Chapter 64: Bluehorn Earth Dragon
The ground trembled.
In the distance, a figure approached, small at first, almost insignificant against the already devastated horizon. But with every step it took, the pressure over the area grew, slow and relentless, like the weight of something that felt no need to hurry because it already knew how things would end.
The steps grew heavier. The figure, larger.
And as it drew closer, its features began to take shape.
Large. As large as a house, perhaps more. A robust body covered in a grey-blue armour of layered scales forged by the earth itself. Four powerful legs. A thick tail ending in a sphere bristling with spikes. And at the front of everything else, a massive blue horn jutting from its forehead.
A Bluehorn Earth Dragon.
Elena recognized it immediately, and the moment she did, her voice cut across the battlefield.
"Everyone fall back. Now!" Her voice rang out firm and powerful enough to be heard far and wide, carrying a hint of anxiety, and perhaps even a trace of fear.
Then she reached for the communication device at her side and sent the signal she and Cedric had established in advance, the one meant for situations that exceeded anything they had originally accounted for, the one that meant he needed to show up.
Seconds passed.
No response.
’That fucker...’
She channeled mana into the device a second time, and this time instead of a signal she sent a voice message.
"Get your ass over here," she said, in a tone that left absolutely no room for interpretation. "Or I swear I’ll bury your ass underground when this is over."
The urgency in her words wasn’t fear. It was the clear eyed awareness of someone who had just identified something that could not be handled with the resources currently available.
The Bluehorn Earth Dragon belonged to the earth dragon lineage.
A born Beast Lord, not a made one. Its aura was already at the peak of A-rank, and not simply the peak. It was practically standing on the threshold of what came next. Close to S-rank.
Almost an Overlord, which, for beasts, is a Beast Emperor.
These creatures were categorically different from Beast Lords. Not just because of their own devastating personal strength, a force of nature in the most literal sense, but because of the influence they exerted over other beasts.
That influence was terrifying in its own right.
Under a Beast Emperor, a tide didn’t just become more dangerous. It became destructive in a way that no amount of preparation could fully account for. You didn’t come out of something like that unscathed. It didn’t matter how ready you were.
She couldn’t fight it. No one on this battlefield could.
And she knew it.
But she still had to do something, anything, to slow its advance.
Before she could move, the Naga struck first.
And then, in the same instant, every beast on the field responded.
A deep, thunderous roar erupted from the direction of the Bluehorn Earth Dragon. It was immediately answered by others from every corner of the battlefield, all of them at once, as if the entire field had become a single synchronized voice. At the same moment, the eyes of every beast ignited with a crimson glow.
’It’s already started.’
Her expression hardened.
Dragon Might.
A racial ability of dragon lineage, a command that spread like an invisible tide across the battlefield. It suppressed enemies while empowering allies, stripping beasts of fear and forcing them into a violent, instinct-driven frenzy, amplifying every shred of aggression already buried within them.
The effect was immediate.
The beasts went berserk.
What had once been a brutal but structured battle collapsed into something far worse. Any semblance of a defensive line began to crumble under the pressure. Adventurers were forced backward, slowly at first, then faster, as the forest itself was trampled into submission beneath the advancing tide.
The footsteps of the Bluehorn Earth Dragon grew heavier, closer, each one shaking the ground as if the earth itself were giving way beneath it.
Elena’s jaw tightened.
Even without the Naga standing in her way, she couldn’t stop that thing alone.
But she had to try.
’Damn it... where the hell are you, Father.’
Then her power erupted.
There was no gradual rise, no warning, just an instant detonation of energy that swallowed her whole. Golden-orange light burst outward, dense and pulsing like a furnace finally allowed to breathe. Her dark hair shifted into a reddish hue, lifting slightly as the energy coursed through her body. Her greatsword ignited in flame.
She had activated her bloodline.
She dropped into a charging stance and in the next moment launched toward the Naga like a bolt of lightning,
no more games, no more calculations. It was time to end this.
The Naga saw her coming and didn’t hesitate.
It had activated its own bloodline as well.
Both heads opened at once, each already charged with a different energy. Blue and green took shape between the jaws, coiled around each other in an unstable spiral, and were hurled forward as a single combined attack, fast, lethal.
