At first, Syltra had assumed it was a high-level white dragon. The kind strong enough to wipe out entire armies with a single breath. That would put it at Gold-tier, no question.
But now that she was this close…
No. This looked more like a black dragon. Only with white scales, and it breathed pure ice.
'A hybrid?' Her eyes narrowed. 'Why were its scales glowing like that?'
Something was off. Before she could finish the thought, the dragon suddenly lifted its head again. The ground shook beneath her feet.
It had noticed something.
"…Oh no. What now?"
Syltra turned her gaze toward the city. A massive beam of magical energy had just blasted into the sky. It was pitch black and tinged with violet, radiating a choking, unnatural heat. The kind that made her skin crawl.
Wait… she recognized this feeling.
That pressure… that corrupted energy… it felt just like the monster that almost killed her earlier.
"…Don't tell me… the beast wave was orchestrated by someone?"
Her thoughts spiraled into panic, but the dragon beside her suddenly spread its wings and let out a deep, thunderous roar. Then, with a mighty push, it soared toward the magic beam.
"The dragon just… flew that way… Wait, my hat?!"
Syltra instinctively touched her head, and blinked in surprise. Her mage hat had been returned to her. It was sitting perfectly, not even crooked.
Far beneath the city, deep underground, a cloaked figure hovered over a searing flame that cut a tunnel through solid bedrock. Thick waves of dark magic flowed along the path like living shadows.
The man stepped into a pitch-black chamber. No doors. No windows. Just smooth stone walls glowing faintly with cursed runes and eight-pointed stars, all pulsing with ominous energy.
At the center of the room sat an altar, carved from obsidian and soaked in dried blood.
Floating just above it, suspended by invisible chains, was a warped, heart-like object. Humanoid in shape, it pulsed slowly, letting out wet, gurgling sounds with every beat. Its surface twisted and shifted like it was in pain, its distorted face twitching with each throb.
Every pulse sent out ripples of dark magic. The same twisted magic that had soaked the monsters in the wave.
Embedded inside the heart was a small, flickering ice-blue shard. It glimmered faintly but carried a familiar energy.
Syltra had seen that aura before.
It was the same as the one from the northern cave. The same as the one that belonged to the silver-haired girl with the ice-blue eyes.
The cloaked figure clenched his teeth and hissed through them, "…That damn dragon."
With a furious growl, he grabbed the shard and hurled it across the room. It struck the altar hard, fresh blood splattering across the stone as the cursed ritual continued.
The shard fragment burned in his palm, wrapped in flickering flame. As soon as he severed its connection from the heart above the altar, the endless blizzard outside, at least within this wide area, began to weaken ever so slightly.
Cracks tore through the ritual array as several of its links broke apart. Streaks of magic light bled from the lines like veins rupturing under pressure.
It was over. The long-planned, carefully constructed ritual was undone, by the very person who had created it. A thick jet of blood burst from the heart's opening, like a pressure hose spraying crimson mist.
The original goal was to open a path. Now? All that was left was failure and the price of it.
"I didn't think even some low-tier mutated beast… would force me to do this."
His voice was laced with bitter disbelief.
As someone who considered himself above most creatures, especially those bred in labs or twisted in rituals, he couldn't accept that something so lowly could push things this far.
Somewhere above, he heard a faint dragon's roar. Time was running out. He stopped hesitating and plunged a blackened, claw-like hand into his own chest, yanking out a cluster of gray-white energy, tainted with swirling black mana, from his blood-soaked heart.
"This is all the fuel I've got left…"
His voice rasped through clenched teeth.
Now, if you were writing the guidebook for proper black-robed villains, you'd check every box with him:
Never explain anything directly, always use dramatic metaphors. Always wear a ridiculously obvious black cloak, even when stealth is key.
Always show up with mysterious powers, make a big scene, and then leave the hero alive for no reason before vanishing mysteriously. And yeah, he ticked off every one of those clichés.
But lately, it had gotten harder and harder to keep up the act.
Several of his hidden outposts had been destroyed, flattened, really, thanks to a certain silver-haired ice user. She and her allies had wiped out half his defensive lines, like someone reading from the final script of the play. She'd taken out key zones faster than he could reinforce them.
At this point, he suspected she had some insane future-predicting ability.
To make things worse, a dragon had come crashing down from the sky like a meteor, slamming straight into the most critical nodes of the ritual as if it had memorized the whole formation layout.
He'd lost several auxiliary rituals. His beastified guardians had been slain. Even the elite golden-tier soldiers he'd held in reserve for the final phase were now corpses.
Just days ago, everything had been in perfect order. Now it was all falling apart.
"That dragon… The power of the Dark God's Blessing isn't something your body can handle!"
He thought back to the girl's final act. Even he, someone half-insane already, found her terrifying. The way she recklessly dove straight into the core of the ritual, absorbing the energy into her own body, then blowing it up before the spell could finish, it defied all logic.
She didn't run. She didn't retreat. She exploded with it.
Now she was no longer a person. Not a white dragon, either. She'd become something else entirely. A howling mass of frozen rage and unstable energy.
But it was his own fault. His failure. And today, he would fix it.
"O sluggish dragon… your age is over. The Dark God's era has already begun. Trash like you doesn't deserve a place in His world!"
He turned and left the underground chamber behind. Flames swept through the room, consuming everything, countless bloodstains, complex arcane runes, sacred geometry, all of it turned to ash. He made sure nothing could be traced.
Outside, right on cue, the massive white dragon arrived, casting a long shadow across the land. The sheer size of it made his cloak whip violently in the wind. Compared to that, his black robes suddenly looked small.
"Hmph…"
He lit the Blessing's fire, channeling it through the souls of the dead.
This wasn't normal fire. It didn't just burn flesh, it dissolved existence itself. The flames weren't heat.
They were entropy, decay, the slow collapse of everything into dust. It was the future of the universe, cold, dark, and empty. The fire was just the beginning.