Meanwhile, on the 3000th floor of the Dragon God's Hole, atop the peak of an inverted mountain, a warrior stood.
Around him, blue and purple flames stretched and swirled in a blazing vortex.
His Black Armor shone like the sun, saturated by the enormous quantity of flames it had absorbed throughout the battle, and the translucent blue blade in his hand released restless flares at every moment, as if it were alive, eager to keep destroying.
The scene around him could no longer be called a battlefield.
Lightning tore across the inverted firmament and struck the mountains from time to time, craters and fissures split the vast chain of suspended mountains as though colossal monsters had thrashed there in an attempt to destroy everything, and the temperature around the warrior was so high that the mountain beneath his feet was melting in real time, flowing in rivers of incandescent lava into the inverted sky.
From behind the helmet, as his cape fluttered in the constant wind, his ragged breathing could be heard.
But in the next instant, it stopped.
The golden demon eyes behind the helmet analyzed everything, almost like clairvoyance.
The Apocalypse Beast, Rygar Adoldia.
"Fufufufu~!"
A clear female laugh sounded near him.
That laugh did not come from Rygar, nor from Eris, and even less from his enemy.
It was the Doomsday Sword.
The blade in his hand trembled slightly, and new blue and purple flames leaked from its translucent body with an almost indecent joy.
That had started at some point during the fight, and Rygar still had not had the time to stop and analyze it because of the battle.
Because his enemy appeared before him once again.
Assuming, once more, his titanic form.
The False Dragon God.
The most powerful false divinity in that labyrinth could alternate between two forms.
One was that of a humanoid draconian around two meters tall, fast, powerful, with a strength that could only be described as divine.
Its claws pierced through the Doomsday Armor and the Saint Beast Battle Aura with revolting ease, and its magic was capable of bending the entire world with a simple movement of its hand.
And then there was this form.
Before Rygar, an enormous silver dragon rose once more in all its monstrosity.
Its size was so colossal that the mountain Rygar stood upon looked like a joke. He had to tilt his face upward to see it whole.
Its wings had a span measured in kilometers, its body looked as though it had been shaped to crush continents, and its golden pupils burned with a ferocity that did not belong to anything that should exist.
Its right eye bore a horrendous cauterized wound, its left wing was torn apart, and several other smaller wounds marked its colossal body.
Even so, it remained as fierce as hell. When it rose majestically, even the wind caused by its movements seemed enough to lay entire nations to waste.
Rygar did not know the exact size of the legendary King Dragon King's Kajakut, but he seriously doubted he had ever reached even a fraction of this monster.
After being struck head-on by a Dimensional Rupture shortly before, the false Dragon God fixed its gaze once more upon that small black-clad opponent.
And then it roared.
"RAAAAAAAAAWWWWWRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!"
The roar crossed the entire inverted world. Mountains trembled, and the mountain range itself groaned under the pressure.
In the next instant, that titanic body surged forward.
Its speed was disproportionate to its size. The world shook beneath the movement of that colossal body, and its jaws began to glow golden as flames accumulated around its mouth.
Rygar prepared himself that same instant. A black light seeped into Doomsday.
Gravity, Space, and Barrier Magic began to unify into a single spell born from his will. Mana ran through his body like boiling liquid, and he launched himself from the mountain.
Not to avoid the dragon, but to collide head-on with it.
His voice could be heard as he gained speed, transforming into a brilliant black comet, like a dark star advancing across the inverted sky, leaving trails of destruction wherever it passed.
"Black Light Annihilator!"
The false Dragon God's flames exploded in intensity. The golden energy gathered in its throat reached its peak, and in the next instant, it was unleashed.
A colossal flaming breath emerged.
It looked like a sun in the shape of a beam, expelled from the throat of a divine creature.
An absurd mass of golden flames was spat forward, a river of destruction that tore through the entire world in its path.
