Kae
patreon
Dungeon Diver CH910
🕑 Added 2025-06-25 23:00:08 +0000 UTCEven as another pair of deep purple-colored reptilian eyes appear far off in the Ravine, the Royal Vibrations that ripple off this creature don’t logically add up in my mind.
From the thousands of Dragons I’ve slain, and the knowledge I have from the intricate soul bond I share with Ember, something is telling me what I’m seeing is a trick.
Dragons cannot awaken paths, at least not in this way.
I’m certain of it.
Yet, all of my enhanced senses show the silhouette of an enormous Dragon, easily 25 kilometers from wing tips, and its aura is just as domineering as the Demon that is bonded with it.
Even though it doesn't make sense, Maria and I step forward, our own auras growing in luminosity. Both of us are still growing fully accustomed to this new surge in power, so with every moment that passes, we grow even more confident and in tune with the Vibrations rippling out from our souls.
The dark ravine behind us is stained with red and blue light.
My eyes track back and forth from the emerging dragon to the Demon, because the shield it used to block our attacks bends and morphs to cover its entire upper body with a semi-translucent barrier of pure celestial energy.
It is a reinforced armor piece covering its vital cores, and I even watch waves of white energy ripple through its dark black body.
They surge into its muscles and veins, and the red fiery scars and frozen skin on its arms begin to heal, halting the wounds from spreading further.
I kick off the air and focus on a new weak point: the Demon’s neck, while I feel Maria’s gaze look toward its lower abdomen where the white armor ends.
We burst out to separate sides, curving and spiraling through the darkness again.
We’re moving so fast that new pathways in the Ravine below start to show up. Ones I only recognize from those two High Nobles’ memories and not my own.
Several fire and ice slashes fly through the void at our enemy.
However, at this distance, he still has enough time to twist out of the way to dodge. The Demon pulls out a single long and curved blade from his arsenal. It’s longer than its own wingspan and has sharp-toothed ridges all over the outside edge.
At first, it is only pitch black in his grasp, but when he holds it with two hands, it glows with the same deep purple hue his eyes do. Soon after, waves of the white energy from his armor start flooding into the sword.
Its core turns white, as the two soul artifacts link their celestial energy flows. Instead of dodging the last few ice and fire crescents that curve back around, he blocks with his massive sword. They explode in the air just as they did when they hit his shield the first time.
However, he had to turn about to block these strikes and was not sent flying backward any further. We’re closing in on this Demon again.
“Any last words?” it yells out at me with a growing grin on its face while its blade and armor glow brighter and brighter.
I don’t change my flight path, but I do realize something strange in this moment.
The two pieces of soul artifacts resonate with their own unique Royal Vibrations. They are very similar to this Demon’s, but they have their own hum and specific wavelengths.
They are all connected by a barely noticeable strand of invisible energy, like a mutated wavelength of Royal Vibrations.
The instant I feel this, I feel my own bond to my sword, and much weaker ones to all of the soul armor sets covering my body.
Something clicks as I shift my gaze past the Demon again and see its Dragon’s full body emerge into the light of all our auras.
Its eyes that I witnessed from afar are the only thing natural about it…
One of its front legs glows bright white, while one of its hind legs is pure cyan threads.
Massive streaks and patches make up its wings, powering each flap forward, leaving trails of infused Celestial Energy and the mutated Vibrations of its bonded Royal Demon.
Its whole tail, from its base down to the point, flickers with light purple sparkles, crackling with lightning.
Even the top of its head, where its neutral horns should be, one is bright white while the other is grey.
Its entire underbelly is stitched together with armored plates, covering its vitals and pulsing into its muscles and bloodstream. The bulging veins of this true Dragon’s body look like they are stressed to the limits.
There are only tiny patches of real deep purple scales that match its eyes.
I feel like I’m witnessing a dragon cyborg. It is like a half-soul weapon, half-dragon flapping its wings and coming toward us.
It is enormous and bends space with far more intensity than a Dragon should. They are usually this Demon’s weak points, but this one is certainly on par with its bonded partner. There is rage and pain in its eyes, as it looks like it’s been a product of this Demon’s experiments for an eternity down in this Ravine.
I open my mouth to reply to the Demon’s taunt, but Maria yells out first.
“Last words? We should be the ones asking you that! It’s clear you’ve made up your mind to never leave this Ravine. So we’ll make things easy and put you out of your misery!”
She’s made eye contact with that Dragon as well, to see the pain I did, and steps off the air to veer her path upward toward it.
No words need to be spoken between us. We just fly in to finish the job.
The Demon lets out a laugh that echoes through the air.
“Fighting me together was the only chance you had! Splitting up has sealed your fate!”
The Demon’s toothed blade comes swinging across its body to release a bright white crescent of Celestial Energy with the combined Vibrations of this Demon and its two strongest Soul Weapons. Its own black aura reverberates throughout the slash, making space bend and threaten to crack around its edges.
I dip down, and Maria takes another step upward through the air.
The Demon’s attack misses, and I get in close enough to make an attack of my own. I’ve compressed all of my aura into my legs and my sword, pushing myself forward in a blur of crimson.
Instead of a weakened long-range attack, I want to make contact blade to skin. I fly in toward its neck with no fear at all in my eyes, and certainty flowing through my strike.
The royal steps backward through the air and swings upward with speed enhanced by white bursts of light coming out of his arm.
Less than 20 meters away from its neck, my blade is caught between two spiked teeth in its blade.
I stare past our swords, looking into the dark purple eyes of this Demon. Its pupils alone are larger than my head.
Yet, the weight of our Vibrations completely distorts the perception of the battlefield.
In the depths of our minds, it is as though two equal forces are colliding with each other. Like hands interlocked in a contest of pure strength, wrestling for dominance.
The shockwave of a white and grey light pulsing against a dark crimson aura rips through the Ravine for hundreds of thousands of kilometers.
Over a hundred pedestals, and tens of thousands of demons die instantly from the overwhelming mental blast.
At the same time, an ear-piercing screech, filled with a guttural pain, like it's releasing the stress from millions of years of torture, comes out from the dragon above.
The purple lightning crackling in its tail surges through its whole body, becoming infected by all kinds of patchwork soul weapons, changing its wavelength and adding strange variations to the elemental flow.
Once the wave of electricity makes it to the monstrous beast's eyes, its whole body lights up and sends hundreds of bolts of Royal Grade lightning down at Maria.
Some are pure white, others are dark black, some purple like its tail, and a few even resemble the natural dark demonic purple coloring from its eyes. The most deadly of all of them is the largest one coming straight out of the Dragon’s mouth, made of pure cyan threads and the Royal Demon’s infused will.
Maria doesn't flinch. She only tracks the bolts of lightning coming down at her from all angles and takes a deep breath in and out while activating pseudo cores within her new Royal form. At first, it is just one in the center of her being, but it starts to spiral outward to create a second, then a third, then five, and eight, and thirteen.
Each core is invisible, all layered within her body, stretching and stacking in directions impossible to comprehend in this 3-dimensional universe. It is like they are infinitely small, but infinitely large at the same time. Impossible to pinpoint their centers, but acting as though each core covers every centimeter of her body.
The cores stack further as this invisible spiral within her body grows, making twenty-one, then thirty-four, and fifty-five; five more rotations pass, and the number of pseudo cores pouring out energy from her body multiplies to six hundred and ten.
It’s clear they could continue stacking, possibly forever, but Maria grins and halts her concentration here, allowing all of these cores to contract and expand at once.
A royal blue glow pulses out from her body just as all of the lightning bolts are less than 100 meters away from colliding with her.
The impossible looks like it is happening, the bolts of pure energy stop moving…
In fact, when the waves of blue light hit them, the jagged, surging energy freezes.
A dense layer of ice, sparkling with source resin, covers every bolt of lightning and starts to surge upward toward its sender.
Maria swings her blade to send a massive crescent of pure celestial ice upward at the largest bolt made of pure cyan threads.
–
At the same time, as I’m interlocked blade to blade with the Demon, our Vibrations clash, and we have a pure battle of wills.
He gets to feel the certainty in my blade and my newfound resolve in the fact that I am the Rising Emperor, and there is nothing that can sway me from my path. I’ve left no secrets unturned in this moment, and I will strike to kill the moment I have the chance. I will do it over and over again, like I have in the past every time before.
