Mystic Calling：Stone of Glory

Seraphina’s body only swayed a little to the side.

The attack marks the teal dragon left behind hadn’t even pierced her outer scales.

It was faster, sure—but the power was nowhere close to enough.

That level of damage didn’t even register for Seraphina.

After finishing the summon, Vhalrath didn’t strike again.

It lowered its head and watched the fight inside the cage, its attention completely hooked on the chaotic slaughter on the ground. As for the two little balls flying straight at it... it didn’t even bother to care.

Did something that small deserve attention?

Whether they could even get through this tiny cage was still a question—let alone actually hit it.

And yet, Vhalrath very quickly realized it had judged wrong.

Stellar Core slipped through the bars first.

The cage didn’t stop it. There wasn’t even a ripple across the surface. The pale-red energy sphere right behind it pierced through the exact same spot.

Vhalrath shifted its eyes slightly and glanced at them.

Just one glance.

Its focus dropped right back to the battlefield inside the cage.

The next instant, Stellar Core slammed head-on into Vhalrath’s body.

A blinding white flash erupted from the point of impact, flooding every corner of the space with light. The power packed inside the sphere released all at once, forming a ring-shaped shockwave that expanded at terrifying speed.

Wherever that pressure ring passed, the space around it shattered.

Layer after layer of spatial structure was smashed apart. Darkness bared its teeth for a heartbeat—then snapped shut again around Vhalrath. The break and repair happened so fast that all anyone could see were alternating bands of light and shadow rippling outward along the dragon’s massive body.

And in that moment, everyone finally saw Vhalrath clearly.

Its entire body was covered in deep blue scales.

Across every scale, a star-like dark shimmer flowed as if it were alive. And between those scales, little dim-lit Stellar Cores floated—one after another—suspended in the gaps.

Those spheres orbited Vhalrath’s enormous body in a slow, lazy rotation. There was no real difference between them and the one that had just attacked everyone.

In one of the dragon’s claws, it was also holding several Stellar Cores.

It casually tossed one into its mouth, chewed a few times, and swallowed. When it noticed everyone inside the cage staring at it like idiots, Vhalrath paused, then very politely tucked away the rest of its "snacks."

After that, it lifted one "tiny paw" and gave them a little wave.

Right then, the energy sphere Kaelira had launched finally arrived.

The pale-red orb slid forward along the raised dragon claw and struck dead-center in the palm.

No explosion.

No deafening impact.

That sphere—compressed with all of Kaelira’s rage, enough to make the time and space around it seize up—did something strange the moment it touched Vhalrath’s claw.

It... fit.

The orb spread flat against the deep blue scales.

The pale-red energy didn’t bounce away. It didn’t meet resistance. Instead, it seeped through the gaps between scales, flowed into the claw, and merged into Vhalrath’s body as easily as water sinking into sand.

The white lightning inside Stellar Core had been a decoy from the start.

The real target was the energy sphere in Kaelira’s hands.

Ethan had deliberately used that white lightning to control Stellar Core, then shoved it straight at Vhalrath to pull the dragon’s attention. Meanwhile, Kaelira’s attack kept its feral, violent look—so Vhalrath would treat it as just another amusing toy.

Even Ethan hadn’t expected Vhalrath to simply reach out and catch it.

Against a body as vast as Vhalrath’s—so huge it was impossible to measure—"shrinking" hadn’t weakened it at all.

It was compression.

A re-merging of density.

A Stellar Core detonation that could erase huge stretches of space only left a brief flare of light across those deep blue scales.

The shock was repaired in the blink of an eye.

To Vhalrath, that kind of attack was like a dragonfly skimming water.

A trivial little scuffle—so small it could be ignored.

Vhalrath lowered its head, glanced at the pale-red energy that had fused into its claw, then casually looked toward the creatures still fighting below the cage.

A new, very fun idea surfaced in its "tiny" little head.

Ethan drifted down from the air.

