A quiet, warded chamber beneath the Sorsogon Vanguard outpost had been secured for the ritual. The stone floor was covered in intricate, glowing silver arrays drawn by Captain Kashima himself.
Krad sat cross-legged in the center of the room. Thanks to the Elixir of the First Dawn and the massive feast at the plaza, his physical body was in pristine condition. His torn thigh muscle was perfectly knit. His micro-fractured ribs were solid. For the first time since he had stepped into the Rage Tournament, he felt completely, flawlessly whole.
But as he looked at the three people standing outside the silver array, the weight of the moment pressed down on him.
Queen Hania stood with her hands clasped in prayer, her silver eyes filled with maternal terror. Mist stood rigidly beside her, his hand resting on the hilt of his Celestial-tier sword, prepared to draw it and execute his student if things went wrong. Captain Kashima stood at the forefront, his stormy gray eyes as hard as iron.
"The array will isolate your physical body from your soul," Kashima instructed, his voice echoing in the quiet stone room. "You must force your consciousness inward. Enter your Innate Domain, find the beast and subjugate twenty percent of its essence, or it will subjugate you."
"And if it tries to eat me?" Krad asked, trying to force a half-smile.
"Then Mist and I will ensure your body does not leave this room," Kashima replied, completely devoid of humor.
Krad swallowed hard. He nodded once, closing his golden eyes.
He slowed his breathing. Inhale for seven. Hold for four. Exhale for eight. He felt the ambient mana in the room fade away. He felt the cold stone beneath him vanish. He focused entirely on the cold, hollow, pulling sensation in the absolute center of his chest.
Drop.
The sensation of falling was instantaneous and violent. Krad's consciousness plunged through the dark abyss of his own mind, accelerating until the darkness suddenly shattered like glass.
Krad opened his eyes.
He was no longer in the Vanguard outpost. He was standing on the surface of a perfectly still, endless black ocean. The water felt like solid glass beneath the soles of his boots.
Above him, the sky was a terrifying, suffocating expanse of pitch-black space, illuminated by not one, but thousands of massive, glowing moons.
This was his Innate Domain. The landscape of his soul.
"You dare return to my presence, little jar?"
The voice did not come from the air. It vibrated up through the black ocean, vibrating Krad's very bones. It was a voice of grinding glaciers and dying stars.
The black ocean in front of Krad violently erupted.
A geyser of silver water shot thousands of feet into the air. From the depths, the Moon Eater emerged.
Krad had felt its power before, but seeing it in its true, unsealed form was mind-breaking. The Bakunawa was a colossal, serpentine dragon of abyssal darkness. Its scales were the size of houses, shifting with the constellations of a forgotten universe. Its eyes were twin supernovas, burning with a furious, ancient hunger.
Just the sheer wind of its emergence sent Krad skidding backward across the glass-like water.
"I didn't come to beg," Krad shouted, planting his feet, refusing to be blown away by the beast's primordial aura.
The Bakunawa lowered its massive, horned head until its supernova eyes were level with Krad.
"You seek to command me. I can taste the arrogance of the mortals who sent you. They want you to leash me. To siphon twenty percent of my cosmic essence to fight their petty, terrestrial wars."
"I need your power to stop Xerxes!" Krad yelled back. "He's coming to rip you out of me! If he does, he'll use you to destroy the world!"
"Let him try!" the beast roared, a sound that cracked the thousands of moons in the sky above. "I am the inevitable entropy! I am the end of light! I will consume the Corrupted Mage, and then I will consume you, and then I will consume this pitiful world!"
The Bakunawa lunged.
Its massive jaws, lined with teeth like jagged mountains, snapped shut exactly where Krad was standing.
But Krad wasn't there.
Moon Step.
Krad reappeared a hundred feet in the air, directly above the dragon's snout. He wasn't relying on borrowed silver light. He was relying on Mist's brutal training, Dani's tactical footwork, and his own Unbreakable Spirit.
He chambered his fist, twisting his hips in mid-air, transferring every ounce of kinetic energy into his knuckles.
"Fundamental Strike!" Krad roared, driving his fist directly into the bridge of the Bakunawa's nose. The impact echoed like a thunderclap across the silent ocean.
For a mortal to strike a god-level Mythical Beast with raw, physical martial arts was an absurdity. But this was Krad's soul. In here, willpower was physics.
The massive dragon flinched, its head snapping downward toward the water.
"You insolent speck!" the Bakunawa bellowed, thrashing its colossal tail. The black ocean surged into a tidal wave hundreds of feet high, crashing down upon Krad.
Krad didn't run. He dove directly into the crushing wave, using the evasive maneuvers he had perfected while dodging Brick Stonefist's Stone Bombardment. He twisted through the heavy water, bursting out the other side.
"I'm not a speck!" Krad screamed, launching himself off a floating chunk of frozen water. "I am the master of this vessel!"
He drove his knee into the dragon's jaw, then flipped backward, landing lightly on the ocean's surface.
The Bakunawa roared in absolute fury. Its silver eyes flared, and the gravity in the Innate Domain shifted. A suffocating, crushing pressure slammed down on Krad's mind, a thousand times heavier than Brick's Crushing Embrace. It was the pure, unfiltered killing intent of a primordial entity trying to erase a mortal ego.
Krad's knees buckled. Blood poured from his nose. His vision went white.
"Submit," the Moon Eater hissed, its jaws opening to swallow Krad's consciousness entirely.
No, Krad thought, forcing his hands flat against the glass-like ocean. I won't let you consume me.
Krad poured every ounce of his soul into one desperate, upward palm strike, aiming directly at the center of the Bakunawa's descending forehead. His hand connected with the beast's shimmering scales.
FLASH.
The impact didn't cause physical damage. Instead, the collision of Krad's absolute willpower and the Bakunawa's ancient soul created a bridge.
The black ocean vanished. The moons shattered.
Krad was violently pulled into a memory that did not belong to him.
He was soaring through an infinite sea of stars.
Krad looked down at his own hands, but they weren't hands. They were massive, shimmering silver claws. He was the Bakunawa. But he didn't feel angry. He didn't feel the gnawing, agonizing hunger that constantly plagued him now.
He felt... proud. He felt purposeful.