Vale stood tall.

  His eyes were no longer merely wide, they had gone beyond fear. Whatever primal terror had once rooted him to the spot was gone, burned away by awe. What replaced it was something dangerous, intoxicating.

  Wonder.

  A mad smile crept across his face as he watched the two demonic entities face one another,

  one a hero twisted into legend and blood,

  the other a being born of pure dread, created for no purpose other than to devour existence itself.

  The thousand-horned dragon, no, the Herald, stood low against the raging sea. Its legs were spread wide, rooted like pillars of bone and corruption, its body layered in jagged horns and exposed skeletal growths. Though there were no eyes behind the hollow skull that served as its face, its gaze was unmistakably fixed on the great black dragon hovering above.

  The Herald slammed its massive tail down.

  The ocean exploded.

  Water and shattered ice erupted skyward as a deafening roar tore free from its maw, a sound so violent it seemed to fracture the heavens themselves. It was not merely loud; it was a declaration. An ending spoken into reality.

  Behind Vale, several students collapsed instantly, minds unable to withstand the sound. Others screamed, clutching their ears as blood streamed from between their fingers.

  Ember moved.

  The wyvern stepped closer to Vale, its massive wing nearly healed now, the last remnants of ice melting away. The three ravens clung to its back, feathers bristling, but Ember itself was calm, eerily so.

  Chrome remained farther back, his damaged systems still struggling to stabilize. He watched, silent and rigid, knowing full well that this battle was beyond him.

  Ember’s gaze lifted.

  Its ember-lit eyes widened slightly as they locked onto the great black dragon in the sky.

  Dagon.

  The Herald’s roar rolled across the sea, and Dagon answered.

  His roar was different.

  Not a howl of endless suffering, not a shriek of madness, but something real. Something almost… human. It carried wrath, yes, but also resolve, memory even purpose.

  Thunder detonated above him as violet and azure lightning clashed violently with the crimson storm clouds, the skies themselves warring for dominance.

  The Herald reacted.

  Its body began to glow, veins of corrupted crimson atum racing across its skeletal frame. The horns and bones embedded in its flesh began to grow, impaling its own body as they expanded outward. The sea around it simply vanished, erased by unholy energy.

  Its mouth opened.

  A violent crimson light gathered within, condensing into a beam of annihilation.

  Dagon watched.

  For a single heartbeat, his gaze shifted, not to the Herald, but downward.

  To the students.

  To the fragile lives floating helplessly atop the broken ice.

  Something flickered in his violet eyes.

  The Herald followed his gaze, and laughed.

  A low, agonizing chuckle crawled from its throat as it turned its skull back toward the students, the crimson glow intensifying. It was going to erase them all.

  Dagon moved.

  In an instant.

  The dragon vanished from the sky and reappeared in the water before the Herald, his landing sending the ocean into absolute chaos. Waves detonated outward, tearing through the remaining ice as a storm coalesced above the two titans.

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  Dagon lunged.

  His claws slammed into the Herald’s skull-like face, gripping it with godlike force as he roared directly into it. The Herald retaliated wildly, its remaining claws slashing toward him,

  but a massive claw erupted from Dagon’s wing.

  Not bone.

  Not scale.

  Something else.

  It pierced through the Herald’s arm in a spray of crimson blood, staining the ocean as the demonic hero’s blood mixed with the sea. With a violent wrench, Dagon tore the arm free and hurled it away.

  The severed limb crashed down near the students, detonating the water beside them and sending a tidal wave cascading over the ice.

  The Herald shrieked in agony, its mouth sealed shut by Dagon’s grip.

  But Dagon was not finished.

  With a furious snarl, he clamped his jaws around the Herald’s throat.

  The Herald screamed internally and retaliated, its horns growing explosively, erupting from within Dagon’s skull. Bone-like spikes tore outward through his head, blood spilling freely as his own body was impaled from the inside.

  Yet Dagon did not release.

  Like a god lifting a lesser thing, he hoisted the Herald from the ocean entirely. The massive creature thrashed, attempting to activate its abilities, but nothing happened.

  Vale’s smile twisted into something frenzied.

  He understood.

  The realization struck him like lightning.

  Nirvana.

  The third user.

  It had never been a mystery, only one he had failed to see.