Elena didn’t slow down for even an instant.
She had no intention of defending.
She was already inside the attack’s trajectory when she raised her sword and released a single slash.
An arc of pure orange energy separated from the blade, compact, concentrated, and drove head-on into the Naga’s spiral.
The collision was immediate. An explosion of energy erupted outward in every direction, carving a crater into the ground beneath it. The shockwave swept across the battlefield, catching nearby beasts in its radius, some were killed outright, others hurled away like broken debris, along with several adventurers who had no time to escape its reach.
For a single heartbeat, the two forces remained locked in place, suspended in an unnatural stalemate, as if the entire world had stopped to witness the moment before collapse.
Then the orange shifted.
It didn’t yield.
It advanced.
The blue-green spiral fractured from within, dissolving like glass under sustained pressure, and Elena’s slash continued its trajectory without slowing for even a fraction of a second.
The Naga barely had time to register what was happening.
Then it was cut through.
A single clean strike divided its body in two, and the heads fell in opposite directions, still open in an expression of delayed surprise.
Elena didn’t stay to watch.
She charged forward, intercepting the trajectory of the Bluehorn Earth Dragon, which was already breaking through the battlefield’s edge. Without hesitating, she drove her greatsword into the ground with everything she had left.
The impact carved a crater nearly ten meters across.
But that was only the beginning.
A powerful wave of mana propagated through the earth beneath her. The ground shook, imperceptibly at first, deep underground, then with growing violence as reddish cracks split open across the surface like glowing veins on skin about to tear.
When the Bluehorn Earth Dragon was fifty meters from her, the ground erupted.
Not upward. Forward, a directed explosion, a wave of molten rock, magma, and massive debris that launched itself like a living avalanche directly into the creature’s path.
The impact was devastating.
It had cost her almost everything she had left. But it was the most she could do in that moment.
For an instant, those watching from a distance felt their hearts stop.
Then the silence broke.
The magma collapsed in on itself, and through the debris and smoke, the dragon’s silhouette re-emerged, still moving. Its blue horn glowed with intensified light, charged with energy as it pushed forward.
Slowed. But not stopped.
It reached Elena in an instant.
The blow caught her full.
Her body launched backward like a projectile, crossing the battlefield until it drove into the great stump with an impact that shook the entire structure, and with it, the city above.
Adventurers cried out in shock.
Citizens screamed in terror.
Elena remained embedded in the hollow carved into the stump’s surface by the force of her impact.
Motionless.
Alive or dead, it was impossible to tell.
The beast didn’t slow to confirm it.
It continued its advance, each step crushing into the ground with monstrous weight, ignoring every adventurer who tried to stand in its way as if they were nothing more than debris rather than living beings.
It was nearly at the center of the battlefield when the air shifted.
A fluctuation of mana appeared from nowhere, sudden, too precise to be accidental. The beast had barely registered it before something struck it with considerable force.
An enormous shard of ice, sharp as a spear, plunged from above.
The impact was hard and loud. The ice shattered into thousands of fragments of cold energy, but the kinetic force behind it was enough to interrupt the beast’s advance, pushing it back several steps.
Not enough to hurt it seriously.
Enough to stop it.
The six eyes of the beast, three on each side of its enormous head, shifted slowly, in unison, toward a single point above.
There, suspended in the air as though it had been waiting all along, a figure had appeared.
Cedric wore an annoyed expression. Mildly irritated, rather than truly serious.
"Tch," he murmured, tilting his head slightly. "Didn’t go quite as planned. Oh well."
He was clearly unsatisfied with the result. He had known the beast was powerful, had known it would require more than brute force, which was exactly why he had waited, had let things develop.
He figured that with the Duke nowhere to be found and Elena tied up here, he could let the beast handle the hard part, take her out, or at least put her down for a while, while he set up something strong and precise enough to land a real hit before the actual fight began.
The plan had worked, halfway.
Elena was out of the fight, or close enough. That part had gone as intended.
But the beast had proven more resilient than expected. The attack hadn’t done nearly enough damage.
And now Cedric found himself staring at something he would have very much preferred not to face alone.