Beast Gacha System: All Mine

Chapter 433: Suitable Blessing

BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAST!!!

Black fire vomited from the heavens.

"ROAAAAAAAAAR!!!" Oathran screamed in fear. He had never felt this fear once before. This fear—was beyond death itself.

Black flame enveloped them. Nothing like flame as Oathran understood flame.

It didn’t flicker or dance. It poured, a cascade of absolute darkness that swallowed the light and the water and the screaming creatures around him in a single, terrible instant. It scoured the surface of the corrupted sea like the hand of a god wiping clean a slate.

Huh?

It wasn’t... hot?

But the creatures around him scattered.

The serpent with too many jaws released his wing and fled, its body already dissolving where the black fire had touched it. The crustacean thing let go of his leg and scrambled backward, its chitin cracking and peeling, its mandibles clicking in a frenzied, agonized rhythm.

The shark-thing, the spiraling nightmare of teeth, simply came apart, its corrupted flesh unraveling and its bones crumbling to dust that drifted down into the abyss.

The black fire did not die when they dove beneath the surface. It followed them, clung to them, burned them even in the depths where no fire should burn.

The screams of the dying creatures echoed through the water, through Oathran’s skull, through the very fabric of the rift itself.

He looked up. He could see nothing.

Just the vast, grey sky, empty. No shadow. No wings. No hint of the thing that had just vomited annihilation from the heavens.

His heart hammered against his ribs. His body trembled in the dark water.

What had that been?

Not what.

Who?

There was no creature in any bestiary, no dragon in any legend, no horror in any rift that could do what he had just witnessed.

"Dear Isaia—"

"Yes?"

Oathran’s soul left his body. His massive white form thrashed in the water, his claws scrabbling against nothing, his wings beating uselessly against the surface, as pure, undiluted terror flooded through him.

There was a figure. A humanoid figure. Male, dressed in black.

It was kneeling on the surface of the corrupted ocean as though it were a marble floor.

Oathran had not seen him approach or sensed him. Had not felt even the faintest whisper of his presence until he spoke.

"A little training camp for the children... he said?" The black figure muttered to himself. "I messed up. I shouldn’t have helped."

Oathran felt it. The source of his fear, just muttering there, casually, like a man discussing the weather.

Such a dense presence—

His dragon instincts, honed over four hundred years of survival, simply shut down. There was no fight here. There was no flight. This trembling, animal certainty that he was in the presence of something that could unmake him with a thought—

The figure reached down toward the water.

Oathran, in his massive white dragon form, backed away. Yes, a creature of legend, the strongest man in the ’world’, reduced to a quivering animal by nothing more than a hand descending toward the surface.

But the hand didn’t strike. Didn’t burn. It simply touched the water, gentle as a parent’s caress.

"Isaiah is here," the figure said, calmly. Amused, even. "You are even more fitting to receive a blessing than that other child."

It paused, somehow fondly.

"That handsome little boy, Ierofey."

BLAAAAAAAST!!!

Blue light erupted from the depths. It was different from the dead black of the figure’s fire. It was something bright and familiar. Something that pulled at Oathran’s chest like a hook.

"OATHRAN!"

The pull came from below. A current of water magic, wrapping around him, yanking him downward with a force that was not hostile but desperate. He knew that magic.

Wait.

Wait, wait—he wanted to ask something.

The black figure. The fire. The blessing. The name. He turned back toward the kneeling man, his jaws opening, his voice emerging raggedly.

"You are—?!"

"How many times do I have to say it?" The figure was already fading, his body dissolving into smoke that curled and drifted on the dead air. His voice, when it came again, was almost gentle. "It is me, Isaiah."

Oathran was dragged back into the depths.

The water magic wrapped around him. It was unignorable and familiar.

Even in his battered physical and mental state, he recognized it. Baswara, the old Sea Dragon’s touch was unmistakable, woven into the water. It truly had felt as if it was someone who had been shaping currents for millennia.

Oathran didn’t fight it. He couldn’t have fought it even if he wanted to.

The pace picked up. Serayu and Lazuardi appeared on either side of him, their bodies circling his massive white form like escorts.

Their claws found his scales. Their magic reinforced Baswara’s pull as they dragged him down through the black water, toward the distant, flickering glow of the rift.

"Who destroyed the rift core?" Oathran rasped, transmitted through the water in vibration-based speech of dragons. "Still needs to fi—"

"Didn’t you see the blast earlier?" Baswara’s voice cut through the water. The old Sea Dragon had joined them now, his massive form coiling through the water beside Oathran. "Your goddess. Are you not ashamed of having your ass saved by your wife? Stupid!"

Wife. The word ricocheted through Oathran’s skull.

Cecilia. His Cecilia had destroyed the rift core?

His pregnant human, Cecilia, had descended into a corrupted ocean and done what he had been trying to do?

From a different direction, he saw them.

A bubble of air, glowing faintly blue in the darkness, and inside it, Cecilia. Her expression was focused, intent and without fear.

Beside her, Jenggala swam with powerful strokes, his water magic propelling them both toward the rift at urgent speed.

The opening ahead of them was glowing blue now. It was collapsing slowly, the edges of the tear folding inward like a healing wound.

And beyond it, the second rift, the dormant one, the one they had frozen and tried to ignore, had begun to ripple in sympathy.

As expected, they were connected.

Baswara surged forward, dragging Oathran through the rift’s opening with a yank. The frozen plug Lazuardi had placed there shattered around them, shards of corrupted ice scattering into the black water.

Jenggala followed. Then Serayu. Then Lazuardi, his scales flashing in the dim light as he slipped through the collapsing portal.

One by one, the dragons breached through the membrane between worlds and landed on the dry, cracked earth of the dam basin, their massive bodies collapsing onto solid ground.

Oathran turned immediately, his body screaming in protest, his eyes fixed on the rift. "Cecilia..."

She was still there.

Standing at the precipice, her mana was still plugging the jet-like water pressure of the deep and her eyes were fixed on the darkness beyond the closing portal.

Her expression was unreadable.

The rift folded inward, the blue glow of her magic sealing the wound like a cauterized scar. The second rift, still rippling, sealed itself first.

And still, Cecilia stared into the darkness.

"What..." Oathran’s voice failed him.

She walked out of the collapsing portal as though stepping through a doorway, her feet touching the dry basin floor just as the rifts sealed behind her with a soft, final hiss.

"Strange," she said thoughtfully. She turned to Oathran. "Did you obtain a new type of power, Oathran?"