Chapter 37: Primordial
The Drake's chest glowed like a forge, painting the grotesque hatchery in pulses of hellish red light. The air crackled and swam with heat. The primal, human part of Azazel's brain finally synced up, overriding the absurdist shock.
Oh shit. the T-Rex can shoot fireball.
A sphere of condensed, white-hot flame, larger than a man, erupted from the monster's maw. It wasn't a breath; it was a Fireball of cataclysmic scale, hurtling towards them with the speed and finality of a comet.
"AZAZEL, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING? SNAP OUT OF IT! RUN!" Reginleif's scream was raw with fear and fury.
Her hands were already moving. With a guttural cry, she threw every ounce of her remaining strength into the air before her. "SKY'S LOOM: BASTION WALL!"
A vertical plane of solidified, screaming wind materialized between the party and the oncoming annihilation. It wasn't the full dome—she didn't have the strength—but a desperate, focused barrier.
The fireball struck.
The sound was a thunderclap of conflicting elements. Flame met hurricane-force wind. The Fireball detonated against the Bastion Wall, spraying torrents of liquid fire to either side that splashed against the organic walls, setting them ablaze with a terrible whoosh. The concussion wave knocked everyone off their feet. Reginleif was thrown backward, skidding across the damp floor, her barrier shattered, her arms smoking. The heat was so intense it singed hair and leather.
But they were alive. For now.
As the smoke and steam swirled, Azazel climbed to his feet. He looked at the burning walls, at the colossal creature that was already drawing another, deeper breath, its maw re-igniting. He looked at the Hands of Scouting, scrambling up in pure terror.
"You guys can run," he said, his voice unnervingly calm amidst the chaos. "I'm gonna fight this thing."
Reginleif stared at him from the ground, her face smudged with soot and disbelief. "What?! Have you gone mad? That's a Drake! A Crimson one at that! You don't 'fight' it, you die to it!"
Azazel finally turned his head to look at her, and in his eyes, she didn't see madness, but a terrifying, focused clarity. The kind he got when he was solving an impossible equation. "All I see is a giant lizard. A giant, fire-breathing lizard. I was supposed to be done with the Stone Age." He gestured vaguely at the smoldering hatchery. "It's imitating the raptors, but it's its own thing. Its own… problem. If we don't try to kill this thing now, it's going to be a problem later down the line. So let's get the job done."
His logic was insane. It was suicidal. It was purely, quintessentially Azazel.
Reginleif pushed herself up, wincing. "Damn it. Why are we doing this again?"
"It's not a floor boss, like before," he said, as if that explained everything. He cracked his neck, his gaze locked on the Drake, which was finishing its deep inhalation, the light building again. "So we got this."
"What about the Hands of Scouting?!" she yelled over the growing inferno's roar.
Azazel didn't even glance their way. "I don't know. Tell them to value their life or something. Whatever. I don't give a fuck." He raised his hands, dark energy beginning to coil around his fingers. "My mind is only on the giant-looking lizard."
Reginleif spat out a mouthful of bloody phlegm and turned to the horrified group. Kael was trying to herd them back towards the tunnel, his face ashen. "Hey! Everyone! You should get out of here! Your lives are more important! Me and Azazel are going to fight this thing!"
In the background, Azazel was already moving. He launched a volley of Black Ice spears not at the Drake's body, but at its face, aiming for its glowing eyes and flaring nostrils—a distraction, an insult. The spears shattered harmlessly against its scales, but it made the beast flinch and snap its head, the building fireball sputtering slightly.
Joren stared at Reginleif as if she'd grown a second head. "Are you guys crazy? It's a Crimson Drake! You can't fight it! We need to run, get a Gold-rank team, a platoon!"
"Joren, I know how you feel," Reginleif said, her voice softening for a moment with genuine empathy. "But you have no choice. Even if I left with you, Azazel is still going to fight this thing. Because this is the first time he's seeing it, I think. It's… a little weird for him." She grasped for an explanation they might understand. "I think you've noticed. He's from a tribe somewhere far to the east. Isolated. They have… different instincts. So I'm going to help him fight it."
