A hammerblow shook the entire Magma Forge from afar; the already shaky cable bridge quivered like a plucked bowstring. Kabos grabbed the chain at his side. Then a dragon’s roar, harsher than a blastwave, slammed after it. The tremor dumped him onto his backside. His palm reached to brace, and caught only air—mere inches away yawned the bottomless abyss.

Luck clung to him like sweat: at the last heartbeat, he shifted his weight, rolled and scrambled back to the bridge’s center.

Normally the easygoing him would thump his chest and laugh with relief. Now his eyes burned red, his teeth locked on his lip.

On the wall before him stood the console, matching the map’s sketch. The manual lever sat jammed in the red lock detent, just like Tela said.

One pull, and the final safety blocking magma from the Forging Hammer’s engine would open. Firestone currents could begin the conduction sequence, with lake‑boiling power reigniting this engineering miracle.

But a small problem perched before that, like a splinter under the nail.

A steady clack‑clack kept needling Kabos’s ears, quieter than the battle thunder afar, yet ticking like a death bell drawing near.

After a long breath, he spoke, pained and wry. “Big bro Hos… you really should’ve listened to Tela more, and talked less.”

Just like Hos’s drunken “minor construction issue,” the clacking came from the retractable floor right before Kabos.

Under the console, steel supports tried to unfold. Each attempt hit the same obstruction, clacked, withdrew into the wall, then popped out again seconds later—futile motions on repeat.

In other words, the console hung entirely over nothing. To release the safety, Kabos had to leap a ten‑meter gap, clear the bone‑grinding abyss, and reach that lever.

And this time, no hemp pole would help him vault that void.

Meanwhile, the control room was a knot of chaos.

[Magma Pipe Three nearing overload; Line #57 burned—execute manual overwrite: reroute energy to #95…]

Crimson alarms pulsed without pause. Tela stood at the copper control panel, hands flying like twin sparrows, flipping dozens of parameters, punching switch after switch. Hos’s anxious voice rose behind.

“Damn it, these bastards keep multiplying—hey! The corridor’s about to fall!”

The shuddering boom of the heavy scattershot cannon drowned him out, followed by a blastwave from primed charges. The penultimate line was gone. Chaos Spawn pressed dangerously close. Nacha Tribe fighters bared blades for melee. “How long over there?!”

“You ask me—who am I supposed to ask?!”

Tela’s glasses fogged white with panic. She snapped back, and a mechanical voice chimed in—[Safety mechanism anomaly]—making her face sink further.

Since the start she’d tried every way to bleed Firestone’s energy: reset the Forging Hammer startup, force reroutes by manual overwrite, shunt excess through the Magma Forge’s backup engines.

Even so, after all she could do at this stage, Firestone still slid toward overload.

The once‑solid mass had split along its seams, now huge shards held together by arcing light. Under unstable high voltage they trembled madly. Blue arcs bled toward violet, each second flirting with collapse.

Tela eyed the fracturing Firestone. Her hand hovered over the big red start button. Sweat traced her frames and fell to copper. She choked down the gambler’s urge to end it, and went back to rerouting, trying to delay the coming overload.

Only now, that effort felt futile, like bailing a storm with a teacup.

“Let this pointless struggle end here.”

On the main field, Soul Devourer Sormaidon pronounced judgment to the immobilized Varie.

“Oh, you must be furious—a so‑called Lionheart Hero, shamed by a dragon once unknown. Will you accept a death so pitiful, stripped of ‘honor’?” Its voice rose, crescendoing like a storm. “No, of course not, of course not! You’re Lionheart. Even now you’re hunting a way to turn it around. Too bad…”

It lowered its massive head without shame, close and looming. Chaos‑stinking dragon drool dripped from its maw. It sneered with the pride of a tyrant.

“Too bad—you, most likely… have no choice left.”

It spoke, then its neck snaked toward the floor gap where Menglan had fallen into magma. Below, the lava seethed, heat surging like bottled rage. Another power shackled it, forced a split. It didn’t overflow the gap, but poured steadily into the Magma Forge’s intake.

No doubt, only the Elven Queen could wrestle such a wonder. It was the cornerstone of any hope to eradicate Sormaidon. Yet the dragon watching it bared a cruel smile.