  Nirvana was the art of perceiving origins, of seeing pure atum as it existed before distortion. But the books had never fully explained its final truth,

  At high mastery, Nirvana did not merely observe existence.

  It overrode it.

  If the wielder was stronger, Nirvana could shut down a spawn’s abilities entirely, severing them from their atum at the root.

  Vale laughed, wild and unhinged, as the storm battered his body and the sea raged around him.

  “So it was you?” he shouted, voice nearly lost to the chaos.

  “You were the third!”

  Dagon answered not with words, but action.

  He released the Herald’s throat, his claws ripping deep into its body, then slammed it back down into the ocean with cataclysmic force. Water erupted skyward, the impact echoing across the horizon.

  Lightning raged behind Dagon as he roared once more.

  The Herald lay broken for a heartbeat… then looked up.

  Its expression was no longer calculating.

  It was animalistic.

  And as it shrieked, the sound that escaped its maw was like countless humans screaming in agony all at once.

  Dagon looked down upon the Herald with a gaze forged from pure fury.

  The countless holes that had torn through his skull moments earlier began to close all at once, bone knitting, flesh reforming, atum flowing back into place as if the damage had never existed. The great black dragon inhaled slowly, then lowered one massive leg and planted it squarely upon the Herald’s chest.

  Bones shattered.

  The impact drove the Herald deeper into the ocean floor, cracking the seabed beneath it. Dagon did not merely pin the creature, he anchored it. Nirvana flared silently through his body, an unseen pressure that disrupted the Herald’s regeneration at its source, scrambling the atum attempting to reassemble its form.

  Dagon leaned down, his violet eyes burning.

  He growled.

  The Herald responded with desperation.

  Its remaining claws lashed out, raking violently across Dagon’s leg. Chunks of scale and flesh were torn free, crimson blood spilling into the sea in vast, roiling clouds. Yet every wound healed in the very instant it was inflicted, flesh sealing, scales reforging, atum reasserting itself.

  It was no longer a battle.

  It was an execution delayed only by inevitability.

  The Herald thrashed, screaming without sound, tearing at Dagon’s leg again and again, but it was fighting something far beyond its reach. Even with all its power, even though a single unrestrained attack from it could have annihilated the planet, it stood utterly powerless before the great black dragon.

  Dagon knew this.

  He had always known.

  That was why he had never allowed the Herald a single moment of offense. He understood its destructive potential too well, and so he denied it the very option of attack, keeping it crushed against the ocean floor, locked in a state of absolute suppression.

  Dagon’s scales began to glow.

  Not crimson.

  Not violet.

  White.

  A pure, blinding radiance spread across his body as he drew himself upright. For a moment, he simply looked down at the Herald, which continued to claw uselessly at his leg, its blood saturating the water around them.

  Then Dagon opened his maw.

  Nothing came out.

  Instead, something was taken.

  The Herald began to glow.

  White light erupted from within its body, spilling through fractures in its flesh as Vale’s eyes widened in horror and understanding. He could feel what was happening, his breath caught in his throat as his mind struggled to comprehend it.

  The Herald screamed.

  Not outwardly, but inwardly.

  Its body convulsed as its very existence began to unravel, atum being torn apart from the inside. This was not death. This was not destruction.

  This was erasure.

  Dagon was not killing the Herald.

  He was removing it from the fabric of reality itself, forcing the atum that defined its existence to separate, to revert, to return to a different point of origin. The corrupted essence that had once formed the devil was stripped away, undone at the most fundamental level.

  And then,

  The atum turned.

  It flowed into Dagon.

  The Herald’s body dissolved into pure white light, its agonized cries fading into silence as it ceased to be. What remained was nothing, no corpse, no residue, no echo.

  Only Dagon, standing upon the ocean floor, his power now even greater than before.

  The great black dragon lifted his head and roared.

  The sound split the heavens.

  Clouds tore apart under the force of it, the crimson and violet storms scattering as the roar declared absolute victory. The sea trembled. The world itself seemed to exhale.

  Vale watched as Dagon slowly turned.

  The dragon’s immense form rose from the depths, his gaze drifting back toward the platform, toward the students still frozen in stunned silence.

  Toward Vale.

  Vale’s heart pounded as dread crept back into his chest.

  This was it.

  The moment of truth.

  Would Dagon, the fallen hero, the cataclysm, the dragon who had saved and slaughtered alike…

  …spare them?