The Final Heart waited for them. Suspended ahead within arterial arches and spiraling auric veins, the heart loomed like a sun forged from flesh and gold. It was vast beyond reckoning large enough that its surface curved away from the eye, its pulsations slow and deep, each contraction bending light, sound, and gravity around it. Veins thicker than fortress walls crawled across its surface, glowing with molten bioluminescence. Every pulse sent tidal waves of pressure through the surrounding caverns, rattling bone pillars miles away.
Artorius stood upon the ridge overlooking the heart, lance grounded, wings folded tight against the turbulent air. Around him gathered the force that could stand in defiance of what waited inside. Royal Dragons, not armies, also some noble blooded dragons and lesser blooded dragons who were either brave enough or stupid enough to join them.
Behind them, the army who was too weak to resist a Dragon Roar maintained their distance. Siege platforms made from calcified arteries anchored themselves along ridgelines. Draconic ballistae the size of towers were drawn back with screaming sinew. Spellcasters chanted, their magic trembling under the oppressive gravity of the heart.
"Fire," the Sword Dragon commanded. A hundred artillery weapons discharged as one. Bolts screamed through the air. Flames lanced forth in fiery white-hot annihilation. Lightning spears the size of tree trunks ripped through the chamber, cracking space behind them. Giant-forged arrows glimmered silver as they fell like meteor rain and great boulders the size of cars went arching through the air.
The Final Heart was struck. Explosions bloomed across its surface vast, rolling detonations that tore open layers of tissue and sent geysers of radiant ichor spraying into the air. The chamber shook violently. Veins ruptured. Flesh tore. Entire arterial towers collapsed. The heart recoiled and convulsed inward.
"Again," Sword Dragon ordered coldly. They fired again. And again. And again. Layer by layer, the heart's outer defenses were stripped away. The golden membrane charred black. Massive rents opened, exposing chambers of raw, luminous tissue beneath. Pulses became erratic. Veins spasmed.
Then the heart opened. A colossal orifice irised open at its center, tendrils of flesh peeling back like petals. A path was cleared for them. Sword Dragon raised his blade. "Move in!" Artorius wasn't sure that was a wise choice but what other option did they have left.
The dragons who made up this strike force surged forward. The Sword Dragon led the charge, blazing ahead with authority. Ocean Dragon followed, tides of watery pressure coiling around her form. Fragrance Dragon drifted like a lethal dream, spores of perception-altering mist trailing behind her. Gem Dragon thundered forward, crystalline armor refracting the chaos into prismatic shields.
Twilight and Dawn flew as one dark and light entwined, eclipses forming between their wings. Psychic Dragon hovered near Artorius, eyes closed, mind already stretching ahead. And Artorius, he leapt forward with wings snapping open, lance blazing with power, he crossed the threshold into the heart alongside the others. The moment they entered, the heart closed behind them. The fleshy aperture slammed shut like the jaws of a trap.
"Well that is not great," he commented as he looked behind them. Outside he was pretty sure he heard shouts and roars followed by clashes.
"It had an army of its own!?" the fragrance dragon asked out loud then honed in on the shadow dragon.
The shadow dragon shook his head, "No… not unless it gained a class." Artorius was able to see beyond the heart thanks to his Draconic eyes, for the brief moment he was able to peer out thanks to the crack in his collar he saw a ghastly sight.
A great horde of dead dragons were clashing with their army. They moved with eerie grace as the broken bodies which had littered the place outside were a waiting trap that came alive. Artorius did not reveal his finds not only to keep his hand hidden but also there was nothing they can do.
Try as she might, whatever blows the Gem dragon rained down on the heart did nothing, they were trapped here and there was only one way forward. "Let's continue," the Sword Dragon uttered.
The interior of the Heart was a vast hollow sphere stretched infinitely in all directions, its walls formed of rotating sigils, collapsing organs, and fragments of shattered probability. Gravity had no fixed direction. Light barely existed. The place was swallowed by emptiness.
At the center of it all was a broken egg where sat a young dragon. It was no longer a hatchling. It had grown. Its body was immense, dwarfing even the Royal Dragons. Scales swallowing the light. Beside him floated the Phantasmal Dragoness, her form flickering between states, eyes filled with awe and terror.
Artorius used inspect on it and what that revealed shattered his whole understanding of everything. [True Void Dragonling — Level 31]
All he focused on was the word true which was the exact same word he had in his race. "This couldn't be," he muttered to himself. There was no way he was also an immortal descendant.
