicked screams of a humanity terrified by what it could not understand. They cornered her, hunted her down like a wild beast, tearing away her laughter to replace it with tears, and then, the silence of death. Abraham had knelt before her lifeless body, feeling his own soul extinguish, until the Goddess Selene descended from the heavens.
In an act of pity, Selene had breathed a fraction of her essence and powers into Abraham, transmuting his flesh into unalterable gold so that he might become the vanguard of vengeance.
Returning to the present, Abraham clenched his golden fists so hard that the metal of his fingers screeched.
"They killed my daughter, Alexander," he murmured, his voice trembling with a millennial rage. "She was innocence itself. She did not have an ounce of malice in her. And yet, they slaughtered her out of pure cowardice! It was Selene, the Goddess of Dragons, who saved me from despair by granting me these powers, making me her worthy disciple so that justice could be served. Do not speak to me of their greatness. 'Mercy to the wolves is an injustice to the sheep.' These monsters deserve nothing but death, and you know it better than I do, Alexander..."
"The world is different today," Alexander replied calmly, though his gaze softened for a fraction of a second at the mention of the tragedy. "They have evolved. They are capable of compassion, sacrifice, and greatness. The humans are not all the same, Abraham..."
Abraham shook his head, regret once again submerging his burning pupils.
"I do not want to kill you, Alexander. We are the last dragons still strong enough to subjugate this world; we have no business tearing each other apart for the salvation of these insects. Come with me. Walk with me. Together, we can sweep away this heresy, destroy this corrupt world, and rebuild upon its ashes a new empire made solely of dragons, worthy of our past grandeur."
Alexander did not flinch. Yet, a cold gleam entered his eyes, and a polar chill instantly settled within the crater, freezing the molten metal that bubbled at their feet.
"Besides, why do you persist in fighting under this ridiculous, limiting human form?" Abraham resumed, raising his voice, pointing an accusing finger at the S-Class. "In your dragon form, you would have a far better chance of standing against me! Why do you want to repress your animal instinct at all costs?! Unleash the beast within you, Alexander! Let the blood of the dragons that courses through your veins speak!"
At those words, a breach opened in Alexander's mind. An image buried in the deepest recesses of his psychic memory flashed before his eyes.
A world in ruins. Skies torn apart by black flames and plasma storms. Oceans of blood boiling under an infernal heat. And him, standing in the middle of that chaos, stained with the blood of the people he had slaughtered. He saw himself again, howling his rage, his distress, and his loneliness before a desert of corpses. Millions of lives reaped in a single strike. Entire civilizations reduced to ash by his breath of Destruction alone.
Alexander briefly closed his eyes. His fists clenched until his knuckles turned white, fighting with all his might to banish the vision of his ancient slaughters.
"Before... I killed countless people, Abraham. I was a true scourge, that walking calamity you revere so much. But today... I am trying to change. I am trying to preserve what little humanity and morality I have left."
He opened his eyes, the darkness within them sharper than ever.
"I have learned that *'true courage does not consist in yielding to one's nature, but in taming it.'* It is out of the question for me to give in to the ease of a wild beast, and it is even less of a question for you to threaten to turn me back into the monster I used to be. Never again will I unleash that part of me and become a killing machine."
Abraham stared down at him from his full height. The expression on his golden face hardened into a grimace of immense, infinite disappointment. The sorrow of a Dragon before a desecrated temple.
"I am so deeply disappointed..." the Dragon breathed, his voice losing every trace of warmth.
Suddenly, the tyrant rose into the air without the slightest effort, levitating hundreds of meters above the crater. His arms spread wide, palms upturned toward the firmament. An aura of unbearable, almost blinding intensity began to emanate from every pore of his transmuted skin. The gold no longer merely shone; it irradiated everything.
"GOLD RUSH!" Abraham bellowed, a pure and savage wrath tearing through his throat.
The shockwave propagated at a speed that defied all logic, tearing through the infinite universe in less than a single second. It was not an explosion of energy; it was something else entirely.
In a fraction of a second, the plain, the Earth, the atmosphere, then the solar system, the neighboring stellar systems, the nebulae, the distant galaxies, and the entire universe were repainted in a gleaming, heavy, sterile yellow gold. The cosmos was reduced to nothing but an immense golden matrix, frozen under the iron will of the tyrant. The distant stars were now nothing more than motionless pearls of jewelry; the vacuum of space itself had taken on the consistency of a precious fluid gold.
"Look at yourself!" Abraham shouted, mad with rage and disgust, glaring at Alexander from his celestial pedestal. "Seeing the son of Destruction reduced to crawling for insects sours my stomach! If you refuse to fight seriously, to show me your savage nature and honor me with a true battle, I am going to detonate this entire space-time continuum! I will shatter it with my bare hands and reduce it to a completely empty void to the point where all matter and even time itself will not escape it!"
He constricted both of his fists. Then, he continued:
"You and I can breathe and survive in the vacuum of the void, Alexander. The humans and your precious Earth cannot. If I destroy everything here and now, you will have nothing left to protect, no refuge left to mask your cowardice! You will have no choice but to let the monster out if you hope to survive against me! SO FIGHT ME LIKE THE DRAGON YOU ARE!"
At those words, the golden universe began to tremble, balanced precariously on the brink of the total annihilation Abraham intended to unleash, having liberated his energy across the entirety of the cosmos.
.
To be continued...