Ali's single blackened eye stared at Mateo's new form, and for the first time in a long while, his Force Sense was screaming at him.
Danger. Everywhere. All at once.
The sheer volume of warnings crashing into his brain threatened to split his skull in half. His senses were being drowned in alerts, overwhelming him until he had no choice but to dull them down just to stop the crushing weight of danger signals.
And in the instant he eased the flow—
BZZZT!
His vision blurred.
Everything slowed for half a heartbeat, but the only thing visible was a pale fist, cloaked in raw lightning, coming straight for him.
Ali's blackened left eye barely had time to widen before—
CRACK.
The fist drove into his nose with a sound like stone breaking. His nose flattened against his face, bone shattering into fragments. Blood erupted outward in a messy spray, painting the air as the skin across his face seared under the sheer voltage.
PSSHHHHHHT—
Ali's body was hurled back like a rag-doll, spinning through the air. His face burned with numbness and electric sting, blood trailing behind him like a scarlet ribbon.
'Fast. Too fast'. His thoughts were clipped, broken, even inside his mind. 'I can't even—'
He raised his right arm on instinct, black aura hardening over it like armour to block what his senses told him would come next—
But his defence met nothing.
Instead—
WHAM!
Mateo's shin crashed into Ali's abdomen and shoulder from the side with the force of a freight train. Bone popped, his breath blasted out of his lungs in a soundless gasp, and his body was shot off in a new direction.
Ali careened through the forest like a human cannonball. Every tree he struck cracked, snapped, and splintered, leaving a mangled trail of destruction behind him. Bark split, wood exploded, soil flew into the air.
Behind him, Mateo's lightning burned its own signature into the earth, a glowing line of seared black soil and flaming leaves where his aura brushed by.
Ali's mind sharpened through the agony. 'Even with aura protecting me, I can't match him. My body isn't fast enough. Even if I know where he's coming from, even if my Force Sense tells me exactly when… I'm still too slow.'
CRASH!
He slammed into another tree, the trunk bursting apart on impact. Wooden splinters like knives impaled his back, digging deep into muscle as he bounced off and rolled violently across the soil.
But Mateo was already there.
A shadow loomed.
His leg was raised high above his head. In that frozen second, if one had the eyes to see in slow motion, the air visibly bent around his descending leg.
Electricity hissed through the compressed air, a halo of current sparking with lethal hunger. His white hair stood on end, lifted by the electric static, his eyes blazing blue fire.
Mateo looked less like a man and more like a war god sculpted out of thunder, descending to erase his prey in a single stomp.
In just three attacks, he had already made Ali look like prey.
This wasn't the same fight anymore.
Mateo had transcended. His aura, his speed, his sheer dominance placed him far beyond Paradise's level two.
Ali knew it.
And yet—
'Golden Circle.'
He had thought the words before Mateo's foot even descended. His Force Sense had screamed the warning with enough time for his will to react.
BOOOOOOM.
Golden light erupted from Ali's body like a divine pulse. The ground cratered beneath him as an invisible wave slammed outward. Mateo's eyes narrowed sharply—his lightning sight registering the glow—just before the force hit his chest like a battering ram.
THUD—WHOOSH!
Mateo crossed his arms, the lightning clinging to his skin absorbing most of the blow, dissipating chunks of the impact. Even so, the blast was enough to hurl him backwards. His body blurred across the air like a lightning streak until he landed a hundred meters away, gouging deep trenches in the ground with his heels before stopping.
Ali lay gasping on the soil, sweat mixing with blood. His body trembled from the electricity frying his nerves. And the Golden circles two last Spirit Points.
But the distance was what he needed.
He closed his eyes.
And in the next heartbeat, his awareness shifted.
His Spirit Realm stretched before him: vast, black, endless. His gaze locked onto the single, towering figure that dominated it—the colossal Dragon Gate. The gate loomed impossibly high, blocking out everything on one side of his Spirit Realm, its presence alone filling the void with silent power.
Meanwhile, in the physical world, his hand uncorked a vial and emptied its contents down his throat in one motion. The liquid burned cold, rushing into his veins like fire disguised as water.
The potion Miles had given him. The lifeline he had been saving. If he didn't have it now, this battle would have already been over.
Inside his Spirit Realm, he saw it instantly.
The dry pond at the heart of his Spirit Realm shuddered, then cracked open. From beneath the broken floor, his Black Spirit surged upward in a violent rush, flooding the pond until it brimmed to the edge with inky, endless energy.
