My younger sister mocked my injured F-rank dragon and celebrated her second-place victory, but when the royal official announced the rankings, her confidence shattered as she demanded to know who beat her.

The Eastern Annex of the Imperial Palace had not seen an artisan’s brush in fifty years.

Located on the far periphery of the royal grounds, near the overgrown gardens of the Old Keep, it was a drafty, two-story stone manor where Sarah had lived in quiet isolation since the death of her mother. The roof leaked during heavy rains, the tapestries were eaten through by moths, and the palace staff rarely bothered to deliver firewood until the frost had already set into the glass.

Tonight, however, the draft did not matter.

The great hall of the annex was completely cleared of furniture. Sarah had spent four hours grinding chalk, sulfur, and dried silver-leaf into an intricate, concentric ritual circle across the worn oak floorboards. Every window was shuttered and barred; every door was sealed with protective wax runes to prevent the mana signature from leaking into the night air.

In the center of the circle lay Kale.

Transporting a crippled dragon through the streets of the capital would have been impossible for anyone else. But Sarah had spent her previous life mastering the desperate, fringe magics of forgotten scrolls. She had utilized a temporary spatial fold—a forbidden, excruciating technique that compressed the dragon's mass into her shadow, nearly draining her own mana to zero in the process.

Now, Kale lay sprawled within the chalk boundaries, breathing in slow, ragged gasps. The journey had taxed his broken body to the brink of collapse. His obsidian scales were dull, like burnt slag, and thin wisps of grayish smoke curled from the jagged stump of his severed horn.

Sarah knelt before him, a silver mortar and pestle in her lap.

Beside her sat the Heart of the Leviathan.

In the hands of an ordinary enchanter, the gem would have been ground down or socketed into a staff to cast high-tier hydro-shields. But Sarah knew the secret: the Leviathan was not a beast of water; it was an ancient abyssal predator that lived in the absolute darkness of the ocean trenches—a creature that sustained itself on pressure and gravity.

It was the only substance on earth capable of acting as an artificial crucible for a Void Dragon's shattered core.

“Are you ready?” Sarah asked, her voice quiet in the hollow hall.

Kale’s golden eyes flickered open. He let out a low, dry cough, a fleck of black blood spattering onto the floorboards. “If you fail, little girl, this stone will collapse into a spatial vortex and swallow your entire palace into the void.”

“Then I won't fail,” she said.

She raised a heavy iron pestle and brought it down upon the Heart of the Leviathan.

*CRACK.*

A shockwave of azure light exploded through the room, rattling the heavy shutters. The master-grade heirloom, worth an entire duchy's annual tax revenue, fractured into brilliant, crystalline shards. Sarah did not hesitate. With methodical, unrelenting force, she hammered the shards into a fine, luminescent blue powder that glowed with terrifying heat.

Then, she picked up her silver dagger.

Without a sound, she reopened the cut on her palm, squeezing her hand until a thick stream of crimson blood poured directly into the mortar, mixing with the glowing dust of the Leviathan.

The mixture hissed violently. The blue powder turned a deep, royal purple, bubbling like molten glass and filling the room with the sweet, intoxicating scent of ozone and starlight.

“Drink,” Sarah commanded, lifting the heavy stone bowl to Kale’s snout.

Kale hesitated for half a second. He looked at the purple slurry, then at Sarah’s face—pale, strained from blood loss, but completely steady.

The dragon opened his jaws and lapped the mixture clean.

For three seconds, nothing happened.

Then, Kale’s body arched violently off the floorboards.

A sound tore from his throat—a sound so choked with agony that Sarah had to slam her palms against his neck to hold him down within the warding circle. His obsidian scales began to vibrate at an impossible frequency. Cracks of blinding, violet light spider-webbed across his chest, centering directly over his heart.

“Hold on!” Sarah shouted against the howling wind that had suddenly materialized inside the sealed room. “Do not reject the pressure! Consume it! You are the Abyssal Sovereign! The void does not crack under weight—it devours it!”

*“The spikes...”* Kale’s telepathic scream shredded her thoughts, filling her mind with visions of a battlefield covered in gray mist, skeletal titans, and giant, barbed iron spikes driven through black wings. *“The necromancer’s iron... it is rooted in my marrow!”*

Sarah looked at his back.

Beneath the scales near his shoulder blades, six dark, festering lumps were glowing with sickly green necromantic runes. The Pale Council’s suppression spikes. They had rusted inside his flesh, constantly leaking necrotic poison to prevent his draconic regeneration from ever taking hold.

The Leviathan’s power was forcing the poison to the surface, but the iron was too deep. If the spikes didn't come out now, his regenerating core would seal around them, killing him instantly.

Sarah gritted her teeth. She dropped the mortar, drew her dagger, and vaulted onto Kale’s thrashing back.

“Hold still!” she yelled.

She drove the blade into the scar tissue beside the first spike.

