The light of the full moon was a cold, unforgiving silver, painting the desolate factory district in shades of bone and ash.
It illuminated a horrid tableau, a moment of crushing defeat frozen in time.
There knelt Draco, a broken thing of scales and blood.
A silver spear, cruel and slender, impaled him, its full length running from his right shoulder and bursting out through the side of his ribs, a grotesque flag pole marking a conquered territory.
Each breath was a trial, a ragged, wet gasp that scraped his shredded lung.
A normal mortal would be a corpse, their lifeblood a cooling puddle on the cracked concrete.
But Draco was no ordinary mortal.
His draconic heritage, a deep, primal fire in his blood, was already fighting back.
The regeneration had begun, a slow, agonizing knit of flesh and sinew, but it was throttled by the foreign silver that violated his body.
If only he could get the spear out.
If only he could breathe.
Before him stood Mors, the evilus champion, a figure of absolute dread encased in full-plate black armour.
The moonlight glinted off the intricate engravings of dragons that adorned its surface—a gallery of insults etched in steel.
He watched with an infuriating, detached amusement, his posture relaxed, his victory absolute.
Draco's body was a prison of pain, paralyzed save for the indignant twitch of his long, scaly tail.
The world was unnervingly quiet, the silence broken only by Draco's laboured breathing and the distant, percussive thumps of explosions from the far side of the city.
Mors took a single, deliberate step forward, the joints of his armour whispering a soft, metallic sigh.
He leaned in, his helmeted face a void of polished black, and stared into Draco's eyes.
They were the colour of rubies, reptilian and slitted, and even now, clouded in pain, they held a spark of defiance.
There was no fear, no pleading.
Only a defiant, incandescent spark that promised annihilation.
It was a will so potent, it felt as though it could physically alter the grim reality of their situation.
"It seems you still have some fight left in you," Mors's voice resonated from his helm, a playful, hum that grated on Draco's frayed nerves.
"Very well, little dragon. Show me. Show me what reserves of power give you such confidence in the face of your own death."
With a casualness that bordered on contempt, Mors stretched out a gauntleted hand and gripped the shaft of his spear.
He didn't ease it out.
He yanked it.
The sound was sickening, a wet tear of muscle and sinew.
Chunks of flesh and shattered bone came with it, a gory tribute to the champion's strength.
A guttural growl ripped from Draco's throat, a sound torn from the deepest abyss of pain.
His body, suddenly freed from its anchor, slumped to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.
Blood, hot and shockingly plentiful, poured from the wound, a dark tide threatening to pull him under into the final blackness.
He fought it.
Consciousness was a lifeline, the only thing separating him from oblivion.
The thought of his familia, of the survivors in the camp that Mors had threatened to hunt down one by one, was the rock he clung to in that rushing river of pain.
Reinforcements weren't coming.
He was alone.
A level four against a peak level seven who was, by all indications, merely toying with him.
Mors hadn't even used a single spell, relying solely on a physical prowess that was already overwhelming.
The choice, then, was no choice at all.
Hesitation was a luxury afforded to those with other options.
He had none.
In that case, a cold, hard resolution crystallized in the core of his being, silencing the screaming pain.
'Mors must die here'
The fear of his own power, the lingering terror of what the 'Raging Ascension' would do to him, evaporated in the face of necessity.
If he was going to burn, he would take the champion with him into the pyre.
There could be no half-measures.
No retreat.
Closing his eyes, Draco let go.
He unlocked the cage in his spirit, the one holding back the beast.
He opened the floodgates to the torrent of his rage, paying the price in the currency of his own mind.
The skill was called 'Raging Ascension', and it demanded a sacrifice.
He surrendered thirty percent of his sanity to raw, draconic instinct.
The change was immediate and violent.
The world dissolved into a symphony of agony and ecstasy.
Bones popped and snapped, grinding as they twisted into new, more powerful configurations.
Muscles tore themselves apart and rewove into thicker, denser cords of raw strength.
The grievous spear wound, which had been gushing blood moments before, sizzled and sealed shut, steam hissing from rapidly closing flesh.
His stats, a quantifiable measure of his very being, surged by fifty percent, rocketing him from the peak of level four to the solid territory of a level five.
His form warped.
