Kaelen didn't run. He just… walked.
It was a leisurely, meandering pace. He idly noted that the grass was burning about fifty yards to his left. He stepped over a fissure in the rock that was glowing with magma from deep below. He side-stepped a piece of shrapnel—a helmet, maybe?—that landed near his feet, still sizzling.
The noise was... incredible. A physical wall of sound. And the heat. It was like walking into a foundry.
He was, what, a few hundred yards away now?
The big red thing—Drake, he supposed—finally noticed him. Its head, which was bigger than a house, snapped in his direction. Its previous target, the broken man in the blue armor, was forgotten.
Its massive, sun-bright eye fixed on him.
Kaelen just looked back, his expression flat. "Hey," he said, giving a half-hearted little wave.
The Drake, this 'Crimson Calamity', this apex predator that had just effortlessly annihilated an entire legion of elite cultivators... paused.
Its instincts, honed over millennia, were screaming. But the screams made no sense. The thing in front of it... it was small. It had no Qi presence. It was... nothing. A void. A man-shaped hole in the world. It didn't register as prey. It didn't register as a threat. It didn't register as anything.
And that, to a being of pure power, was the most terrifying thing of all.
The Drake roared. It was a sound meant to shatter mountains, to boil oceans, to unmake the very laws of reality. It was a roar of dominance, of confusion, of a sudden, sharp, inexplicable panic.
The air in front of it warped. The ground turned to glass.
Kaelen just put a finger in his ear.
"Shhh," he said, mostly to himself. "God, you're loud."
He reached for the sword at his hip. It wasn't a grand weapon. There was no name etched into its blade. It had no glowing runes, no pommel set with a dragon's eye. It was a simple, plain-as-dirt iron sword he'd bought in a village market three towns back because his last one... well, he'd accidentally broken it on a "Dragon-King" who turned out to be less 'king' and more 'crispy'.
The hilt was wrapped in cheap leather. The blade was already a little chipped.
As his hand closed around it, he felt... just for a microsecond... that old, familiar, stupid spark.
Maybe this one.
Maybe this one will be different.
Maybe it won't break.
He drew the sword. There was no sound. No flash of light. No screaming vortex of energy.
The Drake, its panic overriding its confusion, lunged. It opened its mouth to swallow this... this wrongness.
Kaelen looked at the oncoming tidal wave of teeth and fire and end-of-the-world.
"Just," he sighed, "be quiet."
He swung the sword.
It wasn't a 'technique'. He didn't channel his Qi. He didn't aim for a weak spot. It was just a swing. A lazy, one-handed, half-hearted flick of the wrist. The kind of motion you'd use to skip a stone across a pond.
The blade moved.
And for a single, infinite moment, the entire world went silent.
A line appeared in the air. A line of pure, perfect, shimmering nothing. It was a cut not through flesh, or scales, or even energy, but through the concept of the beast itself.
The Drake's apocalyptic roar just... stopped. Not 'faded'. Not 'cut off'. It just... ceased to exist.
The heat was gone. The pressure was gone. The shadow was gone.
The world held its breath.