Alex and Zahra stood in the darkness, right outside a great door, from which crimson light poured outward like a fountain of blood.
Though it was no ordinary glow born of normal crystal, but raw bloodlust made tangible, an oppressive radiance that pressed against their skin and thoughts alike.
"It's as if he is waiting for us," Zahra's voice cut through the silence, steady but edged with ice. "Or more accurately… waiting for someone to face him in a final battle."
"Ozythar has made enemies of the other kings," Alex said. "He rules his people with fear, and fear only works so long as one has the strength to back it."
"Now that he's injured, someone would surely come for him, be it another king, or one from his own clan."
This was also the primary reason why the serpent king decided to stay on the Rage island, which could certainly become his grave if he stayed for too long, instead of leaving. It was simply because he was certainly injured, and the island, as dangerous as it was, provided much more protection than the open sea, where his enemy waited to end him.
"So, let's not keep him waiting," Alex exhaled a deep breath and stepped forward.
The surrounding darkness seemed to thicken with his movement, drawn to the two long swords across his back as if the blades themselves hungered for what was to come.
Beside him, Zahra's aura unfurled in silver radiance, sharp and clean as moonlight. She was a stark contrast to Alex, whose presence was drowned in shadow, his form already half-indistinguishable from the darkness.
A vast circular hall stretched ahead, nearly one hundred fifty meters long and seventy-five meters high. Two dozen crimson pillars ringed the walls like silent sentinels, their glow casting bloody light across the chamber.
At its heart rose a raised platform, surrounded by seven small human-sized steps. Above, in the ceiling's center, a great crimson moon had been carved from crystal.
Surrounding the moon, etched in dark stone, were humans, beasts, and merfolk, all following the lead of a towering female figure draped in flowing robes, her right shoulder bared.
Alex had used his void sense to trace every inch of the chamber, yet his eyes never strayed from the presence atop the dais.
The figure stood motionless, looming nearly three meters tall. His body was dark as the starless sky, his broad shoulders framed by deep violet hair that spilled past them in heavy strands.
An elongated face ended in a square chin and thin, wide lips, parting just enough to reveal needlelike teeth. And his eyes were of violet so deep they bordered black stared down at them without flicker or breath, radiating pure malice and madness.
Ozythar also bore clear physical damage, as the right side of his face was discolored, as if the skin burned so deeply that it had yet to truly heal.
Through Alex's eyes of Ancient, he was able to see the true extent of the damage to his body, and seeing it, he couldn't help but feel a bit startled.
'His soul is damaged… severely.' In the stripped-down black and gray of his vision, Alex saw the decay hidden beneath his skin.
While its muscles all over his body were damaged, showing little signs of recovery, and even his mana core was lined with cracks, barely being kept from collapsing.
But beneath the flesh and bone, the true damage was suffered by his soul. It hung fractured like shattered glass, its natural colorless brilliance stained with black, as if poison gnawed endlessly at its purity.
"Boy..." The voice that broke the silence was rough, heavy, rasping like stone against stone. "Do not disappoint me."
As those words rang in the chamber, Ozythar began to undergo a swift and drastic change. Dark scales sprouted along the sides of his face, spreading down his neck and across his chest.
His arms ballooned, cords of muscle tearing through his skin as jagged plates of scale locked into place. His already immense frame stretched higher, bones groaning as they reshaped.
His face elongated like that of a serpent, jaws distending with a wet crack until his lower lip alongside his chin split to reveal fangs long and curved, each one glinting like obsidian.
His torso swelled grotesquely, and from it burst a second pair of arms, clawed, webbed, and quick to swell to match the size of the first.
Below the waist, his body warped further, legs melting and fusing like wax under flame. Thick scales covered his newform's sinuous body, and from waist down, he became a massive serpent and above a strange naga.
Where once had stood the wounded world eater, now rose something else, something between naga and leviathan. A four-armed giant of scale and fang, towering close to ten meters.
Alex's expression did not change, though in silence he weighed what he saw.
'In this state, his strength should sit at the level of a peak Seventh-Rank Ruler. If I weren't forced to hold back, he would pose no real threat to the current me.'
A quiet frustration stirred in his chest. 'Shame. It would have been good to measure my current limits, since it had been months now, and all I have faced are monsters beyond reason.'
While a bit disappointed, Alex buried the thought. To go all-out here, outside Drakaryx lands, would mean allowing Zarach to get intel on him using Ruler wish, unless he was willing to waste a wish of his own to hide it.
And he could not allow that, as he understood that knowing your enemy is half the battle.
A ripple spread through the space, establishing Ozythar's authority over the world. A heartbeat later, the world blurred, colors bleeding into one another until the chamber was gone.
In its place stretched his Elemental Domain, a vast expanse where the sky was a suffocating pitch, and the ground churned like an ocean of molten silver, dense, viscous, and poisonous enough that even a breath of its vapor corroded the lungs.
'He isn't holding back,' Alex murmured. Not that there had ever been doubt. The World Eater had not lingered on the Rage island to buy himself time to heal; he had stayed because leaving would mean being torn apart by one of the other kings, a death stripped of dignity.
On this island, at least, he could choose the stage for his last stand.
And Alex, understanding that truth, answered in kind. His Heart of the Ancient roared within him, and the Tenebrous Shard Enclave bled outward, carving its own dominion of Dark upon the silver sea.
Beside him, Zahra's aura ignited. Silver flames rose in plumes, chaotic and alive, dancing as if chaos itself had chosen her hands as its vessel. The flames carried the property to heal and destabilize in equal measure, burning away vitality from her enemies with the same ease that it took to tear them from within.
Ozythar wasted no words, no ceremony.
In a flash, a massive hammer of liquid metal took form in its right hands, an abyssal shield in the upper left, and a Bronze spear, drowning in rust and pungent miasma, appeared in the lower left hand.
His lamian body sank into the silver ocean, vanishing beneath the waves, only to surge upward as a colossal serpent wrought of mercury.
A roar gushing forth from his massive jaws, potent enough to rattle the elements within their beings, as it dove down on Alex and Zahra.
In a flash, countless needle-like fangs lining its jaw shot forth like a barrage of bullets, covering the distance in all but a second, and rained on them as a death sentence.
Alex's grip tightened on his twin blades. With a single cross-swing, twin arcs of darkness carved through the rain of silver needles. The waves of darkness erased the barrage, then kept on, cleaving straight through the mercury serpent's head.
In the same breath, he brought Misery down in a ruthless diagonal cut, while Sorrow rose upward to meet its mark. The first strike caught the rusted spear's tip, the second the hammer's head, the former's edge erasing the stream of toxin, while the latter's impossible edge screamed against the unnatural weight of the hammer.
Alex slid back across the dark platform of his making, narrowly avoiding the abyssal shield that crashed down where he had stood, its impact tearing a section of the Dark enclave.
In that same moment, Ozythar was engulfed, Zahra's silver flames erupting into a pillar that swallowed the World Eater whole.
Laughter rolled across the Domain as the Serpent King surged forward. At his command, the silver ocean gushed forth, waves rising like a living tide, rushing to swallow the island of darkness whole.
But Alex's Dark Enclave only deepened, swelling outward to meet the ocean of silver head-on. Darkness and molten silver collided in a war of dominion, elements grinding against each other with a violence that shook the very fabric of the Domain.
Their weapons screamed as they struck, sparks of shadow and mercury bursting in every direction. Alex felt his blood stir, a rush of fierce exhilaration tearing through him, since for the first time in months, he faced an opponent who did not utterly outclass him.