The Villainess Wants To Retire-Chapter 509: Ivanya

There was no measure to her attacks, no strategy other than absolute annihilation.

She went mad with grief, her movements fueled by a sadistic, predatory fury. She conjured Fire Chains that didn’t just bind the nearest Elder Syvrak; they tightened with a sickening crunch, snapping scales and pulverizing bone until the sixty-foot beast screeched in a pitch that shattered the air.

She laughed—a cold, jagged sound—as she watched the creatures suffer. She began to use their own blood against them, superheating the fluids within their bodies until they boiled from the inside out. It was brutal. It was methodical. It was the work of a monster who had forgotten how to be anything else.

She set explosive mines beneath the feet of the retreating pack, not to kill them, but to maim them, blowing off limbs and leaving the ancient beasts writhing in the dirt so she could deal with them slowly. Her Fire Whips flayed the scales from their backs, exposing the raw, tender meat beneath.

Vetra was terrified. For the first time in her long, twisted existence, she recognized the creature in front of her. This wasn’t a girl playing with a dragon’s power. This was the Villainess. This was the entity that could unmake the world if her heart was broken.

The seal on Eris’s chest continued to crack. Further and further.

Pyronox, for a moment, wasn’t just whispering anymore; he was surging through the breach.

Eris felt his ancient, heavy consciousness merge with her own, his millenia-old hatred for the Syvrak acting as a catalyst for her rage. The fire changed color, shifting from a bright, angry orange to a terrifying, transcendent black. 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

She was everywhere at once. She was a god-tier calamity. The palace towers fell like children’s blocks under the weight of her presence, the ground cratering and turning to glass wherever she stepped. The Syvrak were being decimated, their numbers dropping from dozens to a handful in a matter of minutes.

She was bleeding from her shoulder, her face was a mask of gore, and her dress hung in charred rags, but she didn’t feel the pain. She only felt the fire. She looked like a rugged warrior from the end of time, her vertical dragon-pupils flickering with a light that wasn’t meant for mortal eyes.

"He was YOURS!" she screamed, launching a spear that pierced Vetra’s shoulder. "You RAISED him! And you... you fucking DESTROYED HIM!"

Vetra was losing. She threw up ice barriers that evaporated instantly. She struck out with her tail, only for Eris to catch it in a bare hand and melt the tip into a stump of smoking bone.

The Elders tried a coordinated pincer attack, five of them lunging from all sides, but Eris simply released a circular pulse of flame that sent them crashing into the distance, their wings charred and useless.

But Eris was fading. Her consciousness was a flickering candle in a hurricane. She was lightheaded from the blood loss, and the sheer volume of power she was channeling was cooking her own nerves.

Don’t care, she thought, her vision blurring at the edges. Kill them first. Then die.

Soren lay where she had left him, his vision a darkening, fragmented mess. He saw the dark flames of Eris’s fury, saw the way she moved like a goddess of death, and a profound, agonizing horror filled the small space left in his mind.

She’s going to die. She’s giving it all away for me.

He tried to move. He willed his arms to push, his legs to kick, but his body was a foreign object, paralyzed and heavy. It felt as if an invisible, arctic force was pinning him to the stone, a gravity of the soul that he couldn’t fight.

He struggled, his breath hitching as he pushed against the void, desperate to reach her, to tell her to stop, to tell her he was still there. But he was helpless. He was a failure. He had spent his life trying to be the shield, and now he was the reason his wife was tearing her soul apart.

Tears, hot and bitter, ran down his face, carving lines through the frost on his cheeks. I’m sorry, Eris. I’m so sorry.

The darkness began to win. The edges of the courtyard, the sounds of the fire, it all began to retreat into a long, black tunnel. He fought it, staring at the silhouette of Eris surrounded by death, wanting that image to be the last thing he ever saw.

Then, the darkness changed.

In the center of the void, a shape began to form. A light that wasn’t the white-gold of the dragon or the purple-black of the hybrid. It was soft. Gentle.

A woman stepped out of the shadows of his mind. She had a face he had only seen in the deepest, most guarded corners of his memory—a face of kindness, of soft features and eyes that held the warmth of a hearth fire.

"Ivanya," she whispered.

The name hit him like a physical blow. It was the name his mother had given him before the world became cold. Before Vetra.

"My son," she said, her voice tender, a balm against the screaming of the night.

Mother? Soren thought, his consciousness surrendering to the pull of her hand. How—

She reached for him, her palm open, an invitation to a place where the ice didn’t bite and the fire didn’t burn. "Come," she said softly.

Soren felt his resistance crumble. He was so tired. The pain in his side was fading into a dull, distant hum. The darkness was no longer a cage; it was a blanket.

Eris... I’m sorry.

He slipped. The connection to the world, to the blood-stained courtyard and the screaming Empress, severed. His eyes closed, and the Emperor of the North was gone.

The battlefield remained a hellscape. Eris was still fighting, unaware that Soren’s eyes had closed. She was a dervish of white flame, slaughtering the remaining Syvrak with a efficiency that bordered on the divine.

Vetra was wounded, her scales cracked and her breath coming in labored, ragged bursts. The Eldest was crippled, his wings gone and his jaw hanging at a broken angle. They were still dangerous, still lunging with the desperation of dying predators, but they were facing a force of nature.

Eris was bleeding from a dozen wounds, her consciousness flickering like a dying bulb. She staggered, her hand clutching the gaping wound in her shoulder, but she refused to stop. She was a rugged, blood-matted warrior standing atop a mountain of corpses, her eyes flickering between human and dragon.

She was alone in the fire, and the dark was closing in on her too.