The truth was dawning on her even as she spoke the half-lie. I have just realised something. I also want to beat this dungeon. I want to find what's at its heart. And if Azazel is motivated for one thing—even if it's a suicidal, lizard-slaying rage—I'm gonna help him. Even if it doesn't align perfectly with my goal… I just have to follow my wind.
Joren looked from her resolute face to where Azazel was now darting between the Drake's stomping feet, using Voidfool in short, blinding bursts to avoid being crushed, leaving patches of Black Ice on the ground to make the beast stumble. It was a dance of utter insanity.
The mage swallowed hard, then gave a sharp, defeated nod. "Okay, Reginleif. We'll leave. We'll get to the guild and tell them what's happening. We'll get backup." He met her eyes, his scholarly demeanor replaced by raw pleading. "Please. Don't die."
A faint, wild smile touched Reginleif's lips. "Don't worry. We won't."
She turned her back on safety and launched herself into the fray.
Azazel saw her green scarf blur into his peripheral vision as she Gust-Stepped onto a burning wall, running parallel to the ground before kicking off in a spiraling dive towards the Drake's shoulder.
"It's about time you jumped into this battle," he called out, his voice carrying a note of grim exhilaration she'd never heard before. He deflected a swipe of the massive tail with a hastily-formed wall of Black Ice, which shattered into a million dark shards. "Let's have some fun with this. Haha!"
The laugh was short, sharp, and utterly devoid of mirth. It was the sound of a chain breaking, of a calculation concluding that the only viable solution was a glorious, violent gamble. The Crimson Drake roared, shaking the burning cavern, and the two smallest figures in the room moved to meet it, one dancing with shadow and ice, the other riding the screaming wind.
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The Crimson Drake was not a beast to be dueled. It was a cataclysm to be survived, a force of nature to be outwitted. With the Hands of Scouting fleeing up the tunnel, the last restraints on Azazel's power evaporated. The careful, two-skill facade shattered.
Reginleif became the storm. She was everywhere at once, a harrying phantom. She didn't aim to pierce its scales; she aimed to disrupt. Pressure Knives shot not at its eyes, but into its nostrils, causing it to sneeze gouts of flame erratically. She used Gust Step to ride the blasts of hot air from its Wing Gusts, turning its own attacks into propulsion, landing on its back to drive her moonstone dagger into the thinner seams between its shoulder plates. When it tried to shake her off, she'd leap, using a Vortex to pull herself through the air to its tail, slicing at tendons before being forced to dart away from the crushing Earthshaker Stomp that made the very cavern floor heave.
She was the irritant, the wasp stinging a giant. And she was creating openings.
Azazel was the calamity.
He fought with a chilling, geometric brutality. No longer limited, his Mythic unfolded in a symphony of darkness.
You Shadow tendrils, thicker than a man's arm, erupted from every pool of darkness in the burning chamber. They didn't try to bind the Drake's limbs—an impossible task. Instead, they lashed at its feet, coiling around ankles, not to hold, but to trip, to upset its balance at critical moments. When the Drake reared up to stomp, a shadow would yank at a backward-bent knee. When it turned to track Reginleif, another would snake around its front foot.
Black Ice was no longer for barriers. He used it offensively, with terrifying creativity. He didn't aim for the body. He targeted the environment. As the Drake charged, Azazel would flash-step with Voidfool and slam his hands onto the ground. A jagged forest of dark ice spikes would erupt behind the charging beast, not to impale it, but to create a wall. The Drake would skid, its momentum broken, its flank exposed. Or he'd coat patches of the spongy, burning floor in a sheet of ultra-slick ice, sending the massive creature into a sliding, roaring sprawl.
His masterpiece was the Abyssal Vortex. He didn't use it on the Drake directly—its mass and power were too great. Instead, he used it defensively. When the Drake unleashed its Fiery Breath, a cone of annihilation wide enough to fill the chamber, Azazel didn't try to outrun it. He planted himself before the oncoming tide, and with a roar of effort, summoned a Cataract—not above the Drake, but in the path of the fire. A wall of swirling, gravitational voids appeared. The flame hit the vortices and was sucked in, twisted, and extinguished with a deafening, steam-blast shriek, protecting the space behind him.
