Chapter 124: The Dragon Queen’s Dance
Lucifer turned to his left.
Isolde, the Winter Sovereign, stood near the edge of the balcony in her human form. Her pale hands were clenched into tight fists. Her white reptilian eyes tracked the massive descending Leviathan.
"They send a flying slug to break my sky," Isolde hissed and her voice vibrated with intense draconic outrage.
"They do," Lucifer agreed smoothly. He looked at the Dragon Queen. "Show them how a real sovereign flies."
Isolde did not wait for a second command.
The Winter Sovereign leaped off the edge of the high balcony. In mid-air, she threw her arms wide and her ice-crystal gown shattered into blinding white light.
[System: Entity Transformation Detected.]
[Target: Isolde, The Winter Sovereign.]
[Form: True Royal Dragon.]
The colossal Crystalline White Dragon materialized in the sky, Her massive diamond-scaled wings snapped open with the force of a localized hurricane.
She roared. It was a deafening sound of cracking glaciers that completely drowned out the hum of Zephyria’s engines.
Lucifer did not hesitate. He activated Zephyr’s Grace and launched himself off the balcony. He landed flawlessly between the massive crystal spikes at the base of Isolde’s neck.
"Wyrms!" Isolde’s draconic voice boomed across the floating city.
The fifty thousand sub-adult Glacial Wyrms roosting on the battlements and lower tiers responded instantly.
They launched themselves into the air in a massive swirling cloud of white scales and leathery wings! They quickly formed a tight aggressive V-formation behind their Matriarch.
They were ready to follow her into hell.
Lucifer stood securely on Isolde’s neck. The wind whipped his dark armor. The Blade of Ruin pulsed in his hand.
Above them, the Abyssal Leviathan continued its terrifying slow descent.
The city-sized rotting whale was entirely encased in black plating. Its thousands of massive barbed tentacles thrashed in the freezing air.
They dripped highly corrosive green acid that hissed as it hit the upper atmosphere.
[System Warning: Collision Imminent.]
[Time to Impact: 45 Seconds.]
"It’s too heavily armored for the brood to bite through," Isolde hissed. She banked sharply to align her trajectory with the falling beast. "Their teeth will shatter on that black rock."
"Then we don’t bite it," Lucifer commanded smoothly. "We freeze the joints and shatter the plating."
Isolde grinned and her massive jaws parted to reveal razor-sharp teeth. "With pleasure, Warlord."
The Royal Dragon surged upward with her massive wings beating with explosive kinetic force.
The five thousand Wyrms followed and accelerated to match her terrifying speed.
They flew directly into the path of the descending Leviathan!
The sheer scale difference was staggering. Isolde was a mountain of diamond and frost, but the Leviathan was the size of a human capital city.
The beast completely filled the sky above them like a massive wall of dark matter and sickly green runes.
"Split the formation!" Lucifer ordered over the comms.
Isolde roared the command to her brood.
The massive V-formation of Wyrms instantly broke apart. They divided into two flowing rivers of white scales that swept around the massive flanks of the Abyssal beast.
Isolde flew straight at the Leviathan’s gaping tooth-filled maw!
"Now!" Lucifer shouted.
Isolde inhaled sharply. She did not unleash a massive wide cone of frostfire. She focused the magic entirely into a single hyper-dense continuous beam of absolute zero liquid magic!
The beam struck the thick black plating covering the Leviathan’s massive lower jaw.
The extreme temperature shift instantly caused the demonic rock to contract violently. The black plating cracked loudly.
Simultaneously, the five thousand Glacial Wyrms flying along the beast’s flanks unleashed their own focused frostfire attacks.
They targeted the joints where the massive barbed tentacles met the creature’s main body.
The corrosive acid dripping from the tentacles instantly froze solid. It snapped the massive appendages off under their own weight.
The Leviathan shrieked in pain and fury!
The sound was a deep resonating psychic wave that tried to crush the minds of the attacking dragons. But Isolde and her brood were immune to mind-control magic, and Lucifer’s Warlord core effortlessly deflected the mental assault.
The beast thrashed wildly and tried to swat the tiny white dragons out of the sky with its remaining tentacles.
Several Wyrms were clipped and their diamond scales sparked as they were knocked off course. But the Warlord’s multiplied vitality quickly healed the blunt force trauma.
"The plating is compromised," Lucifer observed with his void-swirling eyes tracking the massive jagged cracks forming across the beast’s lower jaw. "Break it open."
Isolde stopped her breath attack. She banked sharply and accelerated her massive body to supersonic speeds!
She did not use magic. She used her pure physical mass.
Isolde slammed her colossal diamond-hard shoulder directly into the cracked plating on the Leviathan’s jaw!
CRUNCH!
The impact shattered the weakened armor completely. Massive chunks of black rock the size of small buildings tore free and plummeted toward the earth miles below.
The Leviathan’s thick pulsating purple flesh was entirely exposed.
"Dragoons! Fire on the breach!" Lucifer commanded over the comms rune.
Down on the floating city of Zephyria, the Aether-Steel Dragoons were hovering on the upper battlements waiting for the order.
They raised their heavy aether-cannons and aimed perfectly at the massive exposed wound on the beast’s jaw.
Aether-energy shot up into the sky!
The concentrated artillery barrage slammed directly into the unprotected rotting flesh of the Leviathan. The intense heat instantly vaporized massive chunks of the beast’s lower face.
It boiled its corrosive blood and sent plumes of foul-smelling green steam into the atmosphere.
The Leviathan roared again, this time in absolute blinding agony.
The beast realized it was losing the aerial dogfight. It stopped its descent toward Zephyria.
