Chapter 475

Mark knew he would be an absolute mess as soon as Isoko came back. And so, Mark moved fast, because he couldn’t let Isoko come back to a war. Those Living Kill spells had targeted Union users, and that meant that this was an entirely new part of the war Dominant had started, and that Mark was not going to risk Isoko again.

With a terrible, cold rage, Mark launched into the burning sky, burning it more as he sped right at the thing that had killed Isoko.

The Living Kill spell was purple, a hundred meters tall and emaciated, skeletal hands reaching down into the burning land, filling the world with Death, surviving on Death, propagating Death everywhere it touched. With long limbs it turned nuclear-fire skeletons into minions. With tiny, beady purple eyes it noticed Mark.

Mark crashed into its emaciated chest, screaming with rage, reality rippling as he roared, hands becoming claws, legs becoming claws, face distorting into a maw filled with swallowing purple depths. The Living Kill buckled under Mark’s violence, under Mark’s Union of Energy and Entropy, and Mark gobbled it all up. He drank in the Death, and he drank in the fire, he swallowed the energy of the world itself and frost rimmed the barren land, necromantic constructs flash freezing over like fire had suddenly turned to ice.

Mark’s skin burbled into scales, into horns and a tail and spread-wide wings, black and purple.

The Kill was dead.

Mark glared at the sky from eyes that lined his body, and he saw something weakening. It was the Veil between worlds. It had been cracked and now it was tattered.

“OPEN.”

The world opened, ash-filled auroric skies replaced with ash-filled blue skies.

It was too small.

Mark roared louder, and the sky opened up wider, cracking, rifting.

Mark crawled through and now he was in a war, in the back lines, hovering over a much smaller nuclear wasteland than the one on Daihoon.

Three dragons, a blue, a green, and a red, advanced across the skies of Chiba, toward Crystal Tower, hanging back while the ground troops, 7 Living Kills, slowly advanced off of the beaches and into Tokyo Bay. One dragon hovered above them all, twice the size of the rest of its monstrous forces. It was black and white and tattered.

The necrodragon.

The Living Kill spells were wading into the water, their smaller ground troops moving the slowest of all, deer and bears and so many people looking like they were drowning as the Living Kills dragged those souls along in their wake. Fish were dying in the waters, and a ghost captain of a fishing ship floated alongside one of the Living Kill spells, shaking its fishing pole in a skeletal hand at New Tokyo up ahead, like a raging mascot for an unfeeling master.

The necrodragon astrally grabbed the dead monsters made by the Living Kill spells, and the dead mutated in its touch. Bears became flying sharks. Deer and humans became centaur-like things that pranced across the water, moving unnaturally across the water’s surface. Fish and humans and whatever was left became crawling abominations with bone-sickles for claws and legs and faces, like centipedes that swam just as well as they could kill.

The city had condensed, forming strong lines of defense in the bay.

Explosions rocked the air, but the dragons cast spells and turned nuclear fire into breezes. Castellan fire burned the ocean and the skies, but the dragons turned that fire into little crystals that they flickered into beams that lanced out into the defenders, on the other coast.

Those beams broke on golden flames.

Missiles still filled the sky, but it was New Tokyo versus 3 organized dragons, 1 necrodragon wrangling the Living Kill spells below, and then there were the Living Kills themselves.

One of the giant floating blue cubes shot a concentrated laser off of its nearest edge, directly at one of the Living Kill spells. That beam of perfectly straight, violent light, curved and died under the smallest touch of purple Death, becoming nothing, not even a return blast. The Living Kill spell didn’t adjust its slow, wading course to do that. It just .

All of the dragons were well within the protective shield of the allied Living Kill spells.

The organized forces of Okuana were advancing, inexorably, toward the city center, toward Crystal Tower.

2 seconds had passed.

Mark had seen enough to know his angle.

The necrodragon overhead almost looked backward, noticing the rift Mark had made, and then Mark himself.

Mark moved with Alacrity, moving his body faster than reality kept up, adding ten more hearts to his body and a whole line of brains down his spinal cord. Mark expanded as he slammed into the nearest of the 7 Kill Spells and drank it deep, his body boiling with heat and Death as the Living Kill spell suddenly failed to exist. Mark expanded in turn, wings spreading wide with even more death. Necromantic constructs faltered and broke apart, freezing into saltwater that became a growing iceberg.

