'My arms…' Ali thought, his jaw tight, teeth grinding.
He stood at the bottom of a crater nearly twenty meters deep, his body holding up the wrath of the gods. His arms shone a furious cosmic silver, but they were mangled—riddled with cracks that pulsed like glowing wounds. The fire inside him surged at an insane rhythm, climbing, climbing, threatening to spiral out of control. He had to leash it back at the very last instant, or he'd explode from within.
The crater boiled with silver light, smoke curling around Ali's frame.
Above, Mateo hovered calmly in the storm's embrace. The halo of lightning spun slow and deliberate behind him, each full rotation cutting down his borrowed time. One had already passed. Sixty seconds remained.
'I don't have much time. A minute…' Mateo's expression hardened. His mind raced. Weaken him. Break him. Strip away his power before my clones are ready.
He raised his voice, and thunder rolled with his words.
"Lightning God Spell: Blue Thunder Spirit."
The halo split, bleeding raw divinity. From it poured streaks of titanium-blue lightning, weaving together, growing, forming shape. A towering giant soldier, ethereal yet solid, took form. Its body roared with thunder, its very veins running with living electricity. It raised its arm, a fist the size of a mountain, and brought it down.
Ali looked up. The colossal knuckles of lightning descended like a god's judgment. The crater quaked before the fist even reached him. His arms—already burned, fractured, healing, cracking again—tightened at his sides. His breath was hot iron in his throat.
'I'm going to die at this rate…' he admitted to himself. His dragon eyes narrowed, the black veins crawling higher up his arm as he focused the cosmic fire. 'He cannot possibly hold this power for long. If he can… I'm fucked.'
His gaze flicked to the tattoo on his wrist, Veska's mark. A wild thought passed through him—'would he intervene, like the lightning god had?' His lips curled into a faint, mocking grin.
'No. Not his style. Not mine either. No one saves me but me and what I have.'
Ali bent his knees, lowering into a stance. His right fist drew back. His arm glowed brighter and brighter, cosmic fire boiling out of him, crawling up to his shoulder. Black veins webbed across his skin, his flesh straining under the pressure.
The giant's fist roared closer. It was so massive, it nearly filled the entire crater. There was nowhere to run.
Ali's right arm burned silver and black.
The fist descended.
Ali drove his fist forward.
KAAAAAA-BOOOOOOM.
The world shook.
The impact wasn't flesh against flesh. It was something else—like punching through the atmosphere itself, thick, suffocating, a jelly of air pressing back against him. His fist cracked reality itself. The shockwave ripped outward, deepening the crater, shattering the walls, forcing Ali's legs further down into the rock as he resisted.
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.
Silver fire against blue thunder. They collided, blinding, deafening.
From above, Mateo's eyes were indifferent, as if he'd already consigned Ali to the grave. His lips parted.
"Lightning God Spell: Blue Thunder Burst."
The moment the words left him, the giant changed. The fist that Ali held back dissolved into madness. Its form surged, shook violently, then detonated in an instant.
KZZZZZZZZZAAAAAAAAM.
The giant erupted into raw chaos. Lightning uncoiled, erratic, relentless, exploding downward into Ali.
The pressure vanished—only to be replaced by something worse.
Ali's fist no longer had a shape to resist. Instead, endless spears of lightning crashed through him, piercing skin, muscle, bone, then bursting out the other side. His cosmic fire blazed desperately, but each layer of flame was shredded apart, failing, collapsing.
The lightning tore him open.
It didn't stop.
Every nerve in his body screamed, frying under the assault. The cracks across his arms spread to his chest, his neck, his jaw. His cosmic fire reignited, patched, healed—then failed again, overwhelmed by another surge. Over and over it repeated, healing and breaking, mending and shattering.
Ali was burning alive in silence, caught in the storm's endless lightning….
A lightning streak hissed past Ali's head, stripping the skin clean off his face. His cheekbones, jawline, and even parts of his skull were exposed—charred, black, and dripping molten blood. His eyes were nothing but empty sockets, yet the silvery cosmic glow still burned from deep within them. For an instant, Ali looked less like a man and more like a corpse that refused to fall.
Then the flames surged.
His healing cells roared to life, rewriting his flesh piece by piece. Silver fire poured into the hollows of his face, regrowing bone, weaving muscle, stitching skin with relentless precision. Still, Ali barely noticed. He was too focused, too utterly consumed by the one task that kept him alive: controlling the flames.
If he slipped—if he let go for even a fraction of a second—he wouldn't just burn. He would explode, erased by the god's thunder swallowing him whole.
Inside his Spirit Realm, chaos spread. The once-boundless fog was streaked with jagged bolts of thunder. Arcs of electricity carved through the air, hungry, invasive. The lightning god was there, pushing into Ali's very soul. One wrong strike in here could shatter him from the inside out.
And then—
CREEEEEAAAK.
The gate. The massive, cosmic door to the Hall of Dragons. It opened even more. Not much—just an inch. But the sliver was enough.
From within, a torrent of pure cosmic fire surged out like a tidal wave, flooding Ali's Spirit Realm, colliding head-on with the invading thunder. The clash lit the sky in a violent storm of fire and lightning.
Behind Ali, a familiar presence formed, overwhelming, ancient, crushing.
Bahamut.
The Dragon Lord of Darkness forced his will through the gate, burning some of the origin he had harvested to cross the boundary. He didn't step through himself—he didn't need to. Instead, he reached through one of his creations: Shadow.
