The sky didn't just crack. It screamed.
A piercing, high-pitched howl tore across the sky as pressure and heat warped the atmosphere. Every impact between Belle and Malraketh wasn't just heard—it was felt, like nature itself was wincing under the weight of their blows.
BOOM! BOOM!
Belle's foot collided with Malraketh's shield-arm, the strike laced with a spiraling coil of silver lightning that exploded outward in a jagged burst. The very air cracked like shattered glass, sending spiderwebs of electrical energy through the clouds above.
She didn't stop.
Twisting in mid-air with impossible grace, Belle vanished—blinked—leaving only a shimmering afterimage behind.
She reappeared on Malraketh's blind side, arm pulled back, a fist wreathed in spiraling fire.
A punch—no, a warhead—landed clean against Malraketh's side, the impact cratering the battlefield anew. A burst of fire erupted outward in concentric circles, vaporizing the ground beneath their feet. The shockwave carried for kilometers, rolling over trees like a hurricane.
And yet—the warform did not fall.
Malraketh slid back, plowing a trench in the earth with its heels. Steam hissed from vents along its spine and joints. Warning glyphs ignited in a cascade of crimson around its limbs. Glowing red sigils pulsed like heartbeat sensors as it raised its head.
Its eyes narrowed.
Belle landed hard, boots skidding through gravel. Her breath was ragged, her limbs heavy—but her stance didn't break.
She was exhausted. But alive and burning.
Her aura flickering high and low, indicating the amount of strain she had put on her body while maintaining the Overdrive state.
Malraketh launched.
It streaked across the battlefield like a cannon round, its shield-arm now shifted into halberd, its movements now silent—eerily efficient.
In a blink, it closed the distance. The weapon was a blur, its edge vibrating with kinetic glyphs and quantum precision.
Belle ducked. Barely.
The halberd sliced through the air centimeters from her head, severing strands of her silver hair in its wake. She countered with a rising uppercut, elemental fire surging along her knuckles.
CLANG!!
The blow connected—only for Malraketh to catch her arm mid-strike. Its grip was like an iron vice.
Belle's eyes widened—just as Malraketh spun, slamming her into the ground.
CRACK.
The crater deepened. Dust billowed. The force knocked magic from the air itself. Even the ambient mana recoiled.
Belle coughed, blood spattering the ground.
But before Malraketh could finish the follow-up—Belle was already gone.
She rebounded from the block with a flash of lightning, exploding backward mid-spin, the soles of her feet trailing silver streaks as she flipped into the air.
And without wasting a breath—she extended both hands and hurled a barrage of compressed fire spheres, each one glowing like miniaturized suns, exploding outward like volcanic buckshot.
Malraketh stood still.
The warform made no effort to evade. It faced the incoming barrage with silent contempt.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
The blasts collided with its torso, blanketing the warform in a wave of flame, smoke, and seismic force. A firestorm engulfed it entirely—embers screaming into the air like wailing spirits. A wall of heat pulsed outward, blinding the battlefield for a heartbeat.
Then silence.
From the heart of the inferno—it stepped forward.
Malraketh emerged, wreathed in flame, its body still glowing red-hot from the assault. Sections of its black armor had been scorched and cracked, lines of molten metal dripping from the impact zones.
But it had not faltered.
Its core expanded, a low-pitched hum rising into a haunting mechanical crescendo. Steam hissed from vents along its spine as they opened like wings, releasing bursts of white-hot pressure. And then—runes activated.
Crimson arcane sigils pulsed to life along its body, like veins of living energy, etching their way across its limbs and chest with malevolent grace.
It vanished.
Belle's instincts screamed.
She twisted with lightning reflexes—just as Malraketh reappeared beside her, its full halberd now reborn and raised high, slashing horizontally with annihilating force.
CLANG!!
The halberd met Belle's forearm shield, a barrier of her own aura flaring up just in time. But the impact was like being hit by a falling star.
BOOOOOM!
Belle was hurled across the battlefield like a blazing comet.
She crashed, skipping across the ground—stone rupturing beneath her like a plowed field of ruin.
Each bounce carved trenches into the earth until she flipped upright, skidding to a halt with her boots scorching against the stone, sparks flying.
She exhaled hard.
Sweat streamed down her brow, catching the faint glint of lightning still dancing across her skin.
