Chapter 128: Belgaroth’s Promise
Despite injuries that should have been fatal, he stood to his full, towering height. His breath escaped in bursts of searing vapor, as if an inner fire consumed his very core. His eyes, a blazing crimson, burned with pure, absolute, inhuman hatred. His fangs gleamed in a grimace twisted by pain and boundless rage.
- "You... will... pay..." he articulated, each word seeming to cost him a superhuman effort, his voice distorted into a guttural echo that resonated against the collapsed walls.
He raised his still-intact fist a mass of muscle and razor-sharp claws and slammed it down with unimaginable force onto the already tortured ground. A shockwave rippled across the blackened tiles, cracking the stone into a complex network of fissures from which acrid smoke curled. The ground trembled under the impact, the remaining fragments of walls swayed dangerously, and even the air itself seemed to vibrate under the effect of his unbridled rage.
- "AKANEEEEEE!"
His roar because it was no longer a mere cry tore through the silence like a white-hot blade. That name, pronounced with such hatred it was almost unrecognizable, bounced off the shattered walls, reverberating through the collapsed corridors, carrying with it a promise of destruction that even death could not halt.
The dust slowly settled, shrouding Belgaroth’s massive silhouette in a gray veil. But through that funerary haze, his eyes continued to burn—two infernal furnaces in a disfigured face. A mutilated arm, a lacerated body, but a gaze that promised the apocalypse. He had not been defeated. He had not been destroyed. Not yet.
His breathing gradually stabilized, and in his one good eye, a calculating light flickered cold as death itself. A smile, or at least something that resembled one on that partially destroyed face, twisted his charred lips, revealing yellowed fangs glimmering in the shadows.
- "You will pay... I swear it by the ancient gods..."
His voice had changed, more controlled but just as terrifying.
- "I will hunt them to the ends of this world... I will destroy them to the last... I will reduce their hopes to ashes, just as they tried to do to me."