Ali's Shadow stirred and split. But when it rose, its purple eyes weren't its own. They gleamed with Bahamut's gaze—cosmic, piercing, the kind of stare that could strip a soul bare and make even gods hesitate.
The Shadow's wide maw yawned open, unnatural and vast.
Fangs.
From the darkness around Ali, colossal fangs burst forth—forty meters tall, ten meters wide, rising in a jagged dome. They weren't ordinary fangs. They were covered in a vile black slime, dripping and writhing, the substance absorbing every bolt of lightning that smashed into them. The storm descended. The slime drank it whole.
Ali—nearly reduced to ash—had his chance. His body, nothing but a shredded husk, rebuilt piece by piece inside the shelter of the jaws. Cells lit with cosmic fire, veins stitched, bones reforged. From nothing, his corpse began to breathe again.
But above, Mateo's calm broke.
His halo spun faster. His hand raised high.
He would crush this defence.
ROAAAAAAAAAR.
KRAAAAAAAAAAA.
The roar wasn't just sound—it was madness, a vibration that split the skies. Mateo froze mid-motion, eyes wide, as the black slime shifted. The slime covering the fangs melted together, reshaping, pulling into something far worse.
One head rose. Then another. And another.
Eleven in total, each one larger than Shadow himself, each one a grotesque mockery of his form. Black slime shaped their horns and jaws, their glowing purple eyes gleaming like omens of death.
They opened their maws in unison, a wall of nightmares screaming toward the sky.
Mateo's chest heaved. His face twisted with desperation and fury.
He clapped his hands together so hard the air cracked.
"LIGHTNING GOD SPELL!" he roared..
Two rotations of the halo spun at once, devouring twenty seconds in exchange for raw power. Sparks and arcs bled from his body as he screamed again:
"BLUE THUNDER SERPENT!"
The storm obeyed.
The entire sky above exploded with lightning, twisting into shape. A colossal beast writhed free of the storm, a hundred-meter-long Chinese dragon of pure blue thunder. Two titanic horns curled back from its skull, arcs of divine lightning bridging them like a living storm crown.
Its scales glistened in jagged currents, every movement a flash of blinding light. Its eyes, pits of eternal storm.
Mateo spread his arms wide, his throat tearing as he roared:
"RAIJU!"
The divine thunder dragon shrieked, its voice splitting forests, cracking mountains. It surged downward, twisting through the air, a living catastrophe aimed at Ali and the horrors protecting him.
The eleven black monstrosities screeched in answer. Their jaws stretched impossibly wide, and their teeth launched like volleys of spears—fangs covered in writhing black blood.
RAIJU raised its horned head high, arcs of thunder exploding between the curling horns. Then—
KRAAAAACK!
A blinding beam of divine lightning tore out, crashing down on the thousands of black fangs screaming through the sky.
But the blood dripping from those fangs writhed. It shifted, pulsed, and then liquefied into the same abhorrent black slime. In an instant, the slime fused together, erupting into a sprawling nightmare of tangled tentacles.
The monstrous organism writhed across the air, tendrils lashing like whips, weaving into a living barricade. The divine beam struck it—and was swallowed.
Not deflected. Not resisted. Absorbed.
The tentacles convulsed, their veins glowing blue as they drank the god's thunder and twisted it into more of themselves. Then they surged forward, lunging through the storm, attaching themselves to Raiju's colossal body.
SSSSSSSSSHHHHHH
Everywhere the tendrils latched, gnashing mouths ripped open along their length, rows of jagged teeth burying themselves in the lightning dragon's hide. They weren't just clinging—they were feeding.
They began to crawl inside.
Raiju's body convulsed, the god-beast roaring so loud the forest below buckled. Lightning exploded from its scales in a desperate frenzy, but the storm only fuelled its parasites, feeding their endless hunger. The tentacles multiplied, sank deeper, shredded from within.
Mateo's eyes widened. His breath caught in his throat.
"No… no no no…"
His hands clapped together, as his heart quickened in frustration and surprise…
"LIGHTNING GOD SPELL! BLUE THUNDER BLAST!"
Raiju's body pulsed. Then it detonated.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM
But this time—the light was different.
Mateo's pupils shrank to pinpricks as his irises flashed pure white.
The dragon's blue lightning ignited into searing brilliance, turning white-hot, an unearthly purity of divine destruction. The shockwave slammed outward in a blinding wave, vaporizing the swarm of tentacles, burning the slime monstrosities into nothing but ash carried on the storm.
The air itself seemed to scream as the shockwave erased everything within reach.
And then—silence.
Mateo gasped, sweat flooding down his brow. His chest heaved. His halo had lost another rotation, the clock of his borrowed godhood ticking faster and faster.
In the distance, deep inside Ali's skull, a voice thundered.
"You owe me for that."
Bahamut's roar rumbled like a collapsing world before his presence pulled back, fading from Ali's mind as abruptly as it had come.
Ali, standing tall within the remains of the dome of fangs, flexed his newly rebuilt body. The silver glow burned from his eyes again, stronger, steadier. His chest rose slow, deliberate, as the jaws peeled open above him, letting him see the storm-stricken sky.
He tilted his head back, meeting Mateo's horrified stare.
"You should be honoured…" Ali's voice carried, harsh but calm, every word heavy with iron.
"…to protect your master."
The dome split fully, revealing him—whole, blazing, unbroken.
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