A thin gash ran along her lip, and blood trailed down her chin. Her jacket was torn at the shoulder. Her hands trembled from the raw force behind Malraketh's last blow.
But her eyes—her eyes were alight with defiance. Silver-blue, pulsing like twin stars.
A roar from above.
Malraketh had launched itself into the air, its ascent shattering the sound barrier with a blast of force.
Now it descended like a crimson meteor, halberd blazing with unstable energy, its form cloaked in spiraling red lightning and burning glyphs.
The sky turned red.
For a moment, it felt like the sun itself had been torn from orbit and hurled toward them in wrath.
Belle reacted instantly. She threw her arms wide, eyes flashing.
A colossal sphere of crackling lightning surged around her like a storm's eye—then she plunged it into the ground.
KRAK-KOOOOOM!!
From the earth erupted a towering lightning spike, a geyser of divine fury, surging straight up to meet Malraketh's descent.
They collided mid-air.
A blinding detonation.
The resulting explosion shattered the battlefield.
A ripple of force expanded outward in a sphere of light and heat—the dungeon walls nearby crumbled. Trees were bent with invisible force before they disintegrated into ash. Water from broken underground reservoirs vaporized instantly.
Nearby monsters never had the chance to flee—they were vaporized instantly.
Even the most powerful mages in the area were forced to shield themselves, their spells unraveling under the overwhelming spiritual pressure. Barrier magic flickered. People screamed. Dust storms consumed the field.
Then—all that left was silence.
As the smoke cleared, the battlefield was a scorched ruin. Cratered and broken. Blackened with ash and lined with glowing veins of molten stone.
The scent of ozone, fire, and steel thickened the air.
From across the field, through the shimmering haze—Belle emerged.
Her aura flared wildly, but it was weaker now—flickering between silver and blue, her energy fluctuating from the strain. Her shoulder was bruised, her knuckles bleeding. Her breathing was ragged.
But Malraketh rose.
From the opposite end of the crater, the warform stood tall, its silhouette crackling with unstable energy.
Cracks ran through its armor now—deep fractures across the chest, glowing with internal sparks. Its core still pulsed—but faster now. Louder.
It was under stress. And yet—it was still evolving.
A low, guttural hum resonated from deep within Malraketh's core—subterranean and primeval, vibrating through the stone and the marrow of every being present.
It wasn't just a sound. It was a warning. An omen. A death knell disguised as a whisper.
The crimson veins pulsing through Malraketh's armor began to flicker erratically, glitching—first between red and black, then into something deeper, something void-like, a hue that devoured the light around it.
The battlefield died.
The air grew thicker.
Magic stopped flowing.
Mana threads unraveled and dispersed into dust. Even the wind dared not move. The silence was suffocating, a prelude to calamity.
From the shadows beneath Malraketh's frame, they emerged.
Black tendrils.
Dozens of them. Perhaps hundreds.
Jagged and wiry, like the arms of something ancient that should never have been awakened. They erupted from its back and shoulders, whipping and twitching as if alive.
They didn't move with logic—they moved with hunger.
They blurred, phased, flickered in and out of reality—tendrils made of pure miasma, not smoke or substance, but void-solid, leaking through dimensions like poison bleeding into water.
Then, they struck.
With a hellish screech, the tendrils pierced through the battlefield, zigzagging through the corpses and the broken remnants of still-living monsters.
The monsters shrieked, sensing death too late.
The tendrils impaled them, lifted them into the air like marionettes, twisting their bodies into grotesque angles—arms twitching, jaws locked in silent screams.
They crumbled.
One by one, their bodies disintegrated into obsidian ash, their essence pulled backward through the tendrils like liquid being siphoned through straws.
Their life force can be seen with naked eyes—white wisps of soul-stuff—flowing into Malraketh's core.
Each death was a bell toll. Each soul was fuel.
The miasma around Malraketh thickened—no, it compressed. The light bent toward it, distorted and consumed. Its body shook violently, like it was struggling to contain something vast.
Then came the scream.
A piercing, metallic howl—inhuman and unholy. It tore through the sky like the cry of a dying star.
The ground quaked. Trees in the distance cracked at the trunk. Eardrums bled. Even the strongest adventurers and knights staggered, clutching their heads.
Malraketh's body began to split apart.
