A Battle Approaching Godhood

"As expected of Tiamat's most loyal hound, you indeed possess some skill. But if you think that alone is enough to defeat me—it is far from it!" Cassius spread his wings and let out a roar. Behind him, that blazing sun actually began drifting slowly toward Kazul, rolling with monstrous flames that dispelled the apocalyptic cinders cloaking the sky. "Cassius, you are too young, and far too arrogant." Kazul's eyes flickered. He leveled a calm gaze at the Cinder Emperor, an undisguised murderous intent gleaming within his narrow, slitted pupils. He beat his pitch-black draconic wings. The ash unleashed by destructive divine power swept across the sky like an overflowing flood, entangling with the blazing sun in a relentless clash of mutual negation. Beneath the contest of these two forces beyond natural catastrophes, the sky flickered between bright and dark—at times blazing with blinding brilliance, at times plunging into boundless shadow—as though being continuously torn apart by the two colossal beasts. Every wingbeat of the two red dragons swept up the howling of a tempest; every strike sparked a dull sonic boom that rattled the boiling crimson lake below. The mountains groaned beneath the shadows they cast. The mortals watching from afar tilted their heads to the heavens, feeling their eyes sting and their skin burn. Instinctively, they shielded their eyes with their hands, and some were even struck blind on the spot. Such was a battle between beings that surpassed legends. Even watching from a dozen kilometers away could inflict unimaginable harm on ordinary mortals. *Boom!* The blazing sun was pierced by black radiance. A burning fragment plummeted from the heavens, crashing toward the earth and instantly erupting with terrifying energy—for that was divine solar power, bearing multiple laws of fire, light, destruction, and rebirth. Accompanied by an earth-shattering roar, the ground shook violently as fire and thick smoke from the explosion surged into the sky. When the dust finally cleared, a peak over a hundred meters high that had once stood there was reduced to flat ground. Trees, boulders, and the mountain itself had vanished without a trace, leaving behind only a scorched crater a kilometer wide amid a ruin of shattered rock. This single explosion had obliterated a mountain that had weathered countless ages, slaughtered the innumerable creatures dwelling within it, and inflicted an indelible scar upon the local terrain. Yet this was merely an insignificant aftershock of their battle. "So this is the power of dragons..." Adrian stared at the two massive, blurred silhouettes engulfed in fire and ash high in the sky, his expression growing ever more complex. The further the battle progressed, the more deeply he felt the terrifying might of the Cinder Emperor, and the deeper grew his worry for the Kingdom of Seleucia's future. With power like this, would that being's ambitions truly halt at the north of the Feanso Continent? Yet Adrian knew all too well that if His Majesty harbored ill intent, they would possess virtually no power to resist. *Facing a dragon like this, even if Lord Amaunator were to descend in person, I fear...* The bitter thought was forcibly checked the moment it surfaced. Adrian gave a violent start—such a notion was utter sacrilege! He offered several silent prayers in his heart, begging the Sun God's forgiveness, before redirecting his attention to the battle in the sky. By now, the space surrounding the two dragons was shattered beneath the collision of divine power, riddled with dense rifts like ruins smashed apart by an explosion. Burning meteors, blinding lightning, void fragments, and black ash intertwined. Elemental monstrosities and draconic-blooded dregs poured from the dimensional rifts, clashing like dense, mottled storm clouds and rendering the sky ever more bizarre. In a daze, Adrian momentarily felt as though he stood within the bizarre Outer Planes rather than the Material Plane. Soon, however, a dragon's roar shattered his brief lapse in concentration. "Cassius! Soon you shall understand what a foolish choice it was to stand against me!" "Is that so?" Cassius's voice was frigid. Kazul went on, entirely indifferent: "It is time to end this. I shall show you true world-ending might. I shall make you see that Lady Tiamat's descent is already foreordained and irrevocable!" *Hum—* The sky trembled violently and grew utterly blurred. Spatial fissures tens of thousands of meters long spanned the horizon, sprawling across the darkened heavens like a spider's web. Centered on the great wyrm red dragon, across an expanse of tens of thousands of meters, the earth cracked open. Magma flowed unchecked, greedily crawling over the ground like a living thing. Fire and ash streaked through the air, while countless heavy boulders and fine gravel drifted suspended in midair like miniature asteroids. At this moment, gravity seemed to lose its meaning. The entire space lacked any distinction of up, down, left, or right, much like the Astral Plane, and the laws of the world were thrown into complete chaos. As Kazul beat his pitch-black wings, everything around him gradually disintegrated, turning into fine, pungent ash—this was the apocalypse. Just as the prophecy proclaimed: *When magma carpets the earth and ash cloaks the sky, the old era shall be thoroughly destroyed.