Noxiris looked down upon them and smiled. "Have you come," he asked calmly, voice echoing in every direction at once, "to bow?" The words hung heavy in the air.
"No," Sword Dragon answered. He raised his blade and pointed it directly at Noxiris' throat. What else was there to say?
Noxiris laughed. The sound erased echoes. "Ah," he said. "Defiance." Shadows peeled away from the walls and two figures stepped forth, the Infernal Dragon and the Sand Dragon.
Artorius' blood ran cold as the Shadow Dragon drifted from the Royals' line and joined them without a word. Looking at them, their eyes were pitch black and empty as if they were possessed.
The Fragrance dragon recoiled in horror just like everyone else and uttered, "Possession."
Noxiris spread his wings. "Welcome," he said, voice deepening, resonating with the Heart itself. "to the dawn of a new age." And the Heart beat.
Sword Dragon was unfazed by this earth shattering reveal. He spoke decisively. "Go." The chamber exploded into motion.
The Psychic Dragon opened his eyes as he honed in on the Phanstasmal dragoness. She shot ectoplasm at him which he raised a psychic shield that was able to hold back the intangible energy.
The sea met the infernal flame as the Ocean dragoness clashed with the Infernal dragon. The Ocean Dragoness surged forward, her wings unfurling into vast sheets of living water, tides coiling around her body like serpents. The Infernal Dragon met her charge head-on, fire roaring from his maw, heat distorting the chamber into a blazing haze.
Steam exploded outward in a blinding shockwave as water and fire annihilated each other on contact. Entire sections of heart-tissue were flash-boiled into vapor, arterial walls collapsing into sizzling ruin.
The twilight and dawn dragoness let their light and darkness entwine as they let it shoot towards the Shadow dragon. He did not dodge but went into the shadows. The beam passed through empty air as he appeared from their own shadows.
Shadows surged upward, attempting to swallow the Dawn Dragoness whole. Twilight intercepted, spreading her wings wide as darkness answered her call, stopping him in his tracks. Dawn countered instantly her scales blazing like a newborn star as she drove a spear of pure morning straight through the shadow mass.
The Gem dragoness and the Sand dragon exchanged blows, sandstorms scoured gemstone armor. Each impact rang like a bell.
At the center stood the three of them at the head; the Sword, the Fragrance and him against the Void dragon. "Are you sure you are enough?" the void dragon asked as it stood up. Artorius noticed it was like a petulant child playing with its food.
The Sword Dragon struck first. His blade came down like a great verdict, cleaving space itself. The strike carried years of mastery, a sword art refined and honed. It hit… but nothing happened. The cut passed through Noxiris' neck without resistance, not because it missed but because there was nothing there to cut.
The Fragrance Dragon exhaled. The chamber filled with an invisible haze of conceptual toxins that attacked perception, memory, causality. Even Royal Dragons would falter under it. Noxiris inhaled. The mist disappeared into his maw to be consumed.
Artorius roared and charged, not holding back in the least bit as he went all out. His lance blazing with plasma plus whatever he uncovered of probability. He struck with everything he had learned—endless, randomness, inevitability, certainty unified into a single thrust.
The lance hit Noxiris' chest. Reality screamed. Artorius was flung backward like a comet, slamming into the heart-wall hard enough to crack it. Noxiris looked down at the dent in his scales. "Oh," he said pleasantly. "You can hurt me."
He spread his wings. "And that," he smiled, "means I can enjoy this."
Sword Dragon surged forward to meet him, blade already blazing. The weapon sang, its edge stretching into impossible geometries. The metal reflected something which was well beyond them all and each swing that the sword dragon made carried just a bit of its father's power.
The void dragon backed away from slashes until it was near its egg and broke a chunk off that it used to fight back. Blade met void-chunk, the collision sent rings of distortion rippling outward. "Where did you get that sword?" it asked.
The sword dragon did not answer, he only continued fighting and finally revealed his own Law. Artorius felt it as he got out of the wall he crashed into, it was like a sword at his neck. Finally he understood what he was seeing with his Draconic eyes, Sharpness. He saw edges and he saw where things ended.
The Sword Dragon swung. Reality was torn like a piece of cloth. The slash left a visible wound in the air itself, a pale, luminous scar that did not close. It hummed softly, as if space had been cut and forgotten how to heal. Each follow-up strike layered more of those wounds, crisscrossing the chamber in impossible geometries.
Sharpness was about forcing reality to admit that it could be cut.
