Agnia’s eyes blazed with desperate fury. She wasn’t finished yet.

"Piss off!"

She twisted inside the tail’s crushing grip and unleashed a point-blank explosion of golden flames straight into Rosalia’s chest. The blast scorched across her shoulder and collarbone, burning deep into the flesh.

Rosalia hissed in pain as the heat seared her left arm, charring the skin and drawing blood that sizzled on contact with the air. Another wild slash from Agnia caught her across the back, three deep gashes opening up like red lightning.

But the pain only fueled her resolve. She refused to lose while her husband watched her. It would be a disgrace she could never live down.

Rosalia roared and yanked harder on the tail-noose, slamming Agnia’s face into her knee with a wet crunch. Crimson blood sprayed, but Agnia refused to drop. She drove an elbow into Rosalia’s ribs, then another, each hit landing like a hammer on heated steel. Rosalia staggered for half a second, vision flashing white, but she never let go.

Her pure bloodline surged.

The purple flames around her claws flickered, then stretched. They took on a spectral shape of long, ghostly talons of translucent ice and violet mist that shimmered like they weren’t fully there. The air around them froze solid, cracking with every twitch. Power older than the volcanoes thrummed through her veins.

Max’s eyes widened. He had never seen an ability like that before.

"Just how pure is your bloodline, my love?" he muttered, a hungry gleam in his gaze. Black void energy already coiled around his fingers as he tried to mimic the spectral shape, watching closely while she gathered and reshaped her mana.

Rosalia’s eyes glowed brighter.

She spun once, building momentum, then drove both spectral claws straight into Agnia’s stomach armor. The ghostly talons phased clean through the golden plates like they weren’t even there, sinking deep into the flesh beneath.

Agnia’s scream tore across the sky. With a savage shout, Rosalia hurled her.

The Fire Queen shot backward like a broken arrow, trailing golden flames and blood. She slammed into the castle wall with a deafening boom that shook the entire mountain. Stone and lava exploded outward. Dust and debris swallowed the impact point completely.

Rosalia gathered herself, blowing her disheveled hair away from her face. Her expression twisted in pain as every wound Agnia had left burned as if the flames were still searing deep inside them.

Green magic pulsed across her palm while she pressed it against her injuries. The visible wounds closed rapidly, but her face drained of color. Max had always wondered how Rosalia was the only dragon he knew who wielded magic different from what her bloodline granted.

It was the same green light that had once saved his life. He swore to himself that once things calmed down here, he would ask her about it in private.

He patted the ancestral beast, signaling it to fly closer. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

"It was amazing. You’re way stronger than I first imagined," Max teased, extending his hand to help her up.

Rosalia snorted. "That’s not my limit. I could have done better if I had more experience." It sounded like a complaint, making Max wonder if Henry had never allowed her to train properly.

"Time to declare ourselves the winners. Let’s go collect Agnia from the rubble." A dark smile spread across his lips as he gazed at the pile of debris where she lay.

But the very second the words left his mouth, the ancestral beast erupted into a frenzy. It bucked and twisted with savage force, wings beating the air in raw panic as it tried to hurl them both off its back. Its pupils shrank to razor slits, fixed on some unseen horror.

"Calm down, girl! Easy!" Max shouted, gripping its scales tighter, but the dragon ignored him completely.

"Relax..." Rosalia’s voice cracked with a fear she could not name. Her whole body shuddered as she slammed her hand onto the beast’s head. Purple flames surged around it in a desperate hold. The dragon’s eyes snapped back into focus for a heartbeat, yet its massive frame still quivered like a leaf in a storm.

"What’s going on?" Max demanded.

"Something... I’m not sure. It’s... tied to the dragon blood. A terrifying being is approaching..." Her face turned ghostly pale. "We must flee!" she screamed, slapping the beast’s head again and again.

Max barely had time to brace himself before the ancestral beast rocketed skyward with a terrified roar.

In that instant the distant volcanoes answered with cataclysmic fury. Their peaks exploded in blinding fountains of molten rock that painted the sky crimson and black. The ground beneath them heaved and cracked like a living thing in agony, shockwaves rippling outward as if the entire island fought to tear itself apart.

A chilling sound soon followed...

A deep, hollow growl rolled up from the bowels of the earth, so low and ancient it vibrated through bone and scale alike. The air grew thick with sulfur and heat. The earth split wide with a thunderous crack. Boulders the size of houses shot skyward on jets of superheated lava, raining down in fiery arcs. From the churning inferno below, something colossal stirred.

A golden shape began to rise.

At first only the crown of its head broke the surface, horns black as midnight and each one thick enough to dwarf a castle tower. They tore through rock and soil with grotesque ease, sending fresh geysers of lava spraying hundreds of feet high.

The creature kept coming, shoulders like cliffs of living gold pushing upward, scales gleaming wet and molten under the hellish glow. Its eyes, when they finally surfaced, burned with a cold, intelligent hunger that made the ancestral beast scream in primal terror. The beast’s wings faltered mid-flight as the sheer presence of the thing pressed down on them like an invisible weight.

The golden titan kept rising, larger than any mountain, its breath alone whipping the lava into roaring whirlwinds. Cracks spiderwebbed across the battlefield as its forelimbs clawed free, each talon longer than the ancestral beast’s entire body.

Agnia lay among the shattered rubble far below, her body slick with her own blood. The world around her shook and crumbled, yet a wide, sickening smile stretched across her cracked lips. In her trembling hand she clutched a small amulet broken clean in half, thick golden liquid oozing from it like living blood.

"Fuck it... If we fall, then he shall perish as well. But we will never submit to a human... never..." she whispered hoarsely before her eyes rolled back and darkness claimed her.

High above the chaos, Max felt the mana in the air twist and boil out of control, a raw, suffocating pressure that promised the end of everything they knew.