The colossal monster twisted its massive body in the air and tried to turn around and flee back toward the massive purple-rimmed eye in the sky.
It engaged a crude form of anti-gravity magic and attempted to pull itself back into the Abyssal rift.
[System Alert: Hostile Entity Attempting Retreat.]
[Status: Engaging Spatial Displacement.]
"It’s running," Isolde hissed and her wings beat hard to keep pace with the massive retreating beast. "Its hide is too thick.
Even with the breach, it will take hours to bleed it out. It will reach the rift before it dies."
"It’s not reaching the rift," Lucifer stated coldly.
He did not order the Wyrms to chase it. He did not order the Dragoons to keep firing.
Lucifer stood up on Isolde’s massive neck. The high-altitude wind ripped at his dark leather armor, but his boots remained perfectly anchored to her diamond scales.
He sheathed the Blade of Ruin.
He raised his right hand. The Gauntlet of the Void King crackled violently with thick arcs of pitch-black lightning jumping between his knuckles!
"Isolde. Get me close," Lucifer commanded.
"How close, Warlord?" the Dragon Queen asked and banked upward toward the beast’s retreating tail.
"Close enough to touch it," Lucifer said softly.
Isolde did not question him. The Winter Sovereign accelerated and pushed her massive wings to their absolute limit.
She shot through the freezing high-altitude air and closed the distance between herself and the massive fleeing Leviathan in a matter of seconds.
She pulled up alongside the beast’s colossal thrashing tail. The thick black obsidian plating passing by was jagged and deadly.
Lucifer did not hesitate.
He jumped off the dragon’s neck!
He plummeted through the empty air completely detached from any mount or magical safety net. He was falling directly toward the Leviathan’s massive shifting side.
"Void Step," Lucifer whispered.
He vanished in a flash of black light.
He materialized flawlessly directly on top of the Leviathan’s broad flat back! He completely bypassed its thick outer layer of defensive magic.
He hit the jagged plating hard and dropped to one knee to absorb the impact.
The beast was so massive it did not even register his landing!
Lucifer stood up. He was standing on a moving living mountain of black rock. Miles below him, Zephyria hovered like a tiny black dot. Miles above him, the colossal purple eye of the Abyssal Sovereign stared down.
He did not run. He walked calmly toward the center of the beast’s back.
He raised his right arm. The Gauntlet of the Void King hummed with terrifying spatial density.
"The beast thinks it can fly," Lucifer muttered to himself and a cold predatory smirk touched his lips.
He slammed his iron-clad fist directly into the thick black plating beneath his boots!
"Spatial Rend," Lucifer roared.
He did not tear a portal. He did not use Gravity Crush.
Lucifer used the Mythic gauntlet to physically grab the spatial coordinates that the Leviathan was using to maintain its anti-gravity flight.
He seized the invisible magical tethers keeping the city-sized beast in the air.
And he ripped them apart!
The physical laws of reality shrieked as Lucifer violently severed the beast’s connection to the atmosphere!
[System Warning: Massive Spatial Displacement Detected!]
[Target: Abyssal Leviathan.]
[Status: Flight Mechanics Severed.]
The massive Leviathan instantly lost its buoyancy. The crude Abyssal anti-gravity magic failed completely.
The beast let out a final terrified gurgling roar.
It dropped.
The sheer incomprehensible physical mass of the city-sized monster immediately succumbed to the natural gravity of the mortal plane.
The Leviathan plummeted out of the sky and its massive body tumbled uncontrollably through the freezing air.
Lucifer did not stay on for the ride.
The moment the beast dropped, Lucifer pushed off the black plating. He launched himself into the empty freezing air entirely disconnected from the falling monster!
He was in freefall and plummeted fifty thousand feet toward the earth.
He did not panic. He did not activate Zephyr’s Grace.
A massive white blur shot across his field of vision.
Isolde swooped underneath him. The Winter Sovereign matched his falling velocity perfectly and caught the Warlord smoothly on the thick diamond scales between her massive horns.
Lucifer landed lightly and secured his grip on her crystal spikes.
"Flawless catch, Sovereign," Lucifer noted smoothly and adjusted his dark leather gauntlets.
"I don’t drop my rider," Isolde hissed proudly and her massive wings snapped open to arrest their descent. She banked sharply and leveled out a safe distance away from the falling beast.
They watched the Leviathan fall.
The colossal monster plummeted for miles. It was a massive black shape dropping out of the bruised-purple sky. It hit the surface of the earth far to the south of the burning human capital.
BOOM!
The impact was cataclysmic!
A massive mushroom cloud of dust, dirt, and shattered black obsidian erupted into the lower atmosphere.
The shockwave visibly rippled across the city. The beast was entirely pulverized upon impact and its massive body flattened across miles of ruined terrain!
[Boss Eliminated: Abyssal Leviathan (Level 70)]
[Experience Gain Suspended: Mortal Level Cap Reached.]
Lucifer swiped the notification away.
The sky around Zephyria was completely clear. The Abyssal swarm had been frozen and shattered. The massive siege beast had been grounded and crushed.
The first wave of the invasion was entirely broken.
"The airspace is secure, Warlord," Isolde announced and banked her massive body in a slow victorious circle above the floating city.
Below them, the five thousand Glacial Wyrms roared in triumph with their voices echoing across the heavens.
"Return to the keep," Lucifer ordered smoothly. He kept his void eyes locked on the massive unblinking purple eye hovering high above them.
The eye had watched its entire Vanguard get systematically dismantled. It did not look angry. It looked incredibly terrifyingly focused.
The true war had only just begun.