The chaotic sound, powerful enough to crush stars, met its bane the instant it touched the starfire. The chaotic structure within it was broken down on the spot by the absolute order and creative force carried in the starfire, reduced to the most basic energy particles and dispersed into nothingness.
On the Outer God planet, the crimson eyeball constricted violently.
For the first time, it revealed shock so raw it bordered on disbelief.
The Outer God could not understand.
This creature that seemed to be made of stars… its power was on an entirely different level.
Even its own primal attack had been dissolved so casually.
Humiliation and rage drove it to act.
It tried to draw on even more strength. Across the planet's surface, ever more complex runes began to surface, gathering into something far more terrifying.
But Starforger Dragon Lo Quen gave it no chance to probe further.
A hint of mockery flashed through his star-born dragon eyes.
And at that sight, an emotion the Outer God had long since forgotten finally rose within that vast will.
Fear.
It realized this suddenly appeared Star Dragon truly had the power to threaten its existence.
Run.
It had to flee this constellation.
Without the slightest hesitation, the enormous crimson planet whipped around, attempting to rip open space with its physics-defying movement and bolt into the deep darkness beyond.
It had arrived fast, and it fled even faster.
Starforger Dragon Lo Quen did not pursue at once, nor did he block its escape, letting the Outer God flee in panic into deep space.
It was not that he could not destroy it immediately, but the battlefield was too close to the Icefire World.
If two beings of this scale fought to the death here, the shockwaves alone could easily wipe out the fragile Icefire World.
He meant to protect it, not die along with his enemy.
"Run…"
Lo Quen sneered inwardly. "Once you're out of this cradle where life is born, that's when you die."
He circled beyond the planet's orbit, starlight flowing around him, silently watching the crimson point race away until it vanished into the endless dark of deep space.
The darkness shrouding the world gradually receded, and the maddening celestial resonance finally stopped.
The sky returned to a normal night, save for one more thing: the radiant silhouette of the Starforger Dragon, like a new constellation standing eternal watch over the world.
The survivors stared up at this miracle, unable to speak for a long time.
They knew the world had been saved, and the one who saved it was their Emperor.
Lo Quen, who had become a star-born dragon king.
...
Elsewhere.
The Outer God tore through the void, fleeing for its life across the boundless scale of the cosmos.
It drove its chaotic essence to the limit, twisting the laws of space wherever it passed, desperate to put as much distance as possible between itself and that accursed star system.
It slipped through one dead starfield after another, skimmed past burning suns, cut through the cold wreckage of nebulae, and flung drifting meteors behind it.
Within its perception, a fusion of countless frenzied minds, the deadly starlight behind it did not seem to be in hot pursuit. The distance was slowly widening.
"Success… we've shaken him off!"
A wave of relief, like surviving a catastrophe, spread through the Outer God's collective consciousness.
It began calculating where, in some other corner of the universe, it might find a new "pasture."
But just as it eased its guard and prepared to change course—
At the edge of its vision, or rather within the cosmic backdrop perceived by its eye, five brilliantly conspicuous golden pillars of light appeared out of nowhere.
They looked like columns formed from highly condensed cosmic energy, standing straight in the far starry expanse and radiating an aura that filled it with unease.
"What is that?"
A disturbance rippled through the Outer God's consciousness.
Some unknown cosmic phenomenon?
The remnants of an ancient civilization?
No… that aura—
It was of the same origin as that Star Dragon.
Had he left tracking beacons behind?
A nameless, growing dread pressed in on it.
It altered its course, no longer fleeing in a straight line, but instead hurtling toward the five golden pillars of light.
It had to find out what they were. If they were traps, it would destroy them.
It accelerated again and again, pushing its speed to the absolute limit. Twisted space stretched into serpentine trails behind it.
And then something strange happened.
No matter how it flew, the five golden pillars always seemed close at hand, yet remained impossibly distant.
They stood there quietly against the backdrop of the stars, like eternal, unmoving coordinates.
It raced madly onward, crossing distances measured in light-years, passing through several small galaxies, yet the relative size and position of those five pillars barely changed at all.
This violation of all logic caused the unease within the Outer God to swell rapidly.
Just as it slowed slightly, trying to probe the true nature of the pillars with greater perception,
its crimson eye instinctively glanced down into the depths of space below.
That single glance nearly froze the chaotic core of its will on the spot.
Below it, the cosmic backdrop, which should have been endless darkness dotted with scattered lights, had somehow transformed into a boundless expanse of luminous gold, flowing with soft yet vast energy.
That golden hue was identical to the color of the five pillars.
No, more accurately, the five pillars were nothing more than tiny "protrusions" upon this infinite golden expanse.
This golden field was not lifeless. It flowed as if alive, radiating a presence that made the soul tremble.
As if it had always been there, silently watching its frantic, headless flight.
A terror thick enough to break gods exploded from the Outer God's core.
It felt as though it was not flying through the universe at all, but struggling in vain within the palm of some indescribably vast existence, one far beyond comprehension.
Who?!
What is this?!
It abruptly stopped all movement, freezing in the void.
Then, with a stiffness born of pure fear, its enormous planetary body slowly turned around.
It looked back toward the direction it had come from, toward the starfield it believed it had already escaped.
And in the next instant, it saw it.
Far beyond tens of thousands of light-years, in that stretch of space it had thought lay behind it, a silhouette so immense it defied description filled nearly its entire field of perception.
It was a dragon.
A Starforger Dragon, formed from endless stars, nebulae, and galaxies.
Its body, through which dark-golden starlight flowed, had grown so vast that it had become the cosmic backdrop itself.
Those five golden pillars that had confused it and drawn it in were nothing more than the five fingertips of a single claw, casually extended by this star dragon.
And the radiant golden expanse it had just flown across was the enormous palm of that dragon, spread wide.
This crimson Outer God, which fancied itself the embodiment of destruction and terror, had never once escaped the bounds of that palm.
All its desperate flight had been nothing but a ridiculous, futile crawl across a dragon's hand that covered the starry sea.
Lo Quen, the Starforger Dragon, focused his colossal dragon eye, formed of swirling stars, across light-years, fixing his gaze on the crimson planet that sat like a plaything in his grasp.
Then a cold voice exploded directly within the Outer God's consciousness.
"Where do you think you can escape to?"
On the surface of the Outer God planet, the crimson eyeball, blazing with madness and malice, stretched open to its limit, filled now with absolute despair.
All its chaotic whispers, all its celestial murmurs, all its malignant will fell silent before this great existence that spanned the stars.
At last, it understood.
The enemy it had provoked was never something it could hope to face.
Lo Quen, the Starforger Dragon, shifted his massive dragon head slightly, as if he had lost interest in continuing this game.
The dragon's palm that covered the starry sea slowly began to close.
Then he spoke again, his voice like a final judgment, echoing across the entire universe.
"The Skies Descend!"