The sulfurous stench of vaporized stone and roasted earth clung to the back of Draco's throat like a physical weight.
Every intake of breath felt like swallowing crushed glass, yet it was the primal, suffocating heat that finally coaxed him back from the black abyss of unconsciousness.
HISS!
CRACKLE!
"Ugh…"
A ragged, agonizing groan tore itself from Draco's throat.
He tried to blink, fighting against the heavy grit sealing his eyelids shut.
When he finally forced them open, his vision was greeted by an absolute, impenetrable void. Panic, cold and sharp, spiked through his chest.
He attempted to jerk his limbs, to push himself upright, but a searing, white-hot jolt of agony lanced through his nervous system, pinning him mercilessly to the earth.
'What happened? How long was I out?'
The information swirling in his fractured mind felt like scattered puzzle pieces, jagged and blood-stained.
He clutched at the fading threads of his memory.
'That's right. I was fighting Alfia, and then...'
A dark, volcanic rage surged upward, hot enough to rival the ambient temperature.
But the emotion died almost as quickly as it had ignited, smothered by a sudden, terrifying realization.
The walls around him wasn't just warm; it thrummed with a lethal, rhythmic pulse.
The rubble encasing him glowed with an ominous, incandescent red.
And, Draco didn't need to guess what it was.
Molten magma was pooling around.
His mind raced back to the climax of the clash.
Alfia's ultimate sound magic...Genos Angelus...had reacted violently and unpredictably when Draco's own magic had attempted to interfered with it.
In that desperate, split-second, he could have sworn he felt a faint, lingering wave of spirit magic.
Whether it was a hallucination born of desperation or a genuine catalyst, the result was the same: his magic and hers had fused, mutated, and triggered a devastating detonation.
Given the concentration of volatile fire and sound magic, it wouldn't have been out of the question for the entire 49th floor to have been completely vaporized.
'If that's true, I need to get out of here. Now.'
Worst-case scenarios flashed behind his burning eyelids like frames of a nightmare.
In his heavily compromised state, he was agonizingly vulnerable.
But before he could worry about external threats, he had to dig his way out of his rocky tomb before the expanding sea of magma swallowed him whole.
Drowning in liquid rock wasn't the kind of death he intended to meet.
True, his physical resilience and natural resistance meant the heat alone wouldn't incinerate his flesh, but magic or no magic, a dragon could not breathe in a sea of magma.
Teeth gritted so hard they threatened to shatter, and enduring the agonizing screech of fractured bones grating against one another, Draco managed to flip his massive frame over.
Tapping into the remnants of his mind, he reached out with earth-magic, slowly carving a grueling, suffocating path through the stone for his twenty-meter-long body to safely slip through.
Draco hadn't undone his dragon transformation.
In truth, he couldn't afford to.
He had no way of knowing what had happened to Alfia; she had been standing practically at ground zero of the blast, so the damage to her body ought to have been catastrophic.
But in a death match against a monster like her, assuming anything was a fatal mistake.
He had to remain in his absolute peak combat state.
Besides, his smaller, humanoid form would have fared far worse in the volatile, pressure-cooker environment left in the wake of the explosion.
A violent growl echoed from the cavern of his stomach.
His body demanded fuel, screaming for meat, bread, anything to accelerate his healing.
But there was nothing here...only ash, rock, and the creeping threat of death.
Enduring the agonizing pangs of hunger and the white-hot torment of his battered body, Draco trudged relentlessly forward.
......................................................…
Time lost all meaning in the depths of the fractured earth.
Seconds bled into minutes, or perhaps hours, measured only by the rhythmic thumping of his own heart and the scrape of scales against jagged stone.
Finally, his outstretched claw broke through a thin barrier of slate.
Cool, albeit ash-choked, air brushed against his snout.
Peering cautiously through the newly carved aperture, Draco surveyed the landscape...and froze.
Hell had a name, and it was the lower levels of the Dungeon.