Black, corrosive blood sprayed against her sleeves, hissing as it ate through the fabric and blistered her skin. Sarah did not pull back. She gripped the rusted head of the iron spike with her bare, blood-slicked hand and pulled with every ounce of strength in her body.

The bone groaned. Kale let out a deafening, muffled roar that shook the rafters of the annex.

With a sickening *squelch*, the first spike tore free. Sarah hurled it out of the circle, where it clattered across the floor, smoking with foul green miasma.

“One!” she gasped, her hands shaking, her vision swimming from the agony of the corrosive dragon blood burning her flesh.

She moved to the second.

*Tear.*

“Two!”

By the fourth spike, Sarah’s hands were raw, bleeding, and blistered black from the void-toxin. Her mana core was screaming in protest, strained to its absolute limit as she acted as the external conduit, channeling her own royal life-force through the chalk circle to keep Kale’s soul anchored to the mortal plane.

*“Stop...”* Kale’s voice was suddenly weak, breaking through her haze of pain. *“Stop, Sarah... your soul cannot take the feedback. You will die before the sixth is out.”*

Sarah wiped a mixture of sweat and black blood from her brow with the back of her forearm. Her eyes burned through the dark.

“I died once already, Kale,” she hissed through clenched teeth, grabbing the fifth spike. “In the snow. At the gates of my own home, with my sister laughing and my dragon’s claws in my heart.”

She hauled on the iron with a feral, desperate snarl.

“I will not die in a dusty room before I make them pay!”

The fifth spike tore out.

She lunged for the sixth—the largest, driven directly between his shoulder joints, pinning his broken wings together. It was buried so deep that only a sliver of jagged iron protruded from his flesh.

Sarah dropped her dagger. She gripped the metal with both hands, planting her boots against the ridge of his spine, and threw her entire body weight backward.

Her mana surged—not the weak, stagnant trickle the royal court believed she possessed, but the ancient, dormant resonance of the Star-Caller bloodline. A brilliant, golden aura flared around her arms, burning away the necrotic miasma.

“BREAK!” she screamed.

With a sound like tearing iron, the final spike was ripped from Kale’s back.

The moment the metal cleared his flesh, a shockwave of pure, unadulterated darkness exploded from the dragon’s core.

The chalk circle evaporated. The wooden floorboards buckled and cracked. Sarah was thrown backward through the air, slamming hard against the stone hearth of the fireplace and collapsing onto the floor, gasping for breath as the world spun wildly.

Through her blurred vision, she saw the darkness gather.

It did not dissipate; it drew inward, swirling around Kale like an obsidian cyclone. The horrific, bent bones of his wings began to snap and realign with sharp, echoing cracks. New scales—smooth, iridescent, and black as the void between galaxies—sprouted over his scarred flesh.

From the stump of his broken horn, a new horn burst forth, curved and lethal, gleaming like polished jet.

And his wings—

They unfurled.

They stretched across the entire width of the great hall, easily twenty paces from tip to tip, the membranes not leathery like a common wyvern’s, but resembling sheets of night sky sprinkled with faint, drifting stardust.

The dragon rose.

He no longer limped. He stood tall, terrifying, and majestic, his massive shoulders rippling with muscle that could crush siege engines. He looked down at his own claws, opening and closing them as dark, gravitonic sparks danced between his talons.

Then, he turned his golden-violet eyes toward the hearth.

Sarah was sitting propped against the stone, her chest heaving, her hands bandaged in ruined cloth, covered in burns and black blood. She was shivering from mana exhaustion, but her chin was held high.

Kale stepped forward. His massive bulk made no sound against the splintered wood—he moved with the absolute, terrifying silence of a shadow.

He lowered his great head until his snout was inches from her face.

“You are bleeding,” he said. His voice was no longer a gravelly rasp; it was smooth, deep, and resonated with the terrifying gravity of a primordial king.

“I’ll live,” Sarah whispered, offering him a faint, exhausted smirk. “How are the wings?”

Kale slowly unfurled his left wing, looking at the pristine obsidian membrane.

“They will carry us,” he said.

He looked at Sarah, his slit pupils contracting into thin, focused lines of molten gold. Then, slowly, deliberately, the prince of the Abyssal Brood bent his front legs and lowered his chest all the way to the floorboards, bowing his head until his horns brushed her boots.

A voluntary bow of an ancient god to a mortal woman.

“My core is restored to the B-tier threshold,” Kale said softly. “The rest of the seals will take time and higher catalysts to shatter. But for now... it is enough to tear that silver lizard into ribbons.”

Sarah reached out with a trembling, blistered hand, resting her fingers gently against the smooth, cold scales between his eyes.

“Not ribbons, Kale,” she whispered, her eyes hardening into flint. “We don't just kill him. We show them what real power looks like. We show them what they threw away.”

The dragon let out a low, rumbling purr that vibrated through the floorboards like distant thunder.