"What the hell is that?" Max’s voice cracked as the words left his mouth.

The air itself trembled, thick with sulfur and ancient malice. From the shattered heart of the volcano, the golden titan had fully emerged, towering far beyond the mountain peaks, its colossal frame blotting out the crimson sky.

Its eyes locked onto them: molten gold, ancient, furious, and starved with a hunger that had waited thousands of years for something worth devouring. Scales like liquid sunlight gleamed wet with fresh lava, and every shift of its massive shoulders sent fresh geysers roaring into the air.

Max’s stomach dropped. Beside him, Rosalia clutched her waist, trembling so violently her teeth chattered. Her eyes had gone glassy and slightly unfocused, as if the mere presence of the creature was pressing down on her dragon blood like a physical weight.

The ancestral ice dragon beneath them was no better. It screamed in a raw, primal sound Max had never heard from the proud beast. It rocketed higher, its wings beating in blind panic, fleeing for its life as though the titan’s gaze alone could devour it alone.

The ground below heaved again.

With a thunderous crack that split the sky, the golden dragon lunged. Its jaws, the size of cliff faces, snapped shut where they had been a heartbeat earlier, mountain-sized fangs shearing through empty air with a sound like continents colliding.

Rubble and molten rivers sprayed upward in its wake as it tore after them, impossibly fast, each stride shaking the entire island.

"There’s no way I can fight that!" Max snarled, heart hammering against his ribs. But his body was already moving on instinct. Dark mist exploded around him, condensing into sleek void armor that drank in the surrounding mana like a black hole.

The void blade materialized in his grip, warping the air around it. He didn’t care that the land beneath them would wither and die from the drain; his life mattered more.

The golden titan closed in so fast that its massive jaws had already half-swallowed them. Max realized with ice-cold horror that in the next heartbeat, they would all be crushed and devoured alive if he didn’t act.

"Eat this instead!" he roared.

He slashed once. The void blade vibrated violently from hilt to tip as it drank in every last scrap of mana he could muster.

A crescent of pure black void tore from the void blade, screaming through the air. It slammed into the titan’s maw with a deafening boom. Giant teeth cracked and splintered on impact. The beast recoiled violently, thrashing in sudden agony.

The roar it unleashed was worse than any explosion. It was a deep, bone-shaking bellow that made the air vibrate. Max clapped his hands over his ears, gritting his teeth, convinced his eardrums were about to burst.

Then Rosalia’s broken whisper cut through the chaos. "I can feel... a suppressing blood aura from it... but it can’t be..." Her face had gone deathly pale. "A progenitor..."

Max’s blood turned cold at those words. "Progenitor" itself was a myth he wasn’t ready to face. He had read countless fantasy books and knew that beings on that level were so overwhelmingly powerful they could break reality itself.

The cut on the titan’s jaw was already sealing. It only confirmed that his full-power strike had been nothing more than an insect bite.

Max gulped hard, the grim realization hitting him like a hammer... today he might actually perish.

The creature’s eyes burned brighter. Something molten and golden ignited deep in its throat, glowing like a second sun between rows of fangs.

"DOWN!" Max bellowed, slamming his palm against the ancestral beast’s skull again and again. "Dive—NOW!" 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

The ice dragon folded its wings and plummeted like a falcon. A heartbeat later, a beam of pure molten gold erupted from the titan’s maw. The heat alone scorched the air above them, singeing the edges of Max’s void armor and making Rosalia cry out in pain.

The golden beam shot past, faster than sound, and slammed into a distant mountain range kilometers away. In an instant, stone vaporized on impact... A newborn sun bloomed on the horizon as the entire ridge disintegrated into a roaring fireball.

The Fire Dragon Clan members stationed there simply ceased to exist without understanding what hit them.

The shockwave hit Max’s party, smashing their chests like a hammer. The ancestral beast tumbled through the air, wings flailing, barely catching itself before they could spiral into the lava far below.

Max’s grip on Rosalia tightened, pulling her against his armored chest. "Hang on," he growled in a low and fierce voice, even as terror clawed at his throat. "Whatever the hell that thing is... we’re not dying to it today."

Rosalia’s trembling hand found his, purple flames flickering weakly around her fingers as she fought to steady the ancestral beast beneath them. But her eyes never left the golden horror rising behind them.

"That’s not just a dragon, Max... That’s the First. The one my bloodline was born to serve..." The fear in her voice was raw, making Max hold her tighter.

The ancestral beast managed to stabilize itself just before the colossal giant tore after them once more.

"They were not supposed to exist anymore... So how did the fire clan...?" Her eyes had lost all hope.

"Forget it for now. We must first find a way to shake it off..." Max thrust his hands toward the dragon progenitor as another colossal sun bloomed in its maw. "I only have one chance. After this, I will likely pass out..." he called out to Rosalia.

"What are you—?"

But Rosalia was cut off by a terrifying aura surging around him. Black mist coalesced into a small, trembling orb that vibrated in the air as if it might slip free from between his palms and ricochet across the sky.

Blood streamed from Max’s eyes and nose. He could feel how dangerously unstable this experimental attack was. In that desperate, life-or-death instant, he had chosen to mimic the raw power of a dragon’s breath attack and fuse it with the way Rosalia manifested her spectral claws.

The golden sun detonated from the dragon progenitor’s mouth, hurtling toward them like a falling star. Max released his own attack at the same instant, letting the small orb shatter into a colossal beam of pure darkness...