“Listen closely, Lionheart—you can hear it, can’t you? Her voice grows more hoarse.”

“Shut up…” Varie coughed blood with the curse. The small round ears atop her head did twitch. Sormaidon’s laughter tasted even sweeter.

“Oh, Her Majesty the Elven Queen—still formidable after a thousand years of sleep,” it purred, glaring back into Varie’s eyes, dragon teeth parting. “Yet even if she used her own blood to counter my domain and woke the volcano… how long can she hold like that?”

Its tone was equal parts tribunal and tease. In those chaos‑charged eyes, something transparent slipped forth, creeping toward Varie.

“Lion girl!”

Adelaide finally re‑stitched the scattered array and unleashed Crimson Frenzy, several legion‑grade spells. Without Varie’s sync, Sormaidon shrugged them off with a wraith‑shield.

“Hey, you—get it together!!”

Her barrage earned only that shout’s worth of time. A roar and breath drove her back. Even that desperate call failed to reach Varie’s ears.

Varie had been mauled too hard by that claw. Any other Nacha would be a smear. Even as a hero’s body raced to knit, only a few fingers still moved. She lay there while the invisible seeped from his eyes into hers, cutting her off from the world.

Hero, shall we gamble? Wager… how long Queen Dreamlan can endure.

A minute—or will she collapse in the very next?

The seduction spoke straight inside her heart. Outside sounds blurred. Her mind began to fray.

No… I can’t be swallowed like this…

Varie shut her eyes, trying to shake off the invading voice. But this was Sormaidon’s true namesake—the Soul Devourer—uncoiling its real power.

A cold liquid poured into her heart, laced with a toxin called despair. Numbing pain raced along her arteries, whispering at her ear.

She trusts you so deeply, and you failed her…

How fitting—it mirrors the scene a thousand years ago. Your kin who died by my hand believed their Lionheart leader just like her… and you turned their sacrifice into a joke.

Sormaidon’s voice kept changing—weathered elder, innocent girl. Varie told herself it was all trickery. But the disappointment in her people’s voices pierced her. Her last line of defense softened, then cracked.

Give up, Lionheart.

As my last respect to a worthy foe, I swear by my master—everything ends here.

After this, no pain, no regret…

No more sorrow…

As the voice pressed closer, Varie’s lion eyes began to dilate. Her will to resist fell behind… even started to look absurd.

Yes… why keep resisting? In the last life, she failed the faithful victims, and broke promises she now can’t recall. In this one, she couldn’t stop her tribe’s split, nor beat those long‑eared lunatics growing rabid. Next, she’d drown here like a cat—no dignity, no honor, no meaning. Seeing her this pathetic… she must’ve… already stopped singing, right?

In that instant, Varie nearly bowed to the whisper, letting it swallow her soul.

But at that same instant, a familiar warmth slipped into the tendrils invading her mind. Like hidden, blazing moonlight. Tiny beside Sormaidon’s might, yet enough to focus her pupils and return her senses.

In the brief beat it bought her, the first thing she heard was still Menglan’s song.

She hadn’t stopped.

At the foot of Rama Volcano, Menglan kept singing. The voice no longer crisp. The color had drained from her face; cream‑smooth skin lost its luster, went gaunt. Yet even so, she kept singing.

No. This changes nothing. Stop your useless struggle!

Panic crept into the whisper at Varie’s ear. It tried to drown the song and the warmth, to keep control. Its voice grew farther, smaller.

Don’t get up. Don’t you understand? This is my last mercy—

Sormaidon left whispering for a shout, trying to cinch her heart tight.

But Varie planted her hand, hard, and, slow yet stubborn, crawled herself back upright.

Then she pointed down at the hulking shape. “Dead lizard… so damn noisy.”

Blood still leaked from her lips as she spoke. Yet her face had returned to itself. She showed Sormaidon a scornful smile.

That gesture, unsurprisingly, enraged Sormaidon.

“Lion girl!”

Seeing Varie stand, Adelaide had no time for relief. “Move!” She warned while her hands wove a fast array, trying to buy Varie seconds. Sormaidon roared first, scattered her spell, then swatted her away with a wing. It didn’t chase. It lunged on all fours at Varie.