He grew, his body swelling into that of a hulking, bipedal dragon.
His skin hardened into scales of polished obsidian that seemed to drink the moonlight, leaving nothing but shadow behind.
A thick, powerful tail, tipped with a bony, spear-like protrusion, whipped through the air, carving a groove in the cobbled ground.
His fingers and toes elongated into razor-sharp talons that clicked against the ground.
He flexed his new claws, feeling the immense power thrumming within them.
Mors watched the transformation with morbid fascination.
A creepy, genuine smile spread across his lips, visible now that he'd retracted the faceplate of his helm.
He could feel the surge of power, the shift in the very air around Draco.
It was an impressive display.
"Astonishing," Mors breathed, his tone appreciative.
But he remained unconcerned.
A level five was still a world away from a peak level seven.
A bigger, stronger insect was still just an insect.
He had no idea Draco wasn't finished.
The remaining part of Draco's mind, a desperate captain on a sinking ship, knew it wasn't enough.
Without a flicker of hesitation, he pushed the ascension further.
He gave more of himself to the rage.
A low growl rumbled in his chest, a sound like grinding tectonic plates.
His jaws unhinged, widening to an unnatural degree to reveal rows of dagger-like fangs.
Steam, thick and white, vented from his nostrils and mouth as his scales began to glow with an inner heat.
The temperature of the air around him skyrocketed.
The ground beneath his feet began to soften, the cobble turning to molten rock.
A toxic, acrid smoke billowed from his body, obscuring his form in a swirling, dark cloud.
Within the vortex of smoke and heat, the second stage began.
Some of his obsidian scales flaked away like ash, replaced by something new.
Crystalline protrusions, like jagged, blood-red quartz, erupted from his shoulders, growing into pauldrons of living crystal.
They sprouted along his spine, forming a defensive ridge, and burst from his skull, encasing his head and elongating his horns into cruel, gleaming spires.
When the transformation completed a mere twenty-three seconds after it began, the being that stood there bore no resemblance to the boy who had knelt in the dirt.
He was a monster forged in pain and fury.
His stats received another monumental boost, a full one hundred percent increase that catapulted his power to the realm of a mid to high-tier level six.
The price was steep: another thirty percent of his sanity, leaving only a sliver, a scant forty percent of his reasoning mind, to steer this vessel of destruction.
An exhilarating, terrifying euphoria flooded him.
The sheer, intoxicating power was a drug.
The enemy before him, the insurmountable mountain that was Mors, now seemed… manageable.
The overwhelming pressure was gone, replaced by a primal confidence that bordered on arrogance.
The last vestiges of Draco's reason clung on, a screaming whisper in the hurricane of instinct.
'Don't get cocky. He's still stronger. This just closed the gap.'
Mors was a peak level seven, his physical stats were likely off the charts.
But Draco had balanced stats, and a wellspring of magic that required no chants, no preparation.
Only will.
He could push further.
Stage three beckoned, a siren song of absolute power.
But the rational fragment of his mind knew the cost.
The next stage would grant him power rivalling Mors, maybe even surpassing him, but it would last a scant five minutes and would almost completely consume what was left of his identity.
This current form, Stage Two, would last for thirty minutes.
The plan, fragile as it was, formed in that sliver of his mind: wear Mors down.
Endure.
And just before the thirty minutes were up, when the transformation began to fade, he would force the next ascension and overwhelm the weakened champion.
It was a plan riddled with flaws.
With sixty percent of his mind surrendered to instinct, controlling his rage, pacing himself, and stopping the transformation from triggering prematurely would be a monumental task.
Thirty minutes felt like an eternity.
But there was no time for doubt.
The die was cast.
With a slight exertion of will, Draco commanded the wind.
The smoke around him swirled and dispersed in an instant, revealing his new form in all its terrifying glory.
Moonlight shattered against the crystalline growths on his shoulders and head, scattering in a thousand crimson refractions, while his obsidian scales swallowed the light whole, creating a creature of impossible contrasts, of light and abyss.
Mors's creepy smile widened into a broad, predatory grin.
His eyes, dark and knowing, drank in the sight.
"Beautiful," the champion murmured, his voice now devoid of playfulness, replaced by a raw, dramatic reverence.
