SSS-Rank Harem Sword: My Lustful Life With Legendary Maidens-Chapter 112: “Mercy to the wolf is cruelty to the sheep”
Just hours ago, if someone had asked King Magnus whether a single Academy student could stand against the three Royal Guardians on equal footing, his answer would have been a resounding no. The very suggestion would have sounded outrageous.
But now, watching the 100 meters tall golden and purple regal dragon cause mayhem throughout the Capital City, he could not have been more wrong.
Almost half of the city had been destroyed, and many lives had been lost without those people ever understanding why.
And all of this had happened because of his underestimation of Adonis Kingsbane. The so called inferior breed. The illegitimate child. The Null Heritage.
Thinking about those remarks, he felt a surge of anger from somewhere unexpected.
Whoever had thought that taking down this bastard would be easy, and that their Crown Prince could simply claim the noble dragon bloodline from him, he truly wanted to kill that person right now.
Nevertheless, the damage had already been done. There was no going back now.
His eyes turned colder.
"Adonis Kingsbane must die. If he does not die, he will be the destruction of this Kingdom," he muttered.
"Exactly, Your Majesty." A sudden voice interrupted his thoughts, "Mercy to the wolf is cruelty to the sheep."
King Magnus nodded, agreeing with the statement.
He was too drunk on power to care about the consequences.
"How will you deal with him, Lysandra? Even the Royal Guardians cannot handle him," he asked.
Lysandra’s lips curled. "Do not worry, Magnus. Just watch."
As soon as she finished speaking, several more auras crashed into the fight like living storms.
Rumble! Rumble! Rumble!
More top powerhouses entered the battle, slowly cornering the Dragon from every direction.
Mariana watched from below, and her face turned pale.
"They are bringing more Guardians from the Gratis Kingdom. My husband cannot handle them all at once. I must go and help."
Before Claudia could stop her, she immediately transformed into her Celestial Dragon form.
Rumble!
Her dragon form stood 30 meters tall, emitting an extremely dense silvery star essence.
Buzz! Buzz! Buzzzzzz!
She immediately began to draw upon the power of the stars as she spread her silver wings wide beneath the cloudy dark sky.
Shining like a beacon of Celestial energy, she streaked across the sky like a bright falling star.
However, the moment she drew close to Adonis, a massive red spear struck her from behind.
"Puchi!"
The spear drove deep, its tip emerging straight from the valley of her chest.
Blood spilled instantly, but Mariana failed to register the damage for a second.
When she did, her breathing became difficult, and a burning pain spread from her chest, bringing unimaginable agony.
"Go to hell!"
Splash!
The spear was then wrenched out from her chest by a man with twisted features.
Woosh!
Mariana’s body began to fall like a comet, her eyes desperately searching for the man she loved.
"Adonis... Forgive me... I was useless..." she uttered with great difficulty.
Amidst their ongoing battle, Adonis witnessed this scene: his beloved, the second most precious person in his world, had been ruthlessly pierced through her back.
And it made him instantly mad.
"NOOOOOOOOOO..."
The scream that tore from Adonis’s throat was not a sound that belonged to any living creature that the nobles or ministers or guardians present had ever heard before. It was not grief and it was not rage and it was not the battle cry of a warrior entering a final exchange. It was all of those things compressed into a single, raw, world-shaking note that resonated through the bones of everyone within a kilometer and left something behind in the air that did not dissipate when the sound itself ended.
Mariana was falling.
Her silver celestial form, 30 meters of starlight and grace, was falling through the smoke-filled sky like a comet that had forgotten how to burn, trailing blood that caught the light as it fell and scattered into a thousand crimson droplets that rained silently down onto the ruins below.
Adonis caught her.
He crossed the distance between them in a single beat of his great wings and gathered her falling form against his dragon chest with a gentleness that was almost incomprehensible given the scale of the destruction surrounding them.