Armor plates cracked and shifted, rising like jagged plates of obsidian tectonics. Deep within, new runes pulsed, glowing with ancient, forgotten language—malignant scripture that shouldn't exist in this world.
Its spine twisted, expanded—its limbs grew longer, more angular, monstrously sleek.
Its halberd didn't fall—it melted, fusing into its right arm, reshaping into a jagged bladed cannon that shimmered between reality and ether.
A second core cracked open in its chest—an orb of black-red energy, pulsing irregularly, like a dying heart that refused to stop beating.
Then the wings unfurled.
Not feathered. Not mechanical.
But six wings made of pure miasma, jagged and vast, trailing oily darkness as they expanded. They hissed through the air, bending space around them—gravity itself seemed warped.
Its face elongated, reshaping into something draconic yet artificial—a predator's skull forged in machine metal and fury. Eyes like furnace coals—empty, wrathful, calculating.
The devouring was complete.
Without warning—it vanished.
Belle blinked—and Malraketh was already there. Right in front of her. Closing the distance in an instant.
BOOOOOOM!
An explosive shockwave detonated just from its appearance, sending shards of broken earth in every direction. She had barely raised her arms before the hit landed.
THWAAAAAM!
A devastating blow to her forearm—caught mid-block.
Even in Overdrive, the force sent bone-shattering reverberations through her frame. Her body twisted mid-air like a ragdoll, flung back with meteoric force.
But Belle wasn't done.
She twisted, grit her teeth, eyes sparking. Lightning coiled around her limbs, fire blazed through her core—she flipped mid-air and launched herself back with a burst of flame, countering with a lightning-infused spin-kick, slamming down toward Malraketh's exposed flank.
But it didn't dodge.
It caught her kick mid-air. And threw her.
She skidded across the battlefield like a comet, crashing into broken stone, carving a shallow crater. Dust exploded upward.
She emerged a moment later, aura crackling, face bloodied but burning with fury. Fire and lightning twisted around her fists like gods of war.
She launched forward again.
This time faster. Sharper.
Flame-dashes. Lightning-feints. A flurry of attacks so fast it became a blur of afterimages, punches, kicks, aura spikes, mid-air propulsion spells, feint teleports—the kind of movement no normal being could even track.
But Malraketh could.
It parried her strikes one by one, using only its bare arms and cannon-blade. Its moves were mechanical—eerie—adapted perfectly to her rhythm. As if it had already calculated every possibility.
CRACK—!
A counter-strike. A devastating elbow to her ribs.
Her breath left her in a single bloody gasp. The world spun sideways. She crashed into the rubble, carving a ten-meter trail.
Her ribs—fractured. Her aura—flickering violently.
She pushed herself up, coughing blood, teeth clenched.
But Malraketh was already above her—its leg glowing, aimed down at her.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
An axe-kick crashed down like a meteor.
Belle barely had time to cross her arms before the impact.
CRAAAAAAAAAAASH—!
The ground shattered into a crater. Dust mushroomed skyward.
Belle's body was embedded into the ground—broken stone crushing her back, pain lancing through her nerves.
Her Overdrive aura glitched. Lightning fizzled. Fire sputtered.
She tried to move—but nothing.
Her muscles spasmed from magical recoil. Her vision was static. Her limbs twitched but didn't obey.
Her aura collapsed. The light went out.
The battlefield grew quiet.
Malraketh loomed over her, unmoving—its wings spread like a curtain of death. Both of its cores hummed in tandem—one with stolen souls, the other with something darker. Something alien.
Belle's silver eyes, once so sharp and defiant, dulled. Her fingers twitched weakly, then stilled. Her body was full of bruises and wounds.
Darkness finally took her.
And the world stopped breathing.
Across the battlefield, the adventurers, the knights, the mages—all stared in stunned, soul-crushing silence.
Roderic stood, his hands trembling, his eyes watching with disbelief.
"Belle… there's no way…"
The silver-haired girl who wielded three elemental affinities which was ever known to be only wielded by the Archmage of Legends, the girl who single-handedly destroyed the Mana Titan during the large scale subjugation quest, the girl who rescued Dawnstead's strongest adventuring party from death door and the girl who the entire town had put their hope on to stop the dungeon break…
Had fallen.
End of Chapter 72