It had been inches away from claiming Varie without harming that tough soul. Instead it failed, and got mocked in return. For Sormaidon, who thought victory sealed, that was a provocation it could not abide.

It didn’t matter. If the loser refused a gentle death, he’d just swallow her whole. Soul Devourer Sormaidon, mad with rage, stopped caring if this crude meal shredded the soul. He gaped his maw, charged, every step making the ground buck like a drum.

In seconds, the distance halved. Varie and he had never been far; now she was still recovering, ringed by boulders of torn steel, trapped in a dead-end you could see.

And yet the destined ending didn’t arrive.

Sormaidon’s run halted mid-stride.

More exact—he slammed on a mid-run brake.

Claws stabbed the floor, steel screeched like knives on slate. Not enough; he back-flapped those bone-wings, like he’d glimpsed a ghost, throwing everything into killing his momentum. He tucked his neck, and didn’t dare step closer to Varie.

Chaos churned again in his pupils, but not with fury or scorn. It rolled with hesitation—and fear.

“This can’t… be!”

At first, Varie reacted the same—eyes wide, breath held—then she looked around, confused haze in her gaze like mist over a lake, wondering if this was a mirage.

Pale-cyan afterimages rose around her, countless figures holding blades and spears, like moonlight carved into soldiers.

They were blurred, except for the twin ears crowning their heads, a mark of who they were.

“No, no—you’re only my thralls… ants! You must submit—!”

Sormaidon roared, a mountain with bone-wings unfurled, body a hundred shadows high. Yet before these half-transparent “ants,” his feet kept skidding back, like tide drawn by a darker moon.

Varie stared, stunned. Faces she’d never met, faces she knew by heart.

They were shorter than their descendants; when disaster fell, they hadn’t received any god’s blessing. Even so, not the size of a single dragon scale, they still lifted steel and stood before the Lionheart Hero, spearpoints aimed at a dragon a thousand times their size.

Is this… my fantasy?

A warmth rose first, then her body moved in answer. It wrapped her like spring thaw, soaked into bone and marrow, mending her ruined frame at a hundredfold pace.

That strength was the same moonlight that woke her from the nightmare.

Why? After millennia of nightmare and torment, why do the harmed keep their minds, even take the opposite side of Sormaidon—just to shield me?

There would be no spoken answer. The dead had no voices left.

And yet Varie received one.

—Homeland.

The familiar word rang in her heart like a bell. She turned toward it, to a single soul among the many.

Charred steel-black armor. Flesh etched like it had met white phosphorus. A body and viscera in shards. A face half melted, half memory.

The one who led them here. He half-turned, and though the dead couldn’t see the living, he met her eyes like it was natural, that first unwavering light unchanged.

Varie’s breathing quickened, a hunter’s heart under storm-clouds.

So that’s it?

He believed he would stand beside the Lionheart Hero again.

So at the Magma Forge’s gate, his final gesture wasn’t farewell. It was a blessing.

So… that’s it.

Varie’s chest trembled; a flame re-lit, a brazier in winter wind.

She understood at last how wrong she’d been—these lean, seemingly fragile folk of the Nacha Tribe were never victims waiting for rescue. They fought to the last breath, and even dead, they stood unbowed, holding to their oath.

They endured a thousand years of Sormaidon’s torment for this single heartbeat.

—To take back our homeland.

Young voices, old voices, all different yet one in faith, rang in her heart like a chorus.

With that faith, soft gold light drifted from their forms and poured into Varie’s chest. It set broken ribs with a clean crack. A tidal surge of power blew her hair back, and every strand took fire with gold at the tips.

Feeling strength that could stand beside the first Lionheart Hero, Varie drew a long breath, like drawing a bow.

She opened eyes cleared of doubt, drew the sword at her hip, leveled the point at Sormaidon’s shattered dragon eye, and gave a command a thousand years late.

“Warriors—charge!”

Like a brazen horn, the Nacha souls, once shackled by a realm of wraiths, broke their last fetters. They flooded forward like a tide with no shore. Chaos in Sormaidon’s eyes overflowed with fear.

“No—what are you doing! Stop. I command you—!”