The sheer release drove a migraine into his skull so vicious it felt like knives carving through his brain.
But Ali didn't flinch. Didn't blink.
"Power!" Ali roared, his voice booming through his Spirit Realm, reverberating against the walls of the Dragon Gate.
"Give me everything you've got—or this is the end for the Ancient Dragon Hall!"
His words weren't just a scream into the void. They were a command—a declaration hurled across the unseen bond between his monstrous soul and the souls of creatures who dwarfed nations: the ancient dragons.
And they heard him.
Not in their ears. Not in their minds. In their very souls.
For entities as old and vast as they, the soul was sacred—untouchable, eternal. To feel a mortal's demand pierce that place was unthinkable. And yet it reached them. Clear. Sharp. Very Commanding.
Across their hidden domains, the ancient dragons stirred.
One by one, titans rose. The sky shook. The seas boiled. Entire valleys quaked as colossal bodies moved in unison. Hatchlings and younglings froze in terror, watching their forebears rise as though war itself had come.
Even the most ancient among them, those whose existence was measured in tens of millennia, rose from their slumber.
Then the world itself shifted.
What countless dragons had thought for ages was a mountain of stone—unmovable, eternal—began to tremble. The "mountain" shuddered, boulders crashing down its slopes.
And then it rose.
Not a mountain. Never a mountain.
The head of a dragon so vast that its brow scraped the clouds pulled free of the earth, its body stretching far beyond sight. Skin of jagged rock shifted and cracked as if entire tectonic plates bent with its movements. Its eyes opened, deep brown pools older than empires, staring with crushing weight into the same direction all others faced.
With one breath, it exhaled a storm of dust and rock so thick and heavy it could have buried continents, erased species, and suffocated worlds.
And it was not alone.
From endless oceans, fire-choked volcanoes, and the forgotten cracks between dimensions, the ancients gazed in the same direction: the silvery, cosmic storm that hung suspended across hundreds of kilometres of forbidden sky. A place no dragon dared approach.
But even that silence was broken.
From within the dark, immeasurable void of his dominion, Bahamut himself stirred. His presence blanketed the horizon in shadow. Slowly, his monstrous head emerged from the abyss, his scales glimmering with impossible colours as he fixed his gaze on the cloud.
The cosmos itself seemed to dim under the weight of his anger.
And then—
"HEED HIS CALL!"
The oldest dragon's voice tore through reality. A roar so ancient, so vast, that whole skies split and the silvery cloud itself shuddered and cracked open as though sound alone had cleaved it apart.
For miles, the tremor of that voice left fissures in the air.
The reply came swift, irritated, furious.
"FINE!"
The roar from the cloud carried its own authority, sharp and thunderous, shaking the bones of lesser dragons. Relieved, the ancient dragons lowered their colossal frames, withdrawing to their realms. It was a fate worse than war at stake, it was their very souls at stake.
But in Ali's Spirit Realm, time bent differently.
The instant he had screamed his demand at the Dragon Gate, it responded.
The doors groaned. They opened.
Not a crack. Not an inch. Not the timid slit Ali had forced open in past battles.
A meter.
The gate yawned open like a god's maw, and the sight stole Ali's breath. He had never dreamed of prying it that wide any time soon. He knew instantly this wasn't just his doing. This was an answer.
And then—
"YOU ASKED FOR IT, HUMAN!"
The roar didn't pass through his ears. It detonated inside his skull, splitting his head apart with raw, merciless force. His knees buckled, teeth grit, blood running from his nose.
And then came the fire.
WHOOSH!
A flood of silvery cosmic fire erupted from the gate, a tidal wave of impossible brilliance. It surged forward with such pressure the Spirit Realm itself seemed to buckle. It smashed into Ali, swallowing him whole and then burrowing into his flesh, his veins, his marrow.
It entered him.
And in the waking world—
Mateo had already launched himself forward again, lightning lashing from his every step. But before he could reach Ali, a shockwave exploded outward.
Not of light this time…
Pure air pressure.
BOOOOOOM!
The gale was so massive that Mateo was hurled backwards, skidding violently across scorched earth. Trees didn't just topple—they were ripped from their roots, spun into the sky like straw, and flung away in every direction. Dozens upon dozens of them rained across the battlefield, breaking apart as they struck ground.
At the eye of that storm, Ali stood.
Unmoving.
His arms hung limp at his sides, his head tilted up toward the sun, eyes closed. But his body—once bruised, mangled, broken—was whole again. His nose straight. His ribs reformed. His skin, unmarred. Every wound Mateo had dealt, erased.