He had anticipated many things, but not this.
Not this glorious, perfect monster.
He raised his silver spear, its point gleaming under the moon, and settled into a low, ready stance.
"Come then, masterpiece. Let us dance."
Draco didn't need a second invitation.
The forty percent of his reason was already losing the battle for control. Instinct took over.
He didn't run; he exploded.
The ground cratered under his taloned feet as he launched himself forward, covering the distance in the blink of an eye.
He didn't lead with a weapon.
He led with the elements.
As he charged, his right hand, now a set of obsidian claws tipped in razor-sharp crystal, swiped through the air.
In its wake, five shimmering blades of compressed wind materialized, screaming towards Mors at supersonic speed.
Mors didn't flinch.
With a sublime economy of motion, he spun his spear, the silver shaft becoming a blur that deflected the first three wind scythes with sharp, percussive pings.
He sidestepped the fourth, letting it shear through a nearby stack of barrels, slicing them in half as if they were paper.
The fifth he met head-on, the point of his spear striking the invisible blade with pinpoint accuracy, shattering it into a brief, harmless gust of wind.
But it was a feint.
A distraction born of pure combat instinct.
While Mors was occupied, Draco was already on him.
His left hand, balled into a fist wreathed in roaring flames, swung in a devastating arc aimed at the champion's head.
Simultaneously, his spear-tipped tail whipped around from the opposite side, a low, lethal sweep meant to buckle Mors's legs.
It was a pincer attack of fire and force, one a sane tactician would be proud of, yet for Draco it was as natural as breathing.
Mors was faster.
He dropped, his entire body sinking below the arc of the flaming fist, the heat wave singeing the top of his helmet.
As he dropped, he planted the butt of his spear on the ground and vaulted, kicking off it to flip backward, clearing the scything tail by a mere inch.
He landed silently, ten feet away, already back in his perfect stance.
The entire exchange had taken less than two seconds.
"Yes!" Mors laughed, a booming, joyous sound.
"This is a true battle!"
Draco didn't respond with words.
A frustrated roar, laced with the hiss of escaping steam, erupted from his throat.
The ground itself answered his rage.
The earth beneath Mors's feet suddenly softened, turning to viscous mud.
It was an earth-magic trap, meant to ensnare him, to slow the champion's impossible agility.
Mors simply leaped, his powerful legs launching him into the air, high above the grasping earth.
But Draco was waiting.
His gaze snapped upward, and the moisture in the night air coalesced instantly.
A dozen massive icicles, each the size of a javelin, formed in a halo above Mors and rained down upon him.
In mid-air, Mors became a whirlwind of silver and black.
His spear was everywhere at once, a dizzying dance of death that shattered each descending icicle into glittering dust.
He used the momentum of his parries to spin, angling his descent.
He wasn't aiming for the ground.
He was aiming for Draco.
Draco's instincts screamed.
He brought both arms up, crossing them in front of his face.
At the same moment, he willed a shield of solid earth to erupt from the ground before him.
Mors crashed into it feet first.
The stone shield, three feet thick, exploded into rubble.
The champion's armoured boots slammed into Draco's crystalline forearms with the force of a battering ram.
The impact sent a shockwave through Draco's entire body, forcing him back several steps, his talons gouging deep trenches in the ground.
The crystalline growths on his arms held, but fine, spider-web cracks appeared on their surface.
Pain flared, but the rage consumed it, turning it into fuel.
Mors landed, using the recoil to create distance, but Draco gave him none.
He stomped his foot, and the ground rippled.
A wave of solid earth surged towards Mors, who sidestepped it effortlessly.
But as he did, a massive hand, formed of churning, pressurized water summoned from the deep factory cisterns, rose from the ground and tried to capture him.
Mors thrust his spear into the watery appendage.
The silver weapon pulsed with a faint, almost imperceptible light, and the entire hand of water instantly froze solid around the spear shaft.
With a roar of effort, Mors swung the massive, ice-encased spear like a club, shattering his frozen trap against a nearby wall.
The battle devolved into a blur of elemental chaos and martial perfection.
They became two forces of nature colliding in the ruined industrial park.
Draco was a maelstrom, his every movement birthing some new magical assault.
He didn't think; he reacted.