The flash swallowed the horizon in white gold. Wherever it passed, the air vanished in explosions of heat, clouds were split open, mountains were pierced through, and rocky masses were reduced to incandescent seas.
It was a cataclysm expelled from the mouth of a monstrous god, advancing for kilometers without losing even a trace of force, sweeping away everything before it beneath the crushing violence of golden fire.
Then, amid that hypnotic amalgam of destruction, a long thread of black light appeared, cutting across the horizon.
And it came accompanied by an audible sound.
A deep hum, like a ghostly lament.
The breath was split horizontally in half.
Rygar appeared right before the dragon's enormous mouth, large enough to swallow an entire island.
Doomsday shone with black light, like a black hole compressed into the form of a blade.
Rygar slashed as he advanced like lightning.
"Dark Shimmering Flash!"
A wave of energy burst from that strike, cutting exactly along the line of the jaws and splitting the horizon in half with a terrifying hum.
Because of the spatial and devouring properties of the magic, the scales, the monstrous Battle Aura covering its body, none of that meant anything.
The enormous dragon had no time or space to dodge. The upper half of its head was mercilessly severed from its body.
Dark blood burst forth in torrents.
An agonized cry came from the monster.
"SKRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEE—"
But, as in every other time before, that monstrous body did not remain that way.
In a fleeting instant, the titanic form metamorphosed again, shrinking rapidly.
Flesh, scales, bones, and mana reorganized themselves at absurd speed, reducing themselves until they once more took the shape of the silver draconian.
But Rygar was already waiting.
Leaping through the air, wrapped in the vibrant female laughter coming from Doomsday, he advanced again without hesitation.
Purple flames engulfed his body as he aimed exactly at the point where the diminished enemy would reappear.
"Purple Laceration!"
A horizontal slash of purple fire crossed space in an instant, aimed at the draconian, who was holding his own newly regenerated head with visible agony.
But he was fast. Beating his wings in desperation, he retreated at the last second.
Rygar pursued like lightning.
Every blow he used was a calamity, every exchange of attacks was a chance to kill that horrible monster.
But his senses were growing more and more frantic.
He was winning, he still had mana, he still had fighting strength. The problem was time.
Rygar could feel time running out.
A resounding roar burst out of him as he used Howling Magic. It was not a technique capable of directly injuring that opponent, but it could stun him for an instant. And an instant was all someone like Rygar needed.
In the very next second, he turned into a bolt of lightning.
The storms were on his side.
Twelve lightning bolts descended at the same time upon the silver draconian, crushing the space around him in a divine display, and Rygar attacked from twelve places at once.
"Twelve Lightnings of Olympus: Descent!"
Like twelve lightning bolts taking human form, twelve incarnations of Rygar advanced in perfect sync.
The false Dragon God roared once more, and a Gravitational Force exploded around him like a dome. The world shattered in every direction.
Gravitational waves distorted the air, the mountains bent, the entire terrain was remade.
"HAAAAAAAAAAWWWWLLLLL!!"
But the twelve lightning bolts were not so easy to avoid.
That was the peak of mana, a God-level fusion of Lightning and Space Magic with the Sword and Beast God Style.
While the gravitational waves tore through the world, the twelve attackers skillfully evaded them, as if each one of them were, by himself, a divine swordsman.
One was destroyed. The others kept advancing. Three more were crushed by the rippling gravitational ruptures around the draconian.
Even so, they continued on, lightning that refused to disappear, like inevitable judgments descending from the heavens.
And then they struck. Seven of the Twelve.
Seven new lacerations tore through the Dragon Touki of the labyrinth's final monster, ripping away blood and flesh as the false Dragon God's roar exploded once more across the entire floor.
Wounded, it used the momentum of its legs and wings to ascend into the inverted skies in a sudden burst.
Rygar did not waste a second.
The instant the false Dragon God left behind the gravitational ruptures that had been protecting him, Doomsday pierced the air.
