Chapter 105: Encounter
Across a past life behind the screen, Lucia had tracked the staggering complexity and depth of the Leyndell underground waterways through the digital grid, but it was strictly when his own living eyes audited this real subterranean labyrinth that his intellect decoded how truly gargantuan this forgotten space was.
Colossal stone blocks were piled high to form towering corridors rising tens of meters into the dark, and the central drainage trenches resembled rushing, black rivers. Within the deeper shadows of the distance, thousands of iron platforms, arched aqueducts, and jagged cross-sections were vaguely materialized by the damp air. This architecture could hardly be cataloged as a mere drainage system. Instead, it mirrored nothing short of a colossal canyon, carved from towering subterranean rock faces and anchored by roaring, toxic currents.
As the column of four pressed their boots deeper into the dark, the ambient gloom grew increasingly heavy and suffocating. Strange, wet noises continuously echoed from the stone shadows—a chaotic chorus compressing the sharp chattering of rodents, the heavy scraping of scaled bellies against the flagstones, and a sequence of deep, labored respirations.
Within this oppressive environment where the primordial energy of the Crucible was exceptionally dense, even the spiritual intuition clutched within the centers of the two demigods sustained a constant, maddening interference. Their minds could merely isolate the broad geographic direction of the threatening entities, lacking the capacity to accurately decode their specific species or physical dimensions.
"If our boots maintain this un-mapped course, will our column not eventually lose its tracking lines?" Tolisha whispered, tucking her arms tightly against her chest as the raw nervousness mapping her face became increasingly difficult to conceal.
"Banish the alarm, little sister. My memory has archived every solitary structural turn our heels have cleared across the flags," Lucia reassured her with an easy warmth. "Even if our vanguard isolates zero administrative leads across this sun, the absolute worst tally on our ledger will be to simply retrace our path backward to the well."
He cast a brief glance over his shoulder at Kristoff, who was maintaining a hyper-vigilant, defensive shield beside the young Perfumer, a relaxed smile breaking across his features. "Furthermore... your personal knight is permanently anchoring your flank to guarantee your safety."
Tolisha lifted her chin slightly, her bright eyes executing a rapid, shy glance toward the handsome, unyielding profile of the Ancient Dragon Knight, before snapping her face away toward the far wall. Yet, despite her defensive posture, her boots casually adjusted their stride to press a fraction closer to his iron shoulder plate.
Kristoff remained completely steadfast, reliable, and un-smiling across the march, but Lucia—even with his back turned to the pair—keenly sensed the knight's heartbeat suddenly execute a frantic, hyper-accelerated velocity.
Tsk... still entirely too green across the yard, the dragon prince chuckled silently to himself.
Naturally, their vanguard was not searching the dark without a tactical compass. Lucia, who commanded the single most potent reservoir of divine grace among the four, initiated a specialized search sequence—weaving his spiritual focus and draconic will into a dense, sweeping net, exactly as his hands had executed during the treatment of the royal Omen youth. He strained his senses to map the exact distribution and flow of the primordial Crucible currents undulating through this subterranean wilderness.
The sectors where the primal power of the Crucible achieved its absolute highest concentration presumably defined the secure strongholds where the exiled Omen-Born established their hidden campfires.
The four adventurers navigated another complex ravine of broken masonry. Suddenly, Lucia's boots came to a dead halt. He clamped his eyelids shut, analyzing the vibrations passing through the damp air for a brief watch, before his eyes snapped open, his voice dropping into a sharp executive command. "A massive vanguard of high-vitality entities carrying un-diluted Crucible energy has just breached the fifteen-hundred-meter perimeter. Their velocity is exceptionally high—DRESS YOUR LINES! BE ON GUARD!"