But the Drake's Regenerative Scales were a nightmare. Every wound Reginleif inflicted, every scale shattered by a falling stalactite she'd wind-guided onto it, began to knit closed with visible, nauseating speed. They were wearing themselves out against an enemy that could heal.
"Its core!" Reginleif screamed, dodging a tail-swipe that demolished a column. "It has to have a core! Like a dungeon beast! Find it!"
Azazel's Qliphoth Sight flared. He looked past the fiery aura, past the scales, seeking a concentration of the aberrant magic that powered it. There—pulsing like a diseased heart deep within its chest, behind a fortress of bone and muscle.
"Center mass! It's buried!" he yelled back.
Getting to it was the problem. The Drake, sensing their shift in strategy, grew even more cunning. It stopped chasing and began using the environment, herding them with fire, collapsing tunnels with its tail, forcing them to expend energy just to avoid being crushed or incinerated.
The breakthrough came from Reginleif's desperation. As the Drake cornered her against a wall, its maw opening for a point-blank blast, she didn't try to dodge. She gathered every last shred of her power, the green spectral wings flickering violently around her.
"AZAZEL! NOW!"
She didn't attack the Drake. She attacked the ceiling above it with a single, concentrated beam of cutting wind—Sky's Loom. The beam sheared through weakened, burning rock. A massive chunk of the cavern roof, a spear of stone the size of a cottage, broke free and plummeted.
The Drake looked up, its fire dying in its throat. It braced, its horns and massive shoulders rising to take the impact.
It never saw Azazel's final move.
He didn't use Voidfool to escape. He used it to ascend.
Focusing on the shadow cast by the falling debris on the Drake's own lowered head, he blinked. He reappeared standing on the Drake's snout, between its horns, the world a dizzying blur of scale and motion.
The Drake's eyes rolled up, meeting his. In that instant, Azazel didn't see a mythical beast. He saw a big, dumb lizard, distracted by a falling rock.
He raised both hands, pointing down between its eyes, directly towards the pulsating core he sensed within.
He didn't summon a vortex. He didn't create ice. He channeled the purest, most concentrated essence of his Mythic—the negation, the void, the un-making force at the heart of the Qliphoth. It was a focused beam of absolute Darkness, a lance of anti-energy he had no name for.
"EAT THIS."
The black beam, silent and cold, pierced straight down. It didn't explode. It eroded. It bored through scale, flesh, and bone, not with violence, but with silent, utter consumption, leaving a perfectly smooth, dark tunnel in its wake. It struck the core.
The regenerative magic met the void. And was erased.
The Crimson Drake froze. The ancient fire in its eyes guttered and went out, replaced by empty, glassy black. The falling debris struck its shoulders, but it didn't react. It stood for a moment longer, a crumbling statue of scaled might, before its legs buckled. It collapsed forward with a final, ground-quaking THUD that sent up a cloud of ash and dust.
Silence, deeper than any before, filled the hatchery. The only sounds were the crackle of dying fires and Reginleif's ragged, wheezing breaths.
Azazel walked calmly down the slope of the creature's snout, jumped lightly off its face, and landed on the cavern floor. He turned, looked at the mountainous corpse, then walked over and, with some effort, climbed up onto its broad, scaled back. He sat down on the ridge of its spine, looking like a king on a throne of nightmares.
He looked over at Reginleif, who was leaning against a wall, utterly spent, her face a mask of soot and awe.
"Reginleif," he said, his voice hoarse but vibrating with a strange, triumphant energy. He patted the dead Drake's scale. "This… this is how you kill a prehistoric dinosaur. Haha!" His laugh was a sharp, genuine bark of triumph. "Something I'm definitely gonna brag about."
Reginleif stared at him, then at the impossible creature they had just slain. Exhaustion, relief, and a profound confusion warred within her.
"What," she said slowly, each word a struggle, "is a 'prehistoric dinosaur'?" She shook her head, a faint, bewildered smile touching her lips. "Sometimes… he says certain things I just don't get."
Azazel just grinned, a rare, unfiltered expression of satisfaction, and looked out over their smoldering, victorious battlefield. The 26th floor was cleared. The alpha was dead. The Drake was slain. And he had finally, properly, tested his power against something worthy of it.
The work, it seemed, was going just fine.
End of Chapter 37