High across the vault of heaven, the black mist churned in grotesque heaves, swelling and collapsing like a drunken colossus repeatedly belching into the dark.
Monstrous, indistinct silhouettes flickered within the void.
RUMBLE...
Lightning tore across the canopy in sudden, deafening cracks, coiling through the gloom alongside shrieking gales that inverted the flow of the clouds.
In that single instant, every living soul across the East Blue raised their eyes toward this apocalyptic spectacle.
Anyone with eyes understood that this was a living nightmare descending straight from the underworld.
Foosha Village, Shimotsuki Village, Syrup Village, the Baratie, Cocoyasi Village... The entirety of the East Blue was drowned in suffocating gloom as an eldritch malice writhed behind the veil of mist.
Those looking upon the sky swallowed dryly, trembling from the marrow of their bones.
The sinister horror lurking within that darkness was unmistakable to all.
It was dead of night, still hours away from the first break of dawn. In the pitch-black sky, the mist should have been indistinguishable from the nocturnal firmament.
Yet it writhed like thousands of ravenous dragons and serpents, stampeding across the heavens with unnatural, grotesque vibrancy.
The end of days had arrived; the East Blue plunged into unprecedented, sprawling terror.
System! If you don't start talking right this second, every single one of us is done for! Drake roared desperately within his mindscape, silently cursing his own stupidity.
Had he unleashed his full might to suppress her with absolute, merciless brutality from the opening bell, Im would never have found the breathing room to turn the tables. He was the one who had handed her the opening to unleash this cataclysm.
If he had simply opened with that final technique—
Drake's eyes snapped wide. For this decisive battle, he had kept an ultimate trump card hidden away in reserve.
The amplification granted by the Demon Warder had indeed elevated his combat parameters to a realm of absolute invincibility.
Yet when it came to neutralizing an immortal abomination like Im, he had always felt hamstrung.
He did possess a single strike guaranteed to obliterate Im down to the cellular level, leaving not a speck of ash behind.
The catastrophic price, however, was that Kaya would be vaporized right alongside her.
And because of his fleeting hesitation and soft-hearted indecision, the entire East Blue was now staring down the barrel of total extinction.
In fact, the apocalypse could detonate in the very next second.
[Are you done screeching yet?!] the System suddenly snarled back at him. [Didn't I already tell you? There is no way to restore that girl's body—none! Absolutely none!]
[How many times do I have to hammer it through your thick skull?! This current crisis was orchestrated entirely by your own hands! Don't you dare forget that!]
The System unloaded with unrestrained fury, venting every ounce of pent-up disgust at once.
Before deploying to the East Blue, they had calculated every tactical permutation to confront Im. When Drake learned that aside from Ain's arts, there was virtually no other method to separate Kaya's physical vessel from Im's parasite soul, they had engaged in a deep strategic debate.
They had ultimately forged an ironclad consensus.
If Ain's Soul-Sealing Art failed, Drake was to immediately trigger that ultimate strike to end everything.
That had been the optimal tactical compromise they could devise.
Drake had agreed without hesitation at the time.
Yet when the moment of truth arrived, he had instinctively cast that agreement aside, gambling on an untested sealing art he had never used once in his life.
An ability whose actual efficacy was completely unknown.
In the System's view, this was incurable, suicidal foolishness. It knew for a fact that Drake had never even met the mortal girl named Kaya.
Risking the lives of every living soul across the East Blue for the sake of a stranger he had never laid eyes on was irrational beyond measure.
A man who could not abandon a single life before him could never ascend to the sovereign throne overlooking the world!
A true lord understood the necessity of sacrifice—no matter how deeply his conscience rebelled, it was an absolute law of reality!
When standing upon the precipice of life and death, one was destined to let go of something.
Only through sacrifice could anything be attained!
Failing to grasp the art of sacrifice, allowing oneself to be shackled by the refusal to lose a single fleeting life, would only ensure that one lost everything in the end.
A fool of this caliber could rot for all the System cared.
In any case, the East Blue was likely wiped from existence after today.