Rivers of roiling, incandescent magma cut jagged scars across the shattered terrain.
Above him, the ceiling was gone…...entirely, utterly obliterated.
A gaping, colossal chasm spanned upward, bleeding glowing, molten waterfalls from level to level in a horrific display of ruin.
"Is that… the 49th floor?" Draco muttered aloud, his voice raspy and hollow, bouncing off the scorched walls.
Narrowing his eyes, he forced his gaze upward, tracking the scale of the devastation.
The chasm didn't just span one floor; it cut a vertical wound through at least three tiers of the Dungeon.
Depending on whether the highest visible ledge was the 48th or 49th floor, he was currently sitting at the very bottom of a massive crater spanning the 51st or 52nd floor.
This was bad.
Exceptionally, catastrophically bad.
The structural integrity of the lower levels had been gutted.
The 50th floor, the primary safe zone of the deep levels, had been completely erased.
That realization brought a sudden, heavy dread crashing down onto his shoulders.
'Were there adventurers resting on the 50th floor? Did I kill them?'
The thought tasted like ash.
Draco was no stranger to the brutal realities of the Dungeon, nor was he averse to taking a life when survival demanded it.
But the idea of senselessly snuffing out the lives of innocent adventurers weighed heavily on his conscience.
It struck an agonizing nerve, dragging up ghosts he had buried five years ago during the dark days of the Evilus War.
He could still feel the phantom echoes of that brutal humiliation...when the Evilus champion, Mors, had beaten him mercilessly and used his battered body as a living weapon to slaughter defenseless civilians.
It had been one of the darkest chapters of his existence, a nightmare fueled by rage, powerlessness, and despair.
Before those suffocating, dark thoughts could pull him under again, Draco aggressively shook his massive head, scattering the memory.
'Logical reasoning' he told himself, forcing his heart rate down.
'Think logically.'
It wasn't confirmed that anyone had been on the 50th floor.
If an expedition team had been resting there, they certainly would have heard or felt the tremors of his escalating battle with Alfia long before the final explosion.
The absolute silence before the cataclysm meant one thing: the floor had been empty.
Besides, very few familias possessed the strength, resources, and manpower required to dive this deep into the Dungeon.
An expedition of that magnitude was a monumental undertaking, not something done on a whim.
With that sobering reassurance, Draco let out a long, shuddering exhale, the tension in his shoulders easing fractionally.
Still, the broader implications remained dire.
With three entire floors pulverized and a significant percentage of the upper tiers compromised, the Dungeon's self-correcting mechanisms would kick in.
The world below knew only one response to such catastrophic disruption of its ecosystem.
It was going to spawn a Juggernaut.
Normally, a Juggernaut at this depth wouldn't be an insurmountable threat to a veteran of Draco's caliber.
But this wasn't a normal circumstance.
Three floors had been vaporized, and the structural damage bled upward.
The anomaly the Dungeon would generate wouldn't be a standard Juggernaut.
It would likely be something far worse…...a mutated aberration born perhaps.
Draco knew his current physical state.
He was battered, bleeding, starved, and critically low on both mind and stamina.
He was in no shape to play hero against an aberrant Dungeon horror.
He needed to get out of the Dungeon…...and fast.
As for Alfia… there was no sign of her wreckage among the magma flows.
Even after sending out several pulses of magic, no signs of life came back.
Whether she had been vaporized down to atoms or had somehow crawled away into the darkness remained a mystery.
But he didn't have the strength to hunt her down and pursuing her in his condition was nothing short of suicidal.
'Not worth the risk' he decided, his jaw tightening.
Deciding to cut his losses, Draco focused his remaining stamina and forced his body to revert to its base, humanoid form.
The moment the massive scales receded and his bones shifted back, a fresh wave of blinding agony assaulted him.
He choked back a scream, his knees buckling as he hit the scorched stone floor.
Deep, ugly purple bruises mottled his dark skin.
