Chapter 156: Dragon’s Breath: Sunrise
Vetra exhaled a long plume of black smoke, stepping over the crumpled form behind her. She rolled her blood-soaked shoulder, feeling the dragon-scales re-align over closed flesh.
"Rats," she muttered, adjusting her grip on her claws as she turned her back on the corpse to head toward Vince. "Nothing but annoying—"
The air behind her froze.
It wasn’t a cold born of wind or ice, but a sickly, dense pressure that smelled of rotting leaves and compressed venom. The shadow-infused earth beneath Vetra’s boots began to hum, vibrating with a deep, unnatural frequency.
Behind her, a wet, ragged rasp echoed through the trees.
"To kill a snake..."
Vetra stopped dead. She slowly turned her head, amber eyes widening in genuine surprise.
Sara was dragging herself up against the cracked granite cliff face. Her ribs were caved in, blood pouring down her front in thick, dark rivulets, but her eyes were no longer glass-clear. They burned with a radiant, unholy emerald light.
"...be sure to cut off its head," Sara whispered, her voice layered with a hollow, double-toned resonance.
On her exposed neck, the ink of the coiled serpent tattoo flared to life. The black lines burned white-hot, then turned a deep, luminous green as they burned through her flesh, melting into her skin and sinking directly into her core, eating away at her life force.
---
A hundred yards away, Vince’s eyes snapped toward the eastern ridge. He felt it immediately—a violent, resonant pulse echoing through the soul-matrix, identical to the death-burst Brian had unleashed in his final moments.
Opposite Vince, Vesper’s shadow-blades paused. A cold, knowing look settled over his pale face.
Further in the forest canopy, Kira dodged a gust of Lyrielle’s wind magic, landing lightly on a high pine branch. The serpent mark burned across her own neck in sympathetic resonance.
A dark, cruel smirk spread across Kira’s lips. "Give ’em hell, Sara," she murmured under her breath.
---
"A taboo technique, huh?" Vetra’s shock melted into a slow, feral smile. Her dragonkin blood surged in response to the massive spike in enemy aura. She turned her entire body to face Sara, dropping back into a low, heavy combat stance. "You might not be so useless after all, human!"
Sara didn’t answer. She took a step forward, her feet barely touching the pine needles.
The emerald aura around her condensed rapidly. The ambient shadows of the forest twisted toward her palms, coalescing into twin rapiers. But these were not dark steel. As her soul-force burned to sustain them, the blades ignited into a blinding, pristine white—razor-thin constructs of hyper-compressed soul-mana that hummed with a sound like a thousand angry hornets.
FLASH!
Sara disappeared.
She didn’t shadow-step; she moved with pure, unadulterated physical speed that shattered the sound barrier in the narrow clearing.
CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!
Before Vetra could even lift her arm, white light flashed across her vision a dozen times.
Vetra’s dragon-scales, which had previously turned steel blades into scrap, were sheared through like wet parchment. Deep, clean lacerations burst across Vetra’s thighs, torso, and shoulders. Blood spurted into the air as Sara moved like a phantom storm, circling the dragonkin and raining down hundreds of razor-sharp white-hot thrusts in the span of two heartbeats.
"Gah!" Vetra roared, swinging a massive flame-coated fist through the air, but her knuckle caught only empty air.
Sara materialized above her, her face pale as chalk, veins standing out black against her skin as her life force burned away. With a cold, vacant expression, Sara drove both white rapiers straight down through Vetra’s collarbone, pinning the massive dragonkin female to her knees in the dirt.
Vetra coughed up a splatter of blood, her vision swimming as the soul-mana from the white blades attempted to unravel her core.
Sara landed directly on Vetra’s chest, leaning down until her burning green eyes were inches from Vetra’s face. She raised one hand, condensing a third blade of white soul-light directly aimed between Vetra’s eyes.
"Die," Sara whispered.
Vetra looked up into the dying assassin’s eyes. Despite the blood pouring from her wounds, despite the white blades pinning her shoulders, the dragonkin’s lips pulled back into a bloody, vicious grin.
"You really are a viper..." Vetra rumbled, her voice vibrating with terrifying, bottomless heat. "...but you forgot your own advice."
Before Sara could plunge the third blade home, Vetra’s scaled hands shot up. Ignoring the white-hot soul energy that blistered her skin, Vetra clamped her bare, clawed palms around both of Sara’s wrists, locking her in place with the unstoppable grip of a dragon.
Sara’s eyes widened as she tried to pull back, but Vetra’s grip was absolute.
"You told me to cut off the head," Vetra growled, her jaw unhinging slightly as deep, blinding golden light ignited from the back of her throat.
Inside Vetra’s chest, every remaining drop of dragon-mana condensed into a single, localized singularity of furnace-level heat.
[Dragon’s Breath: Sunrise]
Vetra didn’t blow a wide plume. She concentrated the entire torrent of primordial dragon-flame into a tight, three-inch beam of white-hot plasma directed straight up into Sara’s face.
BOOM!
The localized detonation lit up the entire forest in a blinding flash of golden-white light. The sheer heat vaporized the surrounding air, turning the soil within ten feet to smooth glass instantly.
When the blinding flash receded, Vetra released her grip.
Sara’s body stood rigid for a fraction of a second before slowly topping backward, hitting the glass-melted ground with a hollow thud. From the neck up, nothing remained—completely incinerated into ash by the point-blank dragon blast. Her twin white rapiers shattered into harmless motes of green light, dissolving into the wind.
Vetra stood up slowly, ripping the residual soul-energy out of her shoulder wounds with a grunt. She looked down at the headless corpse, wiping a line of blood from her own jaw.
"Head cut," Vetra muttered softly.
A few yards away, deep in the shadows of the high canopy, the emerald glow on Kira’s neck suddenly snapped.
The feeling of Sara’s serpent tattoo shattered into a lifeless, ash-gray scar. A visceral, agonizing shockwave of severed soul-tether slammed into Kira’s chest, catching her mid-leap.
Kira’s breath hitched violently. Her eyes went wide with sudden, unadulterated grief as her grip on her alchemical vials slipped.
Below her, standing amidst the swirling wind currents, Lyrielle raised her staff, her green eyes locking onto the disoriented assassin above.
"Eyes over here," Lyrielle whispered.
Yards away vesper stood frozen eyes wide