The silence was broken not by sound, but by pressure.
When Barbatos's wall of time collapsed before it could fully harden, the world didn't just resume its rotation. The world exploded.
Color flooded back into Dragon Valley—the black of the rocks, the red of the lightning, and the gray of the dust—accompanied by the brutal return of the laws of physics. The Black Dragon's heartbeat, which had been suspended between two beats, now slammed shut, sending a shockwave that vibrated through the entire valley.
And then, it realized it.
Emptiness.
A sudden hunger. The loss of the sweet flow that had pampered its insides for a thousand years. The crystal in its chest was empty. The battery was gone.
"GRRRAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!"
The roar did not sound like a living creature. It sounded like a continent snapping in two.
The sound wave slammed into the cliff walls surrounding the valley with tangible physical force. Granite boulders the size of houses, which had withstood storms for millennia, cracked and collapsed instantly, crashing down to the valley floor. The black clouds in the sky swirled madly, as if terrified of the monster king's wrath.
Barbatos, who had just shot up a few hundred meters from the dragon's chest with all his might, felt the wind around him tremble in fear. His Barbatos form clutched Aria tightly, protecting her with his own back.
"Damn it... he woke up too fast," Barbatos hissed, his eyes narrowing sharply through the dust. "My time seal hasn't had the chance to lock his consciousness yet."
Down there, amidst the billowing dust and smoke, a pair of red searchlights flared to life.
Those eyes.
One intact crimson eye, and one empty socket pulsing with purple miasma.
The One-Eyed Black Dragon lifted its colossal head. Its long neck writhed like a giant snake, piercing through the fog of dust. It needed no time to think. It needed no logic to understand what had happened.
Its primal instinct screamed one thing: THIEF.
The red eye swept the sky, searching for who dared to take what was its. And in an instant, that deadly gaze locked onto a small green dot struggling to escape into the heavens.
Barbatos.
For a moment that felt like an eternity, the two ancient entities stared at one another.
On one side was Barbatos, the God of Freedom bearing hope and the winds of change. On the other, the One-Eyed Black Dragon, the Living Calamity that had brought the Age of Heroes to ruin.
There were no words. Monsters in the world of DanMachi did not negotiate. They possessed no human logic, driven only by destructive instinct and pure hatred for all living things.
The dragon opened its jaws.
No preparation. No warning.
FOOOOSSSHHHH!
A jet of black fire exploded from its mouth.
It was not ordinary fire. It was not the Pyro element Venti knew. The fire radiated no heat, but rather a burning cold. Its color was darker than night, as if the fire itself were a hole in the fabric of reality.
The fire did not burn matter, it erased the concept of existence.
The tongue of black flame shot upward, swallowing hundreds of meters in the blink of an eye, aiming straight for Barbatos.
Barbatos did not try to parry it. His elemental instincts screamed that touching that fire, even with his remaining power, would be fatal for Aria in his arms.
So, he did what the wind always does. He did not resist, he flowed.
Just before the fire hit him, Barbatos's spirit form faded.
He dispersed himself into billions of microscopic air particles, scattering his and Aria's essence into the vast atmosphere. The black fire passed through the empty space where Barbatos had just been, burning the clouds behind him into nothingness—not evaporating them, but erasing them without a trace.
On the other side of the flame tongue, the wind particles coalesced again. Barbatos rematerialized, his spiritual breath ragged.
"Insane," Barbatos thought, his cyan eyes flickering weakly. "That fire... that was condensed 'Law'. If even a little bit hit us..."
However, the dragon gave him no time to think.
Seeing its fire fail, the dragon roared again—this time with an ear-splitting note of frustration. It stomped its hind legs, and the giant body weighing millions of tons launched into the air.
The speed was illogical. The laws of physics seemed not to apply to this monster.
Its black wings spread out to cover the night sky, creating a hurricane with a single flap.
A giant shadow fell over Barbatos.
A claw.
The dragon's right hand, with claws as sharp as adamantite and each the size of a bell tower, swung down.
The movement was simple. Primitive. Yet, behind that simplicity lay the weight of power that had once destroyed Maxim's absolute defense and broken the Level 9 Empress's attack.
Barbatos knew he couldn't dodge this time. The attack was too wide, covering an area the size of a football field. If he dispersed his body again, he wouldn't have enough energy to pull himself back together quickly.
He had to withstand it.
Barbatos spun his body in the air. His aurora wings spread to their maximum, squeezing out the very last drops of his power.
"Aegis of the Wind!"
The wind in the entire valley was forcibly drawn in, compressed into a multi-layered transparent shield wall in front of Barbatos. The air was compressed until its density exceeded diamond.
DHUAAAARRRR!
Dragon claw met wind shield.