The charred wreckage was gone.
'Control. Rhythm.' Ali's mind whispered, sharp as a blade.
'Follow the rhythm. Nothing else exists.'
His focus tunnelled into the flow of cosmic fire now coursing through him. It wasn't like the gentle cycles he'd managed to tame in his training. This was a roaring river threatening to drown him, endless waves of destructive fire that could break apart his body if he lost even a second of control.
That training—the failures, the Hours of burning pain, the times he collapsed near death—was the only reason Ali had climbed to Third-Level Aura so fast.
Because this fire, this cosmic fire, wasn't just strong. It was chaos itself. Erratic. Violent. Without flow, without order, without mercy. It rampaged through every fibre of his being like a storm of suns, smashing into muscle, bone, and blood without restraint. It refused to obey, refused to yield, refused to be anything but destruction.
Where aura was like learning to breathe, the cosmic fire was like inhaling a supernova.
And yet—Ali endured.
Because only Ali could.
Only he could survive that internal carnage. Only he could stand against the sensation of his own body tearing itself apart from the inside. Only he could grit his teeth through the endless burning agony and still push deeper into the flame.
Others would have been reduced to ash. Others would have begged for death after mere seconds.
But Ali… Ali entered the zone.
That state of absolute focus where his mind became a blade, where the world around him ceased to exist and only the task at hand remained. His will honed to a point so sharp that even chaos itself could be carved into order.
It wasn't enough to have endurance. It wasn't enough to have will. To tame this fire, one had to be both monster and genius—born to conquer what no human should touch.
And Ali was that anomaly.
Meanwhile, far away in the Dragon Hall.
The cosmic fog stretched for kilometres in every direction, an endless storm of cosmic silver. Deep inside that void, two colossal eyes opened.
Not dragon eyes of flesh and scale. But eyes that looked like celestial bodies themselves. Brilliant, burning, unfathomable.
The pupils were thin slits of black that cut through the silver brilliance, and from those slits stretched threads of white light, bursting outward like dying stars across the void.
They belonged to Him.
The Ancient Dragon. The Leader of the Dragon Hall. The one who ruled over immensely powerful beings.
"This human…"
The voice was a roar, shaking the very fog apart, dripping with irritation and hatred as always. But this time—there was something else.
Surprise.
Astonishment.
The impossible sight of a mortal doing what no mortal should.
For in that very moment, the dragon saw Ali tame the wildness of the flames.
Ali finally felt it.
The rhythm.
The fire that once tore at him from all sides, smashing and clawing at his very cells, now began to cycle smoothly through his veins. A current. A river. Still burning. Still lethal. But now—his.
The heat spread evenly across his body, filling him, empowering him, no longer trying to rip him apart. His healing cells felt the even heat all over his body, no longer destroying him from the inside.
Ali's lips parted. His breathing steadied. His focus narrowed.
And then he opened his eyes.
They were no longer human.
Where once were mortal irises and sclera, now shone the Eyes of the Dragon. The same brilliant silvery colour as the flames he borrowed, slit down the middle with a jagged black pupil, from which threads of white light radiated outward like a storm of stars.
The same eyes as the Leader of the Ancient Dragons himself.
Ali tilted his head upward, those new eyes gleaming like celestial blades, and stared directly at Mateo.
The air between them burned.
Mateo's body tensed, his own lightning crackling violently as his piercing blue eyes locked with Ali's silver dragon gaze. The two stood frozen in that instant, power meeting power, storm against inferno.
And then Mateo noticed them.
The cracks.
Tiny fissures began to spread across Ali's skin, first on his forearms, then crawling up his neck, splitting across his jaw. But instead of blood, instead of flesh—there was fire.
Silver fire.
The cracks glowed like molten rivers, as if Ali's skin was no more than a fragile shell holding back a furnace. His entire body became a living vessel of contained apocalypse.
The cracks spread wider, webbing across his chest, his face, his arms, until Ali looked less like a man and more like a statue carved from flame, barely containing the inferno within.
And then the fire escaped.
WHOOOSH!
The silver flames surged outward, swallowing his body in light. His hair whipped upward violently, strands turning into pure silver flame that curled and snapped in the air, as though the fire itself had chosen to take the shape of his hair.
Ali stood reborn in the heart of the storm.
Silvery flames pouring off him. Eyes of the Dragon gleaming with otherworldly power. The ground beneath him cracked and smouldered as if rejecting the weight of the force he carried.
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