CHAPTER 72: THE BIRTH OF A LEGEND

The psychic scream cut off as suddenly as it had begun.

The world rushed back in, a cacophony of sound and color and pain.

Michael was on his knees, his head bowed, his body trembling uncontrollably.

He felt like a live wire, humming with a power so vast, so ancient, so utterly alien that his own human form felt like a cage that was about to burst.

The Umbraxis roared, a sound of pure, undiluted, and deeply personal outrage.

It had been violated.

A tiny, insignificant insect had reached into its very soul and stolen a piece of it.

It was no longer just fighting an invasion.

It was settling a grudge.

It turned its full, undivided, and apocalyptic attention on the small, kneeling figure in the center of the field.

It was going to wipe him from existence.

"He’s... he’s still alive," Jinx breathed into the comms, her voice a mixture of sheer, unadulterated terror and a new, profound, and deeply unsettling awe.

"What in the hell did he just do?"

"He poked the dragon," Jax managed to groan from his position behind the shield wall. "He poked the dragon with a soul-eating spoon."

Chloe didn’t respond.

She was just staring at her datapad, at the energy readings that were not just impossible, but a fundamental refutation of everything she knew about science, about reality, about the very fabric of the universe.

The Umbraxis rose to its full, terrifying height, its massive, leathery wings spreading wide, casting a shadow that seemed to swallow the entire park.

It opened its mouth, and the air itself began to shimmer, a white-hot incandescence gathering in the back of its throat.

The final attack.

The raid-wiping, party-ending, game-over attack.

This was it.

Michael pushed himself to his feet, his movements slow, jerky, like a puppet whose strings had just been cut.

He looked up at the god-monster, at the face of his own impending annihilation.

He was not afraid.

He was not angry.

He was... something else.

The whispers in his head were gone.

They hadn’t been silenced. They had been consumed, swallowed by the new, vast, and terrifyingly quiet presence that now sat in the throne room of his soul.

The ghost of the dragon.

He raised a trembling hand.

He reached for the new, terrible, and wonderful button that was now glowing on his HUD.

The Warden’s voice, which had been silent, screamed a final, frantic, desperate warning in the ruins of his mind.

This is the path of no return, child! To call back a god is to invite the Void to become you!

He ignored it.

He pushed the button.

[REVENANT CALLING (LV. 1) ACTIVATED.]

A new prompt appeared, its text a stark, beautiful, and terrible purple.

[FORGE REVENANT: GATEKEEPER UMBRAXIS?]

[COST: 100 VOID ENERGY.]

[WARNING: SUMMONING A LEGENDARY-CLASS REVENANT WILL CAUSE A CRITICAL SPIKE IN SOUL CORRUPTION.]

He didn’t have a hundred Void Energy. He had two.

But the new power, the stolen sliver of the dragon’s soul, was a deep, bottomless well inside him.

He paid the price without hesitation.

[CONFIRM.]

The air in Central Park didn’t just get cold.

It shattered.

A tear in reality, a hundred feet high, ripped open in the space beside Michael.

It was not a Gate. It was a wound in the fabric of the universe, and it was bleeding pure, purple-black void.

From it, a glitching, spectral, and utterly terrifying echo of the Umbraxis emerged, not as a monster, but as a slave.

It was smaller than the original, its form unstable, constantly flickering between a shimmering, ethereal ghost and a solid, shadowy nightmare.

Glowing, purple chains of pure Void energy were wrapped around its spectral limbs, its neck, its very soul, binding it to the will of its new, insignificant master.

The entire battlefield went silent.

The roar of battle, the shriek of gargoyles, the blare of alarms—it all died.

Every Hunter, every monster, every DGC agent watching from the perimeter, every news drone hovering in the blood-red sky—every eye turned to the impossible, sacrilegious sight.

A lone, unknown Hunter, his clothes tattered, his body bleeding, stood beside his own personal, spectral ghost dragon.

On a rooftop two miles away, Sterling, the arrogant Vanguard prince, stared at the live feed on his datapad, his handsome face a mask of pure, slack-jawed disbelief.

In a secure DGC holding cell, Marcus Arcana watched the impossible image on a small television screen, a single tear of profound pride and absolute terror tracing a path through the grime on his cheek. He knew, better than anyone, what that power cost.

In the DGC command center, Captain Valerius just stood, her professional composure finally, completely, and utterly gone.

And on a distant, hidden rooftop, Commander Kael, the perfected Chimera, the self-proclaimed future of Hunter-kind, watched the feed, and for the first time in his life, his perfect, handsome face was a mask of pure, unadulterated, and deeply personal fury.

He had a rival.

The real Umbraxis, its own attack forgotten, just stared at its own pale, chained, and pathetic reflection.

It let out a roar, a sound of such profound, cosmic confusion and rage that it shook the very foundations of the city.

Michael didn’t give it time to think.

He was a conductor, and this was his symphony of destruction.

He raised a hand, and his Revenant mirrored the movement, its own spectral claws raised.

The battle that followed was not a physical one.

It was a war of energies, a reality-bending light show that burned itself into the retinas of everyone who witnessed it.

The real Umbraxis breathed a river of pure, white-hot fire.

The Revenant countered with a torrent of soul-chilling, purple-black void, the two energies colliding in a hissing, screaming vortex that tore the very air apart.

Michael was locked in a psychic battle, a puppet master straining to control a god.

The feedback was immense. Every blow his Revenant took, he felt. Every ounce of energy it expended, was ripped directly from his own soul.

His vision was tunneling. The world was a blurry, gray smear at the edges of his perception.

He was losing consciousness.

He had one shot left.

One final, all-or-nothing, suicidal command.

He focused the last, shredded remnants of his will into a single, telepathic order.

Charge.

His Revenant, his beautiful, terrible, enslaved ghost, let out a final, silent, psychic roar of pure, desperate agony.

It stopped defending.

It stopped countering.

It gathered all of its remaining, unstable energy into its core.

And it threw itself at its own, living, breathing self.

The two dragons collided.

The real and the echo.

The god and its ghost.

The world went white.

There was no sound.

There was just light.

A massive, silent, and utterly beautiful explosion of crimson and violet energy that vaporized everything in a five-hundred-foot radius.

When the light faded, they were gone.

Both of them.

The Umbraxis, the living Gate, the god-monster that had brought the city to its knees... had been unmade.

The Red Gate in the sky, its anchor destroyed, let out a final, mournful shriek and began to violently, unstably, implode, sucking the remaining gargoyles and the very air itself back into its dying, crimson vortex.

The war was over.

Michael stood in the center of the silent, smoking crater for a single, victorious second.

His HUD, visible only to him, flashed with a final, damning verdict.

[SOUL CORRUPTION: 5.0%.]

[WARNING: SYSTEM INSTABILITY DETECTED.]

[PERSONALITY MATRIX AT RISK OF FRAGMENTATION.]

He gave a weak, tired, and utterly triumphant smile.

Then his eyes rolled back in his head, and he collapsed, a broken puppet whose strings had finally been cut.