The sound of the impact sounded like the sky collapsing. A shockwave spread horizontally, shearing the peaks of the cliffs around the valley flat to the ground.
Barbatos was hurled back a hundred meters in the air, but he held his position. His teeth gritted. His Wind Shield began to crack like glass.
CRAACK!
The sound of fracturing rang out.
On the surface of the Archon's absolute wind shield, fine cracks appeared, rapidly spreading like a spiderweb.
Barbatos's eyes went wide.
"What?!"
This shield had withstood attacks from gods in his prime. But this dragon's claw, driven only by raw physical strength and hatred, was able to crack it in a single strike?
And this... was the power of the Black Dragon without Aria.
The monster was in its weakest state—just woken up, hungry, and missing its energy source. Yet, its power was still in a different dimension from anything else in this world.
"Without Aria, he is still this powerful?!"
Barbatos felt a cold horror creep up his spine. "No wonder the Zeus and Hera Familia lost. They weren't fighting a monster. They were fighting a breathing natural disaster."
The shield shattered into fragments of light.
Barbatos used the momentum of the push to shoot backward, creating distance. His breathing was heavy. Maintaining that shield had burned almost all of his remaining strength.
The dragon prepared for a third attack. Its long tail began to vibrate, readying a supersonic lash that could split the atmosphere.
Barbatos glanced at Aria in his arms. The woman's spirit light was dimming, shaken by the dragon's terrifying aura. If this continued, Aria would die from shock before they even made it out of the valley.
He couldn't win. Not in enemy territory. And not while carrying a burden.
"Sorry, Dragon," Barbatos said, his voice hoarse but full of determination. "I don't have time to play with you. And you... it's time to go back to sleep in your new cage."
The dragon roared again, ready to launch a final attack.
But Barbatos made one last move. He didn't attack the dragon. He attacked the atmosphere around it.
He sacrificed his remaining Wind Authority to create a single visual phenomenon.
"HYMN OF DEPARTURE!"
BOOM!
Barbatos detonated the remnants of his wind shield outwards.
The impact blasted the air throughout the valley. Millions of tons of dust, volcanic ash, and rock debris in the valley were sucked to a single point—right in front of the dragon's face—then spun with insane centrifugal speed.
A giant dust vortex formed. Dark, dense, and blinding.
The dragon roared in confusion. Its vision was completely blocked by the thick dust storm. Its sensory and tactile sensors were scrambled by the chaotic air turbulence.
In those seconds of blindness, Barbatos seized the opening.
He hugged Aria tightly, transformed his body into a thin stream of air that was barely detectable, and shot vertically at full speed.
He pierced through the dust storm, punched through the layer of black clouds, and continued rising until he passed the boundary of the valley's atmosphere.
Behind him, the effect of the Temporal Severance he had planted earlier finally hardened.
The time seal closed.
Not like a door slamming, but like water freezing. The time in the valley was separated from the outside world. The dragon was still there, but it could no longer reach the "Future" where Barbatos was.
.......................................
Down there, the dust vortex slowly subsided.
The Black Dragon flapped its wings, clearing the dust that obscured its vision. Its red eye swept the sky ferociously, ready to breathe fire again, ready to chase the thief to the ends of the earth.
But... there was no one.
The sky was empty. There were only listlessly swirling black clouds.
Barbatos's trace of existence had vanished completely, cut off by an invisible wall of time.
The dragon fell silent. It hovered in the air, its head turning left and right.
Where was he? Where was its food?
The dragon tried to fly higher, intending to chase into the sky. However, when it reached a certain altitude, it hit nothing, yet it moved no further.
It flew, but stayed in place.
The time around it had become a loop.
It tried again.
Clawing. Breathing fire.
Everything was futile.
Its attacks were merely absorbed by the void of time and returned to it.
The dragon stopped.
Its breath came in heavy heaves.
And for the first time in a thousand years... it felt something it had long forgotten.
Fatigue.
Without Aria in its chest, the infinite flow of energy that had sustained it was severed.
The black crystal in its chest was now just a gaping empty hole. Without the supply of pure mana from the Great Spirit, the regeneration of its cells stopped completely.
Pain began to creep up.
The wound in its left eye socket, which had been suppressed by Aria's energy, began to throb with pain.
Its immortal body suddenly felt heavy. And sore.
The monster roared.
But this time, it was not a roar of dominance. It was a roar of frustration. The roar of a wounded beast trapped in an invisible cage of time.
"GRRROOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!"
Its voice echoed inside the dimensional prison, bouncing endlessly, never to be heard by the outside world.
It was caged. Returned to the darkness. Alone with its pain, waiting in a pseudo-eternity.
On the floor of the ruined valley, the World Calamity landed heavily. It coiled its body, protecting its empty chest possessively, waiting... waiting for even the slightest crack in the wall of time to escape and exact its revenge.