His horns were visibly chipped, and his body throbbed with a relentless, deep-seated ache.
To add absolute insult to injury, a hot, vicious plume of sulfurous smoke drafted upward, washing directly over his groin.
'Right'
Draco blinked, looking down at himself.
He was unmistakably naked.
He had stripped off his garments before shifting into his full dragon form to prevent them from tearing, tossing them into a corner that was now presumably lost across non-existent coordinates on the obliterated 49th floor.
The closest viable safe zone with supplies was the 38th floor, but even then, supplies were notoriously sparse there.
His best bet for finding a discarded spare clothing, or even a wandering adventurer who he could stea.... ahem borrow from, would be around the 28th floor.
Swallowing a monumental amount of pride and his burning shame, Draco focused his waning reserves once more, using his partial dragon transformation just enough to sprout a pair of wings from his back.
His plan was simple: use the gaping, multi-floor chasms he had created as a vertical shortcut to ascend through the levels.
Then, mid-flight, another agonizing memory surfaced, striking him harder than a physical blow.
"Oh, right…" Draco muttered, his voice dropping an octave as his expression turned thunderous. "My new Dungeon bag. My custom-forged armor. All my high-grade potions, emergency supplies, magic stones, and the entirety of my Valis… they were all in that bag. On the 49th floor."
He stared blankly into the smoking abyss.
"All of that… just gone."
For a second, the absurdity of his losses broke something inside him.
"AAAAAAAH!"
A scream of unbridled frustration ripped from his throat, echoing off the magma-scorched walls and vibrating through the cavernous depths of the deep levels.
"Curse you, Alfia!" he roared into the empty air, his hands curling into tight fists.
"The very next time we meet, you are going to pay for every single piece!"
Angrily snapping his wings, Draco launched himself upward into the jagged vertical shaft, disappearing into the smoky haze above.
Not far away, hidden in the suffocating shadows on the opposite side of the 52nd floor, a thick stone wall suddenly buckled with a deafening screech of stressed rock.
CRACK!
Debris rained down like deadly shrapnel, plunging into the bubbling lake of magma below.
From the shattered fissure, a lone figure stumbled out into the open.
Alfia.
Her clothes were entirely gone.... though for a vastly different, more violent reason than Draco's predicament.
The epicenter of the magical detonation had incinerated every stitch of fabric she wore.
She had only survived the apocalyptic blast because she had managed to reactivate her magic-negating armor a fraction of a second before the blast wave hit.
Even with her defenses, the recoil had dealt catastrophic internal damage to her body.
If not for the regeneration granted as a creature, she would have been permanently disabled, if not killed outright.
To add insult to injury, the moment she had regained consciousness, she had been forced to immediately suppress her presence and play dead.
She hadn't known what state Draco was in; if the dragon had retained even a fraction more combat readiness than she had, he would have finished her off without hesitation.
Right now, Alfia was operating purely on empty reserves.
Her physical health, already crippled by the burden of her own skill, was dangerously close to total collapse.
She desperately needed magic stones to absorb and stabilize herself, but the surrounding ecosystem had been wiped clean.
Every monster in the vicinity had been vaporized by the blast.
Fortunately for her, Draco had been too preoccupied with his own injuries to conduct a thorough search.
He had left in a desperate hurry.
Yet, as Alfia caught her breath against a scorched pillar of stone, leaning heavily on her shaking knees, she realized her trials were far from over.
Right beside her, the remaining bedrock of the wall violently imploded, sending a fresh shower of jagged stones flying out into the lake of magma.
The Dungeon had sensed the deep, irreparable tear in its architecture.
It was answering the disturbance.
A Juggernaut was spawning.
A/N: Phew, finally managed to finish...had to cut out a bunch of parts to end it here...…overall not the best, but an ok outcome…...hopefully you all enjoy it too....AND yes, I know, some exaggerations were made, but it is what it is...