"Amalgam of Nothingness."
A very small sphere of vacuum appeared directly ahead of the Final Boss's path.
Small and pale.
Almost harmless at first glance.
But something deeply primitive inside the false Dragon God immediately understood that it would mean his end.
Using his gravitational magic to the utmost, he swerved. He fled at top speed, twisting his own body to escape that tiny sphere that seemed like nothing at all.
Then the magic expanded.
The world vanished, as if it were being nullified.
The tiny sphere opened up, devouring everything around it in a white and empty expansion that reduced all things to nothing.
Entire mountains vanished as a new scar appeared in a perfect spherical shape, and the landscape of the last floor looked as if a piece of its existence had been torn away.
When the phenomenon ceased, half of the false Dragon God's body had been erased.
Even so, he still survived.
Rygar could clearly feel that the absurd power of the false Dragon God was at its end. The monstrous endurance of that colossal body, which until now had seemed inexhaustible, had finally begun to give way.
Very little remained. Just one more advance, one more perfect blow, one final push to kill the Final Boss once and for all.
In his hand, Doomsday vibrated as if sharing the same certainty. Dark blue flames gushed endlessly from the blade, as if the sword too were eager for the finishing blow.
Rygar was already prepared to teleport and make his final advance, but then, suddenly, his senses sharpened.
His entire body stiffened.
At the same moment, he pushed his Demon Eyes to their limit, and the world slowed down.
The flames spreading across the inverted skies dragged like ink in water. The fragments of stone, ash, and blood suspended in the air seemed painfully slow.
And in that state, Rygar analyzed everything at once.
That was when he looked into the distance, toward the entrance to the floor.
Two new presences appeared, Badigadi and Laplace.
They had arrived.
At the same time he noticed that, a written message from Eris appeared on his communicator.
"Rygar! Don't you dare let him escape, kill him now! I'll hold them off!"
Of course, thanks to the Foresight Demon Eye, Eris foresaw this situation before he did..
The message had not even finished by the time he already felt Eris move.
She shot forward like a red bolt toward the entrance to the floor, going to intercept them without waiting for a response or confirmation.
They were very far apart from one another, but to Rygar, that did not mean much. If he wanted to, he could cross that distance in an instant.
And that was exactly why he did not know what to do.
If he followed what Eris had said, he could take advantage of the unique opportunity before him and finally kill the false Dragon God.
But to do that, he would have to leave her alone before Badigadi and Laplace.
If he went to help her now, he would abandon the best chance he had had until then to finish off the Final Boss. And if the monster escaped once again, the situation could grow even worse with this new interference.
His mind boiled.
For a fraction of a second, Rygar felt as though his reasoning were going in two directions at once.
He did not know what to choose.
His Sixth Sense, usually so reliable, was just as undecided as he was.
That meant that no matter which path he chose, the result would not be ideal.
That made him freeze for a tiny instant.
Then he looked toward Eris again.
Even from that distance, his vision reached her face, completely resolute, without a trace of doubt in her expression.
Eris had absolutely no chance of holding them off with sheer strength. None.
She knew that. He knew that.
So the real question was not whether Eris could defeat them head-on.
The question was: would Eris be capable of doing anything other than that?
Rygar's eyes burned, and he forced his Demon Eyes even further. Wanting the power to simply freeze this moment and think better before acting.
But time did not stop, and the false Dragon God was still fleeing.
Badigadi and Laplace were still advancing, and Eris was already on her way.
So Rygar decided.
He spoke only to himself.
"Finish them off, girl."
In the next instant, he exploded forward.
With a speed he had never reached before, Rygar surged after the false Dragon God in final pursuit, determined to kill him before any other variable could interfere.
Eris ran toward Badigadi and Laplace.
Rygar ran toward the Final Boss.
Doomsday cloaked itself in a deep dark blue light, and space itself seemed to split apart before its blade.
----
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