Just before his toes touched the cage floor, a gust of wind burst beneath him, catching his body and bleeding off the force of the descent. He landed in the middle of the battlefield littered with bones, white lightning still crawling slowly along his arms, lighting up the dull weapons at his feet—blades that had long since lost their shine.

Up above, the phoenix projection behind Kaelira still hadn’t faded.

Its enormous wings of flame were spread fully to either side, feathers formed from flowing purple-red energy. Every beat of those wings threw two waves of searing heat into the darkness.

The phoenix lifted its head, locking onto Vhalrath outside the cage.

Then, in the next heartbeat, it tore free from Kaelira’s body—dragging a long tail of blazing feathers—and shot out of the cage. Flame slipped through the gaps between the bars, its trajectory absolute, like a moth diving into a sea of fire.

At the same time, the white light left behind by Stellar Core’s explosion began to ebb.

The brightness shrank inch by inch from the cage’s edge. First the glowing pressure-ring that had lit up the bars vanished. Then even the outlines of those dark gray enemies on the ground sank back into shadow. The inside of the cage quickly returned to its original gloom, with only scattered pockets of fire and energy attacks still flickering.

The deep blue scales covering Vhalrath’s body dimmed with it.

The Stellar Cores circling around it disappeared into the darkness first. Then the huge dragon frame gradually lost definition. In the end, the only thing left was a single eye—bigger than the cage entrance itself.

That pupil hung outside the bars, silently watching the creatures below.

After a brief pause, even that enormous eye faded little by little—until it vanished completely from outside the cage.

The phoenix projection slammed into the spot where it had been, but there was nothing to hit. Purple-red fire passed through empty space, spreading outward, then stalling beyond the cage with nowhere to go.

Kaelira stared hard in the direction Vhalrath had disappeared.

She raised her hand and curled her fingers.

The phoenix projection outside instantly turned back, compressing into a thin stream of flame that raced along the same path home. The fire sank into Kaelira’s back, and the purple-red light burning in her eyes dimmed until her pupils returned to their original color.

A force surged up beneath her feet—then, under her control, eased downward again, lowering her smoothly back to the ground.

But the fighting inside the cage didn’t stop just because Vhalrath had left.

The dark gray enemies it created kept attacking. Their neat, stiff steps crunched over the bone-strewn ground, blades and weapons hacking nonstop at the defensive line formed by Emerald Castle’s army.

Phoenix Queen Ignara lifted her gaze toward the air above the battlefield.

Flames rose from beneath her feet and swallowed her whole. Her human outline stretched inside the fire—arms unfurling into enormous wings, several burning tail-feathers dragging behind her.

In the blink of an eye, a towering giant phoenix stood inside the cage.

Ignara beat her wings and swept over both sides of the clash. Her massive body blotted out nearly half the battlefield, red firelight spreading along her wings and washing the cage—just returned to gloom—in a violent, blazing crimson.

She didn’t dive into the enemy ranks.

She circled high above the cage, holding an altitude that let her overlook the entire battlefield. Flames streamed back from the edges of her wings toward her core, compressing between feather after feather until bright beams of energy formed.

The aerial gunship was in position.

The first wave of strikes rained down.

Searing firelight compressed into red-hot shells, firing in rapid succession from beneath Ignara’s wings. They sailed over Emerald Castle’s lines and landed precisely in the densest clusters of the dark gray enemies.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

Fire detonated one after another.

The front ranks were thrown up by the shock. Before their bodies even hit the ground, blood-colored flame had already burrowed into torn flesh. The fire burned inward from the wounds, melting muscle and meat in seconds—until all that remained was a puddle of dark red gore spread between the bones.

But the fire didn’t go out.

Little tongues of blood-red flame kept dancing on the surface of the pooled blood.

When the enemies behind stepped through the burning slurry, the flames leapt onto their ankles immediately and climbed up their calves. Dark gray skin split and cracked under the burn. Blood seeped out—only to become the next path for the fire to spread.

The enemy mass kept surging forward, like a swarm of mosquitoes sweeping across the land.