He panicked, maw yawning. White light surged up his throat. As a devourer of souls, his breath was a poison built to melt spirits. The foremost phantoms dissolved the instant the white flame touched them. It lasted less than half a second. A lion’s roar smashed through his breath like thunder through rain.

“Shut. Your. Mouth!”

In the next instant, Varie flashed to his face—speed never seen since the fight began, momentum like a falling star. Before even an afterimage formed, her heel whipped up and slammed his lower jaw. The reptile maw snapped shut under the blow, and the whole dragon head kicked skyward. Gray fangs exploded into shards midair, and his breath cut off like a dammed river.

Meanwhile the tide of souls crashed onto his feet. They swarmed, shoulder to shoulder, climbing like ants over stone, driving spearheads and blades at the dragon overhead.

Their strength and weapons couldn’t match Sormaidon or the Lionheart Hero, not in flesh and steel. But their points slid easy through Sormaidon’s soul-shield. Every place they touched began to boil like a kettle.

It wasn’t a strike on matter. The shield’s foundation unraveled. These awakened wills were waking more souls, freeing them from the nightmare Sormaidon had woven.

“It… can’t… be…!”

Mouth bound in spirit cords, Sormaidon hissed disbelief through his teeth. His soul-shield thinned to film. Varie’s blows began to land on meat. For the first time since he woke, he felt a danger that bit.

Survival and terror surged. Chaos in his cracked pupils burst its leash. It tore his pupils open, turned his eyes into two black holes. The formless content spilled like falls, flooded over fresh wounds, tar-thick and hungry.

“Tch.”

Varie had just shaved off a broad swath of scales. The formless chaos filled it at once, knitting half the damage in a blink.

At this rate, she couldn’t kill him. She needed the Forging Hammer to pulp him in one go. Easy to conclude, hard to do, with that obscene regeneration. Worse, Sormaidon had given up on attacking. He only fled the hammer’s shadow. Varie’s power was mostly single-point bursts. Break a leg, he still had wings. Break the wings, the legs were back.

This won’t do. Time’s almost gone. She couldn’t see the Firestone ready to blow in the control room, but the Forging Hammer above was screaming steam through the ceiling. The clock was burning.

Now it made sense. That monstrous regeneration was how he stalemated the last Lionheart Hero. She had to cripple every way he moved at once. How—

“Lioness!”

Adelaide’s shout cut clean as a blade. Varie’s eyes lit; golden hair flared anew. She burst forward and sliced a thick, meat-laden plate from the back of his neck.

Then she flung the bloody chunk toward Adelaide like tossing a torch in the dark.

“What you wanted—catch!”

No need to plan. They’d planned long ago. Adelaide saw the nape-meat spinning in, and scarlet joy flashed in her pupils like wine in sun. She charged to meet it and mouthed a silent number.

—Zero.

She vanished for a heartbeat. A razor-woven composite spell sang again, a string drawn to snapping. To cover Varie, that number had dropped to one—her last safe use of Crimson Frenzy. But when Varie handed her the wyrm’s living flesh, she couldn’t hold the flood.

She was a Blood Mage. What Blood Mage sees a prize like this and stays cool? Who refuses to accelerate just because a little heart pain says no?

Sure, maybe some ascetics exist. Adelaide knew she wasn’t one today.

In the slowed world, she drank in the drifting dragonflesh like incense. She watched chaos churn through muscle and vein like storm-tide. As if touching a most delicate lover, the sacrificial sigil at her fingertip kissed the still-throbbing meat.

Crimson Frenzy ended in the next beat. A gale of magic ripped her sleeve to the right shoulder. Smooth skin took a thousand hair-thin cuts.

She only smiled wider. This price was a leaf on the river compared to the ruin rising ahead.

From her fingertip, power bloomed, a blast tens of times her desert strike, devouring every scrap of light. Sormaidon felt the horror coming and raised bone-wings as a shield. They held less than half a second before the light-eating flood.

Wing membranes burned first, then the bone joints, the chest scales, the forelimb flesh. When the barrage ended, his front was a canvas of ruin.

He screamed, a cliff face cracking. Adelaide’s beam lacked Varie’s tightness, but a broad wash was exactly what he feared. Wings and forelimbs charred to cinders, they couldn’t bear a dragon’s weight. He crashed with a boom, and couldn’t twitch.