A swipe of his claws left trails of fire in the air.
A stomp of his foot sent jagged spikes of rock erupting from the ground.
A guttural roar became a physical wave of concussive force, a breath attack of pure wind that kicked up a storm of dust and debris.
Mors, in contrast, was a scalpel.
He moved through the storm with an unnatural grace, his armour shrugging off ambient heat and shrapnel.
His spear was his only answer, but it was enough.
He was a master of angles and leverage, deflecting, parrying, and redirecting Draco's raw power with minimal effort.
He'd slice through a torrent of fire, not by overpowering it, but by piercing its source at the exact moment of its creation.
He'd use a rising stone wall as a ramp to launch himself into a new attack vector.
The dragon engravings on his armour seemed to mock Draco with every fluid movement.
They crashed through the wall of a derelict smelting plant.
The cavernous interior was a graveyard of silent machinery.
A rusted tread-wheel crane hung precariously from the ceiling.
Draco, driven by instinct, saw an opportunity.
He lashed out with his tail, not at Mors, but at one of the main support pillars of the crane.
The pillars and rebar shattered under the blow.
With a groan of tortured metal, the massive steel crane began to fall directly towards Mors.
Mors looked up, his expression unreadable.
Instead of retreating, he charged forward, directly into the path of the falling behemoth.
At the last possible second, he planted his feet, aimed his spear upward, and thrust.
The silver point met the descending mass of steel.
There was no cataclysmic explosion.
There was only a high-pitched shriek of resonating energy.
The spearhead glowed with intense white light, and the several-ton crane was simply… arrested.
It stopped dead in its tracks, impaled on the spear, held aloft by the single, unbending figure of the evilus champion.
Draco's rational mind, screamed in disbelief.
That wasn't normal strength.
Even for a level seven, that was monstrous.
It was a skill.
One of the special abilities Mors had been hiding.
With a grunt, Mors heaved, shifting the massive weight of the crane and flinging it sideways.
It crashed into the far wall of the factory, bringing a section of the roof down with it in a deafening avalanche of brick and steel.
The battle lust in Mors's eyes was now a blazing inferno.
"Is that it?" he boomed, his voice echoing in the ruined space.
"Is that the fury of a dragon? You shatter my playground, but you cannot touch me!"
The taunt struck a raw nerve deep within Draco's psyche.
The carefully constructed plan to wear Mors down began to fray.
The rage, a constant, roaring fire, grew hotter.
The line between instinct and impulse blurred.
Draco let out a roar that was pure, unadulterated fury, and unleashed his most potent elemental attack yet.
He slammed both hands onto the factory floor.
Fire, water, wind, and earth magic erupted simultaneously.
A miniature volcano of molten slag erupted beneath Mors.
Geysers of scalding steam shot from ruptured pipes in the walls.
The air itself became a vortex of razor-sharp debris, and tendrils of solid ice shot out from the shadows, attempting to lock Mors in place.
It was an environmental attack on a massive scale, turning the entire factory interior into a kill box.
Mors was finally forced to move with more urgency.
He became a phantom, a black flicker in the heart of the chaos.
He danced on the lip of the erupting slag, leaped between jets of steam, and batted away flying chunks of metal with the flat of his spear shaft.
He was untouchable, a master surviving his element.
But Draco wasn't just casting spells.
He was hunting.
Through the swirling chaos, he charged, his crystalline horns lowered like a battering ram.
He burst through a wall of his own ice, his obsidian scales shedding the cold, and slammed into Mors.
For the first time, he made solid, meaningful contact.
The sound was like a church bell being struck by a meteor.
Draco's shoulder, clad in jagged crystal, crashed into Mors's chest plate.
The champion was driven back, his armoured boots carving deep furrows into the floor.
The air was driven from his lungs in a sharp grunt.
The dragon engravings on his breastplate cracked under the sheer kinetic force.
A flicker of genuine surprise, and perhaps even pain, crossed Mors's face.
He had underestimated the raw physical power of this new form.
Victory, hot and tantalizing, surged through Draco.
He pressed the advantage.
Claws raked against armour, sending showers of sparks into the air.
His tail, a living weapon, hammered against Mors's legs and back, trying to find a weak point in the articulated plate.