* Every deity transcended the laws of the Material Plane. Their very existence distorted reality, manifesting a "domain" akin to a divine realm, and now Kazul possessed a similar power. The pitch-black ash clinging to the great wyrm red dragon gradually condensed into heavy scale plates, a massive tail, and hideous bone spurs, forming a brand-new body. This caused Kazul's originally eighty-plus-meter draconic frame to swell drastically, his length surging from one hundred meters to two hundred, five hundred, a thousand... all the way to two thousand meters. What did such a colossal beast signify? The highest peak in all of Seleucia, Sunset Mountain, stood at an elevation of barely over three thousand meters. A dragon two thousand meters long was equivalent to hurling a majestic mountain into the heavens. With the meager, impoverished imaginations of ordinary mortals on the Material Plane, they could never have conceived such a sight. Yet now, that mountain-like dragon was truly present high in the sky, spanning the heavens, relentlessly radiating a majestic pressure and a chaotic, all-destroying tempest that nothing could halt. "Gods above!" "Merciful gods..." "Amaunator above! Is this a dragon that destroys worlds? Even the Cinder Emperor—" Mortals gazed up at the distant sky, their diverse faces revealing undisguised astonishment and profound shock. At this moment, the great wyrm red dragon was pitch-black with crimson undertones. His vast draconic wings blanketed heaven and earth, casting a colossal shadow. "Blotting out the sun and sky" had ceased to be an exaggeration and had become a literal description of reality. Those wings hung like the clouds of heaven. Merely beating them slowly whipped up a fierce gale that devastated everything within a dozen kilometers. The torrent of destructive divine power radiating from those dark wings even leveled several rolling ridges and hills, reducing them to drifting ash. This was a scene straight out of myth and legend, comparable to twilight falling upon the gods. The great wyrm red dragon in the sky seemed the very embodiment of the apocalypse, capable of bringing the most absolute and despairing ruin to this world. Back in the Empire's battle lines, the dragon-blooded ogre archmage Langpu raised his head toward the heavens, his gaze exceedingly grave. "Th-this is... the world's laws are being altered by him. This great wyrm has actually grown this powerful!" Langpu turned to look at the Cinder Emperor, his eyes brimming with anxiety and concern. Although he held immense trust in His Majesty's strength, even he felt a pang of dread after witnessing this terrifying, multi-thousand-meter dragon with his own eyes. As a legendary spellcaster and the head of the Imperial Institute of Deities, he possessed an accurate grasp of Kazul's might and understood what this entailed. Could His Majesty Cassius truly defeat this "Doomsday Dragon"? "Cassius, tremble before the mighty power that ends worlds—!" Kazul flapped those sky-blotting draconic wings. A chaotic black gale carrying ash surged forward, laden with terrifying destructive divine power; anything that came into contact with this ash was swiftly assimilated. The dense pressure of divine power in the air converged from every direction, leaving even Cassius feeling a suffocating weight. In a sense, Kazul—now unleashing the Heart of Tiamat with all his might—was already equivalent to half a lesser deity, and Cassius was standing directly before a god. "Get away from me—!" Cassius dared not show the slightest negligence. He likewise beat his wings with all his might. Amid a succession of explosive cracks in the air, flames poured forth like a tide, barely checking the dark hurricane rushing head-on. Clenching his right claw, he activated the Authority of the Storm Sovereign. Blinding arcs of electricity burst from his slitted pupils. Accompanied by sharp crackles, storm clouds saturated with lightning manifested as well, crisscrossing bolts weaving into a colossal silvery-white net that enveloped him. "Senseless struggling..." A raspy voice rolled from Kazul's cavernous maw, akin to a low growl echoing from the depths of the Abyss. Kazul was now the avatar of the end times. Even his ordinary words carried the terrifying power to shatter mortal sanity and plunge souls into despair. Before his voice had even faded, the churning black wind grew fiercer, actually wrapping around Cassius like a rampaging beast seeking to devour the high-altitude red dragon alive. Under the corrosion of this divine tempest, the flames surrounding Cassius were mostly extinguished, and hideous, black-smoke-venting wounds were carved across his flesh. *Roar—!* Cassius reared his head beneath the crushing divine pressure, roaring with everything he had. That heart derived from the divine corpse of Karaxis thudded just as madly, pumping violent divine power and boiling dragon blood through his major vessels to every corner of his body. Blazing solar fire, silvery-white Flame of Order, dark-crimson Chaos Fire, holy celestial light, pitch-black hellfire, pale-white lightning... Boundless forces erupted from the dragon crystal on Cassius's chest, instantly enveloping his entire body to forge a brand-new form. Within this vessel, various domineering and devastatingly destructive forces blended together, operating according to bizarre laws like a miniature plane. These forces altered the surrounding environment as well, exerting an influence over reality across an expanse of a thousand meters and even reshaping the laws to manifest a "domain" unique to him alone. At this moment, Cassius stretched nearly five hundred meters in length, his posture towering like a mountain peak. Though his size fell far short of that "Doomsday Dragon" Kazul, he had nevertheless reached the same tier, avoiding being utterly overwhelmed. Cassius's appearance differed little from before: equally muscular, balanced, and flawless, radiating an aura of sacred majesty. Red, silvery-white, dark-crimson, and deep-black radiances flickered and intertwined across his scales, while the dragon crystal at his chest revealed a cosmic phenomenon akin to a vast sea of stars. Even more striking were Cassius's eyes and horns. His pale-golden eyes were unfathomably deep, as though able to see through all things in the world, his narrow slitted pupils exuding a subtle yet absolute authority. His four massive horns stood like a crown—sacred, magnificent, and emanating a divine presence that compelled submission. After devouring the divine bodies of Erebus and Gorazdla, Cassius had reshaped his own flesh. Modeling himself after their divine forms and relying on the remnants of divinity, he had transformed his eyes and horns into substances akin to a god's body. *Boom—!* Accompanied by a roar through the air, an immense pressure of divine power similarly manifested around Cassius, barely managing to hold its own against Kazul's divine aura. This was the brand-new ability Cassius had refined and consolidated through days of experimentation and adjustments after ascending into a dragon of apotheosis—the Demigod Body! And all of this had been prepared specifically to confront Kazul, a being on the threshold of godhood.