Mark kicked off of the iceberg with long legs and crashed into the second Living Kill spell, opening his maw wide to bite off the top 10 meters of the thing, crunching down on Energy and expanding once again.

Overhead, the necrodragon glared down, opened its claws, casting a giant circle magic—

Gravity crushed Mark into the ocean, plummeting him through the ice, deep into the murky waters of Tokyo Bay.

Mark opened five maws and grabbed the Energy of the gravity spell itself, breaking the power of that spell directly. Mark grew another several meters as his range increased, his rage doubled, and he was suddenly able to reach two more Living Kill spells. Or rather, they reached for him, now that he touched them with Union. He drank those ones down, too, icing a large portion of Tokyo Bay and locking the remaining 3 Living Kill spells into that ice.

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Mark was trapped in the ice, too, but semi-natural ice was nothing to Mark. Ice was vaguely stronger than water, which was vaguely stronger than frozen mud and dirt. He churned through all of it, flash boiling the ocean as he grabbed at the remaining three Living Kill spells in a crashing moment.

Their focus on Union piggybacking was their undoing.

Mark doubled in size, purple shimmers joining his black scales as he broke from the ice and lifted his head to the sky, to the deathly-white necrodragon overhead.

The necrodragon glared down, and then it did another spell. The other three dragons opened maws full of fire and power. Perhaps, some of that might have mattered.

Mark drank in the Energy of everything; of life, of death, of power, and of mana—

The black dragon roared defiance and rage and domination.

The black dragon matched the corpse dragon for size, and the tables turned in a moment.

Claws lashed dead flesh. Dead flesh parted, revealing purple bones and fires. Black maws cracked through brittle bones even while a tail of bone and blades slashed through the middle of the black dragon. One black dragon became two for a brief moment, and then the black dragon became a cacophony of crunching, raging teeth, cracking through the necrodragon’s flesh, biting, raging, biting, raging.

The black dragon roared and three living dragons fled, fast as the sky could take them, but the city had been waiting for them to break formation.

Blue diamonds floated over the bays and opened up with lancing beams of light that cut straight through the green and the red dragon. The blue one managed to turn just a bit, the laser going off-center, clipping the back of the wing.

And then a small man of shimmering body, much larger than his own tiny self, was on the blue dragon, buoyed there by the wind. The small man gripped and tore until the blue enemy was dead.

Every enemy was dead.

This was a triumph!

The black dragon raised his head to the sky, tiny missiles from the human lands over yonder doing nothing to his immaculate scales. The dragon was unassailable, in a position of utter domination over all he—

A notification appeared in front of Mark’s face.



Rebuilding cohort, Isoko Kanno.

99%

Return to the point of death to finish resurrection, or proceed as-is.



Mark jolted, and then he looked backward at the closing rift.

He abandoned his dragon self, ripping out of the 10-pointed crown at his skull, leaving behind a collapsing pile of adamantium and lingering Death mana as he zipped through the sky and then back through the rift, back to Daihoon.

- -

Nuclear fire burned quietly on an ashy mountain, partially covered in frost.

Mark landed in the ash, feeling something tearing out of his soul.

And then Isoko appeared, waking up in Mark’s arms, as if she was always there and she just needed a moment. She blinked, and she blinked again, and then she rubbed her eyes and looked up at Mark.

“Why are you crying?”

Tears flowed faster, but Mark smiled. “A lot of reasons. Mostly because of you.”

“Whatever it is, I didn't do it.”

Laughter. And then… “What do you remember?”

Isoko almost said something, her lips opened slightly, and then she paused, her face getting cute as she was worried, but also thinking deeply. And then her eyes went wide in realization.

“I died.”

“Yeah, you did, but the blockade is broken.”

“I hope I went out suitably heroic.”

“”

Isoko’s eyes went a little wide. And then she looked at Mark, and then she held him closer. He held her closer, too. She had a long, joyful, quiet moment, sitting against his legs, his arms around her chest and shoulders, her own arms around his hands and forearms. She pressed her face against his chest and neck, and he put his head onto hers.

“So... We gonna hold each other in what appears to be nuclear ash all day long?”

“Just a little while longer.”

“I gotta admit, I don’t mind any of this.”

Quiet, happy laughter, echoed on the barren, ashy mountain.

“Nicest resurrection I’ve ever had!”

Mark tried not to cry.

Isoko let herself cry.

They held each other closer.