She was so much smaller than him in this form. He held her the way something ancient and enormous holds something it recognizes as irreplaceable, with the particular, terrible care of a being that understands loss. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚
Her silver eyes found his chaotic ones.
"Adonis," she whispered, the sound coming after a rasp. "I am sorry."
"Do not," he gasped. "Do not apologize to me."
His voice had changed. The devilish depth was still there but something underneath it had cracked open, something that had no armor over it and had never needed armor until this moment.
Her eyes were dimming at the edges.
"I wanted to help you, husband," she said. "I wanted to be strong enough."
"You are," he said. "You are the strongest person I know."
She smiled at that, small and faint and real, and then her eyes closed.
He held her for one long moment, his great chest barely moving, the battle raging in every direction around him utterly forgotten.
Then he set her down, carefully, on the one section of ground within sight that was still flat and intact, folding his wings around her briefly in a gesture that needed no translation.
He straightened.
He turned.
His purple eyes swept across the sky above the ruined Capital, across the assembled force of Royal Guardians and Gratis Kingdom powerhouses circling him from every direction, across the shattered remnants of the Grand Arena and the Royal Palace district and the broken walls of a city that had stood for centuries and would not look the same again.
He looked at all of it.
And something behind his eyes went very, very quiet.
Not calm. Not peaceful. Something beyond both of those things, on the other side of them, in the place a person arrives when grief and rage have burned through every available layer of restraint and found something underneath that is simply true.
His Ether reserves were nearly gone. He could feel the edges of his Primordial Dragon form flickering at the extremities, the scales at his wingtips dimming, the sustained output of Chaos energy becoming something he was pulling from places in himself that were not meant to be pulled from.
It did not matter.
He drew every last fragment of it inward.
Every remaining drop of Ether. Every last thread of Chaos energy. The Crown of Bahamut blazed between his horns with a light so intense it cast hard shadows across the ruins below even through the thick smoke.
Vexa, no longer a physical sword but present nonetheless in the deepest layer of his being, screamed with pure, unhinged delight:
< Yes, Master. Yes. Give them everything. Give them all of it. Let there be nothing left.>
He opened his jaws.
"Chaos."
The word alone sent a pressure wave rolling outward that knocked three of the circling powerhouses sideways in the air.
"Ultima."
ZZZZZZZZZZZ
The sky above the Royal Palace turned purple. Not the color of sky at dusk or the hue of a storm approaching. Purple in the way that only Chaos energy produced it, deep and total and alive, pressing outward from the point of his existence in every direction simultaneously as though the atmosphere itself was being replaced with something older and more fundamental.
And then it came.
What had leveled the arena had been a whisper compared to this. What had broken the city walls had been a preliminary tremor.
This was the full measure of everything Adonis Kingsbane had left in his body, his Ether, his bloodline, his grief, his fury, his love, all of it converted without reservation into a single outpouring of Primordial Chaos energy directed at the one structure that represented everything that had been done to him and to Mariana and to his mother before either of them had been old enough to understand what enemies were.
The Royal Palace.
ZZZZZZZZZZZ!
It was not a explosion.
Explosions implied a beginning and an end, a central point and an outward progression.
What happened to the Royal Palace happened all at once. Every stone, every tower, every gilded corridor and throne room and grand hall and secret chamber simultaneously ceased to be a structure and becoming a churning, obliterated field of superheated matter that expanded outward in a sphere of purple and gold light so bright that people in the furthest districts of the Capital, already fleeing through the broken outer walls, turned and shielded their eyes against it as though a second sun had briefly ignited above their city.
The shockwave that followed flattened the remaining structures in the immediate palace district completely.
The ground beneath the palace foundation cracked to a depth that engineers, weeks later, would measure at forty meters and find still radiating faint Chaos energy from the walls of the fissure.
The purple light climbed high enough into the sky to be visible from the border of the kingdom.
Both humans and beasts could only shake in terror.
"Oh my god! What kind of punishment is this?"