“You ants… my master will soon descend. I won’t fall here—”

“Then go meet your master, dead lizard!”

Varie didn’t let chaos knit him. She hooked her fingers into the eye-socket hole, shouted, let her strength surge like a breaker, and hurled him under the Forging Hammer.

“Pin him down!”

Easy to say—with what? Adelaide opened her mouth, then stopped. A soul in a craftsman’s apron at her side eyed the mana-core sword at her waist. He mimed a two-handed grip, wrists crossing, then a hard twist.

No words, only motion. She drew the blade and copied him, cat-after-tiger.

The twist didn’t just twist. The mana-core sword chattered with a clatter of tiny gears, then started guzzling ambient mana like a starved beast.

Adelaide jolted as the blade swelled. In seconds, it grew from a standard one-hander into a greatsword she couldn’t wrap with both hands. The craftsman’s soul gave her a thumbs-up, pride plain as sunlight—told you my work sings.

Adelaide remembered her doubt about the blade like a splinter under the skin, and the designer’s answer came back through steel like thunder through a sword.

The realization tugged a crooked smile at her lip, a twitch like a fish on a line, and she swallowed the snark as cold spider-legs carried her up like spears onto Soul Devourer Sormaidon’s crown.

When she leveled the blade at the dragon’s skull and drove it down like a lightning rod, the words burst out like steam from a kettle.

“That’s why I say—you Nacha people!”

Her sword tip slid into Sormaidon’s head like ink bleeding into water, dark and decisive.

Then, in scattered places like stars blinking in one sky, five things happened at once.

In midair, Varie loosed two arrows like twin nails, pinning Sormaidon’s wings, and on the drop she kicked the hilt like a comet, ramming the greatsword through and nailing the head to earth like an anvil.

In the main control room, Tela read the last warning on the brass plate like a red dawn, clenched her jaw like a wolf bite, and slammed the crimson button like a heart.

Kabos took one last look toward the beanpole’s direction like a farewell to shore, yelled “To hell with it,” and dove like a swallow, reaching for a safety lever that hung like a distant star.

Mira’s cloak snapped back in the overload like a storm ripping a sail, blue arcs scored her face like whips, and she poured a wave of force into the Firestone like a tide into a cavern.

A kilometer below, Menglan’s pitch climbed like a blade of wind, and high-pressure magma stampeded like a river of fire into the pipeline feeding the Forging Hammer’s last engine.

There, the final heavy iron safety gate blinked open like an iron eyelid, a breath before the magma would have struck.

At the manual station, Kabos hung in air like a nail in a cliff, almost falling, and by a hair he caught the lever and dragged it to green like springlight with his body’s weight.

[Safety released. Program initialization successful—]

With that flat voice like a bell in fog, the fractured Firestone snapped shut like jaws, and from it as the calm eye, an invisible shockwave rippled like rings on water while electric thunder rolled.

The energy on the lines outran the shockwave like lightning outruns thunder, met the injected magma like two rivers joining, flashed into a fierce reaction, and bloomed with power beyond their sum.

[Forging Hammer: Start]

Steam roared from the flanks of the Nacha megaton hammer like geysers, the push began slow like a glacier, then crossed a ridge in an instant and the hundred-meter giant shot down like a bullet.

In that heartbeat, Adelaide clawed at the Dreamfeast Spider core on her sword like prying a barnacle, hoping to save it from the crush, and Varie snatched her collar like a hawk, yanking her out on the clock’s final tick.

Before dust curtained her sight like a gray sea and the impact wave tore her eardrums bleeding like red threads, she watched Sormaidon meet his end.

Under tens of millions of tons of impact like a falling mountain, Sormaidon’s proud armor failed like ice under a hammer, and the great dragon turned into a ripe tomato in a fist.

He didn’t even stall the Forging Hammer for a blink, and the blow ground him to base particles like sand under a millstone, pressure and heat fusing into a white sun.

In that moment, Adelaide felt a beauty of pure violence, clear as a storm mirror, something not of sigils but of thunder.

Before absolute power, even the void of Chaos is brittle like frost on a leaf, ready to shatter.

That was her last thought before the shockwave blew her away like a dry leaf in a gale.