Drake's gaze turned vacant, staring at the roiling black mist as an unprecedented, crushing sense of soul-deep powerlessness welled up within his chest.
Was this... truly caused by my own weakness...?
Yet standing by and watching Kaya be obliterated before his eyes was something he simply could not bring himself to do.
That innate, unshakeable reverence for life made it impossible for him to watch a weak, innocent soul perish in front of him.
Let alone executing her with his own two hands!
"AHAHAHA... What's the matter, Drake? Giving up already? With your monstrous power, even if you can't strike me down, you should still be capable of doing something, shouldn't you?"
"For instance... scrambling to save a few pathetic ants?"
"If you pushed yourself to the limit, I'm sure you could shield that nearest island and keep it intact, couldn't you?"
"Why aren't you moving? Or could it be..." Im's primordial malice surfaced across her features, curling into a sinister, taunting smirk.
"You've already surrendered?!"
Seeing Drake suspended motionless as if his soul had left his body, Im could scarcely contain her manic jubilation.
In this moment, she knew her gambit had paid off brilliantly. Formidable and terrifying as Drake's raw might was, the fool harbored the absurd desire to save every single inhabitant of this ocean.
What breathtaking naivety!
RUMBLE...
No sooner had Im's taunt echoed through the sky than the dark mist turned violently frantic, surges of pitch-black energy undulating like a boiling sea.
The Heaven-Burying Dark Tempest—unleashed to eradicate all creation!
Before Drake's eyes, the vision of the East Blue's ruin seemed to materialize: desolate islands stripped of life, smoke choking the sky, scorched earth reduced to ash.
"AHAHAHA! You truly aren't going to lift a finger? Well, it hardly matters—even if you wanted to stop it, you are far too late!"
From the heart of the black mist, streaks of laser light ignited.
In the span of a single breath, the firmament was densely blanketed by concentrated beams of black light—a torrential rain of pure destruction surging forward to drown the world below.
"It is finished!"
The world plunged into absolute darkness. Drake felt his vision swim, everything collapsing into meaningless void...
BZZZZT—!
Around the chassis of the Demon Warder, spatial fluctuations intertwined with crackling arcs of lightning, humming with erratic frequency.
Drake's fists clenched white-knuckle tight, his mind an absolute blank. At this most critical juncture, his limbs refused to move.
Only the violent spatial fissures leaking uncontrollably from his frame betrayed the raging tempest tearing through his soul.
Seeing this, the cruel smile on Im's lips widened further.
Right at that heartbeat, a blinding, radiant light flared across the distant horizon, a pillar of incandescent golden-crimson soaring straight into the clouds!
To the terror-stricken inhabitants of the East Blue, that brilliant flare looked like a solitary golden star descending upon the earth, piercing the suffocating dark with the sudden dawn of salvation.
"What is that?!"
Before the eyes of the watching world, that pinpoint of starlight expanded exponentially, aggressively swallowing the surrounding night at a pace visible to the naked eye.
Across the vastness of the entire East Blue, it remained a localized ember.
Yet to the island nestled directly beneath that pillar of light, the spectacle was clear as day—it was the blazing radiance of pure, unbridled flame!
The fire flashed across their vision, burning away the despair that had taken root in their hearts.
A single spark... igniting a prairie fire!
Radiating outward from a singular focal point, the flames tore across more than half the East Blue in the blink of an eye, arriving directly at Im's coordinates!
"IMPOSSIBLE!"
Im let out a shrill, shrieking screech so ear-splitting that it made Drake's scalp tingle, snapping his consciousness back to reality in an instant.
The encroaching inferno wrapped around Im's physical frame in a fraction of a second, sweeping past her without the slightest resistance to swallow the airspace behind her—surging with unstoppable momentum to engulf the entirety of the East Blue.
The darkness shattered; a sea of golden flame bloomed across the heavens, heralding the arrival of dawn.
"ARGHHH!! What is this?! Impossible, this cannot be! These flames... HOW CAN THIS BE?!"
Im writhed violently within the fire, her flesh thrashing against the blaze as blood-curdling screams tore unceasingly from her throat.