Radahn acted instantly, his heavy gauntlets crossing behind his mantle to un-sheathe the two colossal greatswords from his back, his fingers locking around the grips. Parallel to his move, Kristoff raised his heavy iron shield, executing a disciplined sweep to securely lock Tolisha within the absolute center of their tactical formation. The young girl un-capped two silver perfume vials from her satchel, discharging two brilliant patches of luminous mist—one a vibrant crimson, the other a deep indigo—to wrap their armor in a pair of advanced alchemical enhancements: Wild Aromatic and the Ironclad Shield.
Seconds down the clock, a deafening, chaotic thunder of frantic footsteps violently echoed around a massive stone buttress a few hundred meters ahead. Hundreds of indistinct, low-slung silhouettes tore through the gloom. As the stampede cleared the darkness to meet the light, the four adventurers suddenly realized the vanguard comprised an immense swarm of gargantuan sewer rats—creatures matching the physical dimensions of mountain goats—fleeing in a state of absolute, mindless frenzy!
Yet, trailing right behind the heels of the rodent host, vastly grander predators of the deep warrens gradually un-veiled their parameters. Massive subterranean lobsters that out-registered the dimensions of royal carriages surged through the muck, accompanied by giant land crabs whose spiked legs spanned a width of more than ten meters, and a handful of mutated, heavy-jawed cavern lizards that looked exactly like primitive earth dragons!
Radahn's expression hardened into a grim, battle-hungry knot. "By what logic do so many alpha beasts execute a synchronized stampede? This baseline numbers game is genuinely troublesome!"
A surging, brilliant azure light violently ignited along the cutting edges of his twin blades, and twelve distinct streams of high-density starlight mana coalesced within the high rafters, formatting a radiant, hovering array of phalanx glintstones poised to execute a downward execution strike. On the parallel flank, Kristoff's gauntlet also ignited with the ancient, un-abridged incantations of the Erdtree lineage, preparing his steel to receive the brunt of the beast horde.
In their estimation, while these mutated monsters affected by the raw growth of the Crucible lacked the martial capability to threaten their foundational life reservoirs, their absolute numerical volume was simply too massive to cleanly liquidate with common strikes—particularly with the physically vulnerable Tolisha anchoring the center of the grid. A brutal, bloody melee of attrition appeared completely non-negotiable.
"Withdraw your blades. Stand behind my shield."
Right at that cross of data, Lucia's voice cut through the tension with an absolute, undisturbed calm.
He strode forward with heavy, measured steps to claim the open ground fronting the stampede. As the wave of frenzied beasts neared his slippers, he un-clasped his arms across the space. Millions of blinding, silver-white streams of pure draconic energy violently cascaded over his flesh, and his magnificent, mountain-like true morphology suddenly erupted before the eyes of the group!
The exact microsecond his colossal Ancient Dragon chassis—spanning a physical length of more than thirty meters—manifested within the chamber, an incredibly powerful, civilization-crushing draconic pressure violently surged across every quadrant of the canyon. At that specific watch of the clock, even the most feral, mutated monsters driving the stampede suffered an instantaneous, terrified freeze!
This freezing, bloodthirsty majesty—emanating directly from the absolute depths of their ancestral souls—involuntarily awakened the primal awe and absolute terror that had been hard-wired into their genetic lineages across un-counted generations of evolution!
This defined the supreme majesty of the Dragon—confronted by the oldest, most powerful kings to ever rule the skies of the ancient world, every minor living beast in the mortal realm was conformed to shiver and prostrate its mass in the mud!
While Lucia's full-fledged draconic form lacked a minor fraction of the swift agility clutched within his semi-dragon humanoid morphology, his parameters reached their absolute, undisputed peak when evaluating raw thermodynamic power and physical devastation.
He lifted his massive, stone-ridged dragon skull to face the frozen, trembling horde of beasts. A blinding, solar-bright explosion of white-hot energy ignited deep within the basements of his throat. A moment later, his lungs violently discharged a magnificent, roaring torrent of crimson dragon fire across the dark!
