Chapter 31: Why is there a third phase?

Cleave!

Lilith cried out, and the Primordial Ark ripped open space, hauling her straight through the Golden Dragon’s neck. The bone dragon’s gold-slick throat split in one clean stroke. Its massive golden head toppled, thudding onto a floor flooded with molten iron.

Headless, it thrashed its wings twice, then stilled. It fell like a felled pillar, plunged into the iron, and sank beneath the glowing flood.

The furnace, torn open by their clash, vomited a torrent of molten iron. The Little White Dragon hovered, safe above the heat, but the floor and the Golden Dragon weren’t so lucky.

At first, the spill only drowned half its body. Then the flood swelled, filling the pit and packing the dragon’s skeletal frame. Soon even the highest wing vanished under the seething surface.

She hovered, tense, watching the furnace retch and gush like food poisoning. At its center a girl hung suspended, a mirror of Lilith’s face. The Little White Dragon knew her—the Reaper Fragment.

The Reaper Fragment had been floating by some unseen force. As the iron surged, that support failed. It wobbled in midair, on the brink of falling into the cauldron to melt into sludge and join the pitiful Golden Dragon below.

Lilith sheathed herself in ice, chill mist blooming around her. She beat her wings and streaked toward the drifting Fragment.

Her gut was right. As she flew, the Fragment suddenly dropped, about to be swallowed by the iron. Lilith accelerated, cut through the heated air, and caught the Fragment in a single grab.

She didn’t hesitate. With the Fragment in hand, she turned and shot back into open air. The floor below was a deathbed of fire. Lilith froze a thin platform beneath her, settled on the glassy ice, and thought hard on her next move.

Dread pricked her: the Golden Dragon was likely done for. An iron flash flood had buried it; no living thing walks out of that unscathed.

But Lilith knew its motive: it craved her worth as a Divine Fragment. Spotting the Reaper Fragment bearing Bosaklie’s mark, it aimed for the Grim Reaper as well. What puzzled her was how a thing this weak planned to ascend. Even Eve, who once threw Morris’s world into chaos, felt stronger than this lumbering beast. Where did it get that nerve?

“Don’t tell me it’s got a third phase,” the Little White Dragon muttered. She snapped her mouth shut. Her words had a nasty way of becoming omens. She’d just jinxed it with a casual slight, so she braced herself.

With this mouth, five seconds after a line like that, something always crawled out of the woodwork.

Five.

Lilith held up a tense finger.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

“Nothing?” Lilith tilted her head, puzzled. She peered through the ice—and the world heaved. A quake slammed into her like a rolling mountain.

“Knew it!” she snapped, beating her wings to steady her hover, refusing to be shaken into a headless-fly tumble around the chamber.

The ice beneath her shattered. A massive, jagged iron hand punched up, spearing straight into the ceiling like a forged spear.

Then came a colossal dragon’s head.

It took her a beat to recognize the Golden Dragon’s skull, now entombed in cooled iron plates. The bone beast had turned into a swaggering iron colossus.

“It can still move?” she blurted. She’d cut its head clean off—ten meters from its body—yet here it was, writhing, wrapped in a hard iron carapace. Stubborn as a cockroach in armor.

Fear pricked, but it didn’t take root. The iron lump of a dragon was nightmare fuel, the kind to scare a child silent. Yet Lilith wasn’t truly afraid—for a simple reason.

No matter how thick, that iron skin was paper before the Primordial Ark. It wasn’t real protection—just another layer to tear.

Worse, the armor weighed it down. The already huge dragon turned into a rooted stump, standing there for the Little White Dragon to chop at will.

She’d never seen a foe sabotage itself so eagerly. It was rare to the point of absurdity.

Lilith conjured an ice chain and slung the unconscious Reaper Fragment to her side. She fluttered her small wings and dove at the hybrid monster of dragon and congealed iron below.

“Ridiculous!” the Golden Dragon roared. Its iron plates shivered loose, reshaping into sharp bars that shot toward the Little White Dragon like a storm of steel thorns.

Lilith spun and wove through the gaps, a white blur slipping past its ranged assault with airy ease.

Then her breath hitched. The iron bars seemed alive, trailing her like hunting swallows. They twisted mid-flight, knitting into a vast net to trap her in one sweep.

She slashed one bar open with her blade and slipped through the split.

“Damn Golden Dragon. Weren’t you about wealth? Since when do you control iron?” Lilith cursed, juking past another bar in midair.

It had shown its dominion over iron. Rushing a close fight against a lump that puppets metal was madness. The Little White Dragon had to abandon melee and end it with magic.

“Well, it’s not like I’m out of tricks.” Lilith tied the Reaper Fragment to her calf and beat her wings harder, keeping them aloft.

The little dragon raised her right hand at the beast below. The bracelet at her wrist flared with a ghostly blue glow.

Pinpricks of starlight gathered in her palm. The single spark swelled into a white orb, then—

A cerulean beam burst forth, lancing straight into the dragon’s head.