He was a whirlwind of black scales and red crystal, a purely physical assault now, the magic forgotten in the blood haze.
This was what Mors wanted.
A physical contest.
He met the flurry with his own.
His spear became a cage of shimmering silver, blocking the claws, parrying the tail, deflecting the fangs that snapped inches from his face.
It was no longer a dance; it was a brawl.
A slugfest between two monsters under a pale moon, their battle lust so potent they were deaf and blind to the world outside their personal sphere of violence.
Time ceased to have meaning.
Was it ten minutes? Fifteen? Twenty? Draco didn't know.
The voice of reason in his head was now a faint, pathetic whisper, drowned out by the roaring symphony of rage and the primal joy of battle.
Every blow he landed, every clash of his claws against Mors's armour, fed the fire.
Every blow he took only made it burn brighter.
The cracks on his crystalline pauldrons had spread, and several smaller shards had broken off.
Mors's black armour was dented and scraped, the proud dragon engravings marred and broken.
A thin trickle of blood, dark in the moonlight, leaked from a joint in his helmet.
Draco had drawn blood.
The thought was a jolt of pure ecstasy that pushed him closer to the edge.
He was winning.
He could feel it.
He could break him.
He drove Mors back out into the moonlit yard, their struggle destroying what little was left of the camp.
Tents were shredded, makeshift barricades obliterated.
Draco grabbed a twisted steel piece from the rubble, hefted it like a club, and swung it at Mors.
Mors met the blow with his spear, not to block, but to guide.
He twisted his body, letting the momentum carry it past him, and used the opening to thrust forward.
The silver spear point, faster than thought, slammed into the side of Draco's ribs, finding a spot between the obsidian scales.
It didn't penetrate deeply, not like the first time, but the impact was immense.
The spearhead, glowing with that same strange energy, sent a debilitating shock through Draco's system.
It wasn't just pain; it was a wave of pure, system-stalling energy.
His muscles seized, and his magical senses flared with agony.
The physical shock was the final push.
The whisper of reason in his mind—the forty percent that he had clung so desperately to control, the part that remembered his familia, the plan, the time limit—was almost completely extinguished.
It wasn't going to completely fade at stage 3, but what was ten percent reason going to do against ninety percent madness.
The mental erosion gauge, a concept he could no longer grasp, slammed from sixty percent to ninety in a heartbeat.
A new kind of pain, an agony beyond the physical, erupted from the core of his being.
The Raging Ascension, barely held in check by the last slivers of sanity, took its, terrible due.
The failsafe had failed.
The thirty-minute timer was irrelevant.
The third stage was triggering.
Now.
Draco's body locked up.
A strangled, horrifying roar tore from his throat, a sound that was neither humanoid nor dragon, but something agonizingly caught between.
His head snapped back, his jaw unhinging to an impossible degree.
Mors, who had been preparing a follow-up strike, froze.
He lowered his spear slightly, his head cocked.
The creepy smile was gone, replaced by an expression of intense, wide-eyed curiosity.
The power radiating from Draco was changing again, spiking to a level that made the hairs on Mors's arms stand on end.
This was no longer a controlled transformation.
This was a cataclysm.
Draco fell to his knees.
The red crystalline growths on his body began to glow with the intensity of a sun.
They spread like a disease, consuming the black scales.
Veins of molten light pulsed beneath their surface.
The ground around him cracked and melted, turning into a pool of glowing glass.
His muscles, his very bones, began to break and reform again, twisting into a shape even more monstrous, more alien.
His size began to increase exponentially, his form elongating, quadrupling.
The humanoid shape was lost, melting away into something far more ancient and terrible.
The last coherent thought to echo in the ruins of his mind was not of the battle, not of Mors, not of the overwhelming power.
It was a fractured, heart-wrenching image of his familia.
The thing he was trying to protect.
Then, that too was disappearing, burning away in a tidal wave of pure, undiluted, world-ending rage.
The monster looked up, its eyes no longer the embers of defiance, but twin novas of pure destruction.
It no longer saw an enemy.
It only saw a world that needed to be unmade.
And in the face of this absolute, mindless apocalypse, Mors finally, for the first time, felt a sliver of something cold and unfamiliar coil in his gut.
It might have been fear.