Compared to the watch his flame had assisted Ranni's matrix to anchor Malenia's seal, his current draconic breath scored as vastly more violent, un-bracketed, and intensely destructive. The gargantuan rats commanding the absolute front of the line were instantaneously vaporized into wisps of gray smoke without a sound. Concurrently, the massive lobsters and crabs tracking their heels were violently launched into the air by the sheer kinetic displacement of the blast, transmuting into roaring, incandescent torches mid-air before their carapaces fractured!
The gargantuan cavern lizards attempted to maintain their forward momentum through pure physical weight, but the exact watch their frames penetrated the overwhelming crimson curtain of fire, their flesh was stripped from the bone within a microsecond. Only charred, white skeletal remains cleared the opposite side of the blaze, collapsing into piles of fine ash the moment their structure struck the flagstones.
Following the closure of the draconic breath, the hundreds of mutated beasts had been completely liquidated from the ledger. Only the river water churning within the drainage trench continued to hiss violently, completely boiled by the extreme thermodynamic output into a dense, white steam mist that lingered heavily through the rafters.
Radahn stood frozen, staring blankly at the smoking, empty stone basin before him. Following a long watch of silence, a slow, deeply satisfied grin broke across his face as he un-clasped his blades. "Lucia... does your house possess the stomach to execute a wager? One sun down the timeline, my own magic will achieve a broad-area destruction payload that easily matches the majesty of your fire."
Lucia's massive form dissolved back into his silver-haired human morphology, stepping out from the steam. He cast a brief glance at the red-haired prince, and his mind immediately replayed the agonizing historical memory of being tortured to the literal brink of death by Radahn's Gravity Magic and the terrifying Starscourge Great Wilderness Fall during their initial digital encounter. He decisively spoke. "My intellect records an absolute belief in your words, big brother. But my house dare not accept the wager, and my hand will permanently desist from gambling against your cards."
"Excellent! Then the treaty is formalized—" Radahn abruptly choked mid-sentence, his eyes widening in total bewilderment. "What in the name of the Outer Gods? Your tongue just validated the claim?! You believe it?! Just like that without a fight?!"
His jaw opened and closed thrice across the space, looking exactly like a warrior who had prepared a massive martial argument only to find the battlefield completely empty. He veered his arms through the air, angrily dispelling the floating starlight swords hovering around his shoulders, grumbling through his beard. "Entirely boring!"
Observing the legendary Starscourge get so thoroughly defeated in a battle of words, Tolisha and Kristoff could no longer suppress a low, synchronized chuckle from behind their cloaks.
"Keep the boots moving. My intuition calculates that the terminal hour is not too far removed," Lucia spoke, a small smile breaking across his silver features as his head shook. "Let our vanguard press deeper into the..."
He had yet to finalize the sentence when an exceptionally sharp, bone-chilling killing intent instantaneously locked onto his jugular!
SHIIIIING—!
With a violent, high-velocity screech of displaced air, Lucia's longsword cleared its scabbard within a microsecond. His arm executed a fluid, defensive arc through the steam, cleanly splitting a massive, oncoming iron spear completely in two!
THUD! THUD! THUD!
Simultaneously, a dozen identical iron spears rained down from the dark, driving deep into the flagstones a mere single pace removed from the group's slippers. The heavy iron shafts vibrated violently, deeply embedded into the stone masonry of the floor!
"My calculations assumed some blind, surface-dwelling human scavenger had cleared the grates to hunt for his death... but my eyes never anticipated tracking an entity of your specific dimensions down here." An exceptionally arrogant, rasping voice floated down from a high stone platform anchoring the darkness hundreds of meters away. A tall, imposing silhouette cloaked in a heavy black-and-red mantle stepped through the mist to dominate the ledge.
"Evaluating the precision of your blade and the cycle of your years... your silver hair must define that new Ancient Dragon brat who has just cleared the capital court registries—Luciassax?"
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