Noxiris' movements slowed by a fraction as the blade struck out, this time biting into his shoulder. The wound did not bleed.A portion of him simply stopped being where it had been. Noxiris glanced at it, intrigued.
Behind the Sword Dragon, the Fragrance Dragoness rose. Her wings unfurled fully, and Artorius felt the world inhale. The fragrance dragon also revealed her own Law, Aroma.
A wave passed through the chamber, unseen yet overwhelming. It was warmth, memory, recognition. The smell of rain on stone. Of blood on steel. Of grief that never faded and joy that never repeated. The Heart itself shuddered as the Law took hold.
Noxiris straightened as he kept on getting pushed back and couldn't hold back his laughter which was deep and genuine. "Beautiful," he said. "Truly." The void around him collapsed inward. "Let me show you mine." The Heart dimmed. Sound died. Everything collapsed as emptiness swallowed them whole. "Nothingnes"
The chamber hollowed out. Existence thinned. And Noxiris stepped forward, unburdened by meaning itself. The Laws faltered. Sharpness struggled to define nothing. Aroma found no surface to cling to.
Meanwhile looking at the other fights it was either stalemates or they were losing. The Psychic and Ocean dragon were holding their ground against their foes but the Twilight & Dawn and Gem dragoness were getting overwhelmed. He watched as the Phantasmal dragon flickered in and out of existence and the Psychic unleashed thought bombs upon her.
The waves that the Ocean dragon was falling forth folded into a singular point trying to crush the infernal dragon. Water screamed as it was forced beyond its own limits, forming supercritical flows that stripped anything down to its bones. The Infernal Dragon answered with his own flames that consumed everything at its edges.
The twin dragon fought back-to-back, long perfecting their dance. Together, they should have been unstoppable but the Shadow dragon proved to be a much deadlier foe. Every time Dawn's light struck, it passed through him as though striking nothing. Every time Twilight tried to press him down, he slipped away, refusing to be tied down.
And then there was the worst fight of it. The Gem Dragoness stood amid a collapsing basin of crystallized tissue, her radiant body fractured but still brilliant. The Sand Dragon was everywhere. Sand grains finer than dust swirled around her, compressing, grinding, eroding.
If ever there was a time to step up it was now. Taking a deep breath he honed in on what could save him, finding his own Law. He had been chasing patterns. Endlessness, the infinite branching of what could be. Randomness, the chaos of what might happen. Inevitability, the crushing weight of what must happen. Cause, the comforting lie that everything followed reason.
There were all descriptions, not truths. He saw how poorly it ended for him when he tried to put them together. They were just faucets of a greater, more whole truth, Chance! He finally saw the whole picture before his mind's eye. Artorius stepped forward and probability shifted all around him.
He stopped trying to see every outcome. Stopped trying to weigh futures. Stopped trying to control probability. And in that surrender, he finally gained true understanding of the law he had been chasing.
Chance was the permission for reality to wobble. The place where certainty loosened its grip. Where inevitability blinked. Where cause failed to fully explain effect. Chance was not the guarantee of victory. It was the right to try when logic said it was over.
[New Law Learned — Chance]
+5 Luck
Entering the fight a blade meant to bisect his spine passed a hair's breadth wide. A void ripple erased the space beside him instead of the space he occupied. Debris fell where it needed to, when it needed to, without reason. Artorius felt lighter and more than that Luckier.
And that terrified him because he understood now that luck could abandon him just as easily it embraced him. It was a cruel mistress like that. But it hadn't. Not yet.
The Sword Dragon felt it too. His next swing, one that should have been parried, slipped through a gap that hadn't existed a heartbeat earlier. The Blade of the Dragon King struck Noxiris' flank, carving a deep gouge.
Noxiris struck back, emptiness blooming outward in waves that erased attacks mid-flight, hollowed chunks out of the Heart, and unmade entire trajectories. But every time he should have landed a killing blow it missed. Barely. Infuriatingly.
The Fragrance Dragoness followed up with her scream that flooded the chamber with lingering consequence. Noxiris' movements grew heavier, every action dragging residue behind it like a comet's tail.
The Void Dragon was forced fully onto the defensive as they were slowly chipping away at him. They seemed to be able to win this thing and take down this great foe. Then the balance broke elsewhere. Artorius felt it like a knife in his chest. The Gem Dragoness screamed. He turned in time to see it.
The Sand Dragon had finally found his opening. Dunes compressed into a singularity of grinding force, time and matter crushed together. The Gem Dragoness' radiant body fractured, cracks racing across her crystalline scales like spiderwebs of light.
She looked up at the Fragrance dragon and smiled sadly before she shattered into a thousand pieces. "NO!" the Fragrance Dragoness screamed, the fragments that used to be the Gem dragon raining down. A Royal Dragon had fallen and at that instant the whole battlefield shifted.
Grief poured from the Fragrance dragon and that was the last mistake she made. Her pain and sorrow was an opening that Noxiris took advantage of as he moved in ruthlessly. He was suddenly there, void claw closing around Fragrance Dragoness' chest. Her Aroma flared desperately, trying to stain him but nothingness swallowed it.
He crushed her. The void wrapped around her chest, sinking into scale, bone, soul. Her Law screamed as it tried to cling, to stain, to leave something, anything behind. Her scream cut off mid-note as her body flung away.
The Sword Dragon roared, a sound of pure, wordless fury and struck with everything he had left. Sharpness flared to its absolute limit, carving wounds that refused to close. It wasn't enough. They both knew it. Noxiris straightened, uninjured in any way that mattered. "This was entertaining," he said calmly. "But it ends now."
The emptiness surged. Sword Dragon staggered, blade trembling. Artorius dropped to one knee, Chance flickering wildly, probabilities collapsing faster than they could reform as the Void dragon cut off what he had been doing.
They locked eyes. Understanding passed between them without words. They could not win. Not like this. Artorius looked up at Sword Dragon, bloodied, broken and pointed to the collar around his neck. The mana suppression band pulsed faintly. "If we want to live," Artorius said calmly, "you need to take this off. Now."
Sword Dragon hesitated only a fraction of a second. Then his blade flashed and the collar shattered. Finally at long last he was free. And that is when he heard the voice.
"LET ME IN!"
The voice did not echo. It simply existed inside Artorius' skull, vast and heavy and undeniable, like a continent pressing against the inside of his mind. He had been hearing whispers at the edge ever since he stepped foot here.
Artorius wasn't sure it was a good idea but he watched as the Sword Dragon was driven backward. Noxiris' claw passed through the chamber in a lazy arc, and the Sword Dragon met it with his blade made from his father's scale. Steel sang and sharpness screamed its defiance into the void. However try as he might he could not stand against the young immortal blooded dragon.
He crashed into the inner wall of the Heart, gouging a trench through luminous tissue and collapsing in a storm of bioluminescent ichor. The blade skidded across the floor, embedding itself upright, humming angrily as if offended by its owner's impotence.
Noxiris regarded him closely as he was the only one left standing. He peered at him with those eyes that devoured absence and surprise flashed through its face. "How do we have the same race rank?"
"LET ME IN!"
Artorius could only shrug his shoulders, "Do you want to talk about it?"
Snorting, the young dragon shook its head, "There can only be one of us left standing." He raised one claw and the world seemed to scream. Artorius saw it then, saw it with terrifying clarity. The arc of nothingness would fail to end him.
He could only sigh as he was pushed to a corner. "I did not want to do this."
"LET ME IN!"
"Fine," he drew upon his mutation of Draconic Empowerment and let it in.
Something vast and old surged through his thanks to the channel his mutation opened. Draconic Empowerment was not possession by force; it was consent, a bridge built. He felt it lock into place along his spine, coil around his heart, and then expand.
Power flooded him not violently, but inevitably, like an ocean pouring into a basin that had never known water. Light traced him, probabilities collapsed into elegant, terrible certainty. Artorius' breath caught as something ancient slid fully into mind.
Not invading. Not conquering. Simply… arriving, as though it had always been there and Artorius had merely stopped pretending otherwise. The Heart shuddered in joy with recognition.
Artorius felt his spine straighten against his will. His wings twitched, then folded with a precision he did not consciously command. His heartbeat slowed, each pulse falling into a rhythm older than blood, older than flesh. The pain faded—not healed, not erased, simply… deprioritized.
A sigh echoed inside his skull. It was not weary. It was not relieved. It was satisfied. "Ah. How great it is to be back on mortal coil." The words carried mass. Entire epochs rested in that single sound.
Noxiris froze. For the first time genuine uncertainty crossed the young hatching's face as he felt something was off and his instincts were telling him to Run.
Artorius no, the thing puppeting Artorius' body lifted its head and spoke to him in his mind. "So you are the one who killed my grandson."
-
Author Note: Think Skyfall song from 007 playing especially the line… This is the end.
Anyways do you think Artorius will come to regret this.
Chapter 46 Recap
Gained +5 Luck