SSS Awakening: All My Clones Have Divine Bloodlines!-Chapter 41: Calamity Dragon

With Evan fleeing the city and the rest of the population brought to their knees, Selric found himself alone to deal with the creature of the Abyss.

Selric had faced difficult opponents before.

He had faced things that had pushed him to his limits, things that had made him question whether those limits were enough. He was B-Rank Mid-Stage, not a figure to be taken lightly in any normal context.

But this was not a normal context.

The creature moved with a fluid, predatory certainty that had nothing to do with intelligence or strategy, and everything to do with something older and more fundamental, an instinct for destruction so deeply embedded in its nature that it had become indistinguishable from breathing.

It didn’t fight so much as it consumed, its long clawed arms sweeping through the air with a casual devastation that forced Selric to burn through mana reserves he hadn’t expected to touch.

His goal was simple: hold on. Buy time. Keep the city standing long enough for those people at the capital to intervene.

The creatures of the Abyss hadn’t made an appearance in centuries, but the defenses against them hadn’t been dismantled, they had simply been waiting, maintained out of a caution that most people alive today had never needed to exercise. He was certain the detection systems had already picked up the creature.

Which meant help was already on its way.

He just had to stay alive until it arrived.

He had already done what he could for the city, laid a thin layer of mana over it to dull the worst of the creature’s aura suppression, bought enough clarity for the awakened still on their feet, and given the order for anyone still capable of moving to get the civilians out and away.

It was the best he could do for them at this point.

But his plan to delay things as long as possible was turning out to be far more difficult than he had expected.

Every time he moved to attack, the creature resisted with little effort, only to answer with the same ferocity, leaving wound after wound across his body with every exchange.

A new wound. A new point of pressure. A constant reminder that the gap between B-Rank and A-Rank was not a step but a cliff.

He was bleeding from three separate places now, one of them deep enough to concern him, and the creature’s aura kept growing minute by minute, pressing down on him not with targeted malice but with the simple, indifferent weight of something vastly stronger.

’For the love of the gods,’ he thought, as a claw caught him across the midsection faster than he had been able to register, a direct strike clean and lethal enough to open a wide, ragged wound above his hip and drop him to one knee in what had been, minutes ago, a tavern, but was now little more than a pile of rubble.

’What did I do to deserve this? Is this really how it ends for me?’

The corrupting energy entered through the wound almost immediately. Not a flood, a seep, patient and insidious, something he could feel winding through him like smoke through a cracked door. He pushed mana against it, holding it back, but the effort of doing so while continuing to fight was building against him faster than he could manage.

He forced himself upright.

The creature was suspended in the air above him, unhurried now, drifting toward him with the calm of something that had already decided the outcome and saw no reason to rush the conclusion. Its eyeless face, that long neck, that enormous mouth, gave nothing away, and yet he had the distinct impression it was savoring the moment.

His legs were shaking.

Less than ten minutes had passed since the fight began.

’Ten minutes,’ he thought, something like disbelief surfacing beneath the exhaustion.

’ and Is this all I can do against something like this?’

He could no longer keep his blade steady, the physical strength in his body failing second by second.

His mana reserves were approaching a point he had never reached in combat, the corruption at his wound was growing harder to suppress with every passing moment, and the creature was still coming.

He made peace with it.

There was nothing left to do. He spat blood, coughing as his body desperately tried to expel the contaminated energy.

He closed his eyes and waited for his fate.

He had done what he could.

It simply wasn’t enough.

Several seconds passed.

Nothing.

Confused, he opened his eyes, and found a scene he hadn’t expected. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

The creature, which had already closed enough distance to deliver the finishing blow, was encased in a shell of pale, dense light. A sphere that had appeared around it from nowhere, containing it completely as it thrashed and clawed at the interior with mounting fury, unable to find purchase on something that simply refused to yield.

Eh?

Confused, he tried to make sense of the bizarre scene in front of him, but before he could, the sphere rose.

It lifted slowly above the ruins of the city, ascending until it hovered above the rooftops, and there, standing in the air beside it, was a man.

He appeared to be in his thirties. His attire was refined and perfectly practical, worn with an effortless elegance. Yet anyone who truly knew him would recognize the quiet authority beneath the composed exterior. On the right side of his chest, embroidered in thread that still seemed alive in the way it caught the light, was the image of a phoenix taking flight.

The aura he was emanating was different from the creature’s, different from Selric’s own, something deeper, stronger, the kind of presence that had nothing to prove and knew it.

"Stronger than it should be for its rank," he said quietly, to no one in particular, as the creature continued to tear at the sphere’s interior. "But not enough."

His eyes, grey, sharp, carrying the particular flatness of someone who had seen too many things for most of them to register as remarkable anymore, went cold.

He closed his palm.

The sphere contracted.

Not slowly. The creature had time for one final, frantic burst of movement before the sphere closed around it completely, and then there was silence, the particular silence that follows the end of something very loud, and the sphere, and everything inside it, was simply gone.

The man looked down at the city below him. The ruins of the tavern. The gouged streets. The collapsed sections of wall. The fires that hadn’t been put out yet.

He shook his head once, slowly.

’ A single A-Rank Hollow,’ he thought. ’A handful of minutes. And this is the result.’

This was why people feared them.

This was why the stories were written the way they were, not as exaggerations, not as dramatizations, but as honest attempts to describe something that resisted description.

One creature. And an entire city would need weeks to rebuild.

Imagine an army. Imagine what had been unleashed in the Age of Gods.

He descended, and shortly after landed beside Selric.

Selric, barely clinging to consciousness, saw the man and couldn’t help but let a faint smile cross his face. He knew him, how could he not. He was one of the pillars of the Kingdom of Solren. One of the most powerful humans alive.

The dean of the Awakened Academy.

The man crouched beside him and placed a hand over the wound without asking.

Mana flowed in, clean, dense and precise, nothing wasted, a professional application that immediately began suppressing the corruption and stabilizing the damage.

"Someone will arrive shortly who can complete the healing," he said. His voice was even and unhurried. "Stay alive until then."

Selric managed a breath. Then another.

"Thank you," he said. It felt lame, but given the circumstances, it was all he could do.

He let his head fall back and stared at the sky above what had been Lirath’s central district, now in ruins. The creature was gone. The pressure was gone. The aura that had been grinding him down for the past ten minutes was gone.

It was over.

He exhaled.

"Finally," he murmured. "Finally this nightmare is over."

"It isn’t over yet."

The man’s voice came again, quieter this time, and more serious.

With what little strength he had left, Selric tried to turn his head and look toward him.

The man had settled into a chair nearby, but his expression had changed. The composed, slightly irritated efficiency of a few moments ago had settled into something quieter and considerably heavier, the expression of someone delivering news they would have preferred not to carry.

"What do you mean?" Selric asked. His voice came out slower than intended. Something in the man’s tone had drawn the question from him before he had fully decided to ask it.

The man looked at him for a moment, those grey, penetrating eyes, then turned his gaze toward the horizon.

"The Calamity Dragon has awakened."

The silence that followed was the kind that fills a space completely.

Selric stared at him.

The horror that spread across his face arrived slowly, not the sharp, immediate shock of something unexpected, but the slower, deeper kind that comes from understanding, full and clear, exactly what those words meant.

The Calamity Dragon.

One of the three catastrophes of the Fallen Lands.

A being second only to the gods of the past.

A creature that had wiped out entire nations and races.

Had awakened from its long slumber.