I will kill every Demon in my way: A Fledgling, Lesser, Greater, Arch, Lord, Noble, or even a Royal Family Head.
It doesn't matter. I will always win.
This will is pitted against a Demon who has spent its life killing weaklings in the Ravine.
He has collected all of the best Soul Weapons and killed the strongest of thousands of generations of Nobles, High Nobles, and, from what I feel in its will now, there were even Royal Candidates long ago that faced him.
He is the King of this Ravine.
Nothing can touch him; nothing ever has.
He is the True Royal of this prison.
Yet, that is the weakness I sense.
It reminds me of what he said to me and Maria before hitting us with his club and sending us down into the temple.
He said that we would never sync up our vibrations if we kept secrets from each other… he even mentioned that my soul bonds and paths were twisted up and not properly resonating.
Now, as my heart and soul are certain and calm, I understand exactly what he meant. I yell out loud straight in this Ancient Royal’s face.
“You know what? Lucian was right to leave you here. You would never make it as a True Royal in the Upper Realm. Your soul is filled with far too many doubts. How can you call yourself a True Royal if you have accepted your fate in a prison made by another mortal being?”
I laugh out loud, watching the crack deep in his soul become wider.
It’s a strange sight, as though I’m physically watching the Demon’s confidence and source of its power waver.
“You say you’re the master of Soul Weapons? Yet one of mine, the blade of a so-called lesser race, managed to destroy half your arsenal with ease? You are nothing but an overgrown fish in a tiny pond. You’re the master of nothing… A collector of trash and trinkets… Reliant on the leftover powerful artifacts of others to fight me, yet you don’t even know how most of them got here. Only their true wielders could ever understand them fully and allow them to merge with their path. You are just an old demon from a generation that should either be in a high zone or long dead.”
Its Vibrations waver even more, and it yells back.
“You know nothing! The Imperials divided the Upper Realm this way- And Lucian- he- I- I’ll take that amplifier and show the Demons I’m the Royal that has conquered all Soul Weapons- I-”
“You’ve gone senile… to even think you could take this blade from me. You are sadly mistaken. Even your predictions of how I arrived here from the Lower Realm are wrong. I didn’t kill the Fallen One. I bonded with him. Your chance to leave this place and conquer the Great Families has sadly passed. I think it’s time for your eternal rest.”
I make the celestial fire and corruption covering my face twist into a wide demonic smile as the crack in this Demon’s soul shatters and opens wide.
At the same time, I release the wave of compressed crimson aura out from my body, and it expands far enough to cover the whole upper half of this Royal Demon’s body.
I focus and activate the sensation I feel while using Shadow Step, Dungeon Walker, and even the instant teleport swap feature of my body double skill. I do not have access to the system still, but I’m able to replicate its features due to my Celestial Grade perks.
My figure disappears before the Demon’s wide eyes.
It clumsily follows through with its blade’s strike forward, but I have already sent my own attack flying at the back of its neck.
–
A burst of blue and red energy lights up the Ravine for over a million kilometers in every direction.
I slice off this Royal Demon’s head while it is still in shock, then plunge my blade into what is left of its throat to release a wave of Celestial Fire and corruption of catastrophic scale.
The bright white armor that protects its vitals from the outside does more harm than good.
Instead of protecting from attacks coming in, it works as an insulator, allowing me to cook and corrode this Demon’s insides before it knows it’s even dead. The Core in its chest cracks under the pressure and explodes to bits.
Its eyes, filled with horror, watch its own body burst into fiery pieces as it tries to comprehend what has happened…
Above, Maria follows through with her strike and does another unfathomable feat, slicing the cyan lightning bolt in half while flying up in the air through it.
Her blade makes contact with the nose of the Dragon and slices it clean through the eyes.
Instead of rage, the Dragon looks relieved and thankful.
All of the other hundreds of lightning bolts that were released from its body carry waves of Royal Blue ice into its bloodstream, and its wings are frozen mid-flight.
After its head is sliced in two, the half-monster, half-soul weapon amalgamation shatters to sparkling snow falling down to shower the fireball below.
Comments
Youkai-sama
